Book: GHOST-EYE: A NOVEL
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Published by: Fourth Estate
Price: Rs 799
In Amitav Ghosh’s last novel — though not his last book — it was the hesitant, unsure, and even “possessed” figure of Dinu Datta, a hunter of secrets torn between rational scepticism and instinctive belief, who was called upon to bear witness to the mysteries of our inhabited earth. Gun Island commenced where The Hungry Tide, that masterpiece of ecological lament, had left off, and in so doing it opened up the earlier novel’s environmental horizons to the forces of the uncanny. It summoned up the strangeness and terror of our times, bearing the weight of planetary cataclysms induced by both human and non-human actors. But if Gun Island had focused on migrants and refugees — that is, on travellers through space — the focus of
Ghost-Eye, the extraordinary third novel in what now looks like a trilogy, is on travellers through time. Dinu Datta, with several other characters who appear in the earlier novels, is both witness to and participant in an unfolding mystery.
In the 1960s Calcutta of my childhood, a time and space lovingly recalled here by Ghosh in the first section of his novel, stories of reincarnation were common in the popular press. Reports of children who remembered their past lives (jatismar) drew public attention for a few months at a time, with curious visitors flocking to their homes to meet the prodigy, though in time attention would dwindle and the case would be filed away in public memory as an unresolved miracle. Perhaps the most celebrated case of this kind from an earlier generation was that of Shanti Devi, born in Delhi in 1926, whose claims to remember her past life in Mathura were investigated by a commission established by Mahatma Gandhi. Interestingly, Satyajit Ray’s 1971 novel Sonar Kella, featuring one such child, was made into a film in 1974, the very year that the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson’s Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, first published in 1966, appeared in a new edition from the University of Virginia, where he had long directed its Division of Perceptual Studies. Stevenson was certainly a firm believer in “cases of the reincarnation type”. Seven of the twenty cases in this book were from India, and over his forty years of active research into the phenomenon, he had amassed evidence for no fewer than three thousand.
The child at the centre of Ghost-Eye, Varsha Gupta, is only three years old when she begins to communicate past-life memories, throwing her conservative Marwari family into extreme consternation since the life she remembers, that of fisherfolk in a Sundarban village, is unfathomably removed from her present one. The case is investigated by Dinu Datta’s aunt, the practicing psychologist Shoma Bose, who keeps extensive case-notes on this subject, one of most remarkable she has ever examined. With her husband Monty, the paediatrician attending the Gupta family, she is instrumental in taking the child, accompanied by her father, to visit her “former home” in Lusibari. For readers of Ghosh’s novels, this island in the Sundarban is inseparably associated with the social worker Nilima Bose and her schoolmaster husband Nirmal, as well as characters like the fisherman Horen Naskar and the scientist Piya Roy who appeared first in The Hungry Tide. Indeed, the phenomenon of reincarnation seems analogous to the continued life of fictional characters, just as the afterlives of the work of art are compared by Walter Benjamin, in his great essay on “The Task of the Translator”, to the continual life of animal species.
But Ghost-Eye is much more than a novel about reincarnation. As its title tells us, it is about the larger sphere of existences, knowledges and powers inhering in the things of this world; phenomena that do not yield to what we regard as scientific principles of explanation, though they may indeed pass the scientific test of verifiability. Much more than Gun Island, this is a complex and compellingly readable novel, with a dual time-scheme that entangles persons and places in knots of coherence — much like the knots that Varsha, the fisherman’s daughter, persists in tying. If the first space-time is that of 1960s Calcutta, the second is around the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, commencing in the same year, 2020, that Cyclone Amphan struck the Gangetic delta. Punctuating this chain of events are the haptic conjunctures produced by the touch and taste of food: cooking is the knot that binds us to our remembered lives. The denouement, pairing an act of ecological resistance in the Sundarban with a surprising and delightful recognition scene between human and non-human, brings us almost to the present day, and ties up the knots of memory and hope.
