Book Review
By Manoj Pande
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Ghost Eye – A Novel by Amitav Ghosh (2026)
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How does one attempt a review of the latest book from one’s favourite author? Or should one even attempt it?
Starting from the mid-1980s Amitav Ghosh’s novels have carried an historical context and spanned a wide geographical canvas – Bengal, Burma, China, Egypt and Europe, to name a few. In the non-fiction genre, he has written extensively on environmental degradation, climate change and colonial greed that replaced natural flora with a different set of vegetation in remote islands and in other places with terrible consequences. These concerns often show up in his novels.
Ghost Eye is his latest novel. This time around, its basic theme is neither historical nor environmental. Bordering on the occult, paranormal, reincarnation and such phenomena, it is, like his earlier works engrossing and ‘unputdownable’.
Thus, to use a term from train operations, I gave ‘precedence’ to this novel midway through reading a fine book by another Jnanpith Awardee, Vinod Kumar Shukla. For the record, Ghosh too is a Jnanpith awardee, the only one in English so far.
The story begins with a rich Marwari industrialist family of Calcutta which is left flummoxed by the strange utterances of their granddaughter Varsha who suddenly starts expressing a desire to eat fish, to the absolute shock of this strictly vegetarian family. The family doctor (Dr Monty Bose) is summoned who refers her to his wife Dr Shoma, a psychologist and a therapist. She meets the child and concludes it to be a case of past life remembrance. But who was she in her past life and wherefrom did she get such detailed knowledge of different kinds of fish?
In a parallel story, enters Dinu, the nephew of Shoma and a frequent visitor to the doctor couple, who do not have any children. These are the late 60s. The story moves on and decades later we find Dinu in Brooklyn in the US interacting with his aunt Shoma through video calls. These are the times of Covid and Shoma is now wheelchair bound, her husband has since died and she is incapacitated due to age related issues. Her days as a therapist are long past though she has kept all her case records neatly in a locked room only to be accessed by Dinu as and when he comes to India. Many other characters enter as the story progresses.
In an interview quite some time back, Amitav Ghosh had mentioned how difficult it is to let go of the characters once the novel is complete. This was most probably in the context of his Ibis trilogy that had spanned a whole canvas of the opium trade and to the travels and travails of the indentured labour in the 19th century. But some characters from his other novels based on the Sunderbans (Hungry Tide, Gun Island) and Burma (The Glass Palace) are still with him. Ghost Eye though, is not a continuation of any of his previous works and. barring Tipu, all others have a different character from the above novels.
Calcutta of the 1960s with its family mansions had an unhurried life. The bungalow in which the doctor couple live had been built by Monty’s father, Colonel Bose, a doctor in the British Army during the Second World War. It was named ‘Tavoy’ after a coastal town in Burma. Life then was punctuated by strikes, bandhs and power shutdowns. Those were the hey-days of Communism and Naxalism. It was in such environs that Dinu grew up.
All that has changed since then. Most mansions have been replaced with multistorey apartments much to the dismay of a grown up Dinu who now lives in Brooklyn and visits Calcutta sporadically to meet his Aunt Shoma who still lives in Tavoy.
Meanwhile, Varsha had stopped eating anything worrying her family. Therefore Shoma suggested that her strange cravings for fish had to be met. Abhay Gupta, Varsha’s father was for it, but how? It was a problem really as no food of that type could be brought to the Gupta home, leave aside cooked.
So it was decided that Shoma would feed Varsha fish cooked at her own home, in her utensils and in her car. A hush-hush operation, it was known only to Varsha’s father Abhay, with whose consent this was being attempted. So one day Shoma drives down alone to a secluded place near her home with a tiffin carrier containing three kinds of fish which she feeds to the child. While enjoying the fish, Varsha is able to distinguish between the different varieties and even explain how they are cooked differently. It leaves Shoma flummoxed. But some clues emerge about Varsha’s past life, duly noted by Dr Shoma.
Bengalis love fish and food. The novel is full of descriptions of various kinds of fish, methods of their preparation with the ingredients described in great detail. I am not a foodie and a vegetarian to boot, so unfortunately these descriptions simply did not register. I guess a foodie or a fish afficionado would appreciate those pages much more. But having been posted in Calcutta for a couple of years, I could well imagine what was being talked about.
It turns out that Varsha had a link to the Sundarbans in her previous life. Some familiar characters return, one via Italy! The legend of Bon Bibi and Manasa Devi, the Goddess of Snakes, enter the narrative and somewhere in between Burma is back too, with Dev Thapa a half Nepali, half Burmese who had walked all the way to Calcutta searching for the doctor couple (Monty and Shoma Bose). Arriving hungry and penniless, he has now with the passage of time, become the right hand of the aged Shoma. And a new one, a Burmese soothsayer joins the tale. Meanwhile Varsha is untraceable, having left Calcutta after her father’s death.
The story gets more and more interesting and in his unique way of storytelling, Ghosh transports us from Calcutta to Brooklyn to Sunderbans, interspersing it with the genuine ecological concerns of unchecked ‘development’. The narration is simple and one does not really feel the shifts in time and locations as novel proceeds to locate Varsha, who is now a recluse. Telling anything beyond it would take away the charm of the novel.
However, I must point out that an apparent error(?) in the dates occurs at page 3. The year mentioned is 1969 and the sentence goes thus – “…..mass uprisings in the nascent nation of Bangladesh……”. We all know that Bangladesh came into being in 1971. Though this may well be ignored as it has no effect on the narrative whatsoever.
While reading a book, there is always a fair chance that one comes across words and phrases whose meaning one does not know. ‘Ghost Eye’ is no different. I had to reach out to the dictionary a few times. But the word that struck me, ubiquitous as the act is all over our beloved Bharat, was ‘micturators’. Smile, if you know what it means. If not, look up the dictionary. It will surely bring a smile to your lips.
Meanwhile, ‘precedence’ having been given and the novel been read, I am back to reading Vinod Kumar Shukla. A different genre, a different language and a different milieu……
(Manoj Pande is a former Member of the Railway Board and now lives in Dehradun.)
