After I read The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel, the familiar south Kolkata locality of Golpark started to feel slightly enchanted because Tridib, the narrator’s enigmatic cousin, was said to have walked on its pavements. The unworldly, unpredictable Tridib inhabits a world of his own that is defined neither by the limits of morality nor of geography, but by a large awareness of the world, a generosity of being, and a tenderness and longing that, for me, was inseparable from the novel.

When Tridib located on the atlas the places where his stories were set for the benefit of the narrator as a little boy, for me, too, Golpark took on a seductive charm, full of possibilities: of longed-for encounters and of distances between far-off places dissolving, along with hierarchies, as they do on the flat plane of an atlas.

In an episode in the same novel, the narrator’s grandmother, flying back from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to Calcutta (now Kolkata) and expecting to discover the border between the two countries as a visible line, was surprised to see nothing. The incident captured the insubstantiality of borders in a memorable image.

Ghosh’s lyrical prose also had something to do with the romance of The Shadow Lines. He created new worlds in novel after novel: The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), a chilling thriller weaving a myth around the city and challenging colonial claims to scientific knowledge; The Glass Palace (2000), a grand, sweeping novel set across Burma, Malaya, and Bengal; The Hungry Tide (2004), set in Sundarban, the delta region stretching across Bengal and Bangladesh, devastated by climate change and extreme weather events in recent decades. He would return to climate change in his fiction and non-fiction works. His best works open our eyes and connect worlds.

So, it is a bit of a shock to land on Ghost-Eye, his latest novel. It has reincarnation as its theme and brings together characters, themes, and places from his earlier works. Which is fine. The problem is that the book reads like a ready reckoner to India upgraded to contemporary cool and recommends the ability to foresee the future (apparently, a group of people marked by the facial feature referred to in the title possesses this rare gift) as key to the resolution of the climate crisis. The suspension of disbelief involved in the last claim becomes rapidly unsustainable.

World fish

The wish to be readily accepted by a global readership has always been a feature of Ghosh’s works, as it is of much of Indian writing in English even now. A study of the names of Ghosh’s fictional characters demonstrates this. Ever since Tridib, not many had a name involving the yuktakshar (the compound letter common in Bengali words), or a name with more than two syllables. Most names in his fiction have one or two unambiguously pronounced vowel sounds that easily roll off the tongues of those unfamiliar with Indian languages (a category that includes many Indians now).

So, we have Alu, Ila, Uma, Piya, Fokir, from his earlier fiction; in Ghost-Eye, we have Dinu, Shoma, Varsha, Tipu, Monty, Romy. Never a Phuleshwari or a Saraswati, or a Swarup or an Akshay. This could be a coincidence, of course. Only, as Ghosh himself quotes Carl Jung to declare in Ghost-Eye, there are no coincidences, only synchronicity.

In Ghost-Eye, the urge to create a global resonance reaches a desperate height. Every local event potentially has a world dimension. Why else would a sudden reference to the Japanese koi fish be dropped into a conversation taking place in Calcutta in the late 1960s? Even for the privileged classes in the city, the coincidence—there we go again—in the similar names of the Bengali koi and the Japanese koi is a recent discovery.

Fish from Bengal abound in Ghost-Eye and are painfully propelled into performing on the global stage. The most common fish varieties from Bengal get their Latin and English names added to them like long tails, and their availability in other parts of the world is underlined. Did you know that “‘Clarias batrachus’, the species known as the walking catfish in the United States”, is the magur from Bengal? I did not, but now magur becomes meaningful to me, after its American association has been explained by Ghosh. One feels sorry for the poor rui, katla, charapona of Bengal—they die such anonymous deaths every day in the inglorious fish markets of this part of the world without having had a chance to be counted among world fish!

Discrepancies abound, like the fish. Karfu and gojar, the fish that play an important role in awakening the taste buds of a major character and in starting a chain of world-changing events in the novel, are available not so much in the Indian part of Sundarban—as claimed—as in Bangladesh and on YouTube. Residents of Indian Sundarban or fish-sellers of Kolkata are not much aware of them. Tilapia, which was looked down upon for decades and dismissed as fish meant for “cats and poor people”, gets a strangely easy entry into an upper-class Bengali household in Ghost-Eye. But then, invisible forces are at work here, and stranger things happen.

Spotlight on Sundarban

Sundarban gets such a “cool” look that it becomes quite unrecognisable. A girl from a poor family in a Sundarban village in the 1960s is named Isha. It is as fancy a name as the price tags that indigenous rice varieties from Sundarban carry when they are sold at posh city outlets. We are told that the said poor family had doi-maachh, a mostly urban delicacy in which chunky pieces of rui or katla are cooked in a light, subtly spiced curd gravy. Doi-maachh is most unlikely to have been cooked in a traditional Sundarban home; more likely are dishes such as mustard fish or maachher jhal (both spicy fish curries).

Then there is the insufferable, squawking Tipu with the saviour-complex, a carryover from Ghosh’s 2019 novel, Gun Island. (The Hungry Tide, Gun Island, and Ghost-Eye are being read together by some as Ghosh’s Sundarban trilogy.) Tipu, part of the global network of individuals with past life memories and/or special vision who are leading a war against unethical development threatening the environment, is from Sundarban.

The region, which has the world’s largest mangrove forest and is experiencing a sea-level rise that far exceeds the global average, is vulnerable enough, environmentally and economically. Must it also take on the burden of being a register of contemporary identity politics because it is home to an infuriating Gen Z Dalit gay climate activist trying to start an international and extramundane upheaval? The message is clear: the local can be sacrificed at the altar of the global.

And facts are dispensed with. Ghost-Eye claims that in 1969 the population of the Indian Sundarban was about 4 million. That is nearer the population count now, estimated to be around 4.5 million; according to Indian Census figures, the population of Sundarban in 1971 was around 2 million. And, perhaps, the revival of the salt-resistant, extreme weather-tolerant, indigenous paddy of Sundarban, as prescribed by the novel, really needs some divine intervention to make the authorities amenable to the plan. Market-led government policy has for decades forced on the farmers laboratory-developed, high-yielding, chemical-fed grains that are lucrative in the short term. It has effectively made the return of indigenous paddy extremely difficult.

Maybe the psychiatrist Shoma Bose, who specialises in the “reincarnation type”, could have convinced the government? She accepts past life as a literal truth and, like a sledgehammer, relentlessly dins into the reader the theory that reincarnation is real, giving “evidence” from “cases” where people have made such claims. This looks a problematic line of argument at a time when unreason has been turned into a political weapon. Also, surprisingly for a psychiatrist, she never delves into the complexities of the human mind that might lead to such claims.

It may be pointed out that reincarnation and past life have been the themes of some well-known films and literary works, including a few from Bengal: notably, Satyajit Ray’s film Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) and Rabindranath Tagore’s haunting short story “Kshudhita Pashan” (The Hungry Stones). But there is a difference. Both Ray and Tagore leave it to the reader/viewer to decide whether past life exists, whether the visitations from the past really happened. The truth of the imagination is absolute. Literal truth may be inessential.

Meanwhile, in Ghost-Eye, the deus ex machina—a conglomeration of the reincarnated and those with special vision—is about to descend on earth.

In the prelude to this earth-shattering event, such bizarre and absurd incidents start happening that the worst of all disasters takes place: the reader loses interest. The Bengali reader remembers a Bengali phrase here, Golper goru gacche othe (The fictional cow can climb a tree). At this point she also expects a cult figure from Bengali pulp fiction, the redoubtable Deepak Chatterjee, to materialise. Chatterjee is a supersleuth who had famously plunged into the local pond in his submarine while holding two guns in his two hands and a torch in another. For Ghost-Eye, the torch in his third hand may have been upgraded to a CCTV camera.

Chandrima S. Bhattacharya is a journalist based in Kolkata.

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