A love letter to fish

Eerie but believable, Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye lives in the friction between the worlds of Westernised rationalist modernity and traditional Indian ecological knowledge

- Saudamini Jain

Amitav Ghosh’s new novel GhostEye is foremost a love letter to fish — first celebrated in the deepest Bengali sense, culinarily, before being mourned ecologically.

In a wealthy, strictly vegetarian Marwari family home, three-year-old Varsha Gupta, over lunch, demands fish and rice. “Ami machh-bhat khabo. Machh dao,” she declares, refusing to eat anything else. The family, part Jain and fully alarmed, summons a psychologist. Shoma specialises in “cases of the reincarnation type”, having worked with an ‘American professor, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.

So begins this vivid, visceral and deeply satisfying novel.

Varsha claims to have been, in her past life, the daughter of a poor fishing family in the Sundarbans, and seems to have an unusually vast knowledge of fish. Shoma devises a plan. She begins poring over books on the aquatic fauna of Bengal and, with her cook, carefully selects different varieties from the fish market, to quiz the child.

She carefully prepares a lunch menu with three varieties: Labeo rohita, Cyprinus carpio and Oreochromis niloticus. Varsha, as Shoma suspected, turns out to be a fish prodigy.

The fried fish with spices, Varsha recognises, is rui and not catla, a difference that even seasoned ichthyologists often can't spot. She is also able to tell that the doi machh is made with karfu instead of the more commonly used catla.