Tales from the loop

In Ghosh's new book, Ghost-Eye, a child named Varsha, born into a vegetarian family, suddenly refuses to eat anything but fish, and begins to recall details of a past life in the Sundarbans.

- Kanika Sharma

The plot eventually circles back to the theme that occupies Ghosh most: the climate crisis. Could a kind of almost-magic, via people like Varsha, help us? In a world so full of techno-utopian fantasies, why rule this out, Ghosh says. What will it really take? Humility, he adds. And a recognition that the world is 'a much stranger place than we imagine it to be'

The past isn't ever behind us, in Amitav Ghosh's version of the world.

For him, these realms in which fact and makebelieve are braided together form everpresent parallel dimensions of a kind, since no two versions are ever quite the same.

Ghosh's new book, Ghost-Eye, due for release on December 15, works to extend the idea of what constitutes our past, invoking concepts of reincarnation and past life.

At the heart of this tale is Varsha, a threeyear-old girl from a family of vegetarian Marwaris in Kolkata, who suddenly refuses to eat anything but fish, and begins to recall details of a previous life in the Sundarbans.

Eventually, the book circles back to the theme that occupies Ghosh most: the climate crisis. If we are willing to buy into techno utopian fantasies, might we not also consider other kinds of fantastical possibilities? Particularly if they could help us connect with each other, and reconnect with our planet?

"This has been an unusual book to write," Ghosh says. "Usually, it takes me a long time, three years, sometimes four, to write a novel. This one wrote itself, in about a year. It felt the idea just came to me, from somewhere else, and I started writing."

Excerpts from an interview.

Why did you decide to place the theme of past lives at the heart of Ghost-Eye?