Past Meets Present

AMITAV GHOSH'S GHOST-EYE WEAVES PAST LIVES, CLIMATE CHANGE AND FAMILIAR CHARACTERS INTO A GRIPPING TALE THAT MOVES BETWEEN 1960s CALCUTTA AND THE PANDEMIC-ERA SUNDARBANS

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GHOST-EYE

A Novel By Amitav Ghosh HARPERCOLLINS/ FOURTH ESTATE ₹799; 336 pages

AMITAV GHOSH'S LATEST NOVEL GHOST-EYE BEGINS IN 1969 WITH THE GUPTAS, a vegetarian Marwari family in Calcutta, at their wits' end. Out of the blue, their three-year-old daughter Varsha demands fish and rice for lunch, claiming moreover that she has memories of a previous life, with her 'real' mother (in a little Bengali village in the Sundarbans) who taught her how to catch and cook a great many varieties of fish. Dr Shoma Bose, a psychologist and therapist specialising in children who claim to remember past lives, is intrigued by Varsha, especially after the girl clears a blind test designed to test her knowledge of fish. Half a century later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Shoma's nephew Dinu, an antiquarian with a curious mind and a soft spot for her, decides to find out what happened when Shoma eventually took little Varsha to Lusibari, the Sundarbans village (first encountered in The Hungry Tide).