SOMETHING FISHY

Amitav Ghosh’s new novel is as much about families, fate, and endangered ecology, as it is about food and marginalisation, or the way we relate to one another. A conversation.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

NOT surprising for a place that has known man-made famines and hunger in its most visceral form, starvation and surplus are recurring themes in Bengal’s culture — both popular and high.

At the centre of many of its books and films are children either with big appetites or starving; fat kings and merchants and thin animals; or monsters who like people for lunch. Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye adds to that library. His new novel is about almost a historical impossibility as a case study for hunger — the three-year-old daughter of the Guptas, a wealthy Marwari vegetarian family, who one day wakes up telling her mother she is not her mother, that in her past life she has eaten fish in the Sunderbans, and will give up eating unless she is fed some.

The Guptas seek the help of psychiatrist Shoma Bose, who has been investigating cases of reincarnation. What follows is a story set across different timelines and geographies — from ’60s Calcutta and the Sunderbans to post-pandemic Brooklyn with a strong Burma connection. Ghost-Eye is about many things, as Amitav’s novels usually are. It is about endangered ecology, families, fate and scientific dogma, and also about food and marginalisation, and the way we relate to what is on the plate, and to each other.

Excerpts from a conversation with the author on the worlds of connections he sets up and the way the past bleeds into the present.

Your work is Bengal-centric, you have written seven books about the region. But other than the fact of it being your hometown, what is it about Calcutta’s or, Bengal’s history that makes you keep returning to it?