Ghost-eye: A novel
Amitav Ghosh
harper collins
Rs.799
Pages 322 pp

Lusibari in the Sundarbans becomes the site where climate activists, hydrologists, geologists and an international network of the ghost-eye guild converge to fight against a wealthy corporate…

A decade ago, internationally acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh in his non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) criticised modern fiction writers for finding natural climate phenomena such as storms and tornadoes too unrealistic for purposes of realistic fiction. Almost a decade later, in Ghost-Eye that covers “reincarnation type” case studies and attempts to establish the Rights of Nature, he reiterates “alongside the world of our normal existence, there are other concurrent universes… endowed with the ability to interact purposefully with human beings”.

In the story-line, Ghosh reintroduces characters like marine researcher and rationalist Piya from The Hungry Tide (2004) and Tipu, a human trafficking survivor in the more recent Gun Island (2019), who evolves into a globally connected climate activist.

The narrator Dinanath Datta aka Deen/Dinu, a rare-books dealer who lives in Brooklyn, also familiar to readers from Gun Island, is “a semi-retired, middle-aged antiquarian” living in a “nice airy apartment, surrounded by all those old books”. In Ghost-Eye, Dinu prompted by his aunt Shoma’s case studies and notes that he has inherited, revisits his own childhood and teenage memories of Calcutta of the late 1960s.

Through the eyes of his protagonist, Ghosh expounds upon themes that he is passionate about — ecology despoilation and climate change that adversely affects all life forms on the planet, themes that have engaged him for several years now transforming him into a serious literary environment activist.

A fairly straightforward localised story of three-year-old Varsha, a girl-child in a wealthy Marwari Jain family in Calcutta who retains memories of a past life, ends up having transnational repercussions. Lusibari in the Sundarbans becomes the site where climate activists, hydrologists, geologists and an international network of the ghost-eye guild converge to fight against a wealthy corporate trying to acquire the island to set up a factory that is likely to cause an environmental disaster.

Strangely, Tipu who emerges as a grassroots hero has ‘ghost eyes,’ aka heterochromia (eyes of different colour) that in popular myth signifies the power to see both worlds — the material and the spiritual. However by a strange coincidence, or what Carl Jung identified as ‘synchronicity,’ several of the other characters — Varsha, Dev and his spiritual mentor, Shoma the psychologist — are depicted to possess uncanny, intuitive ability to remember the past, anticipate future events or relate near-death encounters. Even Dinu, the narrator is shocked to discover that in his childhood he was a victim of metempsychosis, explained as an Ancient Greek Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls.

The book’s narrative strategy is constant interactions of human agency with invisible cosmic forces. If we expect the novel to follow the rationale of probability or generic requirements of realist fiction, such expectation would have made the characterisations strained and the story somewhat contrived.

When Varsha as a child starts demanding fish in a strictly vegetarian household, Shoma, a professional psychologist, called in by Varsha’s parents, diagnoses what turns out to be the child’s previous birth longings. Thus the narrative digresses into cases of reincarnation and a tour de force identification of riverine fish varieties resulting in gustatory interludes that dive into everyday tastes of rustic Bengali cuisine.

Later in the story, Dinu by deliberate effort chances upon Varsha, now a high profile Wall Street stock broker, Mumbai Monsoon. Subsequently, the fragile Sundarbans and its ecosystem, local fish and haptic memory turn into international markers of how recollection, folklore, myth are thematically poised to invade the discursive domain of climate disruption.

It is not just the narrator of the story but the author himself, who contends that Western logic, reason and empiricism and “fairy tales told by ‘experts’ and billionaires about miraculous new technologies that would magically suck carbon out of the atmosphere” is a utopian dream. If there is any solution in sight it is in keeping human faith alive. There were “resources on our home planet, within universes that existed in parallel to the everyday one” that evoke a sense of wonder and awe.

In Ghost-Eye, Ghosh embeds the narrative with distinctive cultural lore that often seems purposefully weird to counter western materialism. Initially Dinu is sceptical about the manner in which Tipu harnesses local knowledge and belief in Manasa, the snake goddess of popular myth and folklore of the Sundarbans region, to thwart the mega project on Lusibari island.

Curiously, the protest does not intercept policy decisions, nor does it rationally critique climate politics. The face-off between human agents moving along destructive paths and an eerie divine intervention invoked by faith and belief draws the local population together at an auspicious time. Amidst the multiple crises that are widely accepted as causes of global warming and planetary disruptions, Ghosh dismisses Artificial Intelligence and its mimicking of the human brain as inadequate for deciphering the deep complexities of the human mind. However improbable the novel may seem, it privileges intuition and ethics.

The politics of environment degradation is mainly driven by rhetoric of development that translates into accumulation of wealth by large corporations. There is an uncanny foreboding in Ghost-Eye about real-time projects being currently planned by the Government of India for the Great Nicobar Islands.

The ecological wreckage of marine and coastal ecosystems, deforestation which is likely to lead to wide scale destruction of habitats of living creatures, depletion of natural flora and fauna and most importantly the loss of sustainable living for indigenous populations, is simply too massive to be conceptualised. This novel does not directly address this disastrous scenario unfolding currently, but one wonders if anything close to the fictional denouement holds out hope for a severely endangered planet.

Jayati Gupta