In Amitav Ghosh’s new novel, “Ghost-Eye,” Varsha Gupta, a 3-year-old girl in 1969 Calcutta, has a surprise for her vegetarian family.
The child says she’d like to have fish for lunch. Her parents are stunned; Varsha has never had fish. But the girl insists she has — in another life. Her parents take her to a psychologist, Shoma Bose, who is flummoxed to learn that Varsha knows a lot about fish, despite never being served it before.
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Varsha’s case comes up 50 years later, when climate activists fighting to save a forest from corporate greed come upon Shoma’s notes about Varsha; Shoma’s nephew, Dinu, becomes involved, and suspects he might have memories of a past life as well.
Ghosh, who earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, has written about past-life memories and climate change before, but “Ghost-Eye” is one of his most ambitious books to date, tying the two themes together in an epic that spans decades.
The author, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize as well as being the first English-language writer to win India’s Jnanpith Award, among his many accolades, discussed “Ghost-Eye” via telephone from his home in New York; this interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you pinpoint what the inspiration behind this novel was?
Many things, I suppose. I’d been thinking a lot about the death of my mother. My mother died in 2020, the year of the pandemic. She was in Calcutta, and I was here in Brooklyn. I couldn’t go back to her to be with her at the time. That was a very powerful experience. I’ve been thinking about it, and as one gets older, one does think about death, one thinks of one’s own mortality. So as soon as you begin to think along those lines, you really wonder what happens?
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Q: How did you decide to tell the story from Dinu’s point of view?
I’ve written several novels in the first person, and I’ve written several novels in the third person as well. I think writing in the first person somehow creates a kind of immediacy, a sort of warmth of tone. So I wanted to write it in the first person, and Dinu is there because I’d written another novel in which he was also, as it were, the chronicler, someone who is just recording the events that are occurring around him. But at the end of the book, he becomes something else altogether.
Q: What made you decide to bring some of the characters from your previous novels back?
The hardest part of writing a book is when you have to let go of the characters at the end of the book, and I’ve become more and more resistant to that. Also, it’s kind of interesting to think of characters being reborn in another work. It sort of resonates with the theme of this book. It was wonderful to be able to go back and bring those characters into a new narrative.
Q: Do you recall when you first became interested in past-life memories, which are obviously a big theme of this book?
I’ve been interested in that for a very long time. In 1995, I published a novel called “The Calcutta Chromosome,” which actually explores similar themes in many ways. I felt I’d really gone back to that earlier book, and the tone of it is in many ways the same.
There’s a huge amount of material on this subject, really vast numbers of cases that have actually been recorded by extremely reliable people. There have been records made in the United States and many in India, of course, and in many other parts of the world. An enormous literature exists on past life memories. One just has to start reading it with an open mind, and you really can’t, after a certain point, be skeptical of it, because there’s just so much unexplained stuff. I mean, how does a child suddenly start speaking a language that is not spoken in their birth family? How do they remember actual names and addresses? When researchers go back to tally these things, they find that these memories are actually true. Beyond a certain point, it becomes indisputable that this phenomenon exists and that it happens. It’s just that we choose not to contend with it because it just completely overturns everything that we know about the world, and I guess that’s why we just choose to ignore this because it just involves upsetting one’s entire worldview.
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Q: You’ve written before about the climate crisis in both fiction and nonfiction. Does it require the same skillset to write about the topic in both genres?
Absolutely. Once you’ve grappled with the planetary crisis, you can’t really stop seeing it. It’s everywhere around you. You can’t escape it. It enters everything that you do. And the fact that I’d worked with the research that I’d done in a lot of nonfiction writing around these issues, that definitely helped. But beyond that, I would say the one thing that I’ve learned from reading about, writing about, and researching the climate crisis is that in the end, as I said in an earlier book called “The Great Derangement,” this crisis is ultimately a crisis of the imagination. What I mean by that is that the way that we began to think about the world in modern times is that the earth is like a machine, that it’s inert, that it doesn’t have any real life, that it exists only to be exploited by human beings and that technology exists primarily to serve this purpose, to enable us to exploit the earth.
And this mechanistic and materialist mindset really imagines the earth has been dead and emptied of everything, which is why Elon Musk wants to run away to Mars, and he’s not the only one. There are many others who think of the earth in that way, that it’s something empty and exhausting. At the end of the day, from my point of view, what is so urgently necessary is to restore meaning to the world, to restore a sense of sacredness to the earth.
This is something that Pope Francis talked about, that this book talks about as well, because actually there’s a lot of stuff that science can tell us, but science can tell us almost nothing about the really important things, like how a child is born with past-life memories. That should not be possible within a scientific and materialist mindset, yet it happens. So if they can’t tell us about that, then what science can tell us is in its own way very limited. The earth is much stranger and much more wonderful and miraculous than this mechanistic worldview would have us believe.