Amitav Ghosh Writes a Covid Novel Like No one Else

Watching 69-year-old Indian writer Amitav Ghosh pontificate on a number of YouTube videos, I felt as if I was able to receive a subliminal sense of who this author might be beneath the beaming exterior that felt like a practiced disguise. Ghosh has a tender face, but a wary one. His eyes don’t reveal what he is really thinking. There is a charming, old-fashioned quality about him that feels as if he were speaking to us from elsewhere. He reminds me of a genial but overbearing uncle who bats away with humor and a hearty laugh.

Ghosh has been writing for decades and is best known for his historical novels that blend real-world events with myth and heavy doses of magical realism. For example, Gun Island (2019) tackles the climate crisis and its connection to the legend of the Gun Merchant and the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi, who holds sway over his protagonist’s journey through a series of surreal happenings.

Nevertheless, there was the distinct sense that when he speaks to the audience he is engaging in some sort of masquerade, his own practiced version of performance art. If you listen to Ghosh long enough, you can hear snippets of anger peeking through as well as an arrogance he tries to stifle beneath his polite discourse. Despite his stated belief in the possibilities of alternative realms of being that lace his many novels, Ghosh himself seems seriously minded and contained; known only to himself.

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Ghost-Eye: A Novel  
By Amitav Ghosh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 336 pages

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His new novel Ghost-Eye begins with a seductively immersive tale about the Gupta family who live their lives as deeply religious Marwari Hindus and strict vegetarians during the late 1960’s in Calcutta. The 75-year-old patriarch, Harihar Gupta, has done well for himself by turning his jute-processing company into a business empire that spans the entire country. He and his wife, along with their two sons and grandchildren all live in a luxurious mansion where each family has a floor of its own. The family are living a preciously content existence until one day when Gupta’s precocious granddaughter, Varsha, wakes up refusing to eat what is in the house and demands fish, which is forbidden to the Gupta family.

Little Varsha insists she has eaten fish countless times before in her past lives which she seems to be remembering with frightening clarity. The family, distressed by the child’s rantings, summon a psychologist to help them. The child’s mother, Dipika, is filled with shame that her daughter is behaving in such a bizarre fashion fearing the others will condemn her for her poor parenting. The father, Abhay, is sympathetic to the little girl’s plight. It is he who will work in tandem with the psychologist, Dr. Shoma Bose, in trying to get to the bottom of what is going on and relieve the little girl’s suffering.

We are kept in the dark as to who is telling us this strange engrossing tale but sense our narrator is connected to all of this in a way that will be revealed later. For the moment, our unidentified guide speaks to us in a calm and steady demeanor describing for us the world surrounding Varsha at this precise moment in time just as she is falling apart. He writes:

There are certain years when time seems to speed up: for India and its neighbors, as for the world, and even beyond, 1969 is one such, for it is in July that Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to set foot on the moon. This is also the year when the Earth’s temperature is measured by a satellite for the first time, and the reports seem almost unbelievable today: the average temperature worldwide in 1969 is no different from what it was in 1877, almost a century earlier. Around the planet the weather is relatively cool and clement, which is not surprising since the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a mere 325 parts per million.

Ghosh frequently makes digressions such as this one that take us out of the story and present to us the larger world in some shape or form. These diversions seem purposeful and reflective of Ghosh’s belief in our universal interconnectedness. However, his detour to the wider world does not break the spell that has already been cast upon us by the plight of Varsha and her family. We are already invested in her story and want to know if Bose — whom we are told has experience in dealing with children “who remember past lives” — will be able to soothe her.

But our expectations are thwarted when we are suddenly thrust into contemporary time where we finally learn who our narrator is. Dinanath Data, known as Dinu, whom we learn is Bose’s beloved nephew, is sitting solemnly in his Brooklyn apartment in the middle of the raging Covid pandemic thinking about his childhood in Calcutta during the 1970’s:

Calcutta was then in a state of almost permanent rebellion with daily strikes, or morchas, or gheraos. Best of all were the Bandhs, which would shut down the whole city: there would be no buses or cars or trams on the street, so we were free to spend the day outside, gleefully playing wherever we wanted so long as we stayed within precincts of our para where everyone knew everyone.

Dinu wants to get back to Calcutta where his aunt Bose, now 85 years old, is laying in her death bed but he is trapped due to the pandemic’s restrictions on travel. Dinu seems dangerously alone. He has no apparent love life and the phone calls he fields from friends back home seem transient and unable to shake him from his malaise. He lived most of his childhood with Bose for reasons he can no longer remember, but she was the person he was closest to, far beyond his own mother. He loved her husband Monty as well as their driver Dev who played a consequential role in his own recovery from something he can also no longer access. Ghosh is comfortable leaving us in the dark and we sense he feels that this is how most of us navigate our lives; shut off to the primary forces that shaped us to confront an increasingly confusing world.

Despite all the mystery, Dinu is a failed character; bloodless really; he serves no apparent purpose except for leading us back to Varsha. Dinu feels like an unnecessary distraction, a literary sleight of hand that fumbles the ball at the starting line and never picks up steam. We have no feelings for Dinu, and not enough knowledge of his inner life to become invested in him or what he is sharing with us which seems to grow more bizarre and untethered as the novel progresses.

When we finally return to the Gupta family, we learn Bose has not only convinced Varsha’s father to allow his daughter to eat the fish she craves but has agreed to travel with Varsha and the psychologist to Varsha’s insistent memory of her childhood village which resembles closely the child’s imaginings. Bose is moved by certain moments of love and tenderness she sees between Varsha and her father and becomes desperate to help the little girl come full circle; whatever that might mean to the others who are embarrassed by the little’s girl’s memories.

Again, Ghosh interrupts his story and has his narrator reminds us again about what is happening as Varsha is confronting what appears to have been her past life.

“In recent months the world has been rocked by a succession of events: mass uprisings in the nascent nation of Bangladesh; race riots in Malaysia: the deployment of British troops in Northern Ireland; a coup in Libya led by Colonel Muhammar Gaddafi: and intensifying protests against the Vietnam War in the wake of Ho Chi Minh’s death on 2 September. In the midst of worldwide turmoil an apparition of the Virgin Mary, which first appeared a year before, above the Zeitoun Church in Cairo, is still attracting huge crowds in Egypt: the glowing figure outlined withing a shimmering sphere of light has since been seen witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people including President Gamal Abdel Nassar. It has also been extensively photographed and filmed.”

Passages like this one illustrate what an extremely talented and imaginative writer Ghosh can be. But sometimes it feels like Ghosh chooses to hide his immense talent behind fantastical elements which he uses as an escape hatch of sorts to avoid confronting certain uncomfortable truths about our inner lives. He hides behind characters who are often hiding behind the elaborate masks he has created for them. As with Dinu, he remains a thwarted figure throughout the book where if given more emotional heft and inner complexity, could have transformed this work into something truly magical. Sometimes magic can only be found by abandoning it.