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Ghost Eye - Reincarnational resistance


A prosperous family living in Calcutta, conscious of its status and robustly vegetarian, is disturbed when the youngest child of the younger son, at age three, boldly demands to eat fish with rice. Even more disconcerting is her assertion that her 'real' mother is a poor fisherwoman living in the Sundarbans - the extensive region of islands, waterways, and mangrove swamps in Bengal. Consternation reigns!

What to make of this? Has someone surreptitiously been feeding her fish? But why would they? Is she ill, and if so, is it physical or mental? Fortunately, her pediatrician is married to a therapist, one who has had reason to study ''cases of the reincarnational kind" and recognises the signs.

There follows an intertwining story of two "cases of the reincarnational kind," one apparent, one hidden, woven within a developing environmental campaign to dislodge a prospective coal-fired power station by animating the powers of an 'other world', and weaving them in a powerful cultural narrative of defending a temple site sacred to the inhabitants of the Sundarbans.

All through the novel, Ghosh demonstrates both a fascination for, and knowledge of, the anomalous or paranormal - including the work of Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia on reincarnation. Yet neither term does justice to the unfolding story - for what is 'paranormal' is simply presented, not without a nod to a decent, but not dismissive, skepticism as part of the fabric of the world (perhaps seen from within whilst most of the time we are entrapped in the only one, wrongly presumed, surface of things).

The great explorer of the all too usually unusual: Charles Fort so disliked the term 'paranormal' for precisely this reason - it refused the opportunity to grasp a greater whole and, as St Augustine noted, a 'miracle' is not a denial of the laws of nature - a supernatural intervention knocking them off course but simply an extension of what is possible within nature - an irruption of another world that is wholly enfolded in this one. If we have eyes to see.

It is a wonderful achievement to incorporate all these possibilities in a novel that naturally and engagingly narrates the lives of its engaging, complex characters from different strata of society, a society that is wider than the human, from their pasts into the world of the present - of Covid disruptions, of climate change and migration and corporations out to sacrifice the world for a quick buck irrespective of consequence. It is also an enticing preview of traditional Bengali cuisine - especially that featuring fish that drives the plot onwards!

The intriguing twist is that the cumulative effect of the gathering ''anomalies" combines to remind us of a living world of presences and persons, only some of whom are human, that was once natural to us - and it is hinted might be natural again, if we pay the right kind of attention. 

The invitation to pay such attention is one of the gifts of this accomplished novel.

P.S. It would, I am afraid, be to give away a key component of the plot to explain why reincarnation (and its rediscovery in the lives of one of the main characters) is the trigger for an act of social resistance (and a rediscovery of lost love) ... the book holds its surprises, and carries them well.



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