GHOST-EYE: A journey into the unknown

If you really wish to enjoy Amitav Ghosh’s latest and his tenth novel GHOST-EYE, it will help if you believe in reincarnation and brought-forward ancestral memory from one’s past life, because reincarnation is a central theme of the novel. I don’t wish to scare you, but it would be a bonus if you believed in “metempsychosis” too. (If you didn’t know the word, no issues; it would just mean you haven’t read Ghost-Eye). Metempsychosis is migration of the soul from the body of a dead animal to that of a human or the other way round. For example, you were an otter in your last life and are reading this now! (I understand there are many recorded cases when little children accurately describe another place and family where they claim to have lived in their previous life. But I remain a sceptic. As I read Ghost-Eye, I carried the burden of my scepticism.)

Amitav Ghosh, a significant literary voice cautioning us about the climate disaster, has used the delicate ecology of the Sundarbans not just as a background, but as a central character in his novels THE HUNGRY TIDE (2004), THE GUN ISLAND (2019), and GHOST-EYE (2025). All of them carry strong messages about saving our planet. Another interesting aspect of Amitav Ghosh’s novels is the ease with which he moves between the past and the present and between continents! (In The Gun Island, between the Sundarbans, Los Angeles, and Venice.) His craftsmanship as a novelist is awesome; his language, captivating. Despite my scepticism, I got immersed in Ghost-Eye in no time.

Soon, I discovered that the arcane title of the novel comes from a protagonist, a Sundarban-based climate activist Tipu, whose eyes are of different colours. Tipu’s “ghost-eye” gives him the power to clearly see the past, the future, and also, things happening far away. And the phrase ghost-eye becomes the signature of a group of mysterious humans with similar abilities. 

Moving on to the story, like The Gun Island, Ghost-Eye too is narrated by Dinu, a middle-aged single man who lives in New York. Dinu tells us the story of Varsha Gupta, a girl slightly younger than him, and who grew up—like him—in Southern Avenue flanking the Dhakuria Lake in Kolkata in the 1960s, although they didn’t know each other. One day, Varsha stubbornly demanded to eat fish and nothing else. She also claimed that in her previous birth, she had lived with her fisherwoman mother in a thatched hut near a river. Both fish and poverty were anathemas for Varsha’s wealthy, strictly vegetarian family. Devastated, they got in touch with Shoma Bose, a clinical psychologist—who happened to be Dinu’s aunt—to counsel Varsha.

A parallel story begins when Dinu is confined in his New York flat during the COVID pandemic. Far away in the Sundarbans, a company is about to set up a large coal-based plant, despite warnings from environmentalists that it would be a disaster for the tidal archipelago. Tipu, who is among the people who are trying to block the project, believes there is a connection between averting the crisis and a former client of Shoma. Through video-calls across unstable connections, Tipu prods Dinu to trace that particular client of Shoma. Digging into his memories of Shoma and bits and pieces of clues, Dinu tries to identify the client like a detective, as Shoma’s professional ethics doesn’t allow her to reveal anything about her clients.

There are two ways of looking at the immensely readable novel. I feel that while Ghosh’s first novel based in the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide, explores the intersection between nature, folklore, human survival, and science, in his latest Sundarban-based novel, while the first three elements remain, “science” has been replaced by the “paranormal”. Given the wiring in my brain, I cannot be happy about the shift personally.

However, you can also say that reincarnation has been used merely as a literary tool here, Amitav Ghosh—through folklores of the people of the Sundarbans—is actually looking at our past, and the disaster that our future is increasingly looking like

Bengaluru / 14 March 2026