In Delhi, Amitav Ghosh reflects on memory, loss and the world behind ‘Ghost-Eye’

The concerns — about loss, memory and fragility — runs through the novel that moves between late-1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, weaving together reincarnation and ecological unease

Returning to the city where he spent almost a decade of his young adult life, renowned author Amitav Ghosh used the Delhi leg of the launch of his latest novel, Ghost-Eye, to speak not just about fiction, but about what he sees as the slow erosion of the institutions and landscapes of the national capital that had once shaped him.

Referring to recent changes in DU’s syllabi, Ghosh called the university’s decline a tragedy. (PTI)

In conversation with writer Keshava Guha at the Ambassador Hotel in Khan Market, Ghosh ranged easily between the imaginative world of his new novel and the city he returned to — touching on the decline of Delhi University, the fragility of ecosystems, and what he described as a growing public push-back against ecological damage. He pointed to the recent debates around the Aravallis as a sign of that shift. “People are aware and fighting to protect them,” he said, underscoring what he described as a rare but crucial moment of environmental consciousness.

It was Delhi University, however, that emerged as a particularly personal marker of loss. Referring to recent changes in DU’s syllabi, Ghosh called the university’s decline a tragedy. “DU in the 70s and 80s may not have figured in the world rankings, but it was as good as any university in the world. I went from DU to Oxford in 1978 and I loved Oxford too. But intellectually speaking, DU back then was much more exciting. We had all read much more and we had much deeper engagements with our subjects,” he said. To see the institution “literally being destroyed in this way” was deeply painful, he added, noting that institutions take decades to build but can be dismantled with alarming speed.

Those concerns — about loss, memory and fragility — also run through Ghost-Eye, a novel that moves between late-1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, weaving together reincarnation and ecological unease. The story opens with three-year-old Varsha Gupta, born into a strict vegetarian family, insisting she wants fish because she remembers another life by a river, catching and cooking it with a different mother. Her baffled parents turn to psychiatrist Shoma Bose, who has spent years studying what are known as “cases of the reincarnation type”. Half a century later, Varsha’s case file resurfaces, drawing Shoma’s nephew into a search that reopens buried histories and uncomfortable truths.

Ghosh described the novel as one that arrived almost unbidden. Unlike many of his books, which take years to gestate, Ghost-Eye “just wrote itself”, he said, recalling Stephen King’s belief that stories sometimes arrive from somewhere outside the writer.

That sense of continuity is also personal. Referring to Varsha, the three-year-old at the centre of the novel, Ghosh noted that he was not yet a grandfather when he began writing the book. He described grandparenthood as an experience distinct from parenting. “It is so different from being a parent. One explanation is that when you’re actually parenting, you feel so busy parenting, you don’t get to enjoy it the way that you do as a grandparent,” he said.

Reincarnation, a central theme of Ghost-Eye, Ghosh suggested, may have grown out of his extensive reading on the subject in recent years, including research documenting children with past-life memories in India. What struck him, he said, was how often those memories are centred on food. “Food is the essential way in which we as humans relate to the earth, to other beings and to each other,” he said, calling Ghost-Eye “in a way, a book about food”.

That attention to food, seeds and everyday practices also connects to Ghosh’s long-standing engagement with environmental crises. He cautioned against reducing all disasters to climate change alone, arguing that biodiversity loss, ecological degradation and social inequities are equally central. Yet, he added, once a writer begins to see these patterns, “you can’t unsee it”.

Ghosh will take Ghost-Eye to readers in several Indian cities, including Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata, over the coming weeks.