In Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Ghost-Eye, memory is an undefinable, multi-functional thing. It is the key to the past, and to the future. It is the bridge that connects our reality – built on scientific rationality – with the uncanny and divine – built on essentially unknowable phenomena. It is also the barrier that stands between our current, worsening state and a better, more climate adaptive future state. Finally, for some characters, memory is a weapon, available for wielding to a select few, who can use memories from previous lives to fight the planet-exploiting scourge of industrialisation and “progress”.In a somewhat meta move, Ghost-Eye is mostly a recollection written by Ghosh’s now-familiar character Dinu as he pieces together his memories of his aunt Shoma’s encounter with a particular client from her psychiatry practice in 1970s Calcutta. The client, Varsha, is a “case of the reincarnation type”, who at the time of seeing Shoma is a three year old with vivid memories of being a young fisherwoman in the Sunderbans. The novel time travels through 1970s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn as Dinu uses his memories, past-Shoma’s painstakingly compiled notes and present-Shoma’s recollections to piece together past-Varsha’s story. In the present day, Varsha seems to have vanished, somehow managing to leave no trace of her whereabouts or fate on the internet.Amitav GhoshGhost-EyeHarperCollins, 2025Dinu’s exercise in remembering is all for the sake of his reluctant ward, Tipu, another familiar character from Ghosh’s earlier work. Tipu, now sporting a “ghost-eye” post his own life-altering encounter with the uncanny, believes Dinu’s recollections hold the key to locating Varsha in the present day. He’s desperate to find her and recruit her to his cause – a vaguely sketched out scheme to save the Sunderbans from ecological exploitation.As Dinu pieces together a specific time and place from various sources of memory to find clues for what happened to Varsha, he finds himself reminiscing about his childhood world. Now, contemplating the imminent demise of his ailing aunt, Dinu grapples with the realisation that he’s also experienced the loss of his childhood environment. The vultures that routinely frequented the lake by Shoma’s house have dwindled down to nothing in the last few years. The sky, always blue and clear in Dinu’s memory, is now more likely to be a perma-grey. Current-day Dinu despondently tracks carbon dioxide levels in the air in the manner of someone watching a speeding train heading straight for them. Shoma’s demise should not signal the end of the world as she knew it, yet it does.It is difficult to contemplate the losses that Dinu – and we, by extension – have experienced in Shoma’s lifetime. In the intervening years, the world has lost thousands of species of birds, animals, plants, trees; entire habitats and worlds have been wiped out; entire ways of being are gone and are never to be recovered. And that’s just the world we have words for and can verbalise, and hence, recognise.While Dinu’s response to this is a sort of climate anxiety, Tipu’s is an anger that drives him to action. To him, “progress” is a dirty word that has come to stand in for the destruction of the environment, the devaluing of local environmental management traditions that are rooted in religion and ritual, practised and kept alive through memory. He is desperate to find Varsha because he believes that her ability to access the divine, likely granted from being a devotee of Manasa Devi, can be used to create a supernatural spectacle that will galvanise apathetic Sunderban locals to stand up against an exploitative brand of “progress” and recover more symbiotic ways of living on this angry, ailing planet. Tipu believes that ghost-eyes can do this by deploying practical knowledge, lost to us in the present day, but commonly known to their past selves. For instance, he hopes that Varsha can remember a variety of rice that can withstand flooding from saline water and would make it possible for people to survive the periodic flooding of the mangrove forests.However, remembering itself is a challenging act because one lifetime’s worth of memory is insufficient to recover what we’ve lost. Present-day adult Varsha, so traumatised by her supernatural knowledge and inability to act on it, is totally cut off from her powers – lost to her own self if you count her previous life – when Dinu cooks the fish meals of her childhood to reawaken her memories. He has to teach himself how to do this;, that intangible, haptic memory of touch and taste can only be pricked awake with months of research and effort.Remembering is a tricky business in the book, as in life. Dinu finds a path forward, one of climate hope, by working on recovering old recipes for Varsha’s benefit, but investigating his own past leads him to rediscover repressed memories of his own. Ghosh frames Dinu’s new self-knowledge as a liberation; Dinu finally understands the reasons for some of the unsettling experiences that have always followed him, and finds emotional resolution in love. But remembering the past also opens the door to mourning – and how do we remember the world as it was without being driven mad by the profound loss we’ve all experienced and continue to endure? How do we fight against a modernity that pathologises this feeling of inescapable, infinite loss? Where do we find place for this collective memory in a culture that stipulates a deadline for grief and labels anything beyond it a disease?As a story, Ghost-Eye is a tad unsatisfying. Ghosh takes our credulity for granted, papering over narrative gaps with supernatural explanations and missing the opportunity to build out the world of ghost-eyes. His choice to tell the story through Dinu’s relatively passive perspective instead of, say, Tipu’s fiery activist lens or Varsha’s remarkable double-memory is frustrating because it keeps us far removed from the main action in the story. We never get the catharsis of Varsha recovering her memories or the excitement of Tipu mobilising a global network of ghost-eyes to save the planet. Maybe the point is for us to feel a camaraderie with an ordinary human like Dinu. His dedicated work is crucial for accessing the supernatural redemption that imbues the conclusion with optimism. Magic, the divine, the supernatural, the uncanny may indeed exist all around us in a dormant state and will remain so if ordinary humans don’t make the effort to believe in the extraordinary and almost will it into being – and we are in need of extraordinary measures.Despite the novel’s flaws, it feels particularly relevant and pressing in today’s context. In an unhappy coincidence, Ghost-Eye’s release coincided with some of the worst air quality that the Delhi-NCR region has seen in years. On one hand it felt galling to carry on as normal as the air outside turned into a solid grey mass, but on the other, what other option do you have if you’re meant to go to work, go to school, live life? This ties in closely with the questions Ghosh leaves us with: How does an individual understand climate change and process it emotionally? How do we connect an experience of such vast loss with optimism for the future? How can we allow ourselves to feel something so enormous without losing our minds and simply giving up? And is that where faith, wonder and awe in the form of the supernatural and divine come in? Is our only hope something unknowable, something beyond human knowledge and experience?Nehmat Kaur is a writer based in London. She works with miso.ai, building bespoke AI models for news organisations around the world.