For instance, In Sea of Poppies, I used to be wanting into the diaspora of the indenture who had been funnelled by means of Calcutta then. And that turned a really fascinating topic to me. Kolkata has this essential hyperlink with Burma and if you happen to go to Yangon, some components of it should appear similar to Kolkata and in truth, they had been made by the identical builders. Lastly, Calcutta was as soon as part of the Sundarbans and this proximity has been essential for me. So in all these methods, Calcutta/Kolkata has been a really main a part of my life. And not simply within the sense of visiting or residing right here in my residence in Jodhpur Park, however my mental life.
In Calcutta Chromosome, Gun Island and now Ghost-Eye, you have touched on the worlds of magic, fantasy and the supernatural in Kolkata and the Sundarbans. How does this side of Bengal’s tradition and its otherworldly realms discover a approach into your books?
I do not like to use the phrase supernatural, and for that matter, I do not even like to use the phrase pure, as a result of, you already know, these are classes that emerged out of the European Inquisition. And actually, why ought to they have any bearing upon how we consider issues on this a part of the world? I imply, it is so fascinating to consider Rabindranath Tagore, who was an especially trendy individual, very a lot rooted in his modern world. But when he writes his childhood memoir Chelebala, he talks about Jorasanko in north Kolkata and in it he describes a particular tree, which had a bromhodoityo (the ghost of a Brahmin) residing in it. And the entire household simply took this as a right and mapped their lives round it. For Tagore, this was one other side of their regular life fairly than the supernatural.