By Preetha Nair
Jul 30 (IANS): Book: Ghosts of Calcutta; Author: Sebastien Ortiz; Publisher: Sampark; Pages: 330; Price: Rs399.
When diplomats write books, they are expected to invoke political controversy, not ghosts. On that count, "The Ghosts of Calcutta" written by the French consul general in the city, Fabrice Etienne, is a book with a difference. Fascinated by Kolkata and its colonial past, Etienne, under the pen name of Sebastien Ortiz, goes on the ghostly trail of the men, women, buildings that constitute the hoary past of the eastern metropolis.
Released last week by French Ambassador François Richier, the book is an interplay of histories, lives and myths. The reader will be intrigued when fact overlaps fiction, and fiction meanders along the lanes of the past.
The author has beautifully woven the narrative using ghosts as the metaphor. Ghosts have haunted Kolkata for as long as the city's memory goes back.
"I had lived in India in my twenties. It was in Calcutta and I was on voluntary overseas service at the French consulate. More than ten years have since passed. This lapse of time was necessary for me to make up my mind to come back. I found a pretext to write a novel about the ghosts of Calcutta - an excuse which was as good as any, to better reign in my own ghosts," Etienne writes in the preface.
Translated by Sriparna Chatterjee from the French original "Fantômes à Calcutta", the novel narrates four parallel stories.
The protagonist, a Frenchman, arrives in Kolkata in 2005 to write a book on the city. He chronicles the lives of English men and women in the colonial era, many of whom died in tragic circumstances. He tells the stories of their lives and how they live on as ghosts in the city.
"The book was a project and a result of my long and wonderful association with the city. I wanted the French to read about the history of Kolkata," said Etienne.
There is Sarvesh, a Bengali who loses his wife and lives an existence that is a ghost of his vibrant past. Many lives criss-cross, for instance, those of a poor Christian maid and her beautiful young daughter Rosemarie.
The author's love and passion for Kolkata and its culture surprised Chatterjee. "He has detailed the book in a way that even a homegrown Bengali like me did not know many things he is talking about the city," said Chatterjee. An ardent fan of Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore, the author also mentions some Indian writers.
As one grapples with life and love in Kolkata, the book meanders through a city that is present in the past and weaves a narrative that is as magical as real. There are lines from Jorge Luis Borges that India is bigger than the world. The protagonist feels that if this was so, then Calcutta is bigger than India. Could this be true?
The author's first novel Taleb (Gallimard, 2002) was shortlisted for several prizes in France, and has been translated into a number of languages. "Fantômes à Calcutta" (Arlea, 2009) is his fourth novel after "Mademoiselle Coeur Solitaire" and "Le gout de Bali".