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Résumé :
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Calcutta lends itself to fact and to fiction. Writers explore the city’s history, novelists create their cast of characters with the city as the backdrop. But few weave fact and fiction as magically as Sebastien Ortiz. Ghosts of Calcutta is a play of histories, lives, myths. Here fact overlaps fiction, fiction meanders along the lanes of past. The lanes of past are lined by palaces in ruins, that create a past in the present. The present too is a play of lives and loves. Ghosts have haunted Calcutta as long as the city’s memory goes. A young boy is killed in a duel between two Englishmen, the wife of the Commander of the British Indian Army declines and dies, a policeman is killed during an eruption of communal violence, the director of the Government Art College dies out of love for the female body. Numerous buildings of colonial Calcutta are today the haunted site of ghosts. Ortiz goes on the ghostly trail of the men, women, buildings that constitutes the many pasts of Calcutta. He also pens the life of a Bengali man, a lover of France, who loses his wife and lives an existence that is ghost of his vibrant past. Many lives crisscross, the poor Christan maid servant, her beautiful young daughter Rosemarie live pages across from the Bengalis in love with Dover Lane music conference. As one grapples with life and love of Calcutta, Ghosts of Calcutta meanders through a city that is present in the past and weaves a narrative that is as magical as real. In the novel, we come across lines from Borges, where he says, India is bigger than the world. The protagonist of this novel feels, if that was so, then Calcutta is bigger than India. Could it be true!
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