Status Updates From Ghost-Eye

It was inevitable then that when I started to cook, it wasn’t the food of my childhood that I learnt to make, but rather the kinds of dishes that Calcuttans ordered in North Indian restaurants: butter chicken, paneer masala and the like, things we never ate at home but would enjoy every once in a while when we went out. Nor could it have been otherwise, because Bengali ingredients were not available

This was not the first time that Shoma had been told that the mango tree had an invisible inhabitant: every now and then Husna would light a candle or leave some fruit at the foot of the tree. When asked why, she would say that the offerings were for a being who lived there, a jinn. But the word that Dev had used was ‘jeebi’, which came from the Sanskrit ‘jiva’, meaning ‘living spirit’ or ‘soul’.