‘And I Am the Arrow’: Pia Ghosh-Roy’s debut novel has a deeply generous heart despite minor flaws

Sylvia Plath – or rather her ghost – appears quite early in the proceedings in And I Am the Arrow, Pia Ghosh-Roy’s debut novel about three generations of women living in a 1940s Art Deco mansion in Calcutta. As the title of the novel and its epigraph are taken from Plath’s poem Ariel (you know the one, with the suicidal dew drop) and since one of the narrators is telling us the story from the afterlife (named “Wah”), the reader is primed for her appearance. Plath is a member of the Dead Poets Society that gathers by a lake in Wah, where “They tell stories that shimmer a different seeing…”. Virginia Woolf is also spotted, a casualty, like Plath, “of the battle that burrows in your head”, a battle in which “…your mind [is] under siege, fragmenting into many wars with each other.”

The narrator(s) from beyond the grave – named Opor/Neech – introduce themselves saying, “We am dead but We am not a ghost.” Opor/Neech loves wordplay and they don’t shy away from the gruesome – the mentions of the Grand-Guinol theatre and its founder Oscar Méténier signal the messiness of their dying. They used to be one mortal body in this realm (“The Other...

Read more