But death is not the end, not in Bhattacharya’s fictional universe. Although Harbart kills himself at the very beginning of the novel, there is an afterlife for him. Doubling back from that scene of suicide, the novel gives us a tragicomic life arc that includes Harbart’s being orphaned early in childhood, his dropping out of school, and his dabbling in verse while becoming an autodidact with an interest in the occult.

Although many members of Harbart’s lower-middle-class family are neglectful and abusive toward him, others are drawn to him in affection: his elderly aunt, the underclass of the neighborhood, and most of all, Herbert’s college-going cousin Binu, a member of the ultra-left Naxalite movement that swept through Calcutta and much of India in the seventies before being put down brutally by the state. Binu, too, is killed by the police, shot down while painting graffiti heralding a revolution that will never come; yet it is his appearance in a dream of Harbart’s that convinces the neighborhood that he possesses the power of communicating with the dead.

And on that local reputation Harbart’s small business is founded, and then conducted from his bedroom but with a signboard outside that reads, in the manner of Calcutta neighborhood stores, “Conversations with the Dead. Prop: Harbart Sarkar.” The business is, of course, a sham, Harbart’s mystical pronouncements conjured by a fervent imagination and close attention to three Bengali books: two occult texts, Accounts of the Afterlife and Mysteries of the Afterlife, the other a pulpy work of genre fiction, The Horribly Haunted Circus.

The business will draw into Harbart’s ambit the bereaved and the lost—parents and siblings, children and lovers, people hoping for communication with the dead that might bring them the comfort and sustenance that life has been unable to provide. It will even attract the menacing businessman Surapati Marik, owner of “property, fish farms, coal mines, mopeds,” a true representative of the new India who offers Harbart a “fifty-fifty” partnership that will globalize the occult business, taking Harbart into the realm of English-speaking elites. Then, inevitably, in a fallout of the publicity sought out by Marik, will come the endgame of Harbart being exposed as a fraud by the West Bengal Rationalist Association.

The skeleton of synopsis and plot, however, can indicate only haltingly the exceptional achievement of Harbart, the kind of artistic and political breakthrough it exemplifies. It is not operating, in spite of its astutely observed details of social milieu, character, and cityscape, within the frame of conventional realism. Slim, novella-length, it moves rapidly in time, compressing entire centuries of violent history (colonialism, the Communist and Naxalite movements, the corruption of the postcolonial state, the counterrevolution of the market) into the brief life of its protagonist while also inserting a kind of magic realism that includes, along with the haunting fairy, the actual, squabbling ghosts of Harbart’s ancestors.

Yet if not realist, neither is the book avant-garde in any fashionably apolitical manner, offering the dreary inventory of a single consciousness as deep, existential meaning. And while it is political, resolutely committed to a leftist challenge to the existing social order, its protagonist is not the revolutionary Binu but the hapless, fake spiritualist Harbart, which requires from the reader a political engagement that is nuanced rather than dogmatic or obvious.