Storyteller for all times

The year is 1974. Or perhaps 1975. And a precocious 18- or 19-year-old Amitav Ghosh has just written one of his first articles. The topic — unusual words in the English language. He has sent it to a magazine — its name escapes him — which is edited by MJ Akbar. The article is summarily rejected. Ghosh is a tad disappointed, but far from broken. Tamasha, he recollects, was one of the words that made it to the list.

Today, Amitav Ghosh is easily one of the most recognised authors of the country. Winner of numerous prizes for his 10 novels and a Man Booker International finalist, Ghosh’s written word demands and achieves instant attention. To endorse his success with numbers — he has sold over three million books worldwide, his work has been translated into 33 languages. But 40 years after that first rejection, some things remain unchanged.

The 59-year-old author still reads dictionaries for pleasure, and continues to revel in unusual words and etymologies. He has just completed the third book,

Flood of Fire , of the Ibis trilogy, set against the first opium war with China (1839-42). As Ghosh says, “history provides the scaffolding, not the anchor of the book,” the rest is really all tamasha, a hurly-burly of action, and emotion, dialogue and conversations. While the trilogy is rich in a sense of play and the anti-serious, its arc spans colonial history and upheavals, battles and empires, the criss-crossing pasts of Europe, China and India. The first book, Sea of Poppies (2008) introduced Ibis , a slave ship carrying indentured labour from Calcutta to Mauritius. River of Smoke (2011), as the name suggests, follows the trail of opium that leads to Canton. Flood of Fire concludes with results of the war, the British takeover of Hong Kong in 1841.

Starting from Bihar, moving onto Calcutta, China and Hong Kong, the trilogy spans a vast trajectory. But Ghosh wrote it sitting in rural Goa, looking out at paddy fields, and in Brooklyn, New York, gaping at the hipsters who passed under his window. He wonders aloud if the location of his desk affects the metre of his prose. And then says with a warm laugh, “In Goa, I am able to daydream more. The wild and whacky bits come in Goa.”

There is plenty of the wild and whacky in Flood of Fire . You only need to listen in to Mrs Burnham, who coos post coitus to her ‘mystery’ (or mistri) Mr Zachary Reid: “Oh Mr Reid, I do not doubt that it is a joy to be a launder of your age, with a lathee always ready to be lagowed — and a dumb-poke is certainly a fine thing, not to be scorned.”

While the trilogy is remarkable for its retelling of history and recreation of lost time, this kind of dialogue and the vocabulary of the text conjure up life into it. Ghosh’s words are like acrobats roistering on the page, contorting into unexpected forms, packing in surprises and often leaving you astonished.

When I meet the author in Delhi, it quickly strikes home that his personality imbues his prose. Both are equally generous with guffaws and information. Both possess an innate sense of glee, even while grappling with the issues of their time.

Having just completed a UK book tour and spurning the first signs of flu, Ghosh seems a tad weary of analysing his books. He expresses no undue distress that the characters he has lived with for 10 years have been put to rest. There is no lingering melancholy at having completed the trilogy. He has no wish to dissect his characters or scrutinise the books’ structure. He says simply, “I didn’t have any idea, I sort of blunder around... It was never completely thought out.” What works, shouldn’t be probed too deeply — that seems to be the axiom of his answers.

We sail out from the Flood of Fire , docking at questions of time and place, and immediately his eyes light up and his ‘Ohs’ rise a notch higher. Calcutta serves as the port of departure for all his characters and for him as well. When he wanders through the city, he sees the “significant global port” that Calcutta was in the 19th century. The wars that the British launched from the port rise before his eyes, as do the opium auction markets and warehouses from where the East India Company sold the narcotic to China. From his childhood, Ghosh’s regular restaurant outing used to be to Nanking, said to be the oldest Chinese restaurant in India, which now jostles for space with a rubbish dump.

Ghosh creates a sense of place through the stories of its people. It is no surprise that his readers root for his characters — be it havaldar Kesri Singh of the East India Company, who learns the hard way that rules of the panchayat prevail even in the army; or Zachary Reid, the young American sailor; or Shireen Modi, the Parsi widow who sails to China to locate her stepson and the grave of her husband.

Through them he reveals that what occurs on distant battlefields often decides the lives of individuals. For Ghosh, a takeaway question from the book, in Neel’s words would be — “how was it possible that a small number of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn.” Ghosh elaborates, “There is something about imagination that emerged from the 19th century which came to privilege process and structure over events... it leads us to forget how much of life is actually contingent and accidental.” The ‘what ifs’ of history enchant Ghosh. What if the Battle of Waterloo had ended differently? Would we be speaking French today, he asks.

Moving from the ‘what ifs’ to the here and now, Ghosh expresses a deep appreciation of his readers. He remains overwhelmed by his readers’ attachment to his early work, especially The Shadow Lines. Stifling a chortle, he recounts, “A few years ago I got a letter. It said, ‘I am a 14-year-old girl from Kerala. I read your book The Shadow Lines and loved it. Now can you please send me a picture of Tridip?’”

His readers believe his characters are made of flesh and blood, dwell in his neighbourhood, and can be captured on film. Is there any greater honour for an author?