Sea of PoppiesAmitav GhoshViking, Rs 599Amitav Ghosh reveals a land hallucinating on opium and a galley of strangers in search of identitiesIt is a land hallucinating on opium — where drifts of white poppy flowers swathe the banks of the Ganga, where Deeti surreptitiously adds shavings of the dark akbari opium to achars to sedate her mother-in-law, where half-naked men with dazed eyes trample the ooze in enormous tanks at Ghazipur’s Sudder Opium Factory, where burra sahibs sell the dope in Maha-Chin and BeeBees slip in a little bit of laudanum before sleep, where butterflies circle the bleeding pods “in oddly erratic patterns” and monkeys hurry to lap up the effluent from the carcanna before returning to their stupefied scrutiny of the river. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first in the proposed Ibis Trilogy, is about the haze before the Opium Wars of the 19th century. It spreads from Benaras to Bihar, from Calcutta to Canton, from land to river to sea. And it drives a host of strangers to a refurbished slave galley sailing to Mareech, the penal colony of Mauritius. The novel begins with the ship Ibis, which the light-eyed Deeti sees in an almost hallucinogenic vision as she takes a dip in the river, and incredulously the very moment the vessel touches the waters miles away. Three-fourths of the book is about the many criss-crossing journeys to the schooner — of Deeti, who escapes from the funeral pyre of her husband, an afeemkhor or opium addict; the gigantic Kalua, who becomes an indentured labourer with many others, for although slave trade is abolished, the East India Company “needs” to export coolies apart from opium; the frail zamindar of Raskhali, Raja Neel Rattan Halder, who becomes a convict with “forgerer, alipore 1838” tattooed on his forehead; the American freedman Zachary Reid who hides his black origins under a fair skin; and the orphaned daughter of a French botanist, Paulette Lambert. It is about how sahibs and sailors, gomusta and grihmitya, blacks, browns and whites become jahaz bhai-behn in the wooden mai-baap. It is a grand narrative that gently reveals history, and how men and women shed the “last shreds of former being” with the keenest instincts of survival and without any ceremony. Even when the Ibis is docked, everything is in flux — lingo, dress and hierarchies of caste and race toboggan like cargo sliding in a ship in a steep roll. Language segues from Dekhehebe ka hoi — and you slowly take to the resonance of musical Bhojpuri and even the following, slightly jarring translation in English — to the “pukka” talk of the Brits. Sample this: “In the old days, the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pish-pash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough, but we’d… wait for the curry of cockup and chitchky of pollock-saug.” Ghosh will not let you forget that it was the period of one robust contact between English and Indian languages and the total pollock-saug-ification of words, the time when a zamindar would say Chatterton and the Brit would ask “Chatterjee?”, but if you do have to make sense of the “zubben” you would need Hobson-Jobson by the elbow. And there is the sailors’ laskari language too, “the motley tongue spoken nowhere but on the water”.The deck becomes a theatre, as man turns woman, Black is presumed to be White; White passes off as Brown and raja becomes qaidi —and anyone who brings up the hidden selves, the old certainties, the indiscretions on land, does not survive the journey. But for all the somnolent pace of the narrative on land, once the Ibis sets sail, Sea of Poppies suddenly seems to be racing to dock somewhere. And it does not. The story, unbelievably, ends mid-voyage, like a ship stranded on a becalmed sea. It is as though Ghosh is eager to remind that this is just part of a trilogy, and not a self-contained one at that. But thankfully for the author, the strangers on the schooner are not easily forgettable and could have you reaching for Book Two of the Ibis, like an afeemkhor for akbari.
