Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. Sheeshmull blazing with shammers and candles. For instance: “Wasn’t a man in town who could put on a burra-khana like he did. “Sea of Poppies” is written in thick, polyglot jargon that is made more or less self-explanatory by its context but still gives the book a mischievous linguistic fascination. Ghosh’s narrative there is also a language barrier to be surmounted. The tale told engagingly by “Sea of Poppies” is hardly a straightforward one. This opening book concentrates affectionately on its oddly matched characters, explaining who is aboard the Ibis and the curious, roundabout way in which each has wound up adrift in this way. “Sea of Poppies” is pointed toward that conflict, in a series perhaps headed for the thick of the fray. Ghosh’s extended story: the Opium Wars, waged between Britain and China over the British East India Company’s monopolistic drug trade.
And the Ibis, which will become a rowdy and imposing vessel as this novel gets under way, transports both drugs and outcasts to far-flung corners of the world.Īnd although none of these people know it, their ship appears to be headed toward the fight that will be central to Mr. Poppy farming is considered a perfectly legitimate line of agricultural work, especially by the businessmen who find it so profitable. It is 1838, a pivotal year in the annals of the opium trade, when Mr. Ghosh turns the ship into something robustly, bawdily and indelibly real.ĭeeti’s family is one of many that supply produce to a British-run opium factory in Ghazipur in colonial India.
But during the course of this novel, the first installment in his projected Ibis trilogy, Mr.
The ship is named the Ibis, and at first it seems a pipe dream, a figment of Deeti’s imagination. The crop, the livelihood of a woman named Deeti and her neighbors, is opium poppies. At the start of “Sea of Poppies,” Amitav Ghosh presents two indelible visions: a tall-masted ship 400 miles from the Indian coast and a voluptuous agricultural crop, a profusion of flowers capable of warping the world.
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