Let’s go to the lush Poppy fields of Ganges this time with Amitav Ghosh!

“How was it that no one had ever told her that it was not love itself, but its treacherous gatekeepers which made the greatest demands on your courage: the panic of acknowledging it; the terror of declaring it; the fear of being rebuffed? Why had no one told her that love’s twin was not hate but cowardice?”

―  SEA OF POPPIES

Amitav Ghosh is the internationally bestselling author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. This is the first book of an epic trilogy. The plot is set around the period just before the outbreak of the Opium War in China. There are very interesting characters in the book and they are onboard in the rolling high seas.

I give a high place to Ghosh among contemporary English Authors from India. A saga of a ship, the Ibis, in the Indian Ocean and a beautiful depiction of local characters in a typical Indian way enthralled me and it kept me engaged with its characters and story. This is a sprawling novel and its historical treatment is just wonderful. I am sure, as Ghosh also acknowledges that he has toiled really hard, doing research of this certain historical period from the past. He has masterfully woven the economic hardship and elements of British imperialism of early 19th century India through his characters and scheme of the novel.

This book is very panoramic, vast, and rich in both suspense and satire. The story revolves around the opium trade and encompasses poverty and riches, expectations, and despair in a very drunk language. The imaginative capacities of Ghosh are always marvelous and it completely stands out. And the way he has written his sentences incorporating elements of local languages in this novel thoroughly engrossed me in the plot.

It consists of everything … Love interests, village atrocities, betrayal, voyage, comic scenes, lots of water too, and many more elements.

During village weddings, it was always the women who sang when the bride was torn from her parent’s embrace…Men remain silent..as if they were acknowledging, through their silence that they, as men, had no words to describe the pain of a child who is exiled from home.

“How will it pass.
This night of parting?”

SEA OF POPPIES

A must-read polyphonic saga from Amitav Ghosh!

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When Oliver Twist evokes the pleasant memories of your childhood!

Image courtesy:outsideonline.com

‘ I hope so,’ replied the child.’ After I am dead, but not before. I know the doctor must be right, Oliver, because I dream so much of heaven, and Angles, and kind faces that I never see when I am awake. Kiss me,’ said the child, climbing up the low gate, and flinging his little arms round Oliver’s neck. Good- b’ye, dear! God bless You!”

OLIVER TWIST

Whenever I think about Oliver Twist, I don’t know why? the only thing, the first thing, and the last thing that always involuntarily hit me right there in my hippocampus is this…

‘I am a little, freaky child, playing in the snow in winter. My woolen hat (which we used to call a topi there) is stuck on top of my head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every moment, and I, giving my head an abrupt twitch every now and then, bringing my hat back to its proper place on my head. Seeing this, my friend, who is another freaky child playing snow-snow with me is running after me, trying to snatch my hat from my head and, I running away from him clutching my hat with both hands.’

Those were such happy days. You know! I spent my early childhood in the frequently occurring picturesque snow-capped ambiance in a hill station in the lapel of Himalaya. I miss those days! And hey! Merriam Webster defines the word ‘hippocampus’ something like this—
a curved elongated ridge that extends over the floor of the descending horn of each lateral ventricle of the brain, that consists of a gray matter covered on the ventricular surface with white matter, and that is involved in forming, storing, and processing memory.

As long as the novel is concerned, I read it only somewhere in 2016. I never read it in my school. The journey and hardship of this orphan boy and the gruesome conditions of an impoverished London and that poverty leading to those criminal activities. This all with that penmanship of Dickens had proved to be a painful yet charming affair for me. Dickens himself had faced those hardships as a child worker I know and the way he has portrayed it here in this book, has shown an apparent profundity of his experience.

“Trifles make the sum of life.”

― CHARLES DICKENS