Years earlier, Deeti had married Hukam by arrangement. Her husband, Hukam, was formerly a sepoy in the British Army but was wounded in action and now works in a nearby opium factory.
As Serang Ali shows him, with a change of clothes, careful manners and a little confidence, Reid can be easily mistaken for a white man.įar inland, in northern Bihar, lives Deeti a young woman with a husband and a daughter, who grows poppies for producing opium on a small plot of land. Reid’s mother was a house slave, his father was her master and Reid, a freeman, is the descendent of several such relations. He and the ship might never had made it if it were not for the help of some lascars – gangs of sailors of varying ethnicity and dubious background who crew ships – and their leader, Serang Ali. A carpenter, Reid is no sailor, but the calamitous voyage to India saw him have to take command of the ship. The Ibis was not a ship like any other in her inward reality she was a vehicle of transformation, travelling through the mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was Truth.Īrriving with the Ibis, having made the entire voyage with her from Baltimore, is Zachery Reid. The Ibis, then, is about to begin her second life, and she is not the only one. The new owners of the Ibis plan to put her to a new use – shipping opium from India to China. A former blackbirder, a slave ship, the Ibis is not swift enough to evade the British Navy ships on the west coast of Africa now that the slave trade has been abolished. In 1838, the Ibis, a two-masted schooner, arrives on the east coast of India. But despite this apparent complexity, and the fact that it benefits from thorough research, Sea of Poppies is highly ‘readable’ and has all the page-turning qualities of a good-old-fashioned yarn.
It is an historical novel where disparate characters, trapped by the confines of class, caste, race, religion, gender, addiction or sexuality, fight for the opportunity to escape, transform and find independence. Sea of Poppies, the first novel of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, has all the credentials of a major literary work.
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