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Holding them in a thrall

Photo: P.V. Sivakumar

Rapt listeners As Shankar Melkote makes a point, the audience waits for Amitav’s response

The short bespectacled man stepped on to the raised platform. A full mop of white crop on his head and with a khaddar kurta he could as well have been a politician. Then he started talking: “The story came to me when I was reading a list of shi ps, passengers and crews. Most of the passengers were migrants from Bihar and Bengal while all the officers were almost always white,” he said, and all the ears in the auditorium were his. Like a good raconteur Amitav Ghosh put together the bits and pieces and threw in nuggets of information setting the stage for a book reading session of his Sea of Poppies. “I wanted to see how they meet, track the process where they come together and how they resolve the differences, how they communicate,” he said opening page number 105 of the book:

“Ten miles downriver, on the Raskhali budgerow (house boat or a luxury yacht if it makes sense), the preparations for dinner had run afoul of some unexpected snags. The boat’s lavish sheeshmahal for one: it had seen little use since the old Raja’s time…” he read explaining a word here, a bit of history there. Amitav ended the reading with a bit of racy, gratuitously salacious bit from the book.

Budgerow, did Amitav say? Yes. Words that are a pick from Bhojpuri, Pidgin and Hindustani flit in and out of the novel and the author explained that he had a tough time learning the syntax so as to get the feel of the language right. The Q&A at the end proved what Amitav said at the beginning of his chat: “Hyderabad is an important reading centre now.”

And there was a rush at the book counter to pick it up and get it autographed by the author.

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