112 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019
BOOKS
@LEISURE
is clothes are all black.
No hint of light. For the
Delhi launch of his new
book, Amitav Ghosh
chooses a dark, linen shirt, as befi ts
the colour of the Bengal sky during
the July rains. Over the years, Ghosh’s
clothes have become monochro-
matic, a contrast to his technicolour
worlds.
Th e tea is Darjeeling; no milk.
Ghosh, however, reaches out for
stevia. Th e ‘thank you’ is prompt. He
is, if nothing, unfailingly polite. At
the book launch at a packed India
Habitat Centre, he signed as many
as six books for one reader, making
small talk as he did, and ended up
reaching his dinner engagement well
past 9.30pm.
Ghosh’s neighbours—he lives in a
Goan village that is straight out of an
Alexander McCall Smith—include
an anthropologist and an artist-fi lm-
maker. Th ey were all in attendance
in Delhi, like they had been when he
was conferred the Jnanpith recently.
An evening at the Ghoshes appar-
ently includes a badminton match
and dinner cooked by Ghosh, whose
culinary skills are believed to be
book-worthy.
His new book, Gun Island, is his
fi rst standalone novel since the Ibis
trilogy. “After the trilogy, I was just
dying to get back to fi ction,” he says.
“It came pouring out really. Fiction is
where I live.”
With the promise of a new ad-
venture and new characters, Ghosh
returns to a new world. Th e book
is not a sequel, but Piya Roy is a
central fi gure, and is still following
the dolphins. Fans of Th e Hungry
Tide will immediately recognise her
no-nonsense self. “Th e characters
who you have lived never go away. It
is what happened with Piya. After Th e
Hungry Tide, I thought I was done
with Piya. But she came back. It was
not all my doing. Characters have
some agencies. I am sure the char-
acters of the trilogy will come back,maybe, in some ways. I don’t know,”
says Ghosh.
Th e central character of the book
is the narrator—Deen, or Dinanath
Datta, a rare book dealer. He jour-
neys into the world of Chand Sadagar
and the goddess of snakes Mansa
Devi—a legend that Ghosh heard
when he was a child. A merchant of
bundooks (guns), Sadagar fl ees to
bundook-dwip (gun island) after he
angers Mansa by refusing to become
her devotee.
Th e canvas is classic Ghosh, and
the story has the epic sweep of the
Ibis trilogy. He weaves a tale that irre-
sistibly links myths, legends, folklore
and the power of nature. “In many
ways, folk tales [and] mythologies
deal with our world more directlythan modern literature,” he says.
“Th is is what struck me powerfully,
with these Bengali stories. I had
grown up listening to them. When
I started reading them as texts, it
really struck me—how much they
address the phenomenon of storms
and animals, droughts and famines.
Th e world that these tales depict
is a real world. Th ey [the tales] are
much truer about the nature of life in
Bengal than novels set in Kolkata are,
for example.”
Ghosh has always been a deeply
political writer, but his concerns have
become deeper in the past decade,
and his writing more urgent. Gun
Island breaks the silence on the cli-
mate disaster waiting to happen, as
it addresses cyclones, pollution andH