Armed with a cursory knowledge of the man, his life, and some of his books, and of course, an exaggerated sense of worry, I set out 15 minutes before my scheduled interview to meet Amitav Ghosh, to talk about the latest and the last in his Ibis trilogy — Flood of Fire .
If the first installment, Sea of Poppies , highlighted the details of opium production, its impact on the people in the Bay of Bengal area, and the First Opium War, the second book, River of Smoke , explored Canton and the growing tension between the Chinese authorities and the traders. Like the detailed panorama Ghosh’s books usually are, Flood of Fire is yet another narrative masterpiece by the extraordinary storyteller.
At exactly 3 p.m., Ghosh emerges and walks us to his room at a city hotel, pausing to make polite conversation. Busying himself, he turns off the television and settles down.
Ghosh started work on the trilogy in 2004, just after the completion of The Glass Palace , and with the release of the final book, marks a decade of dedication to a story on the unfettered trade of opium, the milieu of the subcontinent in the 1800s, small personal stories, as well as the larger sweep of history. So it’s only fitting that he feels a sense of loss. However, Ghosh courteously laughs, and he laughs before answering almost every question, “It’s surprising, because usually when I finish a book, I do feel melancholic; you’re parting from the characters and so on. In this case, I felt an incredible sense of fulfillment — that I had undertaken something very challenging and managed to get to the end of it.”
Since he brings up the topic of challenges, I ask whether he would consider writing a simple novel compared to the complex tomes that he churns out. Ghosh’s books, while they are resplendent and ingenious, are also ones that a regular person would definitely not choose. “I like the sort of work that, say Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi do. It’s interesting. I think it’s important that everyone should do what they feel they are good at. And I do this because this is what I’m good at.” Does that mean he essentially only writes for himself? “Everything I write is for myself. I’m absolutely my own first reader and I write because, in the deepest possible way, it’s pleasure, it’s fulfillment. Which is not to say that it’s pleasurable every day; there are days which are incredibly frustrating and very challenging, but it’s part of the whole process.”
Now that his expansive trilogy has been put to rest, Ghosh will be working on two short non-fiction books, one of which is a set of lectures he is delivering at the University of Chicago in September. But I’m not done with the expansive line of questioning regarding his patience to sit through years of research, his attention to finer details of the characters and his employment of vivid scene depiction. Ghosh explains that the research was the easy part. “I like being in libraries, in archives — all of that is something I actually enjoy. The research and the writing go together for me. If I’m writing about a character in the 1830s, then I think about what this character would have worn; you’ve to find illustrations for that. Just simple things like that are often very difficult.”
Flood of Fire marks Ghosh’s eighth novel — his career has seen his work being translated into more than 20 languages, a shortlist for the Man Asian Prize and the International Booker Prize. Starting out as a journalist to “make a living as a writer”, Ghosh remembers “those days” in clear detail, words that give me faint hope of making it in mainstream literary life. “I did exactly what you are doing. I’d have my pad and the chief reporter would say, ‘You go an interview so-and-so’. I remember interviewing a historian once. My God! He was so bad tempered. It’s seared in my memory how nasty he was, because I was a kid and he was a very senior man, so he must’ve thought he would be interviewed by someone senior but, he really took it out on me.”
In an interview for The Guardian , Ghosh mentions that the writing life is risky and emotionally draining, and that he had lived through terrible conflicts while writing The Shadow Lines . Would he then describe the activity as lonely? “I never feel a sense of deprivation while writing. It’s quite the contrary; I feel like I’m dealing with crowds in my head. It’s a very solitary thing and if you don’t like solitude, you should not be a writer. But even as I say that, I think people don’t understand how very solitary it is. You’re just completely on your own.”
Ghosh also believes that reading is the real key to good writing, and that inspiration to write sounds rather “unreal, like something you wouldn’t expect. But it does really happen,” he insists, adding that, “There rarely are moments, when in a couple of minutes you’ll be able to see just a long, long way ahead of you and I’ve had moments like that for no explicable reason, just sitting or thinking.”
It’s not just his books that people seek out; Ghosh is equally popular in the blogosphere, tackling subjects close to his heart such as climate change, archives from 1942 Burma, his expedition to Mekong River, childhood memories… I call it a distraction from writing his books; Ghosh has a profound, complex explanation. An epiphany, rather. “When you’re deeply immersed in writing, your mind is functioning at a very high level. Like athletes preparing for a marathon who build themselves up, and at a certain point, they’re absolutely at the peak of their functioning. And I think that’s what it was.”
While climate change is a topic he might “quite possibly” write on in the future, he thinks that everyone has hundreds of stories waiting to be written. “It’s strange, when you’re a writer, people will constantly come up to you and say, ‘I have a story you should write’, and I always tell them, ‘Nobody else can write your story. If it’s worth writing, you should write it.’”
After 20 minutes of intense questioning, and what I felt made for quite invigorating conversation, there’s relief on Ghosh’s face only to be broken by the subject of a photoshoot, which he takes in his stride. And after possibly 15 minutes of various poses, with and without his book, Ghosh is ready to retire to his room. Only to get ready for his subsequent interview and to cover more remarkable ground in the next conversation.
