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The Opium Clerk
The Opium Clerk is a novel written by Kunal Basu about the complex effects of the Eastern opium trade on three generations of an embattled Anglo-Indian “family”—all painstakingly traced in his elegant first novel.

He has written about aspects of history that have rarely if ever been featured in historical fiction. His first novel, The Opium Clerk, while nominally about the opium trade, also told the story of the British trading presence in China and Southeast Asia from the perspective of one of the Indian employees

Plot
The tale begins in 1857 with the birth of its protagonist Hiran(yagarbha)—on the very day when his soldier father is killed in action during “the Mutiny” against British occupation. This fateful collision of events influences Hiran’s introspective, meditative nature, particularly after he discovers his ability to divine other’s futures by reading their palms. Basu’s elaborate plot follows Hiran through his early life in Calcutta, employment at an Auction House where transactions relative to the production and distribution of opium are made, and adventures in (the primary market of) China, where he’s caught up in the siege of Canton and barely escapes alive. The plot twist is Hiran’s “employment” by his Deputy Superintendent Jonathan Crabbe to “convince a mother to give up her child” and thus fulfill the vagrant maternal longings of Crabbe’s disoriented, opium-addicted wife. The dynamic of Western exploitation and manipulation of Eastern resources—and a consequent refusal to shoulder responsibilities thereby incurred—is thus echoed in global and personal relations alike, as the British attempt a dignified retreat from the mess they’ve made, the Crabbes abandon their half-caste “son” Douglas, and Hiran, who “inherits” the boy, survives into old age, still bound to obligations long since undertaken, and able at last to decipher “the mystery of the two Life-lines on his [own] palm.” Basu interlards his story with nuggets of wisdom from such classic Indian texts as the Upanishads and Panchatantra. And in the climactic pages, Douglas Crabbe’s helpless reenactment of the familiar patterns of appropriation, evasion, and withdrawal reinforces with powerful irony the lessons learned and not learned by his predecessors—as a young century, and further conflict and conflagration, beckon.

Review
Just one whiff is enough. You don't have to be an opium addict to savour the slow, burning languor of the sticky-sweet saga of the opium trade that Kunal Basu places before you. He does it with so much assurance, twisting the glowing ball of his murky tale at the end of his storyteller's pipe, that when he hands it to you, you don't ask any questions.

You sit back in the dark recesses of colonial history, almost with a sigh of contentment. This is familiar territory; the Calcutta of sahibs and superintendents, of memsahibs as frail in their muslin chemises as the poppy flower itself, of Chowringhee in all its imperial glory, setting itself aflame to welcome another Viceroy, while at the back, in the crowded alleys and lanes, the teeming life of the natives.

It's as sharply etched in black and white as a Daniells' print, until you notice that blurring the edges is the blue-gray smoke that winds through the centre singeing the image so that nothing is left, except an acrid sense of loss.

By this time, you have inhaled so deeply of the potent weed that you cannot say whether it is the effect of the opiate (however removed) that has drugged your senses into accepting the strange visions that Basu conjures before you, or whether it is his skill as a fabulist that powers his narrative.

It hardly matters that the Kolkata-born Basu is a first time novelist, or that the blurb describes him as a teacher in some of the better known universities of North America and the UK, without telling you what he teaches. He has opium in his blood.

There is nothing timid about Basu's intentions. He starts off briskly with the precipitous birth of his hero in the midst of the turmoil of the Mutiny that leaves him fatherless. The young boy, Hiranyagarbha Chakraborti, progresses through life like another Nirad babu, a Bengali aesthete with a mission-school education that enables him to give the correct answer during his initiation into babudom, as a clerk in an auction house, dealing with the opium, though no one calls it that. It is referred to as mud.

As Basu describes the scene: "The dark chamber reminded Hiran of the theatre. The Superintendent paced like an actor before a giant mahogany desk. His face was truly pink, unlike the painted ones at The Star or The Emerald. And he spoke not to Hiran but to his report from the mission school and his certificate of elocution. 'Name an English poet of your liking.' Instantly Hiran thought of Derozio, but he checked himself at the last moment. 'George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, Sir'." Nirad Chaudhuri would have been proud of him.

The auction house not only allows Basu to explore the full ramifications of the opium trade-through the eyes of Hiran indeed we are given more information about it than what we might need-but he also re-creates the rich cast of characters who work there. It's a Dickensian world peopled with Bengali characters.

When he first appears before his fellow clerks, a David Copperfield in an ill-fitting jacket and serge trousers with a dot of sandalwood paste on his forehead stamped by his distraught mother, stricken by the thought that her delicate child must now become a clerk and not a Brahmin priest, the clerks give him the once over. "From desks piled high with files, the gentoos examined Hiran, polishing eye-glasses as if inspecting a letter from an unknown sender . . ."

One of Basu's strengths has been to weave stories from myths and popular legends into his narrative so that they appear in some places as dreams, in others as portents and in still others as a means of communicating the mystery of life.

His main character is at times a palm reader of extraordinary intuitive power. Can everything be explained, or is the imagination all that we have to ncircle us with the phantoms in the brain that will entice us like the promise of smoke fuelled by a dark weed? The Opium Clerk does ot tell, or perhaps he tells it too well.