The narrator grows up in Calcutta idolising his uncle Tridib, a scholar who teaches him to imagine distant places precisely. Through Tridib he becomes fascinated with the Price family in London, especially May, a musician Tridib loved. In memory he travels back and forth between a 1960s childhood and student years in London, assembling a family story in fragments.
His grandmother, a stern schoolteacher born in Dhaka, longs to bring an elderly uncle out of what has become East Pakistan. That journey, in 1964, coincides with communal riots on both sides of the border, an episode the narrator only gradually understands and that he must reconstruct from newspapers and the silences of the adults around him.
Ghosh's second novel questions the lines drawn on maps and asks why violence on one side so precisely mirrors violence on the other. Written partly in response to the 1984 Delhi riots, it won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989 and is widely studied in Indian universities.
Book details
| Author | Amitav Ghosh |
|---|---|
| First published | 1988 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 252 |
| Setting | Calcutta, Dhaka and London, 1939 to early 1980s |
| Awards | Sahitya Akademi Award 1989 |
Themes
- Borders and nationalism
- Memory
- Communal violence
- Imagination
- Partition
Who should read it
Readers interested in Partition's long shadow and novels built from memory rather than chronology.