Pic by Rupinder Sharma

It’s been a whirlwind year so far and he’s been on the move without a break. He’s played star attraction at literary festivals in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Montreal. And he also squeezed in visits to his three homes — in Calcutta, New York and Goa — to take time out to complete his newest novel, River of Smoke. Amitav Ghosh, one of the country’s most hugely acclaimed modern writers, is on a roll.

“There are so many festivals and speaking engagements everywhere. If I wanted I could be in a different place every single week of the year,” says the Calcutta-born author, smiling. And he will find himself in different cities over the next few weeks as he criss-crosses the country on a six-city tour to launch his much anticipated epic-style saga.

Despite his peripatetic life, Ghosh, 55, refuses to rush his books. He finished River of Smoke, the second in the Ibis trilogy, barely three months ago. “Every book is like a tree — it grows and needs time and you can’t hurry it.”

He’s nostalgic as he settles down to a jampacked schedule at Aman New Delhi. Looking about him he’s struck by how the hotel has risen, Phoenix-like, from what was once The Lodhi Hotel. Ghosh says it was a regular haunt and he came here frequently during his student days in the mid-’70s to dig into his favourite dosas at the hotel. “I remember Delhi as a lost world,” he says of the city’s radically changed landscape.

Looking back he’s overcome by a sense of amazement. “Today, it seems almost a miracle that I’m back here as a writer,” he says.

River of Smoke (Penguin) — that took three-and-half-years in the making — is for his mother who recently turned 80. “It’s a birthday present for her,” he says.

The novel, that’s already being described by critics as a cracking good read, has kept pace with Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the Man Booker prize in 2008) with its rich narrative and incredibly vivid prose. A large part of the book was written in Goa — and some in New York as well. “Basically, I just went from one desk to another desk,” he says.

When he began Sea of Poppies (2008), the first in the trilogy, he had the Alexandria Quartet by British writer Lawrence Durrell in mind in terms of the book’s format. He’d read it some 20 years ago and loved it as each book was very different from the other, quite unlike The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott, which had more direct continuity.

Photographs by Rupinder Sharma

At the heart of Sea of Poppies is a former slave ship called the Ibis that’s been refitted to make a voyage from Calcutta, across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius. On board is a motley collection of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. Set just before the Opium Wars it encapsulates the colonial history of the East.

The story moves forward in River of Smoke and is set in the backdrop of a vicious storm in the Bay of Bengal in which three ships are tossed around. When the storm settles five men on-board the Ibis — with its load of indentured labourers among others — have vanished. The Anahita, that’s transporting the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for China, too gets caught in the whirlwind and a part of its precious cargo is damaged. The third, Redruth, is a nursery ship — loaded with plants — from England. Post-storm, the River of Smoke follows the storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbours of China — into the thick of the opium trade and more.

The novel’s main character is one whose presence is only hinted at in Sea of Poppies. Bahram Modi, a Parsi, opium merchant from Bombay — also the estranged father of the half-Chinese, Ah Fatt — is on his way to Canton, where the real story unfolds.

The studio of Guan Lianchang

The silk merchant of Eshing

Captain Richard Wheatland of Salem

Whitmans Hong, a tea-taster’s office

Canton was one of the busiest ports in the world in the 19th century

A glass painter; Images courtesy: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2009 Visualizing Cultures

While Sea of Poppies begins in 1838, River of Smoke ends in June 1839. “I have barely got through one year so I think I will be living with these characters for a very long time yet,’’ he says. So, he may not just end the story with a third book. It may grow to be a quartet, or even a quintet, he promises.

There’s good news for Ghosh’s readers as some of the vast research material that he’s gathered since 2004 is also available on a website for them to refer to (www.theibistrilogy.com).

Research is a hands-on task for Ghosh. Rivers almost turn into major characters in his books — the Nile, the Mekong (in Southeast Asia) and the Ganga — and it’s no surprise that he’s spent a lot of time on choppy waters. “Personally I have been very drawn to rivers,” he says. Then with a laugh: “I’m a Bengali and we are born to water and so much about Bengali life is determined by the river.”

So, he’s travelled down the Nile, lived on boats, and written about it in In An Antique Land (1994). And before writing The Hungry Tide (2004) he worked with a dolphin researcher and sailed up the Mekong studying dolphins. He gleefully recalls sleeping in huts by the riverside.

The research for River of Smoke was no less intense and has been a continuous process since he began on Sea of Poppies. “The most enjoyable part of being a writer is being able to see the places that I write about,” he says.

So, before he embarked on the trilogy, he spent a lot of time in Mauritius and a month in Guangzhou (formerly Canton). “China was the opening of a new world for me. I had never been there before and it was enchanting and overwhelming,” says Ghosh, who lived in Guangzhou for a month in 2004.

In Guangzhou he tried retrieving the lives of the Indian merchants who lived there — which was not easy. For one, the Foreign Enclave, a settlement that he writes about in River of Smoke was destroyed back in 1856. A new Foreign Enclave had been built and he even stayed there but it was nothing like the world that had existed before.

He visited many sites that are associated with the history of Canton which crop up in the River of Smoke. Other chunks of research were done in England as many of the records/documents of the time are to be found there.

His findings about the brisk opium trade in India left him flabbergasted. He says that Calcutta was essentially an opium city and its entire financial world was based around opium. “The finances of the 18th and 19th century revolved around the opium trade. It astonishes me that we have chosen to forget this reality,” he says. He points out that the godowns that still exist around the Hooghly were in fact opium warehouses and an imposing building that still stands in Dalhousie — occupied today by a bank — was once the town’s opium exchange.

If his books are mostly about journeys, he puts that down to his background. His family was originally from east Bengal though they left it in 1856 to move to Chappra in Bihar.

Since his father was in the army his parents moved a lot — so he grew up in Bangladesh and also got spend time in Sri Lanka. Ghosh created his own world — through books. A self-confessed bookworm he voraciously read Bengali writers like Moti Nandi and Satyajit Ray. He also read avidly in English — everything from Sir Walter Scott to Richmal Crompton. “I was just like a vacuum cleaner and kept absorbing,” he says with a grin.

He studied at Doon School and did his BA in history from St Stephen’s College and followed it up with a masters in sociology. He clearly remembers cycling from St Stephen’s College to his south Delhi home. “Buses were few and I couldn’t afford taxis but I enjoyed the ride,” he says.

While doing his masters he also worked as a journalist with The Indian Express for about one-and-a-half years. “My career as a journalist was very formative for me,” he recalls.

And then he switched gears and did a PhD in social anthropology at Oxford University. However, he went back to writing for newspapers much later when he began contributing to The New Yorker and other publications.

“But now I’ve stopped doing that. For all the experiences of my travels go into my books,” he says. His debut novel The Circle of Reason was published in 1986. The book went on to win the Prix Médicis étranger, one of France’s top literary awards.

Today, he says, there’s no time when he’s not writing. “If I wasn’t writing, I would just be sitting on a chair — and that’s no fun,” he says, smiling.

Since his appointments dairy is choc-a-bloc through the year he has to be fiercely protective about his writing time, especially for intense books like Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, The Glass Palace (2000) and others.

Calcutta, New York and Goa are all essential to his life though Calcutta remains home in an elemental sort of way also because his mother and sister live there.

He spends six months a year dashing between Goa and Calcutta and returns to New York for a few months.

“My children are studying in the US, so it’s nice to be with them,” he says. His son is a fresh graduate and his daughter is a student at Yale going into her third year. She is studying history and her interest is in Russian — “one country I have never been to.”

He loves his home in New York. It’s in a quiet part of city and gives him a sense of distance and quietness. “This pendulum shift — of being able to see the world from different axis — is an advantage,” he says.

His author wife, Deborah Baker, is usually his first reader while he is one of her first readers. “In the most basic sense we speak the same language,” he laughs.

While Calcutta and New York are very intense urban spaces, his Goa home is very rural. It’s a refuge where he can set aside all the distractions — and spend time gardening (which he can’t do anywhere else). He’s an avid gardener and grows his own vegetables and is even into composting.

A better part of the year is spent travelling. “Once you uproot yourself in a way, travelling becomes a way of life,” he says. And no, he’s not even thinking about starting on the third book of the trilogy yet. He says flatly: “I find deadlines oppressive and working against a deadline on a book is crippling.’’

Ghosh spent a month in Guangzhou researching the ins and outs of the 19th century opium trade. He found a world of European adventurers, hard-headed Chinese traders and a thriving port with ships from around the world. Some of his research material is now available on www.theibistrilogy.com