For me, the topic of displacement of people with the rise of empires almost always brings to mind The Glass Palace, where Amitav Ghosh’s King Thebaw watches the milling crowds at the Rangoon harbor and wondering,

“What vast, what incomprehensible power, to move people in such huge numbers from one place to another-emperors, kings, farmers, dockworkers, soldiers, coolies, policemen. Why? Why this furious movement-people taken from one place to another, to pull rickshaws, to sit blind in exile? And where would his own people go, now that they were a part of this empire.”

This is India in the 19th century. The East India Company’s hold on Bengal is complete, and the eastern provinces beyond Bengal are also under the purview of the Company Bahadur’s rule. With policies that enforce opium cultivation and destroy indigenous agriculture and trade, this rule spells havoc for India’s villages and towns. Bearing testimony to this is the motley crowd on the ship, all products of the disaster brought on by opium cultivation and trade.

There is the young mother Deeti who, having lost her husband and her fields to opium, is now on the ship to escape her fate. Forced to cultivate opium as part of the Company’s colonial policy, Deeti and other rural folk have abandoned centuries-old agricultural traditions. Their land yields no grains or fruit, and they have no control over their opium produce either, as it is procured by factories at arbitrary prices. One of the accomplishments of this Deeti character and indeed a major highlight of this book is the detailed description of the Ghazipur Opium factory through Deeti's eyes, based on an account by one J.W.S. McArthur, a superintendent of the Ghazipur Opium factory in the 19th century. His book “Notes on an Opium Factory” couldn’t have been put to better use. The narrative sees Deeti on an errand to the factory into a world of “the uniformed burkundazes at the gate and the stacks of poppy flower rotis” (we are told elsewhere that these are used to package the opium). We see, through her eyes, the huge sheds with lofty ceilings and gigantic scales to weigh the raw opium and

“bare bodied men sunk waist deep in tanks of opium, tramping round and round to soften the sludge. Their eyes were vacant, glazed, and yet somehow they managed to keep moving, as slow as ants in honey, tramping, treading.”

“the assemblers’ hands moved with dizzying speed as they lined hemispherical moulds with poppy-leaf rotis, moistening the wrappers with lewah, a light solution of liquid opium.”

“consists of exactly one seer and six-and-a-half-chittacks of poppy leaf rotis, half of fine grade and half coarse, the whole being moistened with no more and on less than five chittacks of lewah.”

Also on the Ibis are Pauline Lambert and Jodu. Pauline, the daughter of a French botanist, is raised by an Indian nanny whose son, Jodu, is almost Pauline’s twin. Pauline catches the fancy of Zachary Reid, an octoroon who has sailed with the Ibis from Baltimore. Zachary has by dint of luck and labor moved up the ladder to become the second mate of Ibis on his second trip on it.

Then there are the Englishmen, who seem quite tame in comparison and who (when they aren't going about some nasty business, as company official Mr. Burnham often is) are happily conversing in a Hobson-Jobson kind of language. This is immensely entertaining (“Is this little Rascal your Upper-Roger?”) with tidbits such as "tumashers in the sheeshmulls," "domepoke and chitchky of pollock-saug" from the "bobachee-connahs." Mrs. Burnham gets to mouth funny lines like “there isn’t a rootie in the choola, is there?” and “there is paltan of mems who’d give their last anna to be in your jooties.” Meanwhile, the locals fill the narrative with sprinklings of bhojpuri aisan mat kara and dekheheba ka hois while the seafarers (lascars) have their lascari lingo. This is a wonderful literary device by which as many languages as people inhabit the text.

Of the few reservations I had is the somewhat Bollywood-esquethe handling of villainous character Bhyro Singh's arrival on Ibis. And although zamindars flew kites in the 1830s, how many would, in the slow and easygoing days of early 19th-century Bengal, where time almost stood still, stop to ask for a "ten minute" break (p 155)? Also discussing the price of Patna opium in dollars “four hundred and fifty dollars a chest” (pp239) in the 1830s did seem a bit out of place. These are very minor points, of course, and the fact remains that the Sea of Poppies is a hugely entertaining and enjoyable read - and an absolutely un-put-down-able book. The next two parts of the trilogy will be eagerly awaited.