The Opium Clerk

The Opium Clerk is Hiran, born in 1857, the year of the Mutiny, the year his father is run down in the park by wild horses. Hiran's life might have been very different had his father lived, for he would have continued his education and life as Brahmin instead of becoming a clerk for the British Empire. At first Hiran did not know what the "mud" was, the dark hand-rolled balls of dreams about which he--and the hundreds of other clerks--kept such meticulous records. There were no laws "against" it, only laws the British made and enforced to ensure their own monopoly of the trade, a lively commerce which brought enormous wealth to the Empire whose motives and corruption Hiran does not judge. Hiran observes, and learns, and moves and is moved along the various paths the trade in the drug offers. He can be trusted, and his sharp eyes and deliberate thoughts preserve his life through many catastrophic moments in India's history and later in China's. He has the gift of reading palms, and his own baffle him--the lifeline in his left, or birth hand, is short, and detours passion, but his right hand, the hand of action, is creased by a much longer lifeline. High born, he is patronized and condescended to by the imperial British. His "superior" is Jonathan Crabbe, whose wife is an addict. The special work he does for Crabbe involves Hiran in every level of Indian life, and the more secrets he learns and keeps, the more important he becomes. The events and journeys in the novel spin for him the longer life his right hand foretells. His journeys have circled him back to his birthplace, and his true passion finally reveals itself to him. Kunal Basu has used as his epigraph for the novel Krishna's line from The Bhagavad Gita: "All is clouded by desire...as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust, as the unborn by its mother." THE OPIUM CLERK is a novel proceeding in glimpses, hints, maddening and marvelous non-linear complexities, sudden clarities, drowsy recessions. Something is going on. Some grand agitation, some wonderful pied and pitiless maelstrom. It is history, perhaps, but it is more than history. It is Time itself, the great wheel which makes everything major minor--even glutted Empires--and grants even the remotest mote a turn. The experience of reading this novel may be characterized by the word disconcerting. The prose is seductive, vividly descriptive and intriguing. There is Mystery. Perhaps Mystery is the main character. There is a dreamlike feeling of following something just beyond comprehension and grasp. A little farther and we shall know, we shall see, we shall comprehend... Surprising jumps, sideways, in the narration move us into side streets and alleys and always with such wit and cleverness from the author we ourselves are experiencing Hiran's culture shock as our own; we feel expatriation. We know what it is to be a stranger at the mercy and whim of people whose ways we do not know, people whom it is worth our life to