Editor’s Note: A fictional story written by Amitav Ghosh for years, Gun Island follows the journey of Deen Dutta, a rare book dealer whose silent world is turned upside down when a strange turn of events leads him to embark on a journey from India to Los Angeles, via Venice. By weaving ancient folklore with contemporary adventures, Ghosh is once again trying to draw readers’ attention to climate change, as he did in his previous book, The Great Disturbance and many others. Gun Island also has some notable female characters and with that, Ghosh returns to fiction, following his 2015 novel Flood of fire (The Ibis Trilogy). The book launched last month and has received positive reviews so far.
Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the book.
The strangest thing about this strange journey was that it was launched by a word – nor an unusually resonant one, but a banal, everyday coin that is in wide circulation from Cairo to Calcutta. That word is bundook, which means “gun” in many languages, including in my own native language, Bengali (or Bangla). The word is also no stranger to English: through British colonial usages, it made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary,
where it is obscured as ‘gun’.
But there was no rifle or rifle in sight the day the journey began; the word was also not intended to refer to a weapon. And that’s exactly why it caught my attention: because the weapon in question was part of a name – ‘Bonduki Sadagar’, which can be translated as ‘the arms dealer’.
The Gun Merchant entered my life not in Brooklyn, where I live and work, but in the city where I was born and raised – Calcutta (or Kolkata, as it is now formally known). That year, as in many others, I was in Kolkata for much of the winter, ostensibly on business. My job, as a dealer in rare books and Asian antiquities, requires me to do a lot of local exploration and since I happen to own a small apartment in Kolkata (carved out of the house my sisters and I inherited from our parents) the city is became a second base for me.
But it wasn’t just work that brought me back each year: Kolkata was also a refuge at times, not only from the bitter cold of a Brooklyn winter, but also from the loneliness of a personal life that grew increasingly desolate over time. even as my professional fortune flourished. And the desolation was never greater than that year, when a promising relationship came to a shockingly abrupt end: a woman I’d been seeing for a long time cut me off without explanation and blocked me on every channel we’d ever used to communicate. . it was my
first brushing with ‘ghosting’, an experience as humiliating as it is painful.
Suddenly, with the sixties approaching in the not-too-distant future, I found myself more alone than ever. So I went to Calcutta that year earlier than usual, and timed my arrival to coincide with the annual migration that occurs when the weather turns cold in northern climates and large groups of ‘foreign-based’ Calcuttans, like myself, spread their wings and fly back to spend the winter in the city. I knew I could count on catching up with a large number of friends and
family members; that the weeks would slip by in a whirl of lunches, dinners and wedding receptions. And the thought of meeting a woman in the midst of it all with whom I could share my life had, I guess, not completely disappeared from my mind (because this has indeed happened to many men my age).
But of course nothing happened, even though I didn’t give a chance to circulate and met a large number of divorced women, widows and other single women of a suitable age. There were even a few occasions when I felt the glow of faint glow of hope. . . but only to discover, as I had many times before, that there are few expressions in the English language less appealing to women than “Rare Book Dealer.”
So the months passed in a cascade of disappointments, and the day of my return to Brooklyn was nearing as I headed to the last of my social engagements of the season: a cousin’s daughter’s wedding reception.
I had just entered the venue—a stuffy colonial-era club—when I was accosted by a distant relative, Kanai Dutt.
I hadn’t seen Kanai in many years, which for me wasn’t quite a matter of regret: he had always been a smooth, vain, precocious know-it-all who relied on his quick tongue and good looks to charm women and get ahead in the world. world. He lived mainly in New Delhi and thrived in the hothouse atmosphere of that city, where he had established himself as a media darling: it was certainly not uncommon to turn on the television and hear him yell
his head off on a talk show. He knew everyone, as they say, and it was often written about in magazines, newspapers and even books.
What annoyed me most about Kanai was that he always found a way to trip me up. This opportunity was no
exception; he started by throwing a curveball shaped like my childhood nickname, Dinu (which I’d long since given up in favor of the more American-sounding “Dane”). ‘Tell me, Dinu,’ he said, after a fleeting handshake, ‘is it true that you have established yourself as an expert on Bengali folklore?’
The almost audible grin rattled me. “Well,” I sputtered, “I did some research on that sort of thing a long time ago. But I gave up when I left academia and became a bookseller.’ “But you did get your PhD, didn’t you?” he said, with thinly veiled mockery. “So you’re a technical expert.” ‘I wouldn’t call myself that. . .’ He interrupted me without apology. “So tell me then, Mr. Expert,” he said. “Have you ever heard of a character called Bonduki Sadagar?”
His intention was clearly to surprise me and he succeeded: the name ‘Bonduki Sadagar’ (‘Gun Merchant’) was so new to me that I was tempted to think that Kanai had made it up. “What do you mean by ‘figure’?” I said. “You mean some sort of folk hero?” “Yeah, like Dokkhin Rai or Chand Sadagar. . .’
He went on to mention a few other well-known characters from Bengali folklore: Satya Pir, Lakhindar and the like. Such figures are not quite gods, nor are they mere mortals holy: like the shifting mudflats of the Bengal delta, they arise at the intersection of many currents. Sometimes shrines are built to preserve their memory; and almost always their names are associated with a legend. And since Bengal is a maritime country, seafaring is often a prominent feature of such stories.
The most famous of these stories is the legend of a merchant named Chand – ‘Chand Sadagar’ – who is said to have fled overseas to escape the persecution of Manasa Devi, the goddess who rules over snakes and all other poisonous creatures.
There was a time in my childhood when the merchant Chand and his nemesis, Manasa Devi, were as much a part of my dream world as Batman and Superman would become after I learned English and started reading comic books. At that time there was no television in India and the only way to entertain children was by telling them stories. And if the narrators were Bengali, sooner or later they would surely return to the story of the Merchant and the Goddess who wanted him as her devotee.
The appeal of the story, I think, is no different from that of the Odyssey, with a resourceful human protagonist pitted against much more powerful forces, earthly and divine. But the legend of the merchant Chand differs from the Greek epic in that it does not end with the hero’s restoration to his family and patrimony: the merchant’s son, Lakhindar, is killed by a cobra on the night of his wedding and it is the boy’s virtuous bride, Behula, who reclaims his soul from the underworld and resolves the fray between the Merchant and Manasa Devi.
I don’t remember when I first heard the story, or who told it to me, but constant repetition made it so deep into my consciousness that I wasn’t even aware it was there. But some stories, like certain life forms, have a special life force that allows them to outlive others of their kind – and since the story of the Merchant and Manasa Devi is very old, I think it must have enough of this quality to make sure that it can survive extended periods of rest. Anyway, when I was in my twenties, newly arrived in America and working on a topic for a research paper, the merchant’s story thawed in the permafrost of my memory and once again claimed my full attention.
When I started reading the verses from Bangla that tell the story of the Merchant (there are many) I found that the place of the legend in the culture of Eastern India strangely matched the pattern of his life in my own mind. The origin of the story can be traced back to the infancy of the memory of Bengal: it was probably born among the original, native people of the region and may have been conceived by real historical figures and events (to this day scattered throughout Assam, West Bengal and Bangladesh, there are archaeological sites which, in popular memory, are associated with the merchant and his family). And also in public memory, the legend seems to go through life cycles, sometimes dormant for centuries only to be suddenly rejuvenated by a new wave of retellings, with some familiar characters appearing under new names, with subtly altered storylines.
The following excerpt from Amitav Ghosh’s book, Gun Island, is published with permission from Penguin India. The hardcover of the book costs Rs 699/strong>
