Amitav Ghosh Summary

Amitav Ghosh it describes on the social ethos and presenting vital truths of life. It is a complex plot, since the narrator, travels into the past and future simultaneously to describe events which highlight particular aspects of character. Tridib is a scholar, living mainly in the world of imagination of the narrator also. He has a “vast reservoir of abstruse information on all kinds of subjects, including Mesopotamian Stallae, East European Jazzo, and the habits of arboreal apes, the plays of Garcia Lorca,” about which he has read in books, but he talks about them with great confidence as if he had personal knowledge of these facts. He makes love with a girl whom he has not met through letters. He is nothing but intellect, devoid of carnal aspect of life. He has not taken interest in such of real life as earning his livelihood or raising a family

Tridib’s example had convinced him that reality was different from what one saw with one’s eyes and heard with ones ears. Apparently Tridib was a wastrel, but in reality he was devoted to his studies. The narrator in the beginning had faith in Tridib’s ways of exploring the truth, but after finding Tridib’s version about Solent Road incorrect, he made changes in his approach and attitude. With the help of Tridib’s Atlas, he learnt certain hard truths about people and places. He drew circles on the maps to find to his amazement that “Khulna is about as far from Srinagar as Tokyo is from Beijing, or Moscow from Venice, or Washington from Havana, or Cairo from Naples”. And he further discovered that “Dhaka and Calcutta ere more closely that bound to each other they had drawn their lines- so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka”. Thus the narrator who began as a disciple of Tridib, ended as a realistic