In River of Smoke, the Indian author Amitav Ghosh banishes one of his characters, a French orphan, to a ship anchored near Hong Kong, then just a “wild, gale-swept” island off the coast of Macau. Paulette spends nearly the entire novel waiting there for news of a rare flower, the Golden Camellia, from a friend in Canton’s foreign quarter — “threshold of the last and greatest of all the world’s caravanserais.” In the 19th century, these South China Sea ports bustled with people on their way to someplace else, and Ghosh meets me in the 21st century equivalent — a New Delhi airport-hotel bar called Savannah.
Tag Archives: orphan
Essay: The Bright Cave Under the Hat
A man in a park in Phoenix showed me how to make a home out of cardboard boxes. Not a home, exactly, but something like a backyard playhouse built by an ingenious child