The Opium Clerk - Softcover

Hiran is born in 1857, some months after his father is accidentally trampled to death in the confusion following the Indian Mutiny ¿ Hiran¿s fortunes seem somehow eternally bound up in the fortunes of India. Brought to Calcutta by his mother, he fails to become a Brahmin like his father, despite a talent for reading palms, and finds work as a clerk in the busy Auction House. It¿s some time before Hiran learns in exactly what commodity the Auction House deals: the mysterious brown mud that passes through East India en route to China, the source of much of Britain¿s wealth. When Hiran¿s Western manners and education bring him to the attention of a wealthy Englishman, he becomes ensnared in another kind of trading. Commissioned to find a baby for the Englishman¿s opium-addicted wife, he trawls the streets and seafronts of Calcutta.

Kunal Basu¿s panoramic first novel follows the vagaries of Hiran¿s life, and the flow of the opium trade, from Calcutta to Canton. Disguised as a missionary, he survives cholera, piracy and war in China, arriving back in India to find his homeland on the verge of another rebellion. And he finds himself suddenly father to a half-caste son, the child abandoned by the Englishman and his wife when they fled back in disgrace to Britain. As Hiran dedicates himself to the education of his new son, the cycle of regeneration continues. Douglas, now an adult, neither black nor white, flees India himself for the Orient, again carried along on the flood of opium, this time to Borneo, to Sarawak: the land of the White Rajahs.