Amitav Ghosh is essayist and blogger as well as novelist, and it was the sheer pleasure from some of his essays and blog posts that induced me to take on one of his novels.

Of his work this book appealed to me most, due to half-remembered reviews describing it as a melange of genres, of nationalities, of languages, cultures, professions, and eras. And because Ghosh in "Confessions of a Xenophile" says his time in Egypt was "my equivalent of writing school. While living in [the governorate of] Beheira I maintained a detailed journal, in which I made extensive notes about my conversations with people, and the things I saw around me. Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing; it also taught me how to translate raw experience on to the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have and it has stood me in good stead over the years."

After reading it, a phrase from Ghosh's lecture Bonds of Captivity: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-`Ain, 1916-18 (video, blogged as Shared Sorrows) can, I think, best summarizes this novel story: "reality often exceeds fiction in its improbability" (at 2:45 in the video). A number of times while reading this book I had to remind myself that the story told therein was non-fiction.

To me this book spoke volumes, as someone with Indian, Arab, and Muslim roots (long since relegated to memory) and with historic, economic, linguistic, and religious interests (still going strong). The two parts of the story told are Ghosh's long stay and subsequent visits to rural Egypt and the historic relationship that so captivated the then-young anthropologist-in-training's interest in the Middle East: the correspondence between Jewish merchants in Aden, in Yemen, and a North African Jewish merchant who lived in the Malabar, in western India, for twenty years who married a Nair woman and who sent a slave from Mangalore on his behalf to the Middle East. This correspondence, from the 1100s, survived because of a habit of these Jews to store all their written correspondences when not needed, and the discovery of such a cache in Fustat, once a Jewish center in Cairo.

This skeletal summary of me and of this book is really all I can give when I try to summarize its thesis. Or rather, there are just so many theses present---and they are all coherent and graspable despite their number because this book is a piece of rock carved from the mountain of Reality, perhaps sculpted and polished, but evoking the whole within the part, like a fractal or a hologram.

But perhaps one of the things that most surprised Ghosh is, in today's world of oil and post-colonialism and derivatives trading and Israel, how unlikely and foreign such a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual story from a millenium ago sounds. This set of relationships, spanning continents, spanning language families, crossing religious boundaries, that to him is so real because of his study of thousand year old letters and ledgers, is incomprehensibly unlikely to most people today, who unthinkingly think globalization presupposes an electronic civilization.

I have learned so much from this book and from this writer that I hope you will forgive me for not trying to enumerate them more than I have so far.