Speaking in tongues: "I love words," says Ghosh
"I love words, I love languages," says Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning Indian novelist. "It's only when you know many languages that you realize there are few boundaries between them." His latest book, Sea of Poppies recently short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize crests along the collision and collusion of tongues found aboard the Ibis , a 19th century schooner plying the Indian Ocean. Its crew speaks a babble of English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Malay, Tamil, Chinese and yet, through "the alchemy of the open water," as Ghosh writes, they communicate sufficiently well to...
