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. He has a few hours en route from Goa to New York City, the two places he calls home, so we drink Indian sauvignon blanc, eat American potato chips and chat about common acquaintances on three continents.
