ONE feature that stands out from his face are his eyebrows, which are jet-black while his hair is grey. Amitav Ghosh was born in 1956 in Calcutta. He belongs to the same generation of Indo-Pakistan writers who write in English, like Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry or Vikram Seth.

Yet Ghosh is not Salman Rushdie, who became notorious for his book The Satanic Verses. The works of Ghosh so far indicate that they are the product of someone who patient