Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh

So finely honed was the system, with relays of runners carrying precise measures of each ingredient to each seat, that the assemblers’ hands never had cause to falter: they lined the moulds in such a way as to leave half the moistened rotis hanging over the edge. Then, dropping in the balls of opium, they covered them with the overhanging wrappers, and coated them with poppy-trash before tapping them out again. It remained only for runners to arrive with the outer casing for each ball – two halves of an earthenware sphere. The ball being dropped inside, the halves were fitted into a neat little cannonshot, to hold safe this most lucrative of the British Empire’s products: thus would the drug travel the seas, until the casing was split open by a blow from a cleaver, in distant Maha-Chin.