Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh

now, as she watched the banks through the screen of her ghungta, her eyes sifted through the greenery as if by habit: there, beneath the upthrust elbow-roots of a mangrove, was a little shrub of wild basil, Ocimum adscendens; it was Mr Voight, the Danish curator of the Gardens at Serampore—and her father’s best friend—who had confirmed that this plant was indeed to be found in these forests. And here, growing thick along the banks, was Ceriops roxburgiana, identified by the horrible Mr Roxburgh, who’d been so unkind to her father that the very sound of his name would make him blanch; and there, on the grassy verge, just visible above the mangroves, was a spiky-leafed shrub she knew all too well: Acanthus lambertii. It was at her own insistence that her father had given it this name—because she had literally stumbled upon it, having been poked in the leg by one of its spiny leaves. Now, watching the familiar foliage slip by, Paulette’s eyes filled with tears: these were more than plants to her, they were the companions of her earliest childhood and their shoots seemed almost to be her own, plunged deep into this soil; no matter where she went or for how long, she knew that nothing would ever tie her to a place as did these childhood roots.