But the book does contain some wonderful snippets of life, possible only in the periods thoughtfully indicated. A whole village wasted by cholera and a helpless doctor and his assistant facing a paucity of medicines. The extraordinary courage of a 16-year-old girl bent on having her own way despite being branded three times by red-hot metal by her father. The legend of Arabipatnam where the local king gets 10,000 Arabian horses in exchange for spices, only to find all but one horse dying in a year because he had not thought of protecting their hooves with horse-shoes. A Brahmin village where a woman ejects tapeworms thinking she’s giving birth to snakes; the whole village is infected due to a belief that eating pork would ward off an epidemic.
The novel crisscrosses over generations with a liberal dose of misadventure, including a Kathakali performer ending up as a kept man in London for a while. Ambition, even literary ambition, has to be made of sterner stuff.
