Nepal, April 22 -- Amitav Ghosh's merits are too many to tabulate, but it will not be impetuous to say that what he does best is write a story.

While reading 'Wild Fictions', a collection of his essays from the past quarter-century, I was tempted to re-read parts of the Big First of Ghosh's fiction offerings, The Shadow Lines. It is impossible to overstate the chokehold this book has had on a couple of generations of Calcutta readers. For the first time in English books, we read of the neighbourhoods we walked in. The Bengali refugee's indescribable smallness, her habit of suppressing, family dynamics too complicated to comprehend, nation, rupture, and the individual experience of collective loss-Shadow Lines was my first brush with the ...