“With scarcely a pause for a mouthful of roti, Deeti stepped outside, on to the flat threshold of beaten earth that divided the mud –walled dwelling from the poppy fields beyond. By the light of the newly risen sun, she saw, greatly to her relief, that some of the flowers had at last begun to shed their petals. On the adjacent field, her husband’s younger brother, Chandan Singh, was already out with his eight-bladed nukha. He was using the tool’s tiny teeth to make notches on some of the bare pods—if the sap flowed freely overnight he would bring his family out tomorrow, to tap the field.”
Tidal waves and human desires for trade and commerce brought an unusual vessel to the Indian Ocean in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Paying close attention to the novel’s ‘setting’ and its important moment in the plot (narrative structure), discuss how the statement from the novel explains how the ocean’s flows challenge social structures and hierarchies.