He lives alone at 83, in a house with outdated carpets that looks like it could use the care of the wife he lost six years ago. He told me he had outdated ideas too, though I did not ask. Master Alastair, as he was called by the servants when he lived in Guyana (then British Guiana) as a boy, said he had seen what places looked like before and after independence. The implication seemed to be that the wreck postcolonial rulers had made of their countries had vindicated the empire. And when he opened up an album full of aged newspaper clippings about weddings and funerals, sepia testaments to love and death, he pointed to the will his grandfather left. His estate was worth about £12,000 (about Rs9.6 lakh now) in 1910. Not very much for a “wicked colonialist”, Alastair concluded.
He used that phrase repeatedly, archly, defensively, without my doing or saying anything to provoke it. I had not accused him of being a wicked colonialist. He just projected into the blanks of my visit what he figured must have been my sentiments. By virtue of who we are, who I am and who you are, he told me, it is inevitable that we should take a different view of things.
Man of word: In 2001, Ghosh refused the Commonwealth Prize for his novel The Glass Palace. John Macdougall / AFP
Who he is — at least during our encounter — is definitely uncomfortable about who he was. No one would know him as Master Alastair now. That was a name from “another life”, he kept saying. His neighbours in Quorn, a tidy suburb in the East Midlands, know him as Frank Mackey. They have no idea that his father and namesake ran Booker Brothers, McConnell & Company in Guiana until his early death in 1942. To run Bookers in Guyana was to be something like a king. The company owned 70% of the sugar plantations in a country that owed its existence to sugar. The original Booker brothers—Josiaf I, George and Richard—first made their fortune in the cane fields of that obscure colony, known then to most of England as Demerara, a name that still survives on the packaging for most brown sugar, no matter its provenance. And the name Booker also survives, of course—most prominently through the literary prize.
If the Ma Booker Prize had gone to Sea of Poppies by Ghosh, it would have been a bit of a joke played by history. The novel tells the story of “coolies” forced to leave India to cut cane on plantations much like the ones owned by the Bookers. Josiah Booker I, the Liverpool merchant who struck out to Demerara in 1815, not only helped provide Ghosh with a backdrop for his historical epic through his demand for near-slave labour, but posthumously provided the Kolkata-born writer with a £2,500 check for representing those near-slave labourers in prose.