Summary

At the beginning of Chapter 2, Deeti’s husband passes out at the opium factory where he works and she and her daughter try to figure out how to retrieve him. Since the family has no money, Deeti gets into her husband’s stash of opium, planning to use the drug as currency. Deeti smells the sap from the poppy fields and believes the harvest will be good, raising her hopes that she will be able to fix the roof on the family’s hut. The information about the thatched-roof of the hut needing repair leads Ghosh to explain more about the system of poppy cultivation under colonial British rule. Readers learn that in the old days thatch was easy to come by because people grew a diversity of crops including wheat, dal and vegetables, but in the age of flowers, colonial agents force farmers...