The Legend of the Gun Merchant

A rare-book dealer should be safe from a legend. That is the joke Deen Datta is in.

The Gun Merchant is not a volume you can invoice. It is a story attached to a shrine in the mangrove, a man running from a goddess, a string of place-names that sound like nonsense until someone who reads Arabic and Venetian history sits down with them. Ghosh is doing with etymology what Borges does with footnotes: making the invented thing answer to the real one until you cannot tell which is holding the other up. Bundook means gun from Cairo to Calcutta because it once meant Venice. The merchant was never fleeing a firearm. He was fleeing toward a city.

What makes it belong on these shelves, and not only in a folklore index, is the use Ghosh puts it to. Deen has decided that stories are his inventory, not his cosmology. The book then arranges storms, beaches full of dead dolphins, wildfire, and a girl with a snakebite until the legend starts to look like the only adequate instrument. A catalogue of imagined knowledge that stopped at bound volumes would miss this — the story that was never printed because it was already everywhere, and is now being asked to do the work the realist novel said it had outgrown.

On the readability rating. Recounted, glossed, mapped onto a shrine and a set of names. No ur-text. The Manasamangal is real and is not this tale. This tale is the one Deen cannot put down.