This novel was written by a social anthropologist, Amitav Ghosh, who is also a skilled literary craftsman when it comes to the precision and clarity of his narrative style. So, knowing his anthropological background and expertise, a reader goes into a book with a little different sense of anticipation; science will surely be a prominent part of the book's theme. And also, I am enjoying reading the novel and observing the two types of cultures – Western and Eastern cultures – and how each of those cultures views and responds to technology and science.
             The plot is made very interesting in a diverse way, because there are characters whose cultural backgrounds are very different from the places and cultures that they are living in; for example, far from his real cultural place of residence is Antar, an Egyptian (Eastern culture), who resides in Manhattan (western culture). His job is to research artifacts (from many cultures) through the medium of cyberspace, which is a kind of other-worldly technology culture that allows individuals of all cultures to interact digitally, but never to actually speak verbally to one another, see one another, or pass judgment other than through the written word.
             Meanwhile, keeping to a diversity of east-west cultural contrasts, Ghosh stumbles across the image on his computer screen of an Indian whose name is Murugan, who is presumed to have disappeared in 1995, and was considered an obsessive researcher in regard to the life and scientific achievements of a Britisher named Ronald Ross, known as Sir Ronald Ross, since he was given that title by the Queen of England after winning the Nobel Prize for science. Murugan, according to a review in the Christian Science Monitor (Rosenberg, 1998), was "an engaging character – an obsessive verging on madness, but also a raconteur with a delicious instinct for life's absurdities in general and colonial hypocrisy in particular."...