The ibis acts as a projection of mixed characters stuck within the stings an empires history. This includes the uncertainties of their lives and their home styled routines. tHE IBIS ALLOWS for a community to form among the people on the ship.
Cut off from their roots, in transit, and looking ahead to a fresh start, the migrants are prone to invent new names and histories. For some, like Paulette, disguised as an Indian coolie to escape her guardian, the "layers of masking" do no more than bear witness to a human being's "multiplicity of selves". For others, like Zachary, the second mate, the truth is bleaker by far. The son of a slave and her white master, he will always be bound, it seems, to a brutal history and the stigma of colour. All have stories to tell and secrets to hide. Like the sketches of people which Deeti finger-paints as keepsakes for her "shrine", their narratives tease the mind with discontinuities and suggestiveness; and, as with Ah Fatt the opium addict's descriptions of Canton, his old home, "the genius... lay in their elisions".
With the colourful characters, another interesting aspect of the storys is the clash and mingling of languages." Bhojpuri, Bengali, Laskari, Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and a larghge spectrum of English including the Baboo Nob Kissin, Burnham's accountant, create a vivid sense of living voices as well as the linguistic resourcefulness of people in diaspora." The "motley tongue" is as much a part of the cultural scene at the lower reaches of the Ganges, and of the multi-layered history of the subcontinent, as the collision of peoples on one of the great rivers of the world.
the characters harves a great need for change yet remain somewhat bound for failure
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