Dramatic Irony: Novels
Ghosh marvels at how in the novels of Madame Bovary and Rajmohan's Wife, two paragons of realist, modern literature, there are still distinctive moments and "chance and happenstance are crucial to the narrative" (23). This is ironic because the hallmarks of the modern novel are the excision and elision of such things.
Dramatic Irony: Novel
Ghosh flat-out calls this ironic: "Here, then, is the irony of the 'realist' novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real" (23). He is not wrong, of course, for realist novels are not actually very realist at all in their structure and in their obfuscation of various aspects of individual and collective life.
Situational Irony: Flooding
There is irony in the phrase "long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect" (53) because one would think that if someone was familiar with floods and knew what damage they could do, then they would be the first to sound the alarm and take proper precautions.
Verbal and Situational Irony: Oil
Ghosh writes of oil, "Serenity is one of the properties of this oil: it is not easy to make a mark upon its surface" (100). There is a twinge of verbal irony here, as we know what Ghosh thinks of the carbon economy, but it is mostly situational irony in that we would not expect such a "serene" resource to be capable of such massive, irreparable damage.
