Simile: Human and Nonhuman
When discussing places like the Sundarbans and the freakish event of a cyclone in Mumbai, Ghosh deems them sites where "human and nonhuman echo each other with an uncanny resonance; the connection between built form and landscape seems to belong to a dimension other than the visual; it is like that of sympathetic chords in music" (81). This simile of the uncanny being more like music furthers his argument because it takes away the hegemony and falseness of language and relies more on sensation; we need to be able to experience nature like this or we will not be able to continue "communicating" with it.
Simile: Gandhi
Ghosh quotes Gandhi, whose words contains a powerful simile about how the capitalist system cannot be implemented around the world: "If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts" (111). This effective simile conjures up an image of rapacious locusts swarming onto crops and eating away every living thing; it makes the reader very aware of the human inclination to do the same thing.
Metaphor: Barques
Ghosh wonders why novels outside of science fiction do not deal with climate change in any meaningful way: "Are the currents of global warming too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration?" (8). The metaphor is of a barque (a boat) navigating itself down a waterway: the waterway is global warming, and the barque is traditional narration, and that waterway is simply too treacherous for the barque to want to attempt. This helps the reader see literature's reluctance to take on this heady topic.
Simile: Understanding
Ghosh is gobsmacked by his encounter with an urban cyclone, and tries to come to terms with it. Eventually he realizes he cannot, writing, "It was like trying to understand a poem by counting the words" (15). He could think about all the individual pieces of the moment and the memory, and do research to understand it better, but he could not grasp the whole from its parts.
Metaphor: Mother lode
For all the power and terror of the encounter with the cyclone, Ghosh does not write about it in his fiction. Here he muses, "Unusual events being necessarily limited in number, it is nut natural that these should be excavated over and again, in the hopes of discovering a yet undiscovered vein. No less than any other writer have I dug into my own past while writing fiction. By rights then, my encounter with the tornado should have been a mother lode, a gift to be mined to the last little nugget" (15). He is using the metaphor of a mother lode of gold ore, saying he should be able to mine that over and over again, finding untold riches in the singular event. But ultimately he does not, concluding it is too fantastical for proper fiction.
