Sea of Poppies

Kalua is a low-caste ox-cart driver at the start of the book. After being beaten by three wealthy brothers, Deeti cleans him up, leading him to think about her frequently; when he realizes she is going to be burned alive, he hatches a plan to save her, and they run away together and marry. Kalua is an extremely large, strong man; it is believed that he is unintelligent as a result of his size, but the novel shows that he is not unintelligent and rather simply quiet. At several points he develops complex plans, calmly going through options in his mind before leaping into action and surprising everyone around him. At the end of the novel, facing execution, he escapes with Serang Ali and others. 

Bhyro is the uncle of Deeti’s first husband, Hukam. He holds a lot of power in the region and was the one who arranged their marriage and eventually tracked them down following her escape. He is a large, cruel man who enjoys exerting his power over others. He is killed at the end of the novel by Kalua, who breaks free from his restraints while Bhyro is flogging him. 

Zachary is a mixed-race American from Baltimore, the son of a freed slave and a slaveowner who was, himself, born free—as the novel notes at the beginning, he is proud to know his actual age and birthdate. He was a shipyard worker for a number of years, but when Burnham buys the Ibis, he agrees to come on board due to his knowledge of the schooner; however, because of an especially rough voyage, by the time he reaches Calcutta, he is the acting captain of the ship. Zachary has a rigid sense of systems and the status quo, and while he accepts Serang Ali’s mentorship, he is also more than willing to accept Burnham’s forceful yet ideologically unsound views of the world. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, his moral code guides his decisions.

Serang Ali is the leader of a lascar company who comes aboard the Ibis en route to Calcutta after most of the crew deserts the ship. He takes a special liking to Zachary and works to mentor him in the hopes that he will one day become captain of his own ship. He is a former pirate; however, through most of the novel, his origins are unknown, even to the other lascars. When Zachary discovers the truth, he allows him to simply disappear at the next port, but Ali instead escapes with Jodu, Kalua, Neel, and Ah Fatt on a stolen longboat heading to Singapore. 

Burnham is the owner of the Ibis along with a very large shipping company that primarily deals in the opium trade. He was indentured at a young age due to his unruliness; along the way, he found God and a devotion to free trade, which he believes to be a preordained, fundamental human right. He is a forceful individual who has little patience for those who disagree with him or do not give him his way, be they individuals, like Neel, or nations, like China.

Nob Kissin is Burnham’s gomusta; however, at the start of the novel, he is working solely to build capital while awaiting the return of his beloved Taramony so that he can build their temple. He believes Zachary to be an avatar of Krishna, and therefore a sign of her return, and sets his plan into motion and maneuvers his way onto the Ibis as the ship’s supercargo, later forming the plan to allow Neel, whom he believes to be Taramony’s chosen adopted son, to escape along with Serang Ali and the others. 

Paulette is the son of a French botanist living in Calcutta; her mother died in childbirth on Jodu’s father’s boat, after which she was raised by her father and Jodu’s mother. As a result, she grew up very close to Jodu and adopted primarily Bengali ways. After her father’s death, she was taken in by the Burnhams and forced to adopt European and Christian ways. Desperately seeking to escape, she first asks Zachary to get her on board the Ibis so she can return to her mother’s homeland of Mauritius; when he refuses, she sneaks on by disguising herself as one of the Hindu women aboard, claiming to be the niece of Baboo Nob Kissin on her way to Mauritius for an arranged wedding. 

Jodu is a Muslim Bengali boy who was raised alongside Paulette. After the death of his mother, he returns to Calcutta to inform Paulette of her death; however, the Ibis destroys his boat, leading him to request work on the Ibis, which fulfills his goal of becoming a lascar rather than a freshwater boatman. While on the voyage, however, he sparks a flirtation with Munia, one of the Hindu migrant laborers. When he is caught, he is beaten mercilessly by Bhyro Singh. He escapes with Serang Ali and others at the end of the book. 

Neel begins the novel as the powerful head of the Raskhali estate. His family made its fortune in part by playing both sides and cozying up to anyone in power, and his father was well-known for being a boisterous and popular man who threw many lavish parties. However, his father also left the estate in great debt, and Neel is, as a result, a bookish, reserved man, and therefore not very well-liked. When he refuses to relinquish his lands to Burnham to pay his estate’s debts, Burnham brings him up on trumped-up charges of forgery, landing him 7 years of hard labor on Mauritius as a sentence, which also means a loss of caste. He is being transported as a prisoner on the Ibis, but escapes with Serang Ali et al at the end of the novel. 

Crowle is the first mate of the Ibis beginning in Calcutta; he is an extremely hard man who carries himself as if he is always looking for a fight or an abuse of power. He is reckless with his crew’s lives, and he is known for having once essentially murdered a crew member for spilling soup on him. At two points in the book, he endangers the lives of his crew—once while still in Calcutta, when he sends Zachary out on a broken boat with a bore rushing in, and later when he sends Jodu, who is inexperienced, out to fix a jib in rough waters. When he discovers Zachary’s race, he appears to attempt to blackmail him into mutiny; however, he is killed by Ah Fatt before he can deliver the manifest to Captain Chillingworth.