Excerpted from "River of Smoke": A novel by Amitav Ghosh

Deeti’s shrine was hidden in a cliff, in a far corner of Mauritius, where the island’s eastern and southern shorelines collide to form the wind-whipped dome of the Morne Brabant. The site was a geological anomaly—a cave within a spur of limestone, hollowed out by wind and water—and there was nothing like it anywhere else on the mountain. Later Deeti would insist that it wasn’t chance but destiny that led her to it—for the very existence of the place was unimaginable until you had actually stepped inside it. The Colver farm was across the bay, and towards the end of Deeti’s life, when her knees were stiff with arthritis, the climb up to the shrine was too much for her to undertake on her own: she wasn’t able to make the trip unless she was carried up in her special pus-pus—a contraption that was part palki and part sedan chair. This meant that visits to the shrine had to be full-scale expeditions, requiring the attendance of a good number of the Colver menfolk, especially the younger and sturdier ones.