" slowly he came to be filled with a great disgust for the life he had led before – a life of profligacy and poverty, in which he had wasted his mind and body in pointless pursuits, squandering his essences, bodily and spiritual, in fanciful imaginings. He longed to leave that life behind him but was again confounded by that hateful query: how? "

― Amitav Ghosh , Flood of Fire