Mark de Silva - Square Wave

He approached the sentries and half-waved. They smiled and followed him with their eyes as he walked through the gate with his pail of water, down toward the village of Belemby, his home for the past nine months. He’d seen this particular gate closed only a few times. The sentries’ mien had been altogether different then.

Four years had passed since the Ceylonese had seized the Ann, their East India Company frigate. That was 1659, at the eastern port of Trincomalee. He, his old friend Robert Knox, and the rest of the crew were kept near the sea for weeks afterward, in a windowless military shed carved into the side of a mountain. It’s where Knox’s father, the ship’s captain, went delirious and died.

Later Rutland learned that the seizure had been unusual. It was, in fact, only their slowness in presenting the king with gifts that brought it on. Knox Sr. had been preoccupied with getting back to England, and thought they might simply trade for the supplies they needed for the return voyage and get going toward home. But this wasn’t India. The rules were different.

As mere merchants, they were thought to pose little threat, so the conditions of their captivity were mild. On Rajasingha’s orders, they were separated (to prevent collusion) and dispersed around the kingdom, to be housed and fed by locals on a rotating basis. Recompense for these families, when it came at all, came mostly as food, a few measures of rice or lentils. When it was time for a rotation, each family hoped it would not be chosen to maintain the men.

Belemby, Rutland’s fourth village, sat in the western county of Hotteracourly, about twenty miles east of Rajasingha’s emergency residence, which he’d taken up only recently, after barely surviving a populist rebellion. Though it was now almost nine months ago, Rutland still knew few of the details, as they were kept from him. What he did know was that the king believed foreigners like him may have helped spur it.

So this was his punishment. Belemby was easily the most unpleasant place he’d been kept. The terrain was arid, craggy, given to drought, and frequently short of grain. The cattle, emaciated in the best of times, would die off, or else the families would have to lead them to relatives living in the more temperate lowlands, if they had any.

Though food and lodging were provided for, no allowance had been made for clothing. Except for his boots, which coconut oil had saved, and his heavy leather gloves, which served him now not on a ship’s deck but in the paddies, bringing in the neighbors’ harvest for a share, Rutland’s garments, mildly supplemented by old garb villagers had given him, were in tatters.

He carried the pot of water along the main avenue bisecting the village, past the row of houses of the wealthiest townsmen. These were seven- or eight-room affairs — two rooms being reserved for the servants — built around handsome courtyards, whose short walls of clay limed white were covered with engravings of birds and lions.

Further along, the houses scaled down to three rooms, then mostly two, and then, for the lion’s share of the avenue, just a single large room. Rutland’s did not even reach this standard. It was just large enough for sleeping and sitting; cooking had to be done in the yard. But it was his, which was new. Through his efforts it might grow.

He hung the water from a vine strung across a pair of coconut palms, above the twigs and woodchips and charred branches of last night’s fire. He picked up one of the sticks and turned for his neighbor’s house, one he had slept in many nights, before he’d been able to shelter himself.

A fire burned in a ring of stones in the grass outside Rajarathnan’s house. He too would be cooking soon. Rutland planted the charred stick in the fire and caught the eye of the man and his wife, Priya, sitting in silence in the house. All nodded.

Rajarathnan had been a natural host. He bore the burden of the Englishmen lightly, especially Rutland, whom he’d once assured was great company next to Francis Crutch, a stormy shipmate of Rutland’s he’d had to house for two months. He said this neutrally, though, as if really he didn’t much mind him either. Rutland himself had always liked Crutch, his irascibility, which even good breeding could not mold or mask. He had known him in boyhood. He was no different now.

The stick smoldered an earthy red. Rutland took it back to his own yard and plunged it into the pile of firewood. It began to smoke. There was enough wood to start a fire, but he’d have to collect more after he ate to take him through to dawn.

Near the outer wall of his little hut he found two small sacks of rice and a large basket full of limes, raw pumpkin slices, coconut meat, and wild leaves he didn’t know the names of, nor seen elsewhere, not even in India. Next to it was a smaller basket of sweet fruit, which the villagers were not obligated to provide. Four purple mangosteens. The supplies would have been left by other villagers — Elara and his wife. It was their turn.

He took one of the sacks and tossed it onto a pile of three others. This was his currency. The idea had not been his but John Loveland’s, another shipmate. Though he lived just fifteen miles away, Rutland hadn’t seen him in almost a year, from the time their various keepers, being known to each other and seeing no harm, allowed several of the Ann’s crew to lunch together. The men converged on Loveland’s village, where they’d learned, though they couldn’t quite believe it, he lived independently.

Each arriving man got a jolt seeing Loveland in a pristine white tunic. It gave him a clerical appearance, though no one could say the church or the god. More than that, it was the starkness of the contrast with their own rags that surprised them. That and the scale of his home: three rooms, like a middle-class townsman. Rutland remembered the faraway look on Knox’s face; the way he wandered through the rooms and the yard, as if private property were a miracle; and the way he stared into the white of the foreign tunic.

Before any sort of gulf could open up between the men, or misunderstandings could multiply, Loveland gave his method, which had nothing to do with religion: “Do not take your food dressed.”

It was simple commerce. The king had ordered the towns-people to provide food for them; he hadn’t said they must prepare it too. After some argument with the councilors, Loveland’s abjection, which they were beginning to find obscene anyway (this perhaps was a religious matter), persuaded them to go along with his plan, so he might earn enough from selling the rice to clothe himself decently. From then on his daily grain came raw. A year of that, Loveland said, had led to this, gesturing to the wealth around him.

From that day, the other Englishmen of Hotteracourly followed suit. It meant they had to go hungry sometimes. But it also meant they had an income now, one that could be transformed in principle into anything at all. A burning stomach, Rutland thought, was a fair price for that sort of alchemy. Bartering had its limits.

Rutland poured the other sack of rice into water on the cusp of a boil. He added a few thick flakes of sea salt. The starch of the rice thickened the water. There was no meat tonight, though the flesh of the coconut was as good as meat to him now. He poured off some of the froth and put the coconut and pumpkin slices in with the rice to simmer.

He turned to the half-knit cap he’d started on the day before. Caps were the real wealth-makers now, for him and the crew. This idea traced to, of all people, the unruly Crutch. When he’d bought some clean clothes at the village trading post with money from raw rice he’d sold, Crutch saw knitted caps for sale. Badly chafed by the equatorial sun, he wondered how he might acquire one, not having quite enough money for it.