Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

And her intuition was not wrong. Freddie greeted her from a distance, with a nod, and seated himself on one of the lower terraces of the nursery, with his back against the trunk of a leafy ficus tree.

For a while he sat motionless, staring northwards with his back to her. She too looked towards the distant clouds of smoke and when her eyes strayed back to him she saw that he had taken out his pipe. Something stirred in her and she went down and seated herself beside him, watching quietly as he arranged his implements on the grass.

‘You would like to smoke, eh Miss Paulette?’

She nodded. ‘I would like to try.’

‘You have not smoked before?’

‘No. Never.’

He turned to look at her, narrowing his eyes. ‘Why not?’

‘I had a fear of it,’ she said.

‘Fear? Why?’

‘I feared becoming a slave to it.’

‘Slave, eh?’ He gave her one of his rare smiles. ‘Opium will not make you slave, Miss Paulette. No. Opium will make you free.’

He inclined his head in the direction of the distant cloud of smoke. ‘It is they who are slaves, ne? Slaves to money, profit? They don’t take opium but still they are slaves to it. For them opium is just incense, lah, for their gods — money, profit. With opium they want to make whole world slaves for their gods. And they will win, because their gods are very strong, ne, strong as demons? When they win they too will see, only with opium can they escape these demons. Only smoke will hide them from their masters.’

In the meantime he had lit a long, sulphur-tipped match with a flint. Now he began to roast a tiny pellet of opium over the flame. When the pellet was properly scorched he handed his pipe to Paulette.

‘After opium catch fire I will put on dragon’s eye’ — he pointed to the tiny hole in the bowl of the pipe — ‘and you must suck hard. Smoke is precious, eh, must not waste.’

Once again he held the pellet to the flame and when it caught fire he placed it on the pipe’s bowl. ‘Now!’

Paulette put her mouth to the stem and sucked in her breath, drawing the fumes into her body. The smoke poured in like a flood, and when the tide ebbed it left in its wake a startling stillness. Just as smoke drives away insects, these fumes too seemed to have expelled everything that carries a sting: fear, anxiety, grief, sadness, disappointment, desire. In their place was a serenely peaceful nullity, a pain-free void.

Paulette lay back against the slope, resting her head on the grass. In a while, when Freddie too had had his fill, he lay beside her, with his head pillowed on his arms, looking up into the dark shade of the tree.

‘Tell me,’ said Paulette presently, ‘how did you learn to smoke?’

‘A woman taught me.’

‘A woman! Who was she?’

‘She was like me, lah — half-Indian, half-Chinese. Very beautiful — maybe too much.’

‘Why?’

‘Sometimes beauty is like curse, ne? For her men would kill, do anything. She needed guards — and I was one. I would bring opium for her to smoke, lah, and one day she ask me smoke with her; show me how, show me secrets. I had smoked before, but I never saw secrets till she show me.’

None of this seemed real to Paulette: it was as if a story had taken shape in the smoke. In that dreamlike state it did not seem too intrusive to ask: ‘And you — did you love her?’

A long time seemed to pass before Freddie answered. Paulette did not know whether the passage of the minutes was real or not: it was as if the hands of the clock in her head had come to a halt and time had changed into something else.

By the time Freddie spoke again she had almost forgotten what she had asked.

‘Don’t know, lah,’ he said. ‘Can’t say if it was love or no. Maybe it was like this smoke, ne, that is inside us now? It was stronger than feelings — like madness, or death.’

‘Why that? Why death?’

‘Because this woman, she belong my boss, she his concubine. He very big man; he “big brother” for many little brother, like me: his name Lenny Chan. Only if mad will a man love woman who belong to big brother. He will always find out, ne?’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘Yes, he find out and he send his men. They kill her — throw her in the river. Try to kill me too, but I get away. My mother hide me, but they find out, so they kill her too — instead of me.’

He laughed. ‘If Lenny Chan know I am here, I would not be alive for long. But he think I am dead, lah — does not know I have been reborn as Freddie Lee. Let us hope he does not find out.’

*

Jodu and Neel had climbed up the Cambridge’s foremast early that morning, as soon as they learnt that a convoy of British ships was approaching the Tiger’s Mouth. From there they had observed the action through a spyglass.

When the Chinese batteries on Chuenpee opened up they had cheered, confident that the British attack would be foiled. But all too soon, as the British began to bombard the fortifications on both sides of the channel, their confidence had turned to dismay. They had watched in disbelief as the walls of both Chuenpee and Tytock were torn open by cannonballs; their disbelief had deepened as they watched landing-parties setting off from the British steamers, in longboats and cutters, to launch frontal assaults on the gun-emplacements. Such was their vantage point that they had been able to observe the landing-parties as they swarmed over the battlements. But not until the end did they spot the sepoys who had circled around the hill to attack the gun-emplacements from the rear. This detachment came into view only after the sepoys had come around the slope.

The slaughter that ensued was largely obscured by dust and smoke but Neel and Jodu still had a vivid sense of what was unfolding, because of the increasing number of bodies in the water. Yet the full horror of it only became clear when shoals of charred and blackened bodies began to drift into the channel.

Not one of the British ships, so far as they could see, had suffered the slightest damage.

The speed with which it happened was as astounding as the one-sidedness of the destruction. The assault started at 9 a.m. by Neel’s watch; by 11 a.m. British flags were flying on both sides of the channel, atop Chuenpee as well as Tytock. The only remaining threat to the British was a squadron of war-junks commanded by Admiral Guan Tiaifei.

The junks had come under withering fire early in the operation. Outmatched, the squadron had retreated to a defensive position, at the edge of the bay that separated Chuenpee from Humen. Between them and the channel lay a sandbar — an impassable obstacle for the larger British vessels but not for those with a shallower draught.

The British fleet ignored the junks while they were occupied in the twin assault on Chuenpee and Tytock. Only when the forts had been stormed did the warships turn their attention to Admiral Guan’s squadron: a number of armed cutters went swarming in for the kill.

But before the cutters could close in they were nosed aside by the gleaming iron hull of the Nemesis . Speeding past the boats the steamer went straight into the shallows until finally her cutwater bit into the sandbar. Then, with a fearsome shrieking sound a volley of projectiles took flight from her foredeck — these, Neel realized, were the weapons that Zhong Lou-si had asked about: Congreve rockets, the prototypes of which had been invented in Bangalore. Arcing through the air, the rockets arrowed into the junks, with devastating effect. One of them hit a gunpowder magazine and a junk exploded with a deafening roar. Then it was as if a tide of fire had engulfed the creek: the entire Chinese squadron seemed to be ablaze.

Now gongs began to ring on the Cambridge , summoning the crew to their battle-stations. The entire outer tier of the Tiger’s Mouth defences was now in British hands so it seemed inevitable that the victorious warships would proceed to attack the next set of fortifications — the batteries of Humen and North Wantung Island, where the Cambridge was stationed.