Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

The old coastal pathway that ran past Sheng Wan village had recently been widened and paved, but work on it was still continuing: the road was to be formally named the next day, in honour of the Queen. Gangs of labourers were putting in milestones and removing rubble as they passed by.

The cart was waiting for them at the top of the ridge that led to the Happy Valley. On arriving there they saw that a cloud was coming across the valley, trailing a sheet of rain.

‘It’s just a shower,’ said Zadig Bey. ‘But we’d better take shelter here while it passes.’

There were some trees beside the road and they huddled under them to wait.

From where she stood Shireen could see much of the shoreline of Hong Kong Bay. The year before, when she had gone to visit Bahram’s grave for the first time, there were only a few little villages dotted along the shore. Now there were godowns, barracks, parade grounds, marketplaces and clusters of shanties. Preparations were already being made for the first land auction: plots had been marked out along several stretches of the shore. At some points sampans and junks were anchored so closely together that it was as if the very soil of the island had expanded.

Paulette too was looking down at the shoreline and she saw that a large, official-looking boundary had been staked out right above the beach where Freddie’s body had washed up earlier in the day. It was there too that he had been sitting the year before when she came down from the nursery and unexpectedly ran into him. The memory brought tears to her eyes and she raised a hand to wipe them away.

Mrs Burnham was beside her, and she slipped her hand into Paulette’s.

‘Do you miss him already, Paulette?’

Paulette buried her face in her hands. ‘I cannot believe,’ she said between sobs, ‘that he too has left me.’

*

At Whampoa the next day, when the guns went off to mark the Queen’s birthday at noon, the blasts seemed to congeal the heat and humidity, making it hard to breathe: Kesri was reminded of the sultry weather that preceded the coming of the monsoons, back home.

The embarkation took unusually long because the transport vessels were a disparate assortment of junks and local boats, captured only the day before. There were no fewer than thirty of them and it was 3 p.m. before the convoy began to move, with all the boats being taken under tow by the Nemesis . But on the way there were further delays because of attacks by fire-boats; as a result there was only an hour of daylight left when the convoy finally reached the designated landing-point, at Tsingpu village, to the north of Guangzhou.

When the boats pulled in Kesri was with Captain Mee on the highest deck of the Bengal Volunteers’ transport vessel. Spyglass in hand, the captain was surveying the salient features of the landscape that lay ahead of them: the four forts he’d pointed out on the chart lay almost due south and were dimly visible through the haze.

The distance between the landing-point and the forts was not great — only three or four miles, as the captain had said — but Kesri saw at a glance that the intervening terrain would not be easy to cross. In between lay a stretch of land that was strikingly similar to the surroundings of his own native village: it was a flat patchwork of fields, covered with green shoots — the crop was rice and Kesri guessed that many of the paddies were flooded. As at home the paths that wound through the fields were very narrow, scarcely wider than a man’s foot, with surfaces of slippery wet clay. Even experienced rice farmers were apt to lose their footing on such pathways; for soldiers and sepoys, balancing muskets and fifty-pound knapsacks, it would be hard going.

Nor was the area as sparsely populated as Captain Mee had led Kesri to think. Kesri guessed that several thousand people lived in the tightly packed clusters of houses that dotted the plain. It was probably in order to resist dacoits and marauders that they lived so close together — and evidently this was exactly what the people of Tsingpu had in mind now. Armed with sticks, staves and pikes they were pouring out to confront the squad of marines that had gone ashore to establish a perimeter around the campsite.

The villagers’ response did not surprise Kesri — people in his own district would have reacted the same way — but the marines were caught off-guard and for a few minutes it looked as though there would be an all-out confrontation. Then an officer took matters in hand: a couple of warning shots were fired, a cordon was formed and the angry villagers were pushed back, past a small temple at the edge of the settlement.

As soon as the situation had been brought under control General Gough stepped off the Nemesis and marched over to the crest of a nearby elevation, to take stock of the terrain. In the meantime some of the junior officers, Captain Mee among them, went into the village temple to look around. They emerged whooping with delight, having found quantities of offerings inside the temple, among them haunches of fresh meat, which they requisitioned for their own table.

‘That fat heathen joss-god can’t have any use for venison, can he?’ said Captain Mee, with a sardonic laugh. ‘So it may as well be used to celebrate the Queen’s birthday.’

The theft of these offerings further inflamed the villagers and groups of men began to collect around the campsite, brandishing scythes and throwing stones; some were even armed with matchlocks. The marines had to shoot into the air to disperse them.

These incidents further delayed the disembarkation. When it finally started the Bengal Volunteers, being small in number, were the first of the 4th Brigade’s units to go ashore.

Sensing an opportunity, Kesri decided to secure a good location for B Company’s tents. He chose a spot on the riverbank, where they were likely to catch a breeze. The sepoys and followers would be grateful, he knew, for an opportunity to wash away the day’s grime in the river — this was a comfort they prized above all others.

But just as Kesri was issuing instructions to the tent-pitchers, Colour-Sarjeant Orr of the Cameronians appeared: ‘Who the hell said you coolies could settle your black arses here?’ He pointed to the tents of the 37th Madras: ‘You belong back there with the Ram-sammies.’

Kesri tried to hold his ground but was outranked and heavily outnumbered. When Captain Mee himself took the other side, saying, ‘I’m sorry, havildar, you’ll have to move,’ he had to give in.

The Cameronians’ taunts rang in Kesri’s ears as he walked away.

‘… let that be a lesson to you, boy …!’

‘… and you’d better be sure we don’t see any of your nigger-snot back here!’

Worse still, the only remaining spot was at the back, where there was not a breath of fresh air, but mosquitoes aplenty, swarming in from the rice-fields. The perimeter site was also uncomfortably close — a group of angry villagers had gathered around a clump of trees, just beyond the nearest picket. But there was nothing to be done about any of this: they would have to spend the night here.

Kesri sighed as he looked around. He could only hope that B Company would soon be gone from this place.

*

That night, because of a shortage of camping equipment, the banjee-boys were billeted with the company’s bhistis and gun-lascars, in a tent where their bodies were packed together as tightly as cartridges in a case. The trapped air reeked of unwashed clothing, stale sweat and urine, and the drone of mosquitoes was as loud as a gale. The ground too was swarming with insects so everybody had to sleep fully clothed, with sheets swathed around their bodies for additional protection — and these too were soon soaked in sweat.