Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

For what could be the intent of such an act? What grounds could she have for imagining him to be an Onanist — indeed, of accusing him of it?

To know something so secret, so private, would mean that she had looked into his very soul. And to see so deep into the head and body of another person was to take possession of them, to achieve complete mastery; he might as well be her dredgy now for he would certainly never be able to look her in the eyes again.

And the worst part of it was that he would never find out whether she knew or not — a subject like this could never be mentioned between a mystery and his mistress.

A terrible dread swept over him now and all thought of his anticipated tryst with Paulette was erased from his mind. He was filled instead with a self-loathing so acute that he could not imagine that such filthy temptations would ever well up inside him again. And if they did he would fight them; he would prove that he was no Onanist: of that he was determined — his freedom, his mastery of his very soul, seemed to depend on it.

His eyes fell on the yellowing rags that lay around his bed and he shuddered. In light of what he knew now, they looked unspeakably vile, veritable founts of sin and contagion. He cast his hands around him until they fell on the rag he had brought into his bed, and he hurled it away with a shudder of loathing. Then he picked up the pamphlet and read it through one more time, from beginning to end.

Over the next few days Zachary wore the pages of Onania almost to shreds, reading the pamphlet over and again. The parts that made the most powerful impression on him were the passages on disease: every perusal deepened his apprehensions about the infections that were simmering inside his body.

Until this time he had been under the impression that the clap was the revenge of the pox-parlour and could not be caught without actually thrusting your cargo through a hatch, no matter whether fore or aft: that merely winching up your undertackle with your own maulers could produce the same result had never entered his mind.

On the Ibis he had seen the consequences of the clap on other sailors: he had listened to pox-ridden men screaming in pain as they tried to tap their kegs; he had viewed, with horror-struck curiosity, the fruit that blossomed on diseased beanpoles — the clumps of welts and boils, the dribbles of pus. He had also heard stories about how the treatment — with applications of mercury and even leeches — was just as painful as the disease. To spike one’s cannon forever seemed better than to take that cure.

It had never occurred to him that his night-time trysts with Paulette might be leading in this direction. He had thought that his bullet-pouch was no different from his bladder or his bowels in that it needed an occasional emptying. He had even heard it said that coughing up your cocksnot from time to time was as much a necessity as blowing your nose. Certainly no one who had ever slept in a fo’c’sle could fail to notice the fusillades that shook every hammock from time to time. More than once had he been bumped in the nose because of an overly energetic bout of musketry in the hammock above. Just as he himself was sometimes shouted at, he’d learnt to shout: ‘Will you stop polishing your pistol up there? Take your shot and be done with it.’

But he remembered now, with a sinking in his heart, that it was always the most trigger-happy gunmen who ended up with the clap. He himself had never been of that number — at least not until he fell under the sway of Paulette’s phantom. Now, as he battled the temptation to sink into her arms again, the very sound of the letter ‘P’ became unbearable to him — as did words like ‘gullet’ and ‘mullet’ and everything that rhymed with ‘Paulette’.

The worst part of it was that each day brought with it worrying signs of the one condition he thought he had been spared — pria-pism. It was a bitter irony that this disease had manifested itself only after he had forsworn its cause; no less was it an irony that the longer he abstained the more vigorously it asserted itself. On some nights it was as if his spuds were cooking in a kettle: to keep the lid on, with the pressure building up below, took a jaw-gritting effort, but he persisted, for to give in would be to capitulate, to acknowledge that he was indeed a congenital tug-mutton.

During the day he managed to keep the symptoms at bay by applying himself strenuously to his work. But even then, scarcely an hour passed during which his tackle did not stir in its stowage. The shape of a cloud would conjure up an image of a breast or a hip, and before he knew it his drawers would puff up like a spanker in a breeze. The sight of a boatwoman on the river, rowing a sampan or a paunchway, could bring on a situation in which he had to race off to find an apron to drape around his middle. One day, a glimpse of a goat, lazily grazing in the distance, evoked the curve of a woman’s thigh — and before he knew it his hawser was trying to bore a hawse-hole through the flap of his breeches.

That night he wept to think that an animal — a goat! — had produced such an effect on him: how much lower was it possible to fall?

When the khidmatgars brought him trays he would stare morosely at them, wondering whether they too had ever visited the Onanian isles. He would examine their faces for signs of the symptoms listed in the pamphlet: pimples, inflammations, rapid blinking, dark patches around the eyes and an unnatural pallor. On none of them were the signs so prominently visible as they were on himself. They had probably married early, he guessed, and would thus never have needed to resort to the solitary vice.

But even these inoffensive reflections were fraught with danger. One thought would lead to another and visions of the khidmatgars’ intimacies with their wives would flash through his head. The hairy hand that bore the tray would evoke the rounded shape of a breast; a calloused knuckle, on the fingers that gifted him a bowl of dumbpoke, would turn into a dark, swollen nipple — and all of a sudden his jib-boom would be a-taunt in his drawers and he would have to push his chair deeper under the table.

His condition being what it was, nothing was more terrifying to Zachary than the prospect of accidentally encountering Mrs Burnham. For this reason he spent all his time on the budgerow, hardly ever setting foot on shore. But one morning, in despair, he decided that confinement was making his condition worse and he forced himself to go for a walk.

As he marched along the riverbank, his head felt lighter than it had in many days. The twitching in his groin also began to abate — but still, as a precaution, he kept his eyes rigidly fixed on the ground. But his confidence grew as he walked and he began to look around more freely. And to his surprise, many sights that would have hoisted his mizzen just the day before — the bulge of a breast under a sari; a woman’s ankle, twinkling down the street — aroused not the faintest flutter.

As his assurance increased he let his eyes wander where they wished, allowing them to dwell, promiscuously, on voluptuous clouds and suggestively heaving trees. Finding no cause for concern he even ventured to pronounce the proscribed words: mullet, gullet and so on until he arrived finally at a full-throated ‘Paulette!’ — and still his foredeck remained perfectly ship-shape, with his tackle tightly snugged down.

He stopped and drew a breath that coursed euphorically through his body: it was as if he had been granted a reprieve, a cure! Turning around, he strolled joyfully back to the budgerow, and there, as if to confirm his exculpation, he found a visitor waiting.

It was Mr Doughty, bearing an invitation to the Harbourmaster’s Dance, a fancy-dress ball intended to raise money for the Mariners’ Mission in Calcutta: it was the custom to give away a few tickets to indigent but deserving young sailors.