Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

One night he got caught in a shower of rain and arrived at the top of the staircase completely drenched. Mrs Burnham was waiting for him in the goozle-connuh. ‘Oh look at you, my dear, dripping pawnee everywhere. Stand still while I take off your jammas and jungiah.’

After stripping him of his clothing, she made him sit on the rim of the bathtub and knelt between his parted thighs. Pulling up her chemise, she draped the hem over his legs and pressed herself against his belly. Murmuring gently, she began to dry his head and shoulders with a towel, clasping him ever closer as she reached around to rub his back. Suddenly she looked down at the unlaced throat of her chemise and gave a little cry: ‘Oh look! I see a helmet! A brave little havildar has climbed up my chest and is raising his head above the nullah, to take a dekko! Oh, but look! He is drenched, even under his topee!’

She delighted in tantalizing him with unfamiliar words and puzzling expressions yet, no matter how intimate their bodily explorations, no matter how much they indulged their appetite for each other, there remained certain matters of decorum on which she would not yield: even when the organ that she had nicknamed the ‘bawhawder sepoy’ was entrenched within her, its master and commander remained Mr Reid, the mystery, and she was never anything but Mrs Burnham, the Beebee of Bethel.

Once, when ‘her shoke was coming on’ as she liked to say, he felt the onset of her tremors and cried out, to urge her on: ‘Oh spend, Cathy, spend! Don’t stint yourself!’

No sooner had the syllables left his mouth than she froze, her shoke forgotten.

‘What? What was that you called me?’

‘Cathy.’

‘No, my dear, no!’ she cried, twitching her hips in such a way as to abruptly unbivouack the sepoy.

‘I am, and I must remain, Mrs Burnham to you — and you must ever remain Mr Reid to me. If we permit ourselves to lapse into “Zachs” and “Cathies” in private then you may be sure that our tongues will ambush us one day when we are in company. In just such a way was poor Julia Fairlie found to be loochering with her groom — for who has ever known a syce to call his memsahib “Julie” as the wretched ooloo was heard to do one day as he was helping her into the saddle? And so was it revealed that much of their riding and saddling was done without horses and in no time at all poor Julia was packed off to Doolally — and all because she’d allowed that halalcore of a syce to be too free with two syllables. No, dear, no, it just will not hoga. “Mrs Burnham” and “Mr Reid” we are, and so we must remain.’

If Zachary bowed to her in this matter it wasn’t only because he accepted her reasoning: it was also because there was something startlingly sensuous about hearing her moan after the passing of a shoke: ‘Oh Mr Reid, Mr Reid! You have made a jellybee of your poor Mrs Burnham!’

The invocation of her married name was a reminder that theirs were stolen, adulterous pleasures, which meant that inhibition was meaningless and restraint absurd: so deadly was the seriousness of their crime that it could only be effaced by frivolity — as when she would cry, with a playful tug: ‘It’s my turn now, to bajow your ganta.’

She deployed these strings of words with the skill of an expert angler, teasing, mocking and egging him on to further advances in the art of the puckrow.

‘Oh Mr Reid, I do not doubt that it is a joy to be a launder of your age, with a lathee always ready to be lagowed — and a dumb-poke is certainly a fine thing, not to be scorned. But you know, my dear mystery, a plain old-fashioned stew can always be improved by an occasional chutney.’

‘You’ve lost me, Mrs Burnham,’ he mumbled.

‘Oh? Have you never heard of chartering then?’

‘You mean like chartering a boat?’

‘No, you silly green griffin!’ She laughed. ‘In India, chartering is what you do with this’ — here she reached between his lips and pinched the tip of his tongue — ‘your jib.’

Thus began a new set of explorations, in which he was soon revealed to be a complete novice, blundering about with all the aptitude of a luckerbaug. ‘Oh no, my dear, no! You are not chewing on a chichky, and nor are you angling for a cockup! Making a chutney dear, is not a blood-sport.’

Her caprices made him long to please her and the mixture of severity and tenderness with which she treated him was far more arousing to him than words of love would have been. On the night when his experiments in chartering finally succeeded in bringing on her shoke, his heart swelled with pride to hear her say: ‘It is a wonder to me, my dear mystery, how quickly you have mastered the gamahuche!’

Her teasing enchanted him, and if he was bewildered by her refusal to take him seriously, he was also captivated by it. He took it for granted that she possessed boundless experience in the amorous arts, and considered it fitting that he should be treated as a neophyte. Yet there was a certain innocence about her too, and sometimes, when she was exploring his body, she would betray an ingenuousness that startled him.

One night when she was toying with the ‘sleeping bawhawder’ and exclaiming over its docile charms, he grew impatient: ‘Oh come now, Mrs Burnham! You are a married woman and have given birth to a child. Surely this is not the first time you’ve handled a co—’

Her hand was on his mouth before he could say the word.

‘No dear, no,’ she said, ‘we will have none of those vulgarisms here. A woman may be bawdy with a woman, and a man with men, but never the one with the other.’

‘But why not?’ he demanded. ‘Why should we not use the words that others use? Why shouldn’t we speak of things by their accustomed names, as all people do?’

Her riposte was swift and unerring: ‘That is exactly why, my dear Mr Reid. Because all people do it, and we are not “all people”. We are you and I; no one is like us, and nor are we like them. Why should we borrow words from others when we can use our own?’

‘But that is unfair, Mrs Burnham,’ he protested. ‘I never was no word-pecker — How’m I to keep pace with you?’

‘Oh fiddlesticks!’ she said, illustrating the exclamation with her fingers. ‘And you a sailor! You should be ashamed to admit to a lack of words!’

‘Very well then, Mrs Burnham,’ he said, ‘I will put my question in ship-language. You are a married woman and have had your mate’s licence for many years. Surely you are not ignorant of the lay of a man’s mast and hatches?’

‘Oh please, Mr Reid!’ she cried with a laugh. ‘Do you imagine that respectable married people would be so wanton as to remove all their clothes and let their hands roam as do you and I? If so, you are much mistaken. I can assure you that for most wives and husbands, coupling is merely a matter of dropping the chitty in the dawk: it is done with a quick hoisting of nightgowns, and that too only when all the batties have been extinguished.’

‘But surely when you were first married …?’

‘No, Mr Reid, you are mistaken again,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Mine was not that kind of marriage: my union with Mr Burnham came about for many purposes, but pleasure was not among them. I was but eighteen and he was twenty years my senior: he wanted respectability and an entrée into circles that had been closed to him. My father was a brigadier-general in the Bengal Native Infantry, as I’ve told you, and it was in his power to open many doors. My dear papa, like many soldiers, was not provident in his ways and was always in debt. He and Mama had pinned their hopes on a brilliant marriage for me — and although a match with Mr Burnham was not quite that, he was a coming man, as they say, and already a Nabob. He offered my parents a very generous settlement.’