Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

‘I see it too sometimes,’ he said. ‘In my dreams, lah.’

Turning towards her he asked, in a shaky voice: ‘Miss Paulette, will you mind if I smoke, eh?’

‘No.’ She thought he would take out a wad of tobacco — but instead he reached into his jacket and pulled out a long pipe and a small brass box.

All at once everything fell into place: the quivers, the twitching, the gauntness of his face. She understood that he was an addict, and withdrew slightly. Yet her gaze was drawn back towards him with a new curiosity.

In the last few weeks, ever since she received Zachary’s letter, Paulette had given a great deal of thought to opium and its curative properties. The letter had come as a terrible shock: it wasn’t only that she had been wounded by it; she had also been forced to ask herself whether her fondest hopes and beliefs were nothing but delusions and pipe-dreams. She had remembered how, on reaching Mauritius, she had gone to the Botanical Gardens at Pamplemousses, to wait for Zachary; she remembered her joy when she found the garden abandoned and overgrown — this, it had seemed to her, was an Eden after her own heart, where she would happily await her Adam. She had decided that theirs would be a romance to surpass even that of Paul and Virginie, whose fate had so often moved her to tears — for their love would be freely and willingly consummated. Here, in this garden, she would joyfully take Zachary into her arms and they would be wedded under the stars, in body and in soul, on an island of their own imagining, far from the imprisoning imperatives of the world, their fates decided only by their own volition, their bodies joined together by that ecstatic, vital urgency that was the true and pure essence of life itself.

She had wandered through the abandoned house of the Garden’s former curator until she came to a room that she knew would be the perfect setting for their first night together. On the floor she had made a nest, not a bed — because in Eden, surely, there were no beds? — and she had strewn flowers over the sheets and hung garlands of boys-love on the windows. She remembered how she had wept that night and the next, and the next, when Zachary had not come; and yet those nights had not been lost either, because she had reimagined them many times in her mind’s eye — when she pictured herself seeing Zachary again, it was always on an island, with both of them in shirts and breeches, running hungrily towards each other.

There was a time when she had joyfully embraced these memories — but after receiving Zachary’s letter, with its unexplained repudiation; after trying and failing to understand what could have caused his change of heart, she had come to be filled with shame, and also a loathing of her own foolishness and naivete, a feeling so intense that she had longed to find some escape. She watched in fascination now as Freddie roasted a tiny droplet of opium and inhaled the smoke. She saw that its effect was almost immediate: his twitch disappeared and his hands seemed steadier. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths before he spoke again.

‘Miss Paulette, why a ladder, lah? What was it for?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I too have wondered what it was for.’

He smiled dreamily. ‘When Anahita comes back maybe then we find out, ne?’

‘Is the Anahita coming back?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Is coming — I have seen it in dreams.’

They sat for a while in companionable silence: for the first time since she had received Zachary’s letter Paulette felt at peace. She sensed in Freddie a void far deeper than that which the letter had created in herself, and it conjured up a powerful sense of kinship, overlaying the bond that already existed between them, the bond of the Ibis .

Had there been time she might have asked for a taste of his opium pipe — but just then she spotted the Redruth ’s longboat, coming to fetch her from the island.

*

A week after the fleet’s departure for the north, Kesri learnt that Captain Smith, the CO of the southern sector, had decided that it was time for the Bengal sepoys to move off the Hind : they were to set up camp on an island called Saw Chow.

Kesri received the news with whole-hearted relief — after so many months on the Hind nothing could be more welcome than the prospect of a move to dry land. But his jubilation ebbed when he went to the island for an exploratory visit, with Captain Mee.

Saw Chow was not far from Hong Kong: it lay halfway up the Pearl River estuary, in a cove that was known as Tangku Bay to foreigners. To the south lay the crag of Lintin island; to the north was the promontory of Tangku, where a detachment of Chinese soldiers could be seen going through their drills. Saw Chow itself was a desolate, windswept little island: there were no trees on its three shallow hills, and scarcely any vegetation either. A less hospitable place was hard to imagine, but orders were orders so they had no choice but to make the best of it.

They picked a site in a hollow between two hills and marked out the lines for the sepoys’ and officers’ tents. The next day a team of khalasis, thudni-wallahs, dandia-porters and tent-pitchers went over to set up the camp. A few days later the whole unit moved over to the island, sepoys, camp-followers and all, with their baggage, equipment and armaments.

Once installed in the camp, their lives settled quickly into a routine of drills and inspections in the early morning: the rest of the day was spent in waiting out the heat as best they could, under the scant cover of their canvas tents.

Every few days the officers would escape to Macau or Hong Kong Bay, but for the sepoys and camp-followers there was no such relief: for them the island was a prison-camp, a place of grinding monotony and discomfort. Other than occasional visits from bumboats there were no diversions.

One day, trying to think of ways to relieve the tedium, Kesri came up with the idea of digging a wrestling pit. Captain Mee readily gave his approval and Kesri went to work immediately: with the help of a few sepoys and camp-followers he dug a pit in a spot that looked across the sparkling blue waters of the estuary. It took a few days to properly prepare the soil, by mixing it with turmeric, oil and ghee; when the pit was ready Kesri inaugurated it himself, with a prayer to Hanumanji.

Once again, the pit had just the effect that Kesri had hoped for, channelling energies, creating camaraderie, and giving the men something to look forward to every day. If anything the impact here was even greater than at Calcutta, for Kesri made sure that the camp-followers were allowed to participate, sweepers, dhobis, barbers and all. A few sepoys were put out by this but Kesri silenced them by citing the inviolable ethic of the akhara, in which worldly rank had no place and all men were considered equal. As for the objection that the camp-followers would not be able to match the sepoys in strength, this too was quickly disproved: several of the gun-lascars, golondauzes and bhishtis were large, brawny men, more than able to hold their own in the pit.

Soon word of the pit spread beyond the island and one day a few Royal Marines came across and asked to participate. But it turned out that they were interested in the Angrezi kind of pugilism — mainly boxing, a form of combat that was abhorrent to Kesri, who saw it as no better than mere marpeet or brawling. Kesri told the marines that if they wanted to enter this pit they would have to abide by its rules. They took this in good spirit and became welcome additions to the widening circle of wrestlers.

One day, on returning from a visit to Hong Kong Bay, Captain Mee announced that a young Parsi merchant had just arrived from Manila, on his own ship: amongst his crew there was a lascar who was said to be a trained wrestler. The young Parsi was a great lover of sport and was keen to see how his lascar fared in the pit.