by Amitav Ghosh
It came as a relief to Neel to enter the presence of someone in authority. ‘Sir!’ he said. ‘I must protest against this treatment. Your men have no right to hit me or tear away my clothes.’
The serjeant looked up and his blue eyes hardened with an incredulity that could not have been greater than if the words had been spoken by one of the chains on the wall – but from what happened next, it was clear that his initial response was prompted not by the burden of what Neel had said, but rather by the mere fact of being spoken to in his own language, by a native convict: without addressing a word to Neel, he turned to the sepoys who had led him in, and said, in rough Hindusthani: Mooh khol . . . open his mouth.
At this, the guards on either side of Neel took hold of his face and expertly prised his mouth open, sticking a wooden wedge between his teeth to hold his jaws apart. Then an orderly in a white chapkan stepped forward and began to count Neel’s teeth, tapping them with a fingertip; his hand, the smell of which filled Neel’s head, reeked of dal and mustard oil – it was as if he were carrying the remnants of his last meal under his nails. On coming to a gap, the finger dug down into the jaw, as if to make sure the missing molar wasn’t hidden somewhere within. The unexpectedness of the pain transported Neel suddenly to the moment when he’d lost that tooth: how old he was he could not remember, but in his mind’s eye, he saw a sunlit veranda, with his mother at the far end, swinging on a jhula; he glimpsed his own feet, carrying him towards the sharp edge on the corner of the swing . . . and it was almost as if he could hear her voice again, and feel the touch of her hand as it reached into his mouth to take the broken tooth from his lips.
‘Why is this necessary, sir?’ Neel began to protest as soon as the wedge was removed from his mouth. ‘What is the purpose?’
The serjeant did not look up from the log-book in which he was entering the results of the examination, but the orderly leant over to whisper something about marks of identification and signs of communicable disease. This was not enough for Neel, who was now seized by a determination not to be ignored: ‘Please, sir, is there a reason why I cannot have an answer to my question?’
Without a glance in his direction, the serjeant issued another order, in Hindusthani: Kapra utaro . . . take off his clothes.
The sepoys responded by pinning Neel’s arms to his side: long practice had made them expert in stripping the clothes from convicts, many of whom would gladly have died – or killed – rather than be subjected to the shame of having their nakedness exposed. Neel’s struggles presented no challenge to them and they quickly tore off the remnants of his clothing; then they held him upright, pinioning his limbs so as to fully expose his naked body to his jailers’ scrutiny. Unexpectedly, Neel felt the touch of a hand, grazing against his toes, and he looked down to see the orderly brushing his feet with his fingertips, as if to ask forgiveness for what he was about to do. The gesture, in all its unforeseen humanity, had scarcely had time to register when the orderly’s fingers dug into Neel’s groin.
Lice? Crabs? Vermin?
None, sahib.
Birthmarks? Lesions?
No.
The touch of the orderly’s fingers had a feel that Neel could never have imagined between two human beings – neither intimate nor angry, neither tender nor prurient – it was the disinterested touch of mastery, of purchase or conquest; it was as if his body had passed into the possession of a new owner, who was taking stock of it as a man might inspect a house he had recently acquired, searching for signs of disrepair or neglect, while mentally assigning each room to a new use.
‘Syphilis? Gonorrhoea?’
These were the first English words the serjeant had used, and in speaking them he looked at the prisoner with the faintest hint of a smile.
Neel was now standing with his legs apart and his arms extended over his head while the orderly searched his flanks for birthmarks and other ineradicable signs of identification. But he did not miss the mockery in his jailer’s glance, and was quick to respond. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘can you not afford me the dignity of a reply? Or is it that you do not trust yourself to speak English?’
The man’s eyes flared and Neel saw that he had nettled him, simply by virtue of addressing him in his own tongue – a thing that was evidently counted as an act of intolerable insolence in an Indian convict, a defilement of the language. The knowledge of this – that even in his present state, stripped to his skin, powerless to defend himself from the hands that were taking an inventory of his body – he still possessed the ability to affront a man whose authority over his person was absolute: the awareness made Neel giddy, exultant, eager to explore this new realm of power; in this jail, he decided, as in the rest of his life as a convict, he would speak English whenever possible, everywhere possible, starting with this moment, here. But such was the urgency of this desire that words failed him and he could think of nothing to say; no words of his own would come to mind – only stray lines from passages that he had been made to commit to memory:
‘. . . this is the excellent foppery of the world . . . to make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon and the stars . . .’
The serjeant interrupted him with an angry command: Gánd dekho . . . bend him over, check his arse . . .
With his head bowed between his legs, Neel still would not stop: ‘Proud man, drest in a little brief authority, his glassy essence like an angry ape . . .’ His voice rose till the words were echoing off the stone walls. The serjeant rose from his seat as Neel was straightening up. An arm’s-length away, he came to a halt, drew his hand back and struck Neel across the face: ‘Shut yer gob, quoddie.’
In some reflexive part of his mind, Neel noted that the serjeant had hit him with his left hand, and that had he been at home, he would have had to bathe and change. But that was in some other life: here what mattered was that he had succeeded at last in making the man speak to him in English. ‘A very good day to you, sir,’ he muttered, bowing his head.
‘Get his bleedin arse out o’ me sight.’
In a small adjoining room, Neel was handed a bundle of folded clothing. A sepoy enumerated the articles as he handed them over: one gamchha, two vests, two dhotis of dungri weave, one blanket; better take care of them, they’re all you’ll have for the next six months.
The unwashed dungaree cloth was thick and rough, its texture more like jute sacking than woven cotton. When shaken loose, the dhoti proved to be half the size, in length as well as breadth, of the six-yard stretch of fabric to which Neel was accustomed. Tied at the waist, it would fall no lower than the knees and was clearly meant to be worn as a langot – but Neel had never had occasion to tie a loincloth before and his hands fumbled so much that one of the sepoys snapped: What are you waiting for? Cover yourself! – as if it were by his own choice that he had been stripped of his clothes. The blood rushed to Neel’s head and he thrust his pelvis forward, pointing at himself with a lunatic’s abandonment: Why? What have you not seen? What’s left?
A look of pity came into the eyes of the sepoy: Have you lost all shame? And Neel nodded, as if to say yes, that’s right: for it was true that at this moment he felt no shame at all, nor any other form of responsibility for his body; it was as if he had vacated his own flesh in the process of yielding it to the tenancy of the prison.
Move, come on! Losing patience, the sepoys took the dhoti out of Neel’s hands and showed him how to knot it so that the ends could be pulled between his legs and tucked in at the back. Then, using their spear-butts as prods, they hurried him down a dim corridor into a cell that was small but brilliantly lit, with candles and oil-lamps. In the centre of the room, a bare-bodied, white-bearded man sat waiting on an ink-stained mat: his torso was covered with an intricate network of tattoos and on a folded square of cloth in front of him lay an array of glistening needles. The man could only be a godna-wala, a tattooist: when this dawned on Neel he spun around, as if to make a lunge for the exit – but the gambit was familiar to the sepoys who wrestled him quickly t
o the ground; holding him immobile, they carried him over to the mat and positioned him so that his head was resting on the tattooist’s knee and he was looking up at his venerable face.
There was a gentleness in the old man’s eyes that allowed Neel to find his voice. Why? he said, as the needle came towards his forehead. Why are you doing this?
It’s the law, said the tattooist peaceably. All transportees have to be marked so they’ll be recognized if they try to escape.
Then the needle hissed against his skin, and there was no space in Neel’s mind for anything but the spasms of sensation that were radiating outwards from his forehead: it was as if the body that he had thought to have vacated were taking revenge on him for having harboured that illusion, reminding him that he was its sole tenant, the only being to whom it could announce its existence through its capacity for pain.
The tattooist paused, as if in pity, and whispered: Here, eat this. His hand circled over Neel’s face and pushed a little ball of gum between his lips. It will help; eat it . . .
As the opium began to dissolve in his mouth, Neel realized that it was not the intensity of the pain that was dulled by the drug, but rather its duration: it so blunted his consciousness of time that the operation, which must have taken hours of painstaking work, seemed to last only for a few concentrated moments. Then, as if through a dense winter fog, he heard the tattooist’s voice whispering in his ear: Raja-sah’b . . . Raja-sah’b . . .
Neel opened his eyes to see that his head was still in the old man’s lap; the sepoys, in the meanwhile, had drowsed off in the corners of the cell.
What is it? he said, stirring.
Don’t worry, Raja-sahib, the tattooist whispered. I’ve watered the ink; the mark will not last beyond a few months.
Neel was too befuddled to make sense of this: Why? Why would you do that for me?
Raja-sahib, don’t you know me?
No.
The tattooist brought his lips still closer: My family is from Raskhali; your grandfather gave us land to settle there; for three generations we’ve eaten your salt.
Placing a mirror in Neel’s hands, he bowed his head: Forgive me, Raja-sahib, for what I had to do . . .
Raising the mirror to his face, Neel saw that his hair had been cut short and two rows of tiny Roman letters had been inscribed unevenly upon the right side of his forehead:
forgerer
alipore 1838.
Thirteen
Zachary’s room, in the Watsongunge boarding house, was just about wide enough to turn around in, and the bed was a string pallet, on which he had spread a layer of his own clothes, to protect his skin from the barbed roughness of its coconut-fibre ropes. At the foot of the bed, so close that he could almost rest his toes on its edge, was a window – or rather a square hole that had long since lost its shutters. The opening looked out on Watsongunge Lane – a winding string of grag-ghars, poxparlours and boarding houses that unspooled into the shipyard where the Ibis was being careened, caulked and re-fitted in preparation for her next voyage. Mr Burnham had been none too pleased to know of Zachary’s choice of lodging: ‘Watsongunge? There’s no more godless place on earth, save it be the North End in Boston. Why would a man step into a galavant like that when he could enjoy the simple comforts of the Reverend Johnson’s Mission House for Sailors?’
Zachary had dutifully gone to take a look at the Mission House, but only to come away after catching sight of Mr Crowle, who had already taken a room there. On Jodu’s advice he had decided to go instead to the boarding house on Watsongunge Lane: the fact that it was a few minutes’ walk from the shipyard had served as his excuse. Whether or not his employer was satisfied by this reasoning was not quite clear to Zachary, for of late he had begun to suspect that Mr Burnham had set a spy on him. Once, answering a knock at a suspiciously late hour of the night, Zachary had opened his door to find Mr Burnham’s gomusta standing outside. The man had leant this way and that, as if he were trying to see if Zachary had smuggled anyone into his room. When asked what he was doing there, he claimed to be the bearer of a present, which turned out to be a pot of half-melted butter: sensing that it was a snare of some kind, Zachary had refused to accept it. Later, the proprietor of the boarding house, an Armenian, had informed him that the gomusta had asked if Zachary was ever to be seen in the company of prostitutes – except that the word he’d used apparently was ‘cowgirls’. Cowgirls! As it happened, after his meeting with Paulette, the thought of buying a woman had become repugnant to Zachary so the gomusta’s snooping had gone unrewarded. But he’d carried on undeterred: just a few nights ago, Zachary had caught sight of him, skulking in the lane, wearing a bizarre disguise – an orange robe that made him look like some kind of duppy mad-woman.
This was why, when woken one night by a quiet but persistent knocking, Zachary’s first response was to bark: ‘Is that you, Pander?’
There was no answer, so he struggled drowsily to his feet, tightening the lungi that he had taken to wearing at night. He had bought several of them from a vendor: one he had strung across the unshuttered window, to keep out the crows and the dust that rose in clouds from the unpaved lane. But the cloth barrier did nothing to lessen the noise that welled upwards from the street at night as sailors, lascars and stevedores sought their pleasures in the nearby nautcheries. Zachary had discovered that he could almost tell the time by the volume of sound, which tended to peak at about midnight, tapering off into silence at dawn. He noticed now that the street was neither at its loudest nor quietest – which suggested that dawn was still two or three hours away.
‘I swear, Pander,’ he snarled, as the knocking continued, ‘you’d better have a good reason for this, or it’s my knob you gon be kissin.’ Undoing the latch, he opened the door but there was no light in the corridor and he could not tell immediately who was outside. ‘Who’re you?’
He was answered by a whisper: ‘Jodu-launder, sir.’
‘Grease-us twice!’ Taken aback, Zachary allowed his visitor to step inside his room. ‘What the hell you pesticatin me for this time o’night?’ A gleam of suspicion came into his eyes. ‘Wait a minute – wasn’t Serang Ali sent you, was it?’ he said. ‘You go tell that ponce-shicer my mast don need no fiddin.’
‘Avast, sir!’ said Jodu. ‘Muffle oars! Serang Ali not sent.’
‘Then what’re you doin here?’
‘Bring to messenger, sir!’ Jodu made a beckoning gesture as if he were asking to be followed. ‘’Bout ship.’
‘Where’d you want me to go?’ said Zachary, irritably. In response, Jodu merely handed him his banyan, which was hanging on the wall. When Zachary reached for his trowsers, Jodu shook his head, as if to indicate that a lungi was all that was necessary.
‘Anchor a-weigh, sir! Haul forward.’
Sticking his feet into his shoes, Zachary followed Jodu out of the boarding house. They walked quickly down the lane, towards the river, past the arrackshacks and knockingdens, most of which were still open. In a few minutes they had left the lane behind, to arrive at an unfrequented part of the shore where several dinghies lay moored. Pointing to one of these, Jodu waited for Zachary to step in before casting off the ropes and pushing the boat away from shore.
‘Wait a minute!’ said Zachary as Jodu began to row. ‘Where you takin me now?’
‘Look out afore!’
As if in answer, there came the sound of someone striking a flint. Spinning around, Zachary saw that the sparks were coming from the other end of the boat, which was covered by a roof of curved thatch. The spark flared again, to reveal for an instant the hooded figure of a woman in a sari.
Zachary turned angrily on Jodu, his suspicions confirmed. ‘Just like I thought – lookin to do some snatchpeddlin huh? So let me tell you this: if I needed to pudden anchor, I’d know to find my own way to the jook. Wouldn’t need no hairdick to show me the way . . .’
He was interrupted by the sound of his own name, spoken in a woman’s voice: ‘Mr Reid.’
&nb
sp; He was turning to look more closely when the woman in the sari spoke again. ‘It is I, Mr Reid.’ The flint sparked again and the light lasted just long enough to allow him to recognize Paulette.
‘Miss Lambert!’ Zachary clapped a hand on his mouth. ‘You must forgive me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know . . . didn’t recognize . . .’
‘It is you who must forgive me, Mr Reid,’ said Paulette, ‘for so greatly imposing.’
Zachary took the flint from her and lit a candle. When the fumbling was over, and their faces were lit by a small glow of light, he said: ‘If you don’t mind my asking, Miss Lambert – how come you’re dressed like this, in a . . . in a . . .’
‘Sari?’ prompted Paulette. ‘Perhaps you could say I am in disguise – although it seems less of a travesti to me than what I was wearing when you saw me last.’
‘And what brings you here, Miss Lambert, if I may be so bold?’
She paused, as if she were trying to think of the best way to explain. ‘Do you remember, Mr Reid, that you said you would be glad to help me, if I needed it?’
‘Sure . . . but’ – the doubt in his voice was audible even to him.
‘So did you not mean it?’ she said.
‘I certainly did,’ he said. ‘But if I’m to be of help I need to know what’s happening.’
‘I was hoping you would help me find a passage, Mr Reid.’
‘To where?’ he said in alarm.
‘To the Maurice Islands,’ she said. ‘Where you are going.’
‘To the Mauritius?’ he said. ‘Why not ask Mr Burnham? He’s the one can help you.’
She cleared her throat. ‘Alas, Mr Reid,’ she said. ‘That is not possible. As you can see, I am no longer under Mr Burnham’s protection.’
‘And why so, if you don’t mind me asking?’