Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘Where, Mr Crowle?’

  ‘Come’n see for yer own bleedin self.’

  This being a mealtime, the deck was about as noisy as it ever was, with dozens of girmitiyas, overseers, lascars and bhandaris talking, jostling and arguing over the food. The exchange between the mates brought the hubbub to an abrupt end: that there was bad blood between the malums was a secret to no one, and every eye turned to watch as Zachary made his way forward, towards the bows.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mr Crowle?’ said Zachary, stepping up to the fo’c’sle-deck.

  ‘You tell me.’ The first mate pointed at something ahead and Zachary leant over the bows to take a look. ‘D’ye have the eyes to see it, Mannikin – or do you need it explained?’

  ‘I see the problem, Mr Crowle,’ said Zachary straightening up. ‘The traveller is unseized and the jib and martingale are afoul of the dolphin-striker. How it happened I cannot imagine, but I’ll fix it.’

  Zachary had begun to roll up his sleeves when Mr Crowle stopped him. ‘Not yer job, Reid. Not yer place to tell me how it’s to be fixed neither. Nor who’s to do it.’

  Turning aft, the first mate surveyed the deck with a hand over his eyes, squinting hard, as though he were looking for someone in particular. The search ended when he caught sight of Jodu, who was lounging in the kursi of the foremast: ‘You there, Sammy!’ He curled his finger to summon Jodu to the bows.

  ‘Sir?’ Taken by surprise, Jodu pointed to himself, as if to ask for confirmation.

  ‘Yes, you! Get a move on, Sammy.’

  ‘Sir!’

  While Jodu was climbing down, Zachary was remonstrating with the first mate: ‘He’ll only do himself harm, Mr Crowle. He’s a raw hand . . .’

  ‘Not so raw he couldn’t pick y’out o’the water,’ said the first mate. ‘Let’s see him try his luck with the jib-boom.’

  Alarmed now, Paulette elbowed her way to the forward bulwarks, where many migrants were standing clustered, and found herself a spot from which she could watch Jodu as he climbed out on the schooner’s bowsprit, over the heaving sea. Till now, Paulette had paid little attention to the vessel’s architecture, treating her masts, sails and rigging as a crazed cat’s-cradle of canvas and hemp, pulleys and pins. She saw now that the bowsprit, for all that it looked like a mere extension of the schooner’s ornamental figurehead, was actually a third mast, a lateral one, that stuck out over the water. Like the other two masts, the bowsprit was equipped with an extension, the jib-boom, so that the whole ensemble, when fitted together, jutted a good thirty feet beyond the schooner’s cutwater. Strung out along the boom were three triangular lateen sails: it was the outermost of these that had somehow wrapped itself into a tangle and that was where Jodu was making his way, to the farthest tip of the jib-boom – the Devil’s-tongue.

  The Ibis was mounting a wave as Jodu began his advance, and the first part of his journey was an ascent, in which he was pulling himself along a pole that was pointing skywards. But when the crest of the wave passed, the climb became a descent, with the Devil’s-tongue angled towards the depths. He reached the jib just as the Ibis went nose-first into the trough between two swells. The momentum of the schooner’s slide sent her plunging into the water, with Jodu clinging on, like a barnacle to the snout of a sounding whale. Down and down he went, the white of his banyan becoming first a blur, and then disappearing wholly from view as the sea surged over the bowsprit and lapped over the bulwark. Paulette caught her breath as he went under, but he was gone so long that she was forced to breathe again – and yet again – before the Ibis began to raise her nose from the water, riding the next upswell. Now, as the bowsprit rose from the water, Jodu was seen to be lying flat, with his arms and legs wrapped tightly around the wooden tongue. When it reached the end of its trajectory, the jib seemed to flip upwards, as if to send its rider catapulting into the clouds of canvas above. A stream of water came sluicing back, along the bowsprit, drenching many of the spectators who were standing crowded around the bows. Paulette scarcely noticed the water: she wanted only to know that Jodu was alive, and still able to hold on – after a ducking like that, surely he would need whatever strength he had left for the climb back to the deck?

  Zachary, in the meanwhile, was stripping off his shirt: ‘The hell with you, Mr Crowle; I’m not going to stand by and see a man lost.’

  The schooner was mounting a swell when Zachary leapt on the bowsprit, and the Devil’s-tongue was still above water when he passed the dolphin-striker. During the next few seconds, with the schooner’s head clear of the waves, Jodu and Zachary worked fast, cutting away ropes and cables, thrusting blocks and pulleys into their pockets. Then the schooner began her downwards plunge and both men flattened themselves on the boom – but their hands were now hampered with so many odds and ends of rope and canvas that it seemed impossible that they would be able to find a proper hold.

  Hé Rám! A collective cry went up from the migrants as the Devil’s-tongue plunged into the water, pushing the sailors below the surface. Suddenly, with the shock of an epiphany, it dawned on Paulette that the sea now had in its grasp the two people who mattered most to her in all the world. She could not bear to watch and her gaze strayed instead to Mr Crowle. He, too, had his eyes fixed on the bowsprit, and she saw, to her astonishment, that his face, usually so hard and glowering, had turned as liquid as the sea, with currents of cross-cutting emotion whirling across it. Then a spirited cheer – Jai Siyá-Rám! – drew her eyes back to the bowsprit, which had emerged from the water with the two men still clinging on.

  Tears of relief sprung to her eyes as Zachary and Jodu slid off the bowsprit, to drop safely back on deck. By some quirk of fate, Jodu’s feet came to rest within inches of her own. Even if she had wanted to, she could not have stopped herself from saying something: her lips breathed his name as if of their own accord: Jodu!

  His eyes widened as he turned to look at her ghungta’d head, and she made only the tiniest motion to caution him – as in childhood, it was enough; he was not one to betray a secret. Bowing her head, she slipped away and went back to her washing.

  It was only when she was stepping away from the scuppers, to hang the washing on the after-shrouds, that she saw Jodu again. He was whistling nonchalantly, carrying a pintle in his hands. As he went past, the pintle dropped and he fell to his knees, scrambling about, as if he were chasing it across the tilted deck.

  Putli? he hissed as he passed her. Is it really you?

  What do you think? Didn’t I say I’d be on board?

  He gave a muffled laugh: I should have known.

  Not to a word to anyone, Jodu.

  Done. But only if you put in a word for me.

  With who?

  Munia, he whispered, as he rose to his feet.

  Munia! Stay away from her, Jodu; you’ll only get yourself in trouble . . .

  But her warning was wasted for he was already gone.

  Twenty

  Was it because of the glow of Deeti’s pregnancy? Or was it because of her success in dealing with the maistries? Either way, it happened that more and more people took to calling her Bhauji: it was as if she had been appointed the matron of the dabusa by common consent. Deeti gave the matter no thought: there was nothing to be done, after all, if everybody wanted to treat her as if she were their older brother’s wife. She might have been less sanguine if she had considered the responsibilities that went with being a Bhauji to the world at large – but not having done so, she was caught unawares when Kalua told her that he had been approached by someone who wanted her advice on a matter of grave importance.

  Why me? she said in alarm.

  Who else but Bhauji? said Kalua, with a smile.

  All right, she said. Tell me: Ká? Káwan? Kethié? What? Who? Why?

  The man in question, Kalua told her, was Ecka Nack, the leader of the group of hillsmen who had joined the migrants at Sahibganj. Deeti knew him by sight: a bandy-legged, muscular man, he had the grizzled look and thoughtful mien of a
village elder, although he was probably no older than thirty-five.

  What does he want? said Deeti.

  He wants to know, said Kalua, whether Heeru would be willing to set up house with him when we reach Mareech.

  Heeru? This so amazed Deeti that she could not speak for several minutes. She had noticed of course – and who could not? – the hungry glances that came the way of every woman on the ship. Yet, she would never have thought that Heeru – poor, simple-minded Heeru, who had become a girmitiya almost by accident, after being abandoned by her husband at a mela – would be the first to elicit a serious offer.

  And here was another puzzle: if this was indeed a serious proposal, then what was it for? Surely it could not be marriage? Heeru was, by her own account, a married woman, whose husband was still alive; and no doubt Ecka Nack himself had a wife or two, back in the hills of Chhota Nagpur. Deeti tried to think of what his village might be like, but such was her plainswoman’s horror of the hills that she could only shudder. Had they been at home, the match would have been inconceivable – but over there, on the island, what would it matter whether you were from the plains or the hills? For Heeru to set up house with a hillsman would be no different from what she, Deeti, had done herself. Surely all the old ties were immaterial now that the sea had washed away their past?

  If only it were so!

  If the Black Water could really drown the past, then why should she, Deeti, still be hearing voices in the recesses of her head, condemning her for running away with Kalua? Why should she know that no matter how hard she tried, she would never be able to silence the whispers that told her she would suffer for what she had done – not just today or tomorrow, but for kalpas and yugas, through lifetime after lifetime, into eternity. She could hear those murmurs right now, asking: Do you want Heeru to share the same fate?

  This thought made her groan in annoyance: what right did anyone have to thrust her into this tangle? Who was Heeru to her after all? Neither aunt nor cousin nor niece. Why should she, Deeti, be made to bear the burden of her fate?

  Yet, despite her resentment of the imposition, Deeti could not help but recognize that Ecka Nack was, by his own lights, trying to do what was right and honourable. Now that they were all cut off? from home, there was nothing to prevent men and women from pairing off? in secret, as beasts, demons and pishaches were said to do: there was no pressing reason for them to seek the sanction of anything other than their own desires. With no parents or elders to decide on these matters, who knew what was the right way to make a marriage? And wasn’t it she herself who had said, at the start, that they were all kin now; that their rebirth in the ship’s womb had made them into a single family? But true as that might be, it was true also that they were not yet so much a family as to make decisions for one another: Heeru would have to decide for herself.

  In the past few days Zachary’s mind had returned often to Captain Chillingworth’s account of the White Ladrone. In trying to fit the pieces of the story together, Zachary had extended to Serang Ali the benefit of every possible doubt – but no matter how charitably he looked at it, he could not rid himself of the suspicion that the serang had been priming him, Zachary, to step into Danby’s shoes. The thought gave him no rest and he longed to discuss the matter with someone. But who? His relationship with the first mate being what it was, there was no question of broaching it with him. Zachary decided instead that he would take the Captain into his confidence.

  It was the Ibis’s eleventh day on the open sea, and as the sun began to descend the heavens filled with sonder-clouds and mares’ tails: soon enough the schooner was beating to windward under what was undeniably a mackerel sky. At sunset the wind changed too, with the schooner being assailed by gusts and squalls that kept turning her sails aback, with thunderous detonations of canvas.

  Mr Crowle was on the first watch of the night, and Zachary knew that the cluttery weather would serve to keep him occupied on deck. But just to be sure of having him out of the way, he waited till the second bell of the watch before crossing the cuddy to the Captain’s stateroom. He had to knock twice before the Captain answered: ‘Jack?’

  ‘No, sir. It’s me, Reid. Wondered if I might have a word? In private?’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  There was a pause followed by a snort of annoyance. ‘Oh very well then. But you’ll have to ship your oars for a minute or two.’

  Two minutes went by, and then some more: though the door remained closed, Zachary could hear the Captain padding about and splashing water into a basin. He seated himself at the cuddy table and after a good ten minutes the door swung open and Captain Chillingworth appeared in the gap. A beam from the cuddy’s lantern revealed him to be wearing an unexpectedly sumptuous garment, an old-fashioned gentleman’s banyan – not a striped sailor’s shirt of the kind the word had lately come to designate, but a capacious, ankle-length robe, intricately embroidered, of the sort that English nabobs had made popular a generation ago.

  ‘Come in, Reid!’ Although the Captain was careful to keep his face averted from the light, Zachary could tell that he had been at some pains to freshen up, for droplets of water were glistening in the folds of his jowls and on his bushy grey eyebrows. ‘And shut the door behind you, if you please.’

  Zachary had never been inside the Captain’s stateroom before: stepping through the door now, he noticed the signs of a hurried straightening-up, with a spread thrown haphazardly over the bunk and a jug lying upended in the porcelain basin. The stateroom had two portholes, both of which were open, but despite a brisk cross-breeze a smoky odour lingered in the air.

  The Captain was standing beside one of the open portholes, breathing deeply as if to clear his lungs. ‘You’ve come to give me an ear-wigging about Crowle, have you, Reid?’

  ‘Well, actually, sir . . .’

  The Captain seemed not to hear him, for he carried on without a break: ‘I heard about the business on the jib-boom, Reid. I wouldn’t make too much of it if I were you. Crowle’s a knaggy devil, no doubt about it, but don’t be taken in by his ballyragging. Believe me, he fears you more than you do him. And not without reason, either: we may sit at the same table while at sea, but Crowle knows full well that a man like you wouldn’t have him for a groom if we were ashore. That kind of thing can eat a fellow up, you know. To fear and be feared is all he’s ever known – so how do you think it sits with him, to see that you can conjure loyalty so easily, even in the lascars? In his place would it not seem equally unjust to you? And would you not be tempted to visit your grievance on somebody?’

  Here the schooner rolled to leeward, and the Captain had to reach for the bulwark to steady himself. Taking advantage of the pause, Zachary said quickly: ‘Well, actually, sir, I’m not here about Mr Crowle. It’s about something else.’

  ‘Oh!’ This seemed to knock the wind out of Captain Chillingworth, for he began to scratch his balding head. ‘Are you sure it can’t wait?’

  ‘Since I’m here, sir, maybe we should just get it done with?’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Captain. ‘I suppose we may as well sit down then. It’s too blashy to be on our feet.’

  The only source of light in the stateroom was a lamp with a blackened chimney. Dim though it was, the flame seemed too bright for the Captain and he held up a hand to shield his eyes as he crossed the cabin to seat himself at his desk.

  ‘Go on, Reid,’ he said, nodding at the armchair on the other side of the desk. ‘Sit yourself down.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Zachary was about to sit when he glimpsed a long, lacquered object lying on the upholstery. He picked it up and found it warm to the touch: it was a pipe, with a bulb the size of a man’s thumbnail, sitting on a stem that was as thin as a finger and as long as an arm. It was beautifully crafted, with carved knuckles that resembled the nodes of a stalk of bamboo.

  The Captain too had caught sight of the pipe: half rising to his feet, he thumped his fist on his t
high, as if to chide himself for his absent-mindedness. But when Zachary held the pipe out to him, he accepted with an unaccustomedly gracious gesture, extending both his hands and bowing, in a fashion that seemed more Chinese than European. Then, placing the pipe on the desk, he cradled his jowls in his palm and stared at it in silence, as though he were trying to think of some way of accounting for its presence in his stateroom.

  At last, he stirred and cleared his throat. ‘You’re not a fool on the march, Reid,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you know what this is and what it’s used for. I’ll be bail’d if I make any apologies for it, so please don’t be expecting any.’

  ‘I wasn’t, sir,’ said Zachary.

  ‘You were bound to find out sooner or later, so maybe it’s for the best. It’s scarcely a secret.’

  ‘None of my business, sir.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the Captain, with a wry smile, ‘in these waters it’s everyone’s business and it’ll be yours, too, if you intend to continue as a seaman: you’ll be stowing it, packing it, selling it . . . and I know of no salt who doesn’t sample his cargo from time to time, especially when it’s of a kind that might help him forget the blores and bottom-winds that are his masters of misrule.’

  The Captain’s chin had sunk into his jowls now, but his voice had grown steadier and stronger. ‘A man’s not a sailor, Reid, if he doesn’t know what it’s like to be becalmed in a dead-lown, and there’s this to be said for opium that it works a strange magic with time. To go from one day to another, or even one week to the next, becomes as easy as stepping between decks. You may not credit it – I didn’t myself until I had the misfortune of having my vessel detained for many months in a ghastly little port. It was somewhere on the Sula Sea – as ugly a town as I’ve ever seen; the kind of place where all the giglets are travesties, and you can’t step ashore for fear of being becketed by the forelift. Never had I felt as flat aback as I did in those months, and when the steward, a Manila-man, offered me a pipe, I confess I took it with a will. No doubt you expect me to blame myself for my weakness – but no sir, I do not regret what I did. It was a gift like none I’ve ever known. And like all the gifts that Nature gives us – fire, water and the rest – it demands to be used with the greatest care and caution.’