Flowers in the Blood

by Gay Courter

  With a child's eagerness, I surveyed the harbor scene. There were barges as broad as they were long, with bamboo cottages mounted on top. Flat boats with cargoes mounded high with hay drifted by. Slim craft with pointed prows leaned precariously in the direction the wind directed their colored lateens to fly. A file of boats kept to the center of the river, including Chinese junks with high curved poop decks and a huge triangular rudder thrust into the muddy current. Ships even larger than ours were berthed three and four deep along the shore, including many full-rigged, four-masted barks.

  My father stood at the railing outside our cabin in quiet contemplation. Then he spoke in a voice of renewed confidence, perhaps because the matter was in the dispassionate realm of facts. “There are three Calcuttas,” he began. “The first is the winter capital of India, the second is the metropolis of the largest white population in Asia, and the third is the tightest-packed sardine tin outside of China.”

  “Why do so many English people live here?”

  “The city was founded by an Englishman when this”—his hand gestured to include the bustling panorama before us—”was but a stinking marsh.”

  “When was that?”

  “Almost two hundred years ago.”

  “Who was he? Mr. Calcutta?”

  My father roared. “His name was Job Charnock.”

  “What does 'Calcutta' mean?” I asked cautiously, in case my father was tiring of questions.

  “You know who the Indian goddess Kali is, don't you?”

  I nodded. Yali had told me many Hindu myths, and no child could but be intrigued with Kali, the wife of Shiva. She appeared in her beneficent form as Parvati or in her terrifying form as Kali, the black one. I had often shivered at descriptions of her brandishing weapons, her long menacing tongue, her necklace of human skulls.

  “And you know what a ghat is, don't you?”

  “The steps along a riverbank.”

  “So 'Kali-ghat'—or the stairway for the goddess Kali—is what this village on the Hooghly was called.”

  “Oh!” The simplicity of the explanation delighted me. “Why ever did Mr. Charnock come here?”

  “Well, Charnock came out as an agent of the East Indian Company. He found the site to be excellent because it was near the sea and on a mighty river that could handle large ships.”

  “Like that one?” I pointed at the Somali from Liverpool.

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “It's the biggest in the harbor, isn't it?”

  “Not only this harbor, it is the greatest British sailing ship.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “Over there is the broadest-beamed boat in the world. Twice she tore her own masts out because of the weight of her cargo.” As he went on telling me what he knew about the visiting craft, I became transfixed by their enormous gossamer webs of spars and tackles.

  “See those coolies?”

  I followed his nod to a procession of glistening laborers carrying coal baskets on their heads up the gangway of a freighter. “In India men are cheaper than using a mechanical lift.”

  “Not in other places?”

  “No, Dinah, at least not in England.”

  “That must be why the boats come here,” I said, surprising my father. He started to touch me in praise, but fearing my recoil, caught himself and slipped his hand in his pocket.

  “Where are the ships going?”

  “I believe that one is being readied for Sumatra, the one across the way for Mombasa.”

  “Sumatra . . . Mombasa . . .” As I began to wonder about the places I never knew existed, a whistle blew. Sailors clad only in dhotis— loincloths draped to form trousers—scurried along the wharf and up onto the decks to untie, throw, and coil ropes. There was much shouting and complaining. The ship groaned as it slipped away from its bollards. Then there was a bump and a crash as it unexpectedly slammed back against the wharf. Two sailors ran across the decks screaming curses at the deckhands below, who kicked their legs overboard and held the ship off so it would not bounce a second time, then swung themselves back on board as the gap widened beneath them. I clapped my hands at the successful acrobatics, not noticing that my father's arms had surrounded me.

  Anticipation of the unknown muted the pain of departure.

  “It is always easier to leave than to be left,” Papa said, expressing the thought for me.

  “Is that why you go away so often?” I asked, but received no reply. At least his pink lips did not blanch in disapproval.

  We were headed north along the Hooghly River, one of the dozens of branches of the most sacred of Indian rivers: the Ganga, or, as the English called it, the Ganges. On the outskirts of Calcutta many riparian settlements were clustered along the banks, but soon the villages came at wider intervals, and their inhabitants seemed more lethargic the farther upstream we chugged. Bathing and laundry ghats lined the river's edge. Temples with spires that looked like obelisks enchanted me. We glided past an industrial area that processed jute, then dignified houses in faded blues, pinks, grays, and yellows. At Chandernagore I waved to children running in front of a pink church with green shutters. At Chinsura we passed an octagonal Dutch church surrounded by sleeping sacred cows.

  Abdul and Yali served our luncheon in our sitting room; then I was expected to nap, if only to give my father a respite from my incessant questions. When I joined him on the deck in time to witness the sunset, he greeted me with enthusiasm.

  “You have brought pens and papers with you, haven't you, Dinah?” he asked, with what I took to be a hint of harshness in his voice.

  “Oh, shouldn't I have?”

  “Yes, yes.” He seemed distracted. “Since you seem to like schooling so much, I thought we could make this trip more educational.”

  “I do like to study ...” I ventured warily.

  “Good. Then tomorrow you shall begin a list. You shall try to discover the one hundred and eight names for the river we will soon join up with.”

  “The Ganges ... the Ganga.”

  “Right, those are two.” He waited. I loved the way his mouth turned up at the edges, almost in a smile, when he was not preoccupied with his own thoughts.

  “Are there truly a hundred and eight?”

  “Yes.”

  “How shall I ever find them out?”

  “Ask. Ask everyone you meet.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Not all, but a few.”

  “Tell me another.”

  “Sindu-gamini, or flowing into the ocean.”

  “Sindu-gamini.” I rolled the words on my tongue. “That's lovely. And another?”

  “Sighra-ga, swift-flowing.”

  “Another!”

  “If I tell you all of them, you will not have to find them for yourself.”

  “One more,” I begged.

  “All right. Bhiti-hrt.” He did not translate.

  “What does it mean?”

  He started to speak, but his voice cracked. The sun slipped behind a shining black herd of water buffalo on the western shore. Once again he tried. “It means ...” I followed his eyes to the current that turned milky under the churning paddle wheel. “The Hindus say it means carrying away fear.”

  On a lower deck a plump musician in a shabby turban was strumming a tinny Bengali melody on a sitar—an Indian instrument with a bulbous body and spidery strings. The stars began to dot the purple canopy of sky. We stayed at the rail long after most of the other passengers had taken shelter inside, waiting, waiting, for the river to stand by its name.

  Accompanying” us along the route were Englishmen and -women who had embarked at the capital to head up to their posts, to join family members, to visit friends. Native Indians also sailed with us, but on different decks. We were not supposed to mingle. In order to have the run of the ship, I told everyone I needed to accumulate more names of the Ganges for my list.

  “Puta, pure,” offered the pilot of the steamer.

  “Sridhar, holy,” stated a Brahmin pilgrim who e
mbarked in Monghyr.

  “Puny, auspicious,” suggested a merchant from Ghoga.

  The hours on the river flowed with a rhythm quite unlike any I had known on land. There were no set times for arrivals or departures from the riverbank ports. Tides and winds, the ritual bathing of the Hindu passengers and crew, the fancy of the captain, the exigency of a notable on board—any of these events could alter the plan—so it was wisest to have no expectations, to take each hour as it came.

  Over the next ten days my list of names grew to include Nandini, for happiness, Satya-sandha-priya, meaning dear to the faithful, and Atlanta, or eternal, and then we arrived at our destination.

  Patna—at least along the ghat—seemed somnolent compared with Calcutta, even though for centuries it had been one of the chief cities of an Indian empire. Sprawling along the southern bank of the Ganges, it was the loading point for the profitable plantation crops grown in the alluvial soil of the Ganges Plain.

  My father sent Yali and his bearer to prepare the rooms the Sassoons kept in a large house off the maidan while he took me to visit the sights. To my surprise, I was lifted upon an elephant. My father scrambled up clumsily beside me in the howdah. We poked along through crowds of natives to a ninety-foot-tall beehive of a building.

  “What temple is this?” I wondered.

  “The gola—the storehouse that was built after a famine a hundred years ago. Mr. Hastings, who became the governor-general before India had viceroys, decided that if during the good years they stored the harvest in large granaries, there would be a surplus for the bad years, so he hired a man named Captain Garstin to build one.”

  I peered inside an open door. “Why is it empty?”

  “It has never been used.”

  “Why not?”

  “Can you figure it out?”

  I strolled around the structure, musing at this monstrous brick egg. “How does it get filled?”

  My father pointed up. “Through that hole at the top.”

  I scampered up one of the two sets of staircases that spiraled to the peak. In the distance the river looked like a ribbon wrapping the banks of the city in a bow-shaped curve. I ran down to my father. “I know! Nobody wanted to make the effort to climb all that distance carrying sacks of grain.”

  “That is partially correct.”

  I tiptoed inside. The muskiness tickled my nose and I began to sneeze. A millisecond after I stopped, the sound came back to me in a crashing echo. I clapped my hands: this was better still. Papa had entered the door on the opposite side and whispered, “Dinah, can you hear me?”

  I started. “Papa!” I shouted, hearing several reverberations before he spoke again.

  “Quietly, in your lowest voice.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yes. Have you figured out the rest of the secret?”

  “The echoes frightened them.”

  His laugh rang out like bells of a cathedral.

  I looked up and tried to imagine the grain raining down among the shafts of light and filling the upside-down cone. Then I walked out, blinked from the harsh light, and tripped over a mound of earth. I leaned against the door to regain my balance. “The doors!” I shouted. “They open to the inside. If the gola was even partway filled, the bottom would be so packed, the doors could not open. How could anyone make such a gigantic mistake?”

  “Everybody makes mistakes. Many vast plans have gone awry during their execution, especially if ignorant men blindly follow their leaders.”

  “Why didn't anyone question the plan?”

  “I do not know, Dinah. There is something to remember here. Obedience to duty has value, but mindless heeding may be foolhardy. Besides, even if some of the laborers doubted the captain, he probably would not have listened. The British rarely believe anything an Indian tells them.”

  I wondered if he also was remembering the judge who warned the jury not to trust the words of our servants.

  Atop the elephant, I laid my head in Papa's lap. He stroked my hair, murmuring, “How very clever you are.”

  The next morning, I awoke much earlier than usual, due in part to the strangeness of the bed, which did not sway like the one on the ship. Because there was no chamber pot in my room, I went to look for the washing area I had sleepily used the night before. I opened the door where I thought it was, but discovered my father's room. A head lifted from the pillow. I saw only a long braid and large almond eyes before I ran back to my room.

  In a few minutes I heard the slap of bare feet on the wooden floors and a door closing smoothly. Only then did I dare get up and try again to find the pot. After I had used it, I saw that my father's door was open. There was no evidence of a visitor. Standing in my nightgown, I shivered in the cool river breeze. I climbed on his bed as unobtrusively as possible.

  “Did you have a bad dream?” my father asked when he found me in his bed.

  “Sort of.”

  He did not seem angry. His face was softer, more filled out, and he smiled more warmly than he had in Calcutta. “Let's get up, then,” he said with more manly vigor than I had heard in a long time.

  After drinking a third cup of tea, he opened the window and breathed deeply. A strong wind blew his hair in front of his eyes. He pushed it back, grinned, and took the napkin he held in his hand and waved it in the breeze.

  “Good, the wind is from the northwest. This dry weather is perfect.”

  “For what, Papa?”

  “Ah, that you will see, my child, for this is why we have come to Patna.”

  Standing before the rickshaw, my father made certain I wore my topee to protect my head from the sun. He himself wore a cork helmet that snapped under the chin. Abdul handed up a leather box tied firmly with straps, and Yali slipped me a package containing fruit and cakes. We proceeded along a narrow but firmly packed path running perpendicular to the river. Soon we stopped amid a collection of mud huts clustered under tall shade trees, each with an untidy garden. Beyond them stretched miles of verdant fields that from a distance seemed to have been sprinkled with streaks of icing sugar. As we came closer I peered more intently, and I could see the whiteness was the petals of millions of gorgeous flowers undulating in the breeze.

  “What are they?” I asked as Papa helped me down. I ran to the head of a blooming row and breathed in the lavish fragrance.

  “Poppies.”

  “Poppies!” My hand brushed a cluster of fringed blossoms that were so ripe the petals flew off like frightened moths. They fluttered a long while in the air currents before settling on the reddish earth. Dazzled by the effect, I moved a few feet down the row and tried again. “Oh!” I cried in delight, running down the slender path between the rows, my fingertips jostling the feathery petals lightly, but having the effect of a scythe. “Poppies! Poppies! Poppies!” I shouted to the wind. A shower of white billowed up around me as I made my way back up a second row.

  Breathless, I met up with my father again. I shook the petals from my hair and grinned. “Why have we come to see them?”

  “Because these flowers are my business, the Sassoon family trade.”

  “You own these fields?”

  “Not exactly. The government owns them, but we will buy most of the crop when it comes to auction in Calcutta later in the year.”

  “So you sell flowers?”

  “Yes, Dinah.”

  “I don't see how you can get them to China before they die.”

  He threw his head back and laughed so hard he had to wipe his tearing eyes. “Today you will learn everything there is to know about poppies.” He plucked a flower. “This is Papaver somniferum,” he said in a reverential tone, “the most prized flower in the world. Not only is it beautiful, it contains a secret substance that eliminates pain, cures diseases, and makes men happy.”

  “Everyone must want it, then.”

  “Yes, and they will pay dearly for it.” He twisted the stem, almost the thickness of my little finger, back and forth. The translucent petals vibrated pre
ttily. “Our little secret is that it is quite easy to grow and process. We purchase it for a handful of rupees and sell it for baskets of silver.”

  My mother had told me tales of weaving straw into gold, explaining these were mere stories, but the idea of converting a plant to a valuable mineral was true! My father plucked the petals and held up the naked, unripened seed capsule. Its pale green flesh, the color of a baby frog, glistened with dew.

  “Watch this.” He took a knife from his pocket and made three vertical slashes in the fat bulb. “This is called 'lancing.' “ A sticky milk, like white blood, began to ooze out. “Lachryma papaveris.” He studied the droplets as though they were precious works of art. “The tears of the poppy. Every spring, when the petals begin to drop, the villagers cut the bulbs in the afternoon, leaving the sap to drip slowly out during the night. The next morning the congealed blackish fluid is scraped off before the heat makes it stick too tightly. This they do about ten times, until the head is exhausted and bleaches out. Later you will see what becomes of the residue.”

  Intrigued, I followed my father on his rounds. We passed through miles of fields. Large flocks of birds wheeled like hovering clouds overhead. “They are after the wheat or maize, which is alternated with the poppies,” my father explained. He pointed out a distant platform raised upon poles to a height of twenty feet over the fields. When we came closer, I could see a small boy stationed there. After several birds began diving at the grain, the boy lifted a simple sling and selected a stone from a basket. With a graceful arch of his back, an unerring stone met its mark.

  “Oh, no,” I cried in sympathy at the plummeting bird.

  “It must be done as a, warning to the rest of the flock. Look.” I followed Papa's gaze as the dark cloud looped up and back, away from the boy on the platform.

  “Who cares for these fields?” I asked as we walked out to inspect an area.

  “Ryots, or cultivators, lease them from the crown. The ryot plows his field, removes the weeds and grass before dividing it into beds with those higher dykes between them.” He showed me a tank about ten feet deep, dug at one end of the field and pulled out a leather bucket attached to a rope. “Water is taken from here and used to irrigate the fields, which is necessary because most of the poppy cultivation is done after the monsoon. The seed is sown in November, the juice collected in February and March. Come, I will show you how that actually is accomplished.”