Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Neither of his companions has much formal education, but even so the words seem to please them. “Company is bastard,” Ashook, the elder of the two, agrees. He is from the south but has lived in Bombay since the age of ten or twelve, working at the chemical plant. It is for skills acquired there that he is here.

  At last there is movement down below. A soldier comes running from the direction of the city, his uniform blood-smeared though he appears uninjured. He talks to the soldiers whose function it is to make sure the ship does not sail. The exchange is brief. Within minutes all but two men have joined the newcomer and are sprinting back to the city.

  “Now?”

  “Let us wait half an hour, Moshin. Right now they are riled up. Let them relax; get sleepy with the evening heat.”

  As Singh answers, he pulls a revolver from his pocket and checks its bullets. Violence won’t get them where they need to go. Still, the weight of it reassures him.

  [ 2 ]

  Just as they are ready to descend from the customs building, there is a new development. The soldiers on the ship’s side—the guards—walk down the gangplank connecting pier and decking. Singh assumes it is to talk to the soldiers who were left behind on the pier. Perhaps they want to ask them for cigarettes, or suggest a game of cards. Instead, they simply walk away without speaking to them, not running exactly but walking with an odd, furtive haste.

  “Fresh orders?” Ashook wonders.

  “I don’t think so.” Singh watches their trajectory, trying to fathom their destination. “I think they are deserting.”

  Even as he says it, the two remaining soldiers start talking animatedly to one another. Both of them are sepoys. The briefest of consultations appears to suffice: then they, too, are walking—now openly running—away from the harbour, heading not in the direction of the city centre but somewhere up the coast. It is hard not to see the hand of fate in this: the laws of historical materialism manifesting themselves in a single breathless moment.

  “Let’s go,” says Singh. “Don’t forget the crates.”

  Not five minutes later, they are on board.

  [ 3 ]

  Their man is there, as promised. He guides them to the entrance to the central hold, then closes the hatch behind them and stands guard outside. They climb down a steep iron staircase, deep into the ship. For a moment Singh is back on the mountain, descending alone, dodging the expedition porters, his feet and hands numb with cold. At the bottom they light an oil lamp and find themselves in a short corridor, acrid with the smell of rust. A second hatch bars their way.

  “Let me go first,” says Singh. And: “We don’t know what state he is in.”

  He squeezes past his companions, tugs at the bolt that holds the hatch shut and realises too late that it is padlocked.

  “Allow me, Singh-ji. I have the bolt cutter.”

  The honorific briefly angers Singh—“We are comrades, man!”—perhaps precisely because he has missed its usage. The next moment it is forgotten. He watches Moshin work the heavy bolt cutter, his muscles bulging in his sailor’s shirt. At last the padlock falls and Singh once again storms forward and tugs at the heavy hatch. It swings open on well-oiled hinges.

  Beyond lies a cube of space the size of a town square, an iron ceiling for a sky. It reeks of seawater and corrosion, of the ghost of opium and sweets. It is also almost entirely empty. The single piece of cargo that is stored here is encased by a strange kind of metal crate, half giant wardrobe, half machine: pipes, chemical tanks, and pressure valves grow out of its flank, like industrial warts. It stands more than twenty feet high. A loading hatch can be seen at the far wall, barred and bolted. It’s a big hatch, but even so it is hard to see how so large an object as this strange crate-machine could have fit through it. They must have assembled it here.

  A man is chained near it.

  It’s the kind of arrangement you might make for a yard dog that you wish to keep forever in ill temper. Six, seven yards of chain are anchored in a ring soldered right into the floor. The chain leads to a bracelet encircling the left ankle: again, it is soldered rather than just screwed in place. The man’s hands are in iron cuffs that allow some limited movement. Enough to lift food to the mouth, or to loosen the cord about his trousers when he needs the privy. Not enough to wipe himself clean.

  His face is hidden by a sack.

  Singh curses and runs to him and tugs at the sacking. But it is sewn into place very cleverly around the neck, so that it won’t easily come off. Singh puts his fingers into the small slit that’s been left around the mouth and tries to tear the fabric. But the cut, too, has stitching running around its lip, making it impossible to tear. He digs through his pocket, disturbed by the man’s passivity, and locates a knife. As he cuts the sacking he finds himself shaping soft cooing words—“It’s me, it’s me”—like a mother soothing her child. Moshin and Ashook seem embarrassed by this and are keeping their distance. Perhaps it is the man’s smell that puts them off.

  At last the sacking is cut open. Thomas Argyle looks thin, worn, dull. He has been drugged, Singh can see, with sweets and opium, suppressing his affect. His naked feet are clumsy on the metal floor. Three toes are missing, two on the left and one on the right. Singh sees it and holds up his two finger stumps; their upper digits sacrificed to the mountain and the cold. A belch of Smoke pours out of Singh’s throat, surprising him by its density. Singh sniffs at it and wishes it were words. He wants to tell Thomas that he never left him. That he climbed down the mountain with luck and guile and left the valley to seek help for his frostbite. That, exhausted still, teetering under his bags of supplies, he returned to the mouth of the high pass a week later, waiting for a sign of the expedition. That he laughed for joy when it emerged and he spied Thomas, tied to a yak’s back, his features hidden by a Smoke mask.

  From then on, Singh watched over him—like a father; like a guardian angel from his strange English faith—on his travels from the Kingdom of the Gorkha all the way to Bombay. He walked the same paths, rode the same trains, stowed away in freight cars, playing hide-and-seek with the guards.

  It was only at the Bombay station that he passed the vigil on to others. He had telephoned ahead, made contact with a friend he knew from the Punjab who in turn contacted a local cell of nationalists. They were at the station to wait for Thomas and follow him to the private villa whose premises provided his first prison; and also, separately, to follow the crate whose progress Singh had monitored along with his friend’s. A crate very different from this current monstrosity, if large enough to make its transport difficult; a thing the yaks shied from and the porters were wary of; that crushed a man’s leg when it slipped while they loaded it from a cart onto the first of the trains and that seeped black water as the straw-wrapped ice that formed a part of its contents gradually melted in the heat.

  But Singh says none of this and simply stands at arm’s length to Thomas; and a calculating part of him is grateful to the Englishman who decided to crop his friend’s hair close to the skull. The mark shows vivid with no hair to hide it, from ear to temple to cheekbone. Behind Singh, Ashook and Moshin unpack the tools they have brought.

  Singh interrupts them by asking if one of them carries water, then takes the tin flask from Ashook’s hand and pours it over Thomas’s face, before offering him a cup to drink. Gradually, Singh sees Thomas struggle up from the well of drugs and despondency. Intelligence returns to his eyes; some modicum of purpose.

  “There is no key” is the first thing he says. “You will need a cutter. Something strong.”

  Singh hesitates before responding.

  “We cannot free you.” He wanted to say “will not,” but the words stuck in his throat.

  Thomas takes this in without reaction; makes to speak then grows distracted. “Do you hear it?” he asks. The next moment he scuttles away from Singh towards the crate-machine. Th
e chain does not quite reach. Thomas strains against it, throws forward his hands, almost touching the metal side walls.

  “There! A gurgling, and something like a knocking. It’s the machine, Singh. It makes ice, somehow. Chemically. And the walls are lined with lead. I saw. They assembled it right here in front of me. Five engineers wearing Smoke masks. Scared.”

  This is not just opium and exhaustion, thinks Singh. This is hysteria.

  Thomas returns to him, dragging his chain across the floor.

  “I understand, Singh. You have a bomb. You are here to sink the ship. Do it!”

  Singh shakes his head. At this Thomas grows agitated; his breath takes on the smell of Smoke but not its colour.

  “But you must! You saw what was squatting in that mountain. Like a spider, spinning…” He trails off, tugs at his chain, gestures. “That guide they tortured—Ajeeba, they called him Ajeeba. I’ve been asking myself, why did he kill himself? He was in pain, yes—but to throw his head at the drill like that…Something answered his Smoke, something frightful. Watts saw it, too; why else this ice machine? I heard them talking, Singh. The first shipment—the first piece of rock—it did not make it.”

  Thomas breaks off, strains against the chain and the sweets within his system, looking for his anger.

  “You must sink the ship, Singh. It’s alive, you see.” Here, he jerks his head at the ice machine and its contents. “That rock must never reach England.”

  “Yes, Sahib! It would be better to sink it in Bombay Harbour and let it blacken our seas. English shores must stay clean!”

  [ 4 ]

  Singh’s rancour is short-lived. He forgives Thomas. After all, their difference is fundamental: they were born on different patches of dirt, one at the centre of power, the other in what was forced to serve as its periphery. Perhaps there are people more fluid in their loyalties, or more capable of seeing the world dispassionately, as a whole, beyond the ideologies of turf and mores. Singh does not have this luxury. First, they must set India free.

  “Please understand the situation,” he says to Thomas now, glad to be free of his scruples at last. “Bombay has risen. And not just Bombay: half the north. Every day new reports reach us. The poppy fields are burning. There are rumours running wild through every city and village. Rumours about a black god that the English have cut out of the mountain—or a demon. Rumours about you.”

  Singh pauses and thinks back to the first meeting he had with the local revolutionary cell. He told them about the rock within the mountain; about Thomas, masked and bound. The men were not interested. Nepal and mysticism: what did they have to do with home rule? In Thomas’s presence, at least, they sensed something that they might be able to exploit. But how?

  And even as they sat and dithered, haggling over strategy and theory, how action could best be made to conform to dialectics, a landslide started in the country. Perhaps Singh himself had caused it: by telling his story to the Nepalese villagers who saw to his injuries, and later to some people in Agra, where Watts and his team changed trains and rested for one night. Or perhaps the porters talked, those Watts had hired and then dismissed with stern warnings that he owned their silence. The masked Englishman; the demon from the mountain. Then the Company raised the taxes on salt; and, independently, onion prices soared as demand outstripped supply. The next anybody knew, mobs were running through the street. The revolution was happening, while the revolutionaries sat talking, making tea.

  And still they were slow to seize the situation. Eight men, shut away in a back room, half of them in Western suits, the others in dhotis, kurtas, pyjamas, speaking in English because there was no other tongue they all held in common. Should they attempt to free Thomas and use him as a symbol, or keep their revolution native? Was the rock national property or an English abomination? They debated all night and in the end they voted. Singh, heavy-hearted, raised his hand for the winning proposal.

  That was the day before yesterday.

  “The Company is divided,” Singh says now. “Those who paid for this”—he points at the ice machine, at Thomas’s chain—“worked in secret but others have taken note. They are asking questions. Until they have answers, the ship does not have permission to sail.” Singh pauses. “We will make sure it does.”

  At last Thomas understands. “You’re sending the devil back to Britain. And me, too. You told me months ago—you have no need for a white saviour.”

  He shivers, tugs at his chain, peers past Singh into the gloom of the hold, where Ashook and Moshin have completed preparations. For the first time, he appears entirely rational.

  “If that is so, Jagat, why did you come at all?”

  Singh welcomes the question. “Do you know what ‘propaganda’ is, Thomas? It’s a Company term. The newspapers you saw in my house, the ones that showed what happened in England in the Great Smoking. That’s propaganda. It’s a weapon used to wage war.” He turns, points to the two men behind him, one of whom stands humped behind a wooden box erected on a tripod. “The country rose because of half a rumour. Imagine the effect of a few seconds of film of you, chained like a beast, aboard this English ship. We don’t want you, Sahib. But we have use for your image.”

  [ 5 ]

  They can’t do it. The lighting conditions are too bad, the two gas lamps they brought barely adequate to see by but too weak for the camera’s narrow lens.

  They had anticipated this, of course, and Ashook has brought a rig of magnesium flash powder lamps for this very reason, imprinted with the stamp of the Bombay Chemical Works at which he worked until last week. Now, however, he hesitates. He must position and light them near Thomas, though not so near as to be visible in the camera’s frame. Moshin is trying to direct Ashook into the required position, but the older man won’t move. Stepping that close will bring him into the range demarcated by Thomas’s chain.

  “He’s afraid of you!” Singh realises. “He’s heard the stories. Always angry. Maximum raging. He’s afraid you will throttle him alive.”

  Thomas does not react. He has withdrawn into himself once more and turned away from them, appears to be listening again for the gurgle of the icebox. Singh steps close enough to touch him, turns him slowly by the shoulder until they both face the camera.

  “Will you let Ashook here close enough so he can light the flash lamps? And will you stand still, not moving too much, so the camera can get a clear image? Will you do that much for me and our cause?”

  When no answer comes, Singh adds,

  “A letter arrived for me yesterday. We burned down the Central Post Office, there is fighting in the street, and yet the local postman comes this morning and cheerfully delivers a letter, stamped with the picture of your dead queen. I open it, and it’s from Isha.”

  “Who?”

  “Isha,” he repeats while Ashook gets ready to light the first lamp. “Mrs. Singh. She is coming here. She is coming, so we can fight side by side. Don’t smile now, Sahib, that is very important! You are oppressed and tortured, remember? That’s why we’re here.”

  Seven seconds of flickering film. First we see a ship, under heavy arms. It is not the same ship that holds Thomas but this is immaterial; it is the nature of the cutting room to impose one reality onto another. The lens finds the twin flag of Company and Empire, hanging limply from the mast. Not far from it tilts the metal pipe of one of the cannons. The film wavers, intersperses a white frame. Then we are inside. At first there is darkness. Then a bright, pulsing light flares up to the frame’s right. It gives movement to a scene that is very nearly static: a single man standing in cotton rags. For a moment—the camera has not yet found its focus—he appears to be smiling, laughing even, but then the face turns grim. He turns his head to half profile, showing off his mark. There it squats amongst his stubble, that coal-dust tattoo-scar that is his brand and stigma. He turns back and raises his chin, and all
at once he is recognisable from all the stories: that pugilist’s stance, that hard directness to the eyes, a habit of honesty, unflinching will. The chained hands only serve to emphasise his strength. Then he turns his back on the viewer, hunching his shoulders, dropping his head. Behind him hulks the machine. A trick of the wavering light makes eyes of its valves, a maw of its gas tank. At Thomas’s feet there snakes a metal chain like an umbilical cord. It appears to connect him to the shadow of the monster.

  Then comes nothing, the searing white blankness of empty frames, like a snow blindness that follows upon the witnessing of truth, like a baptism of light that follows upon darkness.

  The film projector is wheeled out, the stage is swept. The laughter of actors sounds from the wings.

  When the bell is rung to reassemble the audience, there’s a new presence on the stage. It’s a woman in her twenties dressed in a starched white shirt and greasy tails, a top hat on her close-cropped hair. She sits on a stool, unassuming; picks at a loose thread on her lapels; straightens the ruffles of her opulent shirt. Come to think of it, we have seen her before, prompting lines from the edge of the curtain, her whisper a pretty thing, melodious and quick.

  A sign above her head pronounces her to be our Narrator. She seems too young to fill the role with any wisdom.

  A miner’s shovel lies discarded at her feet.

  If we perceive History as this slaughter table on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, this thought necessarily generates the question for whom or what, for which goal or end, these unspeakable sacrifices have been made.