Flood of Fire

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘And he?’

  ‘He too. We were both besotted.’

  ‘Why did you not marry him then?’

  ‘It was impossible. My parents would not have allowed it – he was utterly unsuitable in their eyes. His father was a greengrocer in Fulham, and it was said that his mother was a Levantine Jew. The rumour was that he had got his officer’s commission through blackmail: his mother had been the mistress of a member of the Board of the East India Company and she had forced her lover to use his influence. And it wasn’t as if he could have afforded a wife anyway. He was never one to play cards for craven-stakes – he had not a groat to his name.’

  ‘So what became of him?’

  ‘I cannot tell you – I have neither seen nor heard from him since the day we were torn apart, eighteen years ago.’ Her voice began to tremble again and she paused until she had regained control of it. ‘That summer my father’s regiment was quartered in Ranchi, which is a town in the hills. It was winter, and the station was very gay, with many parties, picnics and tumashers. One day we were at a picnic, in a forest – there are lovely woodlands in those hills – and we slipped away for a walk. We got a little lost, the two of us, and I did not object when he put his arm around me; nor did I resist when he put his lips on mine. Indeed I would not have resisted if he had done more than that – we were burning for each other.’

  ‘But he did not?’

  ‘No. We heard his orderly’s voice, shouting for us: we hurried back and told my parents that we’d lost our way. But there must have been something in my expression to arouse my mother’s suspicions for when we got back to our bungalow she went to speak to my father. The next day I was whisked off to Calcutta to avert a scandal: my mother was terrified that people would think that I had been compromised so she decided to marry me off as quickly as possible. In those days Mr Burnham was dancing attendance on my father in the hope of securing a contract to provide supplies for a military expedition. One day I was told that Mr Burnham had offered for my hand. My mother said I could not hope for a better match.’

  ‘And the ensign? What became of him?’

  ‘He is still with his regiment, I expect. No doubt married, with a paltan of children swarming around his feet.’

  ‘Do you still think of him?’

  ‘Oh don’t! … it is too cruel.’ She turned her face away but he could tell that she was trying to stem a fresh flow of tears.

  Never before had Mrs Burnham evinced so much emotion in front of Zachary: it was clear to him that the emotions the lieutenant had stirred in her were of a singular intensity, surpassing by far anything that she had ever felt for him. Certainly she had never shown signs of such passion with him; indeed he hadn’t thought her capable of it. A burst of vexation flashed through him and somewhere inside his chest a cinder of jealousy began to glow: who was this man, this lieutenant, whose memory could reach out to her through such a long tunnel of time, making her seem a stranger to him while she was in his own bed?

  ‘I’ll ask no more questions,’ he said, ‘but only if you answer one more.’

  Having said this, he stumbled, for his query was strangely difficult to put into words. At last, lamely, he said: ‘Tell me: the lieutenant – was he …? Am I …? Are we … at all alike?’

  At this she gave him a wan smile. ‘Oh no, my dear dear. You are as unlike each other as two men could possibly be – toolsmith and warrior, Eros and Mars.’

  Zachary winced: who exactly she was referring to he did not know but he had the impression that the comparison was not, in any case, flattering to him: it was as if she had said, in so many words, that she would never love him, or anyone else, as much as she had loved her lost lieutenant; that he would be forever the captain of her heart.

  Slowly, with much help from Rosa and Vico, Shireen was able to convince Shernaz and Behroze that there was no great danger in her travelling to China and that the voyage would be in their common interest. The next step was to carry the fight to her brothers and for this part of the campaign Shireen enlisted the help of her daughters. They arranged to meet with their uncles, hoping to test the waters on her behalf.

  The meeting did not go well. The girls came back in tears, to report that their uncles had berated them for falling in with Shireen’s plan: if she went to China a terrible scandal was sure to ensue, they had said, and the whole family’s reputation would be endangered. The seths had accused their two nieces of being unfeeling, shameless and undutiful, to their mother and to their relatives.

  All kinds of unfamiliar emotions surged up in Shireen as she listened to Shernaz and Behroze. Usually anger had an enervating effect on her, making her weary and listless, but in this instance she was roused to a fury. After the girls had left, she found that she could not sit still: as if girding for battle, she changed into a fresh sadra vest and a plain white sari. Then she marched downstairs and stormed into her brothers’ shared daftar, disregarding the protests of their shroffs and munshis. Standing in front of them, with her hands on her hips, she demanded to know if they really thought that it was in their power to keep her from visiting her husband’s grave?

  Shireen’s brothers were younger than her and as children they had always been a little scared of her. The passage of time, and the reverses that Shireen had suffered over the years, had diluted their childhood fear but a trace of it surfaced again now. Other than a few evasive mumbles they could offer no answers to her questions.

  Seizing upon their confusion, Shireen declared that the matter was not in their hands anyway; it was up to her to make up her mind, and she had already done so – neither they nor their wives, nor even her own daughters could prevail on her to give up her plan. It only remained for them to choose what kind of scandal they wanted to deal with. Did they want a public rift within the family? Or would they prefer to stand beside her, as their father and mother would surely have wanted them to? Did they not see that it was to their benefit to tell the world that their sister was doing what any grieving and dutiful widow would want to do? Didn’t they understand that if the family presented a united front to the world then the prestige of the Mestrie name would swing the balance and everyone would surely come around?

  They started to fidget now and Shireen sensed that they were wavering. Planting herself in a chair she looked them directly in the eyes.

  So tell me then, she demanded. How shall we go about this? What shall we tell people?

  Instead of answering her questions they made a feeble attempt to reason with her.

  Hong Kong was a long way away, they said. Getting there would entail a voyage of many weeks and she, with her uncertain health, would find it difficult to be at sea for such a length of time.

  Shireen laughed. She was just as hardy as either of them, she said – and as proof of this she reminded them that her ‘sea legs’ had always been better than theirs. As children, when they went on sailing trips with their parents, she was the only one among the siblings who had never suffered from sea-sickness; the two of them had scarcely been able to step on deck without heaving up their insides.

  Their faces reddened and they quickly changed tack. What about the costs? they said. The journey would be expensive – where was the money to come from?

  This aspect of the plan had so occupied Shireen’s thoughts that she knew the numbers by heart: reaching for a quill she jotted down some figures on a sheet of paper and pushed it across the table.

  Leh, she said. There – have a look.

  Frowns appeared on the seths’ faces as they went through the numbers. Their disapproval was focused on one particular figure, which they underlined and thrust back at her.

  The price of the passage had been greatly underestimated, they told her. The voyage would cost much more than she had allowed for.

  This was exactly the opening Shireen had been waiting for.

  I have been offered a special price, she said, by Mr Benjamin Burnham, who was my husband’s colleague on the Select Committee at Canton. He wil
l provide me with a fine cabin on one of his ships, the Hind, which will be arriving soon in Bombay. She will sail at the end of March, going from here to Colombo and then Calcutta, where she will pick up some troops for the eastern expedition.

  She paused: So you see – it will be a very safe and economical way to travel.

  Her brothers looked at each other and shrugged. Their expressions were such that Shireen knew that she had carried the day even before they said: tho pachi theek che, all right then; do what you want.

  January 14, 1840

  Honam

  I have been very, very fortunate in chancing upon my lodgings in Baburao’s houseboat. I’ll warrant that nobody in Canton has a better view of this vast city than I do. A fortnight ago the residents of the American Factory put on a fireworks display in the foreign enclave, to celebrate the arrival of the year 1840, of the Christian era. I watched it from my terrace and it was as if the show had been put on expressly for my benefit; where others saw only the display in the sky, I saw it replicated also in the water, on the surface of the Pearl River and White Swan Lake.

  Later, Zhong Lou-si interrogated me at length about calendars and was very curious to know which are in use in India and why. Often, when he questions me I am reminded of the tutors of my childhood, the learned pundits who schooled me in Nyaya, logic, and Sanskrit grammar. Like them Zhong Lou-si has an inexhaustible fund of patience, a tenacious memory and an unerring eye for inconsistencies and contradictions. With him too I have to be very careful in choosing my words – he examines everything I say and if I were to make extravagant claims I know I would be quickly taken to task.

  In Lou-si’s demeanour too there is something that reminds me of my old punditjis: like them he sometimes lapses into woolly distractedness and sometimes bristles with irascibility. Yet there is one great difference: unlike the pundits of my childhood, Zhong Lou-si has no taste for abstractions or philosophical speculation. He is interested only in ‘useful knowledge’ – chih hsueh – which includes a great variety of things, mainly pertaining to the world beyond. In months past he would sit with me for hours, asking questions about one subject after another: were the people who Tibetans and Gurkhas call ‘borgis’ the same as the ‘Marathas’? What was the date of the Battle of Assaye by the Chinese calendar? Was Sir Arthur Wellesley the same man as the Duke of Wellington? I am sure Zhong Lou-si knows the answers to many of these questions – he asks them either for confirmation or to check my own reliability. He treats every statement critically; to him the provenance of what is said is just as important as its content: how did I know that the British expedition to Burma had come close to defeat in 1825? Was it just hearsay? What were my sources?

  But since the disaster at Humen there has been a marked change in the direction of his inquiries. He no longer seems to be so interested in history and geography: his questions now are mainly about military and naval matters.

  One day he questioned me at length about paddle-wheel steamers. I told him that I well remembered the day, fourteen years ago, when a steamer called Enterprize had steamed up to Calcutta, having come all the way from London: this was the first steamer ever to be seen in the Indian Ocean and she had won a prize of twenty thousand pounds for her feat. Being young at that time I had expected that Enterprize would be a huge, towering vessel: I was astonished to find that she was a small, ungainly-looking craft. But when the Enterprize began to move my disappointment had turned to wonder: without a breath of wind stirring, she had gone up and down the Calcutta waterfront, manoeuvring dexterously between throngs of boats and ships.

  I told Zhong Lou-si that the arrival of the Enterprize had set off a great race amongst the shipowners of Calcutta. Within a few years the New Howrah Dockyards had built the Forbes, a teak paddle-wheeler fitted with two sixty-horsepower engines. This had inspired my own father to enter the race: he had invested five thousand rupees in a company launched by the city’s most eminent Bengali entrepreneur, Dwarkanath Tagore: it was called the Calcutta Steam Tug Association, and it was soon in possession of two steamers. I told Zhong Lou-si that steamers and steam-tugs are a familiar sight on the Hooghly now; people have grown accustomed to seeing them on the river, churning purposefully through the water and exhaling long trails of smoke, soot and cinders.

  Zhong Lou-si remarked that if steamers had been built in Calcutta then surely it should be possible to build one in Guangzhou as well, me aa?

  Gang hai Lou-si! Yes, of course.

  I told him that I did not see why not: it all depended on the engine. The engines for the Calcutta steamers had come from England, as I remember, but I have heard that a Parsi shipbuilder has built similar engines in Bombay. If it could be done in Bombay then there is no reason why it should not be possible in Guangzhou.

  From the drift of these questions I realized that there was a plan afoot to bring steamers to China. Later Compton told me that a steamer had already visited Canton some years before – he confided also that a local shipyard is now experimenting with a prototype.

  From this, and from some other tasks that we’d been set, it became clear to me that the lessons of the disastrous naval engagement at Humen have not been lost on Commissioner Lin and his entourage: they have realized that China’s war-junks are antiquated and are making every effort to acquire some modern sailing vessels of the Western type.

  A while ago Zhong Lou-si had asked us to look out for notices of sale for Western-built ships. As luck would have it, I soon came upon one. It was in one of the journals that Lou-si’s agents procure for us – the Canton Press.

  The notice was for a ship called Cambridge; she had been put up for sale by her owner, an Englishman by the name of Captain Douglas. The notice said that she was a Liverpool-built merchantman of 1,080 tons, armed with thirty-six guns – perfect in every way from Lou-si’s point of view. But would Mr Douglas sell to a Chinese buyer? Would Captain Elliot allow him to make such a sale?

  I doubted it, but still, I showed the notice to Compton who gave a triumphant shout – Dak jo! – and went racing off to Zhong Lou-si. I heard nothing more about it until today, when Compton made a triumphant announcement: Ah Neel! We have got that ship – the Cambridge!

  This is how it happened: apparently the owner of the Cambridge, Captain Douglas, is well-known to the officials of Guangdong Province – he is a notorious troublemaker and has for months been disrupting the traffic on the Pearl River, sailing up and down the estuary, firing at will on fishermen and trading junks. The local authorities had even put a price on his head, of a thousand silver dollars.

  These being the circumstances, Zhong Lou-si had guessed that Captain Douglas would not willingly sell the Cambridge to a Chinese buyer. To get around this problem he had enlisted the help of a wealthy Co-Hong merchant, Chunqua. He in turn had persuaded his American partner, Mr Delano, to buy the ship. Mr Delano’s bid had been accepted and the Cambridge had been duly handed over to him. After waiting a few days Mr Delano had sold the ship to Chunqua, who had then presented her to Commissioner Lin, as a gift! The Cambridge is now in the possession of the Chinese authorities who are planning to equip her with a new set of guns.

  The deftly handled acquisition has been hailed as a triumph for Zhong Lou-si, said Compton, and my small part in it had not gone unrecognized either. Zhong Lou-si had sent a fine bottle of mao-tai to thank me for having brought the notice to his attention.

  It is heartening – and rather surprising! – to see that a high official, and an elderly one at that, can be so nimble in his thinking and so far-sighted.

  Zachary was hard at work on the budgerow one morning when he heard a khidmatgar’s voice: Mistri-sah’b! Chitthi!’

  The man had brought over an envelope that Zachary knew, at a glance, was from Mrs Burnham.

  January 30, 1840

  Dear Mr Reid

  I need to see you immediately. Please come to my sewing room at once. I’ve told the nokar-logue that I need your advice on some new pelmets so be sure to bring your tap
e-measure.

  C.B.

  Within minutes Zachary was at the sewing room door. ‘Madam? Mrs Burnham?’

  He heard her voice on the other side of the door, speaking to a maid, as unruffled as ever: ‘Oh, is it the mystery? Let him in. Chullo!’

  The maid opened the door and hurried away. Zachary stepped in to find Mrs Burnham sitting at her sewing table, looking perfectly composed, with her embroidery in her hands.

  But the moment the door closed she dropped the frame.

  ‘Oh Mr Reid!’ she cried, jumping to her feet: ‘Everything has been turned on its ears!’

  ‘What do you mean, Mrs Burnham?’

  ‘He is here, Mr Reid! My husband – Mr Burnham! He has returned from China with two ships – the Ibis and another vessel that he has recently acquired, the Anahita. They are anchored at the Narrows, which is some twenty miles away. He has sent a chitty with a sowar – he will be here this evening.’

  Zachary stared at her, aghast: ‘Were you expecting him?’

  ‘No! I had no conception!’ She pressed a fluttering hand to her throat. ‘Oh Mr Reid – and that’s the least of it.’

  ‘What else then?’

  ‘You will not credit it – my husband has decided that we must move to China!’

  ‘To China!’ said Zachary. ‘But why?’

  ‘He says that a new free port is soon to be created on the China coast. A decision to that effect has already been taken in London. He says that great new opportunities will open up and he must be there to make the best of them.’

  ‘And your daughter?’

  ‘She is to remain with her grandparents for the time being.’

  Zachary’s head was spinning now. ‘So what does this mean for you and me? Will we not be able to meet after this?’

  ‘Absolutely not!’ she cried. ‘We can never again meet as we used to. You must not allow that thought to so much as cross your mind. Mr Burnham is fiendishly clever and it is not in your power, or mine, to deceive him while he is here.’