River of Smoke

by Amitav Ghosh

You wait here, patrão, he said. I’ll get some lascars to help. Don’t go down there on your own.

  Why not?

  Vico was already on his feet but he turned back to add a warning: Because suppose something happens to the ship? Patrão will be trapped down there alone, no? Just wait for me – I’ll be back in a minute.

  This was good advice, Bahram knew, but not easy to heed under the circumstances. He was at the best of times, a restless man: repose was a trial to him and at moments when he was neither speaking nor moving, the effort of self-containment would often result in a small storm of toe-tapping, tongue-clicking and knuckle-cracking. Now, leaning over the hatch, he was met by a cloud of up-welling fumes: the sickly-sweet smell of the raw opium had mingled with the bilge-water to produce a stifling, head-churning stench.

  In his youth, when he had been slim, lithe and quick of foot, Bahram would not have thought twice about going down that ladder; now, in his late fifties, his joints had stiffened a little, and his waistline had thickened considerably – but his portliness, if it could be called that, was of the robust kind, his vigour and energy being evident in the golden glow of his complexion and the pink bloom of his cheeks. To wait for Fate to decide matters was not in his nature: throwing off his choga, he began to descend into the hold only to be shaken violently from side to side, as the ladder tilted and swayed.

  Crooking his arm around the iron struts, he was careful to keep a tight grip on the handle of the lantern. But for all his caution he was not prepared for the gummy slime that lay underfoot. With the splintering of the crates, the stuffing of dry leaves and other poppy ‘trash’ had spilled out, melting into the sludge. As a result the deck planks had become as sodden and slippery as the floor of a cattle-midden, everything underfoot being coated in a vegetal mess, of the consistency of cow-dung.

  When Bahram stepped off the ladder his feet shot out from under him, throwing him face-forward into a heap of dung-like sludge. He managed to turn over, pushing himself into a sitting position, with his back against a wooden beam. He could see nothing, for his lantern had gone out; in moments his clothes were drenched in the muddy sludge, from the tip of his turban to the hem of his ankle-length angarkha: inside his black leather shoes, opium was squelching between his toes.

  There was something wet and cold plastered against his cheek. He raised a hand to wipe it off but just then the ship went into a steep roll and he ended up smearing the stuff on his lips and his mouth. Suddenly in the pitching darkness, with chests and containers sliding and crashing around him, his head was filled with the giddying smell of opium. He began to claw at his skin, in frantic disgust, trying to rid his face of the gum, but a wooden chest hit his elbow in such a way that yet more of the drug slipped through his lips.

  Then a light appeared in the hatchway above and a voice called out worriedly: Patrão? Patrão?

  Vico! Here! Bahram kept his eyes fixed on the lantern as it came slowly towards him, down the swaying ladder. Then the ship lurched again, and he was thrown sideways, under a wave of sludge. There was opium in his eyes, his ears, his nose, his windpipe – it was as if he were drowning, and in that instant many faces flashed past his eyes – that of his wife Shireenbai, in Bombay, and of their two daughters; of his mistress, Chi-mei who had died some years before, in Canton; and of the son he had had with her. It was Chi-mei’s face that lingered; her eyes seemed to be gazing into his own as he sat up, coughing and spluttering; her presence seemed so real that he reached out towards her – but only to find himself looking into Vico’s lantern.

  His hands went instinctively to his kasti – the seventy-two-thread girdle, sacred to his faith, that he always wore around his waist. Since his boyhood his kasti had been the talisman that protected him from the terrors of the unknown – but touching it now, he realized that it too was soaked in the sludge.

  And then, above the roar of the storm, he heard a breaking, tearing, splintering sound, as if the ship were being torn apart. The ship rolled steeply to starboard, sending both Vico and Bahram sliding down the deck planks. As they lay sprawled in the angle between deck and bulwark, loose balls of opium came cannoning down to crash into the timbers. Each ball was worth a sizeable sum of silver – but neither Bahram nor Vico now had any regard for their value. The Anahita was listing at so steep an angle that it seemed all but certain that she would roll over on her beam.

  But then, very slowly, the ship began to ease off, with the weight of her keel pulling her back from the brink of tipping over. In righting herself she rolled again, to the other side, and then again, before settling into a precarious balance.

  Miraculously, Vico’s lantern was still alight. When the vessel’s pitching had slowed a little, Vico turned to Bahram: Patrão? What happened? Why did you look at me like that? What did you see?

  Glancing at his purser, Bahram had a shock: Vico was covered in mud-brown sludge, from the crown of his jet-black hair to the toe of his boots. The sight was especially startling because Vico was usually extremely careful of appearances, dressing always in European clothes: now his shirt, waistcoat and breeches were so thickly encrusted with opium that they seemed to have faded into his skin. By contrast his large, prominent eyes seemed almost maniacally bright against the matt darkness of his dripping face.

  What are you talking about, Vico?

  When patrão reached out right now, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  Bahram shook his head brusquely: kai nai – it was nothing.

  But patrão – you were calling a name also.

  Freddy’s name?

  Yes, but you were calling him by his other name – the Chinese one …

  Ah Fatt?

  This was a name that Bahram almost never used, as Vico well knew: Impossible – you must have heard wrong.

  No, patrão, I’m telling you. I heard you.

  There was a cloudiness in Bahram’s head now and his tongue seemed to have grown heavier. He began to mumble: It must have been the fumes … the opium … I was seeing things.

  Frowning worriedly, Vico took hold of Bahram’s elbow and nudged him towards the ladder. Patrão must go to the Owners’ Suite and take some rest. I’ll look after everything here.

  Bahram cast a glance around the hold: never before had his fortunes been so closely tied to a single consignment of cargo – and yet never had he felt so utterly indifferent to the fate of his merchandise.

  All right then, Vico, he said. Bail out the hold and save everything you can; let me know what the damage is.

  Yes, patrão; be careful now, go slowly.

  The ladder seemed unaccountably long as Bahram made his way up. Whether this was because of the pitching of the ship or the giddiness in his head, he could not tell, but he made no attempt to hurry, climbing with great deliberation, pausing for breath between the rungs. He reached the top to find a half-dozen lascars waiting to go down, and they parted to make way for him, staring at him in wide-mouthed astonishment. Following their gaze, Bahram glanced down at himself and saw that he, like Vico, was so thickly caked with melted opium that his clothes had become a kind of second skin. His head was thumping and he stopped to steady himself before stepping over the coamings of the hatch. The taste of opium was not new to Bahram: during his stays in Canton he smoked a pipe every now and again – he was one of those fortunate people who was able to take it occasionally without suffering unconquerable cravings afterwards: he never missed it when he was away. But there was a great difference between inhaling the drug and ingesting it in this raw, gummy, semi-liquid state. He was completely unprepared for the sudden nausea and weakness: he had no thought now for the losses he had suffered in the hold; his eyes and his mind were focused instead, with an almost clairvoyant concentration of attention, on Chi-mei: everywhere he looked, his eyes conjured up her face. Like a Chinese lantern the image seemed to hang before him, lighting his path as he made his way aft through the cramped innards of the ship to the spacious, sumptuously appointed poop-deck where he and the ship’s o
fficers had their quarters.

  The Owners’ Suite lay at the end of a long gangway with many doors leading off it. A group of lascars was standing crowded around one of these doors, and on seeing Bahram approach, one of them, a tindal, said to him: Sethji – your munshi has been badly hurt.

  What happened?

  The rolling of the ship must have tipped him out of his bunk. Somehow his trunk got loose and crashed on him.

  Will he live?

  Can’t say, Sethji.

  The munshi was an elderly man, a fellow Parsi. He had dealt with Bahram’s correspondence for many years. He could not think how he would manage without him; nor could he summon the energy to grieve.

  Are there any other casualties? Bahram said to the tindal.

  Yes, Sethji; we’ve lost two men overboard.

  And what’s the damage to the ship?

  The whole head of the ship was ripped off, Sethji, all of it, including the jib.

  The figurehead too?

  Ji, Sethji.

  The figurehead was a sculpture of Anahita, the angel who watched over the waters. It was a prized heirloom of his wife’s family, the Mistries, who were the Anahita’s owners. He knew they would consider its loss a portent of bad luck – but he had portents of his own to deal with now, and all he could think of was getting into his cabin and taking off his clothes.

  Make sure the munshiji is looked after; let the Captain know …

  Ji, Sethji.

  *

  Neel did not need to have Paulette’s contribution to the shrine pointed out to him: he spotted it himself – it was an outline of a man’s head, drawn in profile, not unlike one of those cartoonish drawings in which human features are fitted into the inner curve of the crescent moon: the nose was a long, pendulous proboscis; the eyebrows jutted out like a ferret’s whiskers, and the chin disappeared into a tapering, upcurved beard.

  Do you know who that is? said Deeti.

  Yes, of course I do, said Neel. It is Mr Penrose …

  Mr Penrose’s face was not easily forgotten: it was gaunt and craggy, with a jutting brow and a chin that curved upwards like the blade of a scythe. Tall and very lean, he walked with a bowed gait, his eyes fixed on the ground, as if he were cataloguing the greenery on which he was about to tread. Notoriously unmindful of his appearance, it was not unusual for him to be seen with straw in his beard and burrs in his stockings; and as for his clothes, he possessed scarcely a garment that was free of patches and stains. When deep in thought (which was often) his tapered beard and bristling eyebrows had a way of twitching and flickering, as if to announce the presence of a man who was not to be spoken to without good reason. This tic was by no means an accretion of age, for even as a child he had had a habit of ‘starin and twitcherin’, in a manner that was so like a polecat’s that it had earned him the nickname ‘Fitcher’.

  Yet, despite all his tics and idiosyncrasies there was a gravity in his manner, a penetration in his gaze, that precluded his being taken for a mere crank or eccentric. Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose was in fact a man of unusual accomplishment and considerable wealth: a noted nurseryman and plant-hunter, he had made a great deal of money through the marketing of seeds, saplings, cuttings and horticultural implements – his patented moss-scrapers, barkscalers and garden-scarifiers had a large and devoted following in England. His principal enterprise, a nursery called Penrose & Sons, was based in Falmouth, in Cornwall: it was reputed especially for its Chinese importations, some of which – like certain varieties of plumbago, flowering quince and wintersweet – had gained enormous popularity in the British Isles.

  It was the plant-hunter’s avocation that had brought Fitcher eastwards again, in his own vessel, the Redruth, a two-masted brig.

  The Redruth sailed into Port Louis two days after the Ibis, after a voyage that had also been beset by misfortune and tragedy. No one on the brig had suffered more than Fitcher himself, and it was at the urging of his own crew that he decided to go ashore for a break: on the first clear day after the Redruth’s arrival two sailors rowed him ashore and hired him a horse so he could pay a visit to the Botanical Gardens at Pamplemousses.

  It was largely because of the Botanical Gardens that Port Louis had been included in the Redruth’s itinerary. The Pamplemousses garden was among the earliest of its kind and counted, among its founders and curators, some of the most illustrious names in botany – the great Pierre Poivre, who had identified the true black pepper, had worked there, as also Philibert Commerson, the discoverer of bougainvillea. Had there existed such a thing as a route of pilgrimage for horticulturists the Pamplemousses garden would have been, without a doubt, one of its most hallowed stations.

  Pamplemousses was not much more than an hour’s ride from Port Louis. Fitcher had visited the garden once before, on the return leg of his first voyage to China: at that time the island was a French colony – now it was a British possession and much had changed in appearance. But, somewhat to his own surprise, Fitcher had no trouble in finding the road that led to the village. On the way, growing by the roadside, he noticed some fine specimens of a shrub known as ‘Fire in the Bush’, a handsome convolvulus that produced a great mass of flaming red flowers. At other times a find like this would have excited and exhilarated him; he would have dismounted to look more closely at the plants – but his state of mind now was not such as to allow this so he rode on without stopping.

  Pamplemousses was upon him before he was aware of it.

  The village was one of the prettiest on the island, with brightly painted bungalows, whitewashed churches, and cobbled lanes that tinkled musically under a horse’s hooves. The houses and squares were much as Fitcher remembered, but when his eyes strayed in the direction of the Botanical Gardens, he received a shock that almost toppled him from his mount: where once there had been orderly, well-spaced trees and broad, picturesque vistas, there was now a wild and tangled muddle of greenery. He shook his head in disbelief and looked again, more closely: the gateposts were where he would have expected them to be, but there seemed to be nothing beyond but jungle.

  Reining in his horse, Fitcher appealed to an elderly passer-by: ‘Madam! The garden? D’ee know the way?’

  The woman pursed her lips and shook her head: ‘Ah, msieu … le garden is no more … depwi twenty years … abandonné by l’Anglais …’

  She wandered off, shaking her head, leaving Fitcher to continue on his way.

  Although Fitcher was saddened to learn that his own compatriots were responsible for the garden’s decline, he was not entirely surprised. Since the death of Sir Joseph Banks, the last Curator of Kew Gardens, Britain’s own botanical institutions had fallen into neglect, so it was scarcely a cause for wonder that a garden in a distant colony should be in a state of disrepair. Yet this did nothing to mitigate Fitcher’s revulsion at the sight of the wilderness that loomed before him now: the untrimmed crowns of the garden’s trees had grown into each other, forming a canopy so dense that the grounds beneath, with their flower-beds and flag-stoned pathways, were shrouded in darkness; along the peripheries of the compound, the greenery was as impenetrable as a wall, and the unclipped aerial roots of the banyans that flanked the main gateway had thickened into a forbidding barrier – a portcullis that seemed to be designed to keep intruders at bay. This was no primeval jungle, for no ordinary wilderness would contain such a proliferation of species, from different continents. In Nature there existed no forest where African creepers were at war with Chinese trees, nor one where Indian shrubs and Brazilian vines were locked in a mortal embrace. This was a work of Man, a botanical Babel.

  Yet, even as he was mourning the garden’s demise, Fitcher was not unmindful of the fact that he had been presented with a rare opportunity. Abandoned or not, the grounds were sure to contain many rare plants, and since they no longer belonged to anyone, a collector like himself could scarcely be accused of robbery if he were to retrieve a few valuable specimens.

  At the old gateway Fitcher tethered his h
orse to one of the rusted posts before stepping towards the thicket of banyan roots that barred the entrance. He had advanced only a few paces when he was brought up short – for he realized suddenly that the garden was not quite as abandoned as it looked: looking down at the ground, he discovered that the muddy soil had been trodden recently by a pair of shoes. Fitcher paused: he had heard that brigandage was still rife in some parts of the island so it was perfectly possible that the prints had been made by some dangerous cut-throat. But having been forewarned, Fitcher had taken the precaution of bringing a pistol and machete. After checking the pistol to make sure it was loaded he put it back in his pocket. Then, withdrawing his machete from the saddlebag, he advanced into the thicket with his eyes fixed on the trail.

  The wet ground made it hard to be stealthy and Fitcher had to lift his knees and tread on his toes, like a tightrope walker, to keep his shoes from squelching in the mud. The trail of prints disappeared abruptly into a tangled thicket of undergrowth and greenery and Fitcher stopped to take stock: although no one was in sight, he could sense a presence, close at hand. More cautiously than ever he took a few more steps and, sure enough, a minute or two later he heard a sound that brought him to a standstill: it was the quiet but unmistakable scratching of a metal blade, digging into the earth.

  The sound seemed to be coming from an opening between two rows of trees. Concealing himself behind a tall thicket of yellow bamboo, Fitcher started to work his way forwards. In a minute or two he found himself in a position where he could see the intruder’s back: he was dressed in breeches and a loose shirt, crouching on his haunches, digging a hole in the ground – possibly in preparation for burying some stolen loot, or perhaps even a corpse.

  A few more sidewise steps gave Fitcher a better view, and he discovered now, to his puzzlement, that he’d made a mistake: what the fellow was digging was not a pit, but rather a shallow hole, like a gardener might make before planting a seedling. His implement, too, was not of a kind that would be of much help in hiding loot or digging a grave: it was a garden trowel – and from the depths of his long experience, Fitcher could tell that the man’s hand was well-accustomed to this tool. Then the man shifted a little and Fitcher saw that he also had a receptacle with him – at first it looked like a small bucket, except that there was a little pin protruding from the top. On closer inspection, Fitcher realized, with something of a start, that this was a ‘transplanter’, the professional gardener’s tool for moving tender plants from one location to another.