River of Smoke

by Amitav Ghosh

  Neel took alarm at this: In Canton, Sethji? But how? I don’t know anyone there.

  Bahram shrugged this off. You don’t need to know anyone. You can leave that part to me. What you have to do is to read two English journals that are published in Canton. One is called the Canton Register and another is the Chinese Repository. Sometimes other papers also come out but you don’t have to bother with them – only these two are of interest to me. It will be your job to go through them and make reports to me. You must cut out all the phoos-phaas and just give me what is important.

  Here Bahram reached over to his desk and picked up a journal. Here, munshiji, this is a copy of the Repository. My friend, Mr Zadig Karabedian, has lent it to me. He has underlined some bits – can you tell me what they say?

  Ji, Sethji, said Neel. He ran his eye over the lines and said: It seems that these are excerpts from a memorial written by a high-ranking Chinese official and sent to the Emperor.

  Yes, said Bahram. Go on. What does he say?

  ‘ “Opium is a poisonous drug, brought from foreign countries. To the question, what are its virtues, the answer is: It raises the animal spirits and prevents lassitude. Hence the Chinese continually run into its toils. At first they merely strive to follow the fashion of the day; but in the sequel the poison takes effect, the habit becomes fixed, and the sleeping smokers are like corpses – lean and haggard as demons. Such are the injuries which it does to life. Moreover the drug maintains an exorbitant price and cannot be obtained except with the pure metal. Smoking opium, in its first stages, impedes business; and when the practice is continued for any considerable length of time, it throws whole families into ruin, dissipates every kind of property, and destroys man himself. There cannot be a greater evil than this. In comparison with arsenic I pronounce it tenfold the greater poison. A man swallows arsenic because he has lost his reputation and is so involved that he cannot extricate himself. Thus driven to desperation, he takes the dose and is destroyed at once. But those who smoke the drug are injured in many different ways.

  ‘ “When the smoker commences the practice, he seems to imagine that his spirits are thereby augmented; but he ought to know that this appearance is factitious. It may be compared to raising the wick of a lamp, which, while it increases the flame, hastens the exhaustion of the oil and the extinction of the light. Hence the youth who smoke will shorten their own days and cut off all hope of posterity, leaving their fathers and mothers and wives without anyone on whom to depend; and those in middle and advanced life, who smoke, will accelerate the termination of their years …” ’

  Stop! Bas! Enough.

  Bahram snatched the journal out of Neel’s hands and tossed it on a table.

  All right, munshiji, it is clear that you can read English without difficulty. If you want the job it is yours.

  *

  If there was one thing Paulette had learnt about Fitcher it was that he was a methodical man. This was why she was not surprised to discover that he had prepared, long in advance, a plan to trace the provenance of the camellia paintings. His hopes were centred especially on the illustration acquired by William Kerr: the picture was no more than thirty-odd years old and had almost certainly been painted in Canton – it was perfectly possible in fact that the painter was still alive.

  ‘But you will need an expert to identify the artist, sir, will you not?’

  ‘So I will,’ said Fitcher.

  ‘And do you know of anyone?’

  ‘No, but I know of someone who may be able to help.’

  The man Fitcher had in mind was an English painter who had been living in southern China for many years: he was said to be well-connected and extremely knowledgeable. Fitcher intended to call on him in Macau, at the earliest possible opportunity.

  ‘And what is his name, sir?’

  ‘Chinnery. George Chinnery.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Paulette’s attention was instantly riveted but she was careful to feign a tone of indifference as she asked: ‘Indeed, sir? And how did you hear of him?’

  ‘From a friend of his …’

  The name had been suggested to him, said Fitcher, by a regular client of his Falmouth nursery – one Mr James Hobhouse, a portraitist who had known Chinnery in his youth. The artist had been living in southern China for over a decade, Mr Hobhouse had told him, and was reputed to be intimately acquainted with the painters of Macau and Canton.

  Hobhouse had known Chinnery at the Royal Academy, where they had been contemporaries of J. M. W. Turner. Chinnery had himself once been regarded as a painter of the same calibre, but he was a man of changeable moods: wilful and witty, amorous and extravagant, he was this minute in a high good humour, and in a deep dudgeon the next. None of this was out of keeping for a member of that clan, Mr Hobhouse had added, for the Chinnerys were a family in which unusual talent seemed often to be combined with odd and excessive behaviour.

  The artist had certainly inherited more than his measure of the family’s traits. The promise of a brilliant career was not enough to keep him in London. He had taken himself off to Ireland, where, like many a feckless youth before him, he had ended up marrying his landlord’s daughter. She had given him two children in quick succession which was perhaps too strong a dose of family life for his flighty stomach; he had taken off again, leaving his wife to cope with the infants as best she could. His destination now was Madras, where his brother was then living: after five years in that city, he had moved on to Bengal, settling eventually in Calcutta. There, in the capital of British India, he had met with tremendous success, being universally acclaimed as the greatest English painter in the East. When word of his triumph trickled back to England his family had decided to make their way to India to join him – first his daughter Matilda, whom he had last seen as a child, and who was now a young woman; then his luckless wife, Marianne; and finally his son John, who had hopes of embarking on a military career. But the move brought misfortune with it: within a year of his arrival, John was carried off by a tropical fever, and the loss had all but unhinged Chinnery, embittering him against his wife, the very sight of whom became unendurable to him. Once again he took to his heels, moving about as far as possible – to Macau, a place that had suggested itself, or so the wags said, because in the event of his wife’s pursuing him any further he could always take refuge in Canton, where he would be safe from all foreign women.

  In southern China, said Mr Hobhouse, his old friend appeared to have found a niche that was to his liking, for he had remained there for the last thirteen years, a length of time that was, for him, an eternity. Now, at the age of sixty-four, safe from marital pursuit, he seemed to be content in the company of sea-captains, travelling merchants, opium traders and other itinerants. They for their part, seemed to regard his work with the greatest approbation: so many, and so lucrative were his commissions that he was reported to have created an atelier in order to keep pace with the demand, training his house-boys and servants in his methods of painting.

  Did it matter to Chinnery that he, who had once been thought of as the equal of Romney, Raeburn and Hoppner, should be languishing in a place that was so far from the salons of Europe, a distant backwater where he had to serve a clientele of the grossest philistines? That he affected to be indifferent to such considerations needed hardly to be said – yet it was rumoured that the cognoscenti’s neglect of his work, in London, had filled him with so much bitterness that he had taken to the opium pipe in order to escape his distress. Whether or not this was the usual idle blather of the canting-crew Mr Hobhouse would not say: but even though he was unwilling to venture an opinion of his own on this subject, he did express the hope that Fitcher would look into the matter and throw some light on it when he returned to Britain.

  Paulette listened to the tale in silence, and was careful to do nothing that might suggest that she knew anything at all about the artist or his career – but in point of fact, the Chinnery name was not unknown to her: far from it. Indeed, on at least
one aspect of the painter’s life she was far better informed than was Fitcher: this was the matter of his other family – the two sons he had begotten with his Bengali mistress, Sundaree, during his twelve-year sojourn in Calcutta.

  Paulette’s acquaintance with George Chinnery’s ‘natural’ sons had arisen out of a fortuitous connection between Sundaree and her own beloved nurse, Tantima. Tantima was Jodu’s mother and she had looked after Paulette since her infancy: it so happened that she hailed from the same village as Sundaree, on the banks of the Hooghly. The two women had renewed the bonds of their childhood in Calcutta, when they both found themselves presiding over the households of unconventional and somewhat addle-pated sahibs. But there the commonalities ended, for Paulette’s father, Pierre Lambert, was always something of an outcast within white society, and his circumstances, as a mere Assistant Curator of the Botanical Gardens, were never anything other than extremely modest. George Chinnery, on the other hand, had earned fabulous sums of money while in Calcutta and his household was as chuck-muck as any in the city, with paltans of nokar-logue doing chukkers in the hallways and syces swarming in the istabbuls; as for the bobachee-connah, why it had been known to spend a hundred sicca rupees on sherbets and syllabubs, in one week …

  An adoring lover, Chinnery had lavished luxuries upon his cherished Sundaree, giving her an outhouse on the grounds to share with the two sons she had borne him. She had also been given her own little retinue of retainers: a khaleefa, several ayahs and khidmatgars, and even a paan-maker, who did nothing but fold betel leaves to suit her tastes. This arrangement had suited them both – Sundaree because it allowed her the freedom to eat and live according to her fashion; and Mr Chinnery because it meant that his precious little passion-pit was readily available when needed, yet safely out of sight when sahibs and ma’ams came to visit.

  Sundaree was herself quite a colourful figure and had once enjoyed her own share of fame and glamour: the daughter of a village drum-beater, she had made a name for herself as a singer and dancer – this was how she came to Mr Chinnery’s attention, for he had paid her to sit for him after attending one of her performances. On becoming pregnant with his child, Sundaree had stopped performing and taken with gusto to a life of indulgence, bedecking herself with expensive textiles and unusual kinds of jewellery. In her prime, she had had no compunctions about ma’aming it over Tantima, pitying her for her cramped quarters and cluck-clucking over the straitened circumstances of the Lambert household.

  But all this had changed dramatically when it came to be known that the artist’s other family was soon to descend on Calcutta. As with many another bohemian, Chinnery was in some ways, extremely conventional – the possibility that his legal wife and children might learn about his Bengali ewe-mutton and her two kids, threw him into a panic. The delectable little butter-bun of the day before suddenly metamorphosed into a gravy-making gobble-prick: she and her two boys were summarily evicted from their quarters and packed off to a tenement in Kidderpore, where a khidmatgar would visit them occasionally to hand over a monthly tuncaw.

  The arrangement deceived no one, of course, for amongst the sahibs of the city Mr Chinnery’s private life was a matter of almost as much interest as the fluctuation of prices at the Opium Exchange. Marianne Chinnery had found out about her husband’s other family soon enough, and to her great credit she had tried to ensure that they were provided for and that her husband did his duty by them. She had even arranged a church christening for the two little boys: known to their friends as Khoka and Robin, they were christened ‘Henry Collins Chinnery’ and ‘Edward Charles Chinnery’ respectively – which became a source of great hilarity to their playmates, who continued of course, to use their Bengali nicknames.

  More usefully perhaps, Marianne Chinnery had also prevailed upon her husband to take the boys into his studio, so that they might learn his trade, and both of them had spent a few years working under their father’s tutelage. Unfortunately for them, this interlude in their lives was not to last long: they had not yet reached their teens when their father fled the city, abandoning both his families.

  This was a double blow, for by that time Marianne Chinnery too had lost interest in Khoka and Robin: perhaps the death of her own son had made it more difficult for her to deal with them; perhaps her daughter, having married an English District Magistrate, had pressed her to sever a connection that might be an embarrassment to her husband; or perhaps it was merely that greater exposure to colonial society had coarsened her own sensibilities. In any event, after George Chinnery’s departure, Sundaree and the two boys were more or less abandoned to their fate: the little money the painter sent was not enough to live on, and Sundaree had had to supplement her income by cooking and cleaning for a succession of British families. But Sundaree was a formidable woman in her own right: despite all her difficulties, she had done what she could to ensure the continuation of her sons’ training in the arts – other than the paintbrush, she liked to say, there was nothing to keep them from sharing the lot of every other street-chokra in Kidderpore.

  Of the the two Chinnery boys, Khoka, the older, was a strapping, swarthily handsome lad, with light brown hair and a personable manner: He was an easy-going sort of chuckeroo who had a certain facility with the brush even though he had no great interest in art – had he not happened to have a painter for a father, no lick of paint would ever have stained his fingers. His brother Robin could not have been more different, either in appearance or in disposition: with his rounded cheeks, prominent eyes, and coppery hair, Robin was said to closely resemble his father; like him, he was plump, and short in stature. Unlike his brother, Robin was endowed with a genuine passion for the arts – a love so fervent that it all but overwhelmed his own very considerable gifts as a draughtsman and painter. Feeling himself to be incapable of creating anything that would meet his own high standards, he directed most of his energies towards the study of the works of other artists, past and present, and was always looking around for prints, reproductions and etchings that he could examine and copy. Curios and unusual objects were another of his passions, and at one time he was a frequent visitor to the Lambert bungalow, where he had spent hours rummaging around in Pierre Lambert’s collection of botanical specimens and illustrations. Although he was several years older than Paulette, there was a childlike aspect to him that made the difference in age and sex seem immaterial: he kept her informed about the latest fashions, bringing her little odds and ends from his mother’s dwindling collection of clothes and trinkets – perhaps a payal to tie around her ankles, or bangles for her wrist. Paulette’s lack of interest in ornaments always amazed him, for his own pleasure in them was such that he would often string them around his own ankles and wrists and twirl around, admiring himself in the mirror. Sometimes they had both dressed up in his mother’s clothes and danced around the house.

  Robin had also taken it on himself to further Paulette’s artistic education. He would often bring over books with detailed reproductions of European paintings – his father had left many of these behind and they were among his most treasured possessions. He never tired of poring over them, and being gifted with unusually strong powers of visual recollection, he was able to reproduce many of them from memory. On learning that Paulette was making illustrations for her father’s book, he had gone to some lengths to tutor her, showing her the tricks of mixing colours and drawing a clean line.

  Paulette’s relationship with Robin was not an easy one: as a tutor he was often insufferably overbearing and the ferocity of his disapproval, when she erred with pencil or brush, was such that it led to many quarrels. But at the same time she was also hugely entertained by his gaudy clothes, his unpredictable shrieks of laughter and his love of scandal – and she was sometimes strangely touched by his attempts to wean her from her hoydenish ways and turn her into a lady.

  For all these reasons, Robin Chinnery had, for a time, been a large presence in her life – but that had come to an abrupt end when she was abo
ut fifteen. Around that time he had developed a strange fixation on Jodu and had decided to launch upon a project – a painting – in which Jodu and Paulette were to feature as the principal figures. The composition was inspired, he said, by one of the great themes of European art, but when Paulette asked what this was he would not tell her. She didn’t need to know, he said, and it didn’t matter anyway because he was re-interpreting it, and giving it a new spirit.

  Paulette and Jodu were not at all enthusiastic about the project and their reluctance to participate grew stronger still when they discovered that they would have to spend hours standing still. But Robin’s pleas were too heartfelt to be brushed aside – this, he declared, was his opportunity of creating a masterwork, of forging his own identity as an artist – so they had taken pity on him and relented. For a fortnight or so, they had obeyed his instructions, standing side by side while he laboured at his easel. Through this time he never once allowed them to look at what he was doing: if they asked he would say, wait, wait, it’s not time yet; you’ll see it when it’s ready to be seen. In these sessions both Jodu and Paulette had worn their usual clothes, a gamcha or langot in his case, and a calf-length sari in hers, and although, at his pleading, they had sometimes wrapped these coverings a little tighter than they might otherwise have done, they had never once gone without them – neither of them could have imagined such a thing.

  This was why, when at last they managed to sneak a look at the unfinished picture, they were doubly outraged to discover that they had been painted stark naked, with not a thread of clothing on their bodies. Not only that, they had been made to look utterly ridiculous in other ways as well, and shameless too, for they were shown to be standing under an enormous banyan tree, staring directly at the viewer as if to flaunt their nakedness – as though they were Naga sadhus or something. What was more, Paulette’s skin was painted an ashy-white colour and she was shown to be holding a mango (under a banyan tree!), while Jodu was an inky shade of black and had a cobra rearing up above his head. Fortunately Paulette’s mango was so positioned as to conceal that part of her which she would least have wanted the world to see – but Jodu was not so lucky with his cobra: even though the snake had its tail wound around his waist it did not cover what it could so easily have done; that part of his body could not only be clearly seen, it was painted in such vivid detail that it gave the clear impression of being uncircumcised, which added in no little measure to Jodu’s sense of injury.