Part 32 (1/2)

'G.o.d d.a.m.n yer eyes, Reid!'

Throwing his head back, the first mate gave voice to a howl that welled up from the bottom of his belly. 'The devil take yer, Reid; G.o.d d.a.m.n yer eyes ...'

Just then, even as the first mate was standing in front of Zachary, staring in disbelief at the knife he had been unable to use, the door of the cabin creaked open. Framed in the doorway stood the slight, shadowy figure of the half-Chinese convict: he had a sharp-tipped handspike in his grip, Zachary saw, and he was holding it not as a sailor would, but like a swordsman, with the point extended.

Sensing his presence, the first mate spun around, with his knife at the ready. When he saw who it was, he snarled in disbelief: 'Jackin-ape?'

Ah Fatt's presence seemed to have a tonic effect on the first mate, restoring him instantly to his usual self: as if exhilarated by the prospect of violent release, he made a swinging lunge with his knife. Ah Fatt swayed easily out of the way, seeming hardly to move at all, balancing his weight on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. His eyes were almost closed, as if in prayer, and his handspike was no longer extended, but folded against his chest, its point tucked under his chin.

'Going to cut yer tongue out, Jackin-ape,' said Mr Crowle, in a voice that was filled with menace. 'Then I'm a-goin to make yer eat it too.'

The mate made another thrust, aiming at the belly, but Ah Fatt turned sideways, eluding the point of his blade. This time the momentum of the strike carried the mate forward, exposing his flank. Spinning on his heel, like a bullfighter, Ah Fatt thrust the handspike through his ribs, burying it almost to the hilt. He held on to his weapon as the mate dropped to the deck, and when the spike was free of his body, he turned the b.l.o.o.d.y point towards Zachary. 'Stay where you are. Or else, you too ...'

Then, just as quickly as he had come, he was gone: slamming the door behind him, he thrust the handspike through the handles, locking Zachary into the cabin.

Zachary fell to his knees beside the pool of blood that was leaking out of the first mate's flank: 'Mr Crowle?'

He caught the sound of a choking whisper: 'Reid? Reid ...'

Zachary lowered his head, to listen to the faltering voice. 'Y'were the one, Reid - the one I'se been lookin for. Y'were the one ...'

His words were choked off by a surge of blood, gus.h.i.+ng up through his mouth and nose. Then his head snapped back and his body went rigid; when Zachary put a hand under his nostrils, there was no evidence of breath. The schooner lurched and the first mate's lifeless body rolled with it. The edge of the old crew-list could be seen peering out of his vest: Zachary pulled it out and stuffed it into his own pocket. Then he rose to his feet and shoved his shoulder against the door. It gave a little, and he jiggled it gently until the handspike slipped out, falling to the deck with a thud.

Bursting out of the first mate's cabin, Zachary saw that his own door was already open. Without pausing to look inside, he went racing up to the quarterdeck. Rain was las.h.i.+ng down from the sky in knotted sheets; it was as if the schooner's sails had come unfastened and were tearing themselves apart against the hull. Instantly drenched, Zachary raised a hand to shelter his eyes from the sting of the rain. A wave of lightning surged across the sky, widening as it travelled westwards, flooding the water below with a rolling tide of radiance. In that unearthly light a longboat seemed to leap out at Zachary, from the crest of a wave: although it was already some twenty yards off the schooner's beam, the faces of the five men who were in it could be clearly seen. Serang Ali was at the rudder, and the other four were huddled in its middle - Jodu, Neel, Ah Fatt and Kalua. Serang Ali had seen Zachary too, and he was raising his hand to wave when the craft dropped behind a ridge of water and disappeared from view.

As the lightning was retreating across the sky, Zachary became aware that he was not the only one who was watching the boat: there were three others on the main deck, below, standing with their arms interlinked. Two of them he recognized immediately, Paulette and Baboo n.o.b Kissin - but the third was a woman in a sodden sari, who had never before uncovered her face in his presence. Now, in the fading glow of the clouds, she turned to look at him and he saw that she had piercing grey eyes. Although it was the first time he had seen her face, he knew that he had glimpsed her somewhere, standing much as she was now, in a wet sari, hair dripping, looking at him with startled grey eyes.

Acknowledgements.

Sea of Poppies owes a great debt to many nineteenth-century scholars, dictionarists, linguists and chroniclers: most notably to Sir George Grierson, for his Report on Colonial Emigration from the Bengal Presidency, 1883, for his grammar of the Bhojpuri language, and for his 1884 and 1886 articles on Bhojpuri folk songs; to J. W. S. MacArthur, one-time Superintendent of the Ghazipur Opium Factory, for his Notes on an Opium Factory (Thacker, Spink, Calcutta, 1865); to Lt Thomas Roebuck, for his nautical lexicon, first published in Calcutta, An English And Hindostanee Naval Dictionary Of Technical Terms And Sea Phrases As Also The Various Words Of Command Given In Working A s.h.i.+p, &C. With Many Sentences Of Great Use At Sea; To Which Is Prefixed A Short Grammar Of The Hindostanee Language (reprinted in London in 1813 by Black, Parry & Co., booksellers to the Hon. East India Company; later revised by George Small, and reissued by W. H. Allen & Co., under the t.i.tle A Laskari Dictionary Or Anglo-Indian Vocabulary Of Nautical Terms And Phrases In English And Hindustani, London, 1882); to Sir Henry Yule & A. C. Burnell, authors of Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary Of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words And Phrases, And Of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical And Discursive; and to the Chief Justice of Calcutta's Supreme Court of Judicature for his verdict in the 1829 forgery trial of Prawnkissen Holdar (reprinted in Anil Chandra Das Gupta, ed., The Days of John Company: Selections from Calcutta Gazette 1824-1832, West Bengal Govt. Press, Calcutta, 1959, pp. 366-38).

This novel has been greatly enriched by the work of many contemporary and near-contemporary scholars and historians. The complete list of books, articles and essays that have contributed to my understanding of the period is too long to reproduce here, but it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge my grat.i.tude for, and my indebtedness to, the work of the following: Clare Anderson, Robert Antony, David Arnold, Jack Beeching, Kingsley Bolton, Sarita Boodhoo, Anne Bulley, B. R. Burg, Marina Carter, Hsin-Pao Chang, Weng Eang Cheong, Tan Chung, Maurice Collis, Saloni Deerpalsingh, Guo Deyan, Jacques M. Downs, Amar Farooqui, Peter Ward Fay, Michael Fisher, Basil Greenhill, Richard H. Grove, Amalendu Guha, Edward O. Henry, Engseng Ho, Hunt Janin, Isaac Land, C. P. Liang, Brian Lubbock, Dian H. Murray, Helen Myers, Marcus Rediker, John F. Richards, Dingxu s.h.i.+, Asiya Siddiqi, Radhika Singha, Michael Sokolow, Vijaya Teelock, Madhavi Thampi and Rozina Visram.

For their support and a.s.sistance at various points in the writing of this novel, I owe many thanks to: Kanti & Champa Banymandhab, Girindre Beeharry, the late Sir Satcam Boolell and his family, Sanjay Buckory, Pushpa Burrenchobay, May Bo Ching, Careem Curreemjee, Saloni Deerpalsingh, Parmeshwar K. Dhawan, Greg Gibson, Marc Foo Kune, Surendra Ramgoolam, Vishwamitra Ramphul, Achintyarup Ray, Debashree Roy, Anthony J. Simmonds, Vijaya Teelock, Boodhun Teelock and Zhou Xiang. I owe a great debt of grat.i.tude also to the following inst.i.tutions: the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England; the Mahatma Gandhi Inst.i.tute, Mauritius; and the Mauritius National Archives.

The lines quoted in Chapter Two (ag mor lagal ba ...) are from a song collected by Edward O. Henry (Chant The Names of G.o.d: Music and Culture in Bhojpuri-Speaking India, San Diego State Univ. Press, San Diego, 1988, p. 288). The lines quoted in Chapter Three (Majha dhara me hai bera mera ...) are from a song collected in Helen Myers, Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 307. The lines quoted in Chapter Five (Sjh bhaile ...) are from Sarita Boodhoo's Bhojpuri Traditions in Mauritius, Mauritius Bhojpuri Inst., Port Louis, 1999, p. 63. The lines quoted in Chapter Nineteen (Talwa jharaile ...) and the lines quoted in Chapter Twenty-one (...uthle ha chhati ke jobanwa ...) are from songs collected by Sir George Grierson for his article ”Some Bhojpuri Folksongs,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18, p. 207, 1886. In all these instances the translations are my own.

Without the support of Barney Karpfinger and Roland Philipps, the Ibis could not have crossed the Bay of Bengal; at critical moments in her journey, when she lay becalmed in kalmariyas, James Simpson and Chris Clark blew wind into her sails; my children, Lila and Nayan, saw her through many a storm and my wife, Deborah Baker, was the best of malums: I, no less than this frail craft, owe them all a great debt of grat.i.tude.

Amitav Ghosh.

Kolkata.

2008.

THE IBIS CHRESTOMATHY.

Words! Neel was of the view that words, no less than people, are endowed with lives and destinies of their own. Why then were there no astrologers to calculate their kismet and make predictions about their fate? The thought that he might be the one to take on this task probably came to him at about the time when he was first beginning to earn his livelihood as a linkister - that is to say, during his years in southern China. From then on, for years afterwards, he made it his regular practice to jot down his divinations of the fate of certain words. The Chrestomathy, then, is not so much a key to language as an astrological chart, crafted by a man who was obsessed with the destiny of words. Not all words were of equal interest, of course, and the Chrestomathy, let it be noted, deals only with a favoured few: it is devoted to a select number among the many migrants who have sailed from eastern waters towards the chilly sh.o.r.es of the English language. It is, in other words, a chart of the fortunes of a s.h.i.+pload of girmitiyas: this perhaps is why Neel named it after the Ibis.

But let there be no mistake: the Chrestomathy deals solely with words that have a claim to naturalization within the English language. Indeed the epiphany out of which it was born was Neel's discovery, in the late 1880s, that a complete and authoritative lexicon of the English language was under prepara tion: this was, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary (or the Oracle, as it is invariably referred to in the Chrestomathy). Neel saw at once that the Oracle would provide him with an authoritative almanac against which to judge the accuracy of his predictions. Although he was already then an elderly man, his excitement was such that he immediately began to gather his papers together in preparation for the Oracle's publication. He was to be disappointed, for decades would pa.s.s before the Oxford English Dictionary finally made its appearance: all he ever saw of it was a few of the facsicules that appeared in the interim. But the years of waiting were by no means wasted: Neel spent them in collating his notes with other glossaries, lexicons and word-lists. The story goes that in the last years of his life his reading consisted of nothing but dictionaries. When his eyesight began to fail, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren were made to perform this service for him (thus the family coinage 'to read the d.i.c.ky', defined by Neel as 'a gubbrowing of last resort').

On his deathbed, or so family legend has it, Neel told his children and grandchildren that so long as the knowledge of his words was kept alive within the family, it would tie them to their past and thus to each other. Inevitably, his warnings were ignored and his papers were locked away and forgotten; they were not to be retrieved till some twenty years later. The family was then in turmoil, with its many branches at odds with each other, and its collective affairs headed towards ruin. It was then that one of Neel's granddaughters (the grandmother of the present writer) remembered his words and dug out the old band-box that contained Neel's jottings. Coincidentally, that was the very year the Oracle was finally published - 1928 - and she was able to raise the money, by joint family subscription, to acquire the entire set. Thus began the process of disinterring Neel's horoscopes and checking them against the Oracle's p.r.o.nouncements - and miraculously, no sooner did the work start than things began to turn around, so that the family was able to come through the worldwide Depression of the 1930s with its fortunes almost undiminished. After that never again was the Chrestomathy allowed to suffer prolonged neglect. By some strange miracle of heredity there was always, in every decade, at least one member of the family who had the time and the interest to serve as wordy-wallah, thus keeping alive this life-giving conversation with the founder of the line.

The Chrestomathy is a work that cannot, in principle, ever be considered finished. One reason for this is that new and previously unknown word-chits in Neel's hand continue to turn up in places where he once resided. These unearthings have been regular enough, and frequent enough, to confound the idea of ever bringing the work to completion. But the Chrestomathy is also, in its very nature, a continuing dialogue, and the idea of bringing it to an end is one that evokes superst.i.tious horror in all of Neel's descendants. Be it then clearly understood that it was not with any such intention that this compilation was a.s.sembled: it was rather the gradual decay of Neel's papers which gave birth to the proposal that the Chrestomathy (or what there was of it) be put into a form that might admit of wider circulation.

It remains only to explain that since the Chrestomathy deals exclusively with the English language, Neel included, with very few exceptions, only such words as had already found a place in an English dictionary, lexicon or word-list. This is why its entries are almost always preceded by either the symbol of the Oracle (a +) or the names of other glossaries, dictionaries or lexicons; these are, as it were, their credentials for admittance to the vessel of migration that was the Chrestomathy. However, the power to grant full citizens.h.i.+p rested, in Neel's view, solely with the Oracle (thus his eagerness to scrutinize its rolls). Once a word had been admitted into the Oracle's cavern, it lost the names of its sponsors and was marked forever with its certificate of residence: the symbol +. 'After the Oracle has spoken the name of a word, the matter is settled; from then on the expression in question is no longer (or no longer only) Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Hind.f, Laskari or anything else - in its English incarnation, it is to be considered a new coinage, with a new persona and a renewed destiny.'

These then are the simple conventions that Neel's descendants have adhered to, marking a + upon every girmitiya that has found a place within the Oracle's tablets. Who exactly made these marks, and at what date, is now impossible to ascertain, so dense is the accretion of markings and jottings upon the margins of Neel's notes. Previous attempts to untangle these notations caused so much confusion that the present writer was instructed merely to bring the markings up to date, and in such a fas.h.i.+on that any interested party would be able to verify the findings in the most recent edition of the Oracle. This he has attempted to do to the best of his ability, although many errors have, no doubt, evaded his scrutiny.

When the mantle of wordy-major was placed upon the shoulders of the present writer, it came with a warning from his el ders: his task, they said, was not to attempt to re-create the Chrestomathy as Neel might have written it in his own lifetime; he was merely to provide a summary of a continuing exchange of words between generations. It was with these instructions in mind that he has laboured to preserve the timbre of Neel's etymological reflections: in the pages that follow, whenever quotation marks are used without attribution, Neel must be presumed to be the author of the pa.s.sage in question.