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 stilclass="underline" 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 will 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 vesseclass="underline" 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.