“Turner? Where are you going? We're still to collect the prisoner when the inspector's finished.”
THE INSPECTOR HELD the budna, a copper vessel with an elongated spout, over the prisoner. He slowly poured water onto the upper lip of his subject. The water ran down the small cracks of his lips and collected in pools around his nostrils sending the man into spasms of drowning.
MASON STOOD FROM his chair, trembling. “You hear him shouting, Turner? It chills your blood.”
Turner wheeled back around and looked into the small square window on the door where the screams emerged-suddenly, he looked frightened. “What do you think he'll say, Mason?”
THE THIEF'S EYES filled with tears and looked as if they might burst.
“Sit up now,” said the still-smiling inspector, handing the copper vessel to his assistant.
It took a few minutes for the thief to find his breath again. “Take me to the baboo! Please!” he said as soon as he could form the words. “I shall confess all, your honor, and tell of my other thefts, but no more, for God's sake! Take me to him!”
“At once, my son.” Gently the inspector helped the prisoner to his feet. “And will you tell us where you've hidden the opium?” he added.
“Yes! Yes!” said the thief.
AS THE THIEF was interrogated, Frank Dickens was seeking different answers, answers he did not believe the thief could provide. For these, he needed to journey to the village where the thief's partner in the crime, the notorious Narain, had lived.
This was no pleasant journey. The natives held two sets of poles, front and back, of the palanquin, or palki, on their shoulders as they ran. Inside the palki, tossed inside a thin blanket, was the wearied traveler. Frank tried to sleep as the natives chanted to the Kali goddess for their strength. When will they be rid of their gods and goddesses, wondered Frank as he swayed inside the rickety structure. It was not the night heat, nor the bearers’ primitive singing that kept him from sleeping as the journey continued through the night but the foul odor of the slow flame of dirty rags and rotten oil that lighted the way for the palki at the front of the vessel.
A while later, they had stopped. Frank stirred, realizing he had fallen asleep and wondered what he had been dreaming. In India he never seemed to remember his dreams. It was morning and Superintendent Frank Dickens had reached the distant Bengalee village of his destination. There was no magistrate or native official to greet him, for he deliberately had not made his sojourn known in advance.
On the road toward a crumbling temple in the distance, the fertile fields teemed with the reddish purple opium poppy. The poppy replaced most of the food crops, and left the surrounding land dry and brittle.
Crossing the opium fields, his police uniform sparkling from its brass on this sunny morning, he saw the ryots, or peasant farmers, men, women, children. They were scraping residue from the opium poppies with an iron sittooha into an earthen pot. Later, the drug would be packed into balls for shipment by natives in long rows at British-controlled warehouses. Frank felt a wave of nausea run through him as he passed the pungent poppies. A ryot looked up from his hoe and suddenly dropped it and ran. Dickens found the patch of land he'd been working and saw that the crop here was in fact rice. He frowned. The opium was mandated, the rice illegal.
The British government paid the ryots to grow the poppy instead of other crops, but they also ordered it, when they had to, by the point of bayonets.
This was one of the poorest villages, Dickens knew, fraught constantly with the threat of famine because of the loss of their natural agriculture. Three years earlier, during the Orissa famine, starvation spread quickly across villages like this. Parents, it was said among the policemen and English officials, had eaten their own children. The government did not want the opium cultivation to get a bad reputation with the moralists back home in England, and so the army delivered as much food as they could to the poorest villages. Still, more than five hundred thousand acres in Bengal at any time were dedicated to the opium poppy, and no amount of rations could make up for the loss of agriculture.
The adjacent river, once bustling with trade to and from Calcutta, trickled quietly now that the English had finished building the railroads for faster transport of opium and spices. Instead of the commerce of the past, men, women, and children now bathed and played there. Elders prayed and chatted as the children splashed about. Everyone in the village went outside at this early hour because later it would be even hotter.
Asking for directions from a group of near naked natives, Frank, stopping to wipe his brow and take water, reached a mud hut in a narrow lane. On the side of the house was a pile of dried plants, dead animals, and rubbish. An even stronger odor attacked him from higher up. Stuck to the walls of the house, clumps of cow dung were being heated in the sun and dried for use as fuel. Under the veranda, a striking young woman, bareheaded and barefoot, was preparing food. She had not lit a fire-a sign she was in mourning. A naked toddler held onto both of her legs for balance. Flies were swarming around the woman, the child, the grain, the ghee.
“You are the widow Narain?” Frank Dickens asked, stepping forward.
She nodded.
“It was my officers, some weeks ago, in the Bagirhaut province, that had him in custody after he and some partners stole opium.”
“We are a very poor village, sir,” the widow remarked, without any shade of apology in her strong voice. “He worked the fields until there were too many workers and no land left to work.”
The hut was surprisingly clean. Frank saw the articles of farming, a rough plow, a broken sickle, hanging from the roof, long in disuse. In the bedroom there was the bed, made of string and wood, and a single book on Hindoo gods in an indentation in the wall that had room for several more volumes. Using the bed as a sofa, Frank sat down and skimmed through the pages of the Hindoo book.
Returning to the widow, who was now nursing her child, he asked whether the book had belonged to her husband.
She nodded.
“He read often?”
“He was never without his books.”
After receiving directions to the bookseller where she had sold other books, Frank walked across the village and found the stall at the quiet end of the busy bazaar.
“The widow Narain has sold you some of her husband's books, I believe. Tracts on Hindoo mythology and religion. Do you remember this?”
The bookseller lowered his spectacles at the Englishman. “Indeed!”
“And you still have these in your stall?”
“I believe I do, good sir. But all the books are mixed together.”
“I will purchase all of the books on these subjects that you have.”
After his return journey in the wretched paiki, that evening Frank met the inspector who had questioned the captured fugitive.
“Oh, yes, Superintendent, he has confessed it all to the magistrate of his village. Not as tolerant of physical discomfort as the Thuggees I used to interview in past years, these ordinary dacoits.”
“You believe he has told the truth?” asked Dickens.
“I do, yet…”
“What is it, Inspector?”
“Only that although he has told the truth, it seems to me there's more he's not saying, as though afraid, afraid in a different way than I can make him on the chabutra. The thief may have a secret he has yet kept from us. Your man Turner has been trying to find out what has happened all day. He is rather worked up over the affair.”