by Porter Hill
Groot squinted beneath the brim of the blue cap pulled down over his pale blond eyebrows. ‘I got reason to worry, maybe. The Tamils don’t like people from the North and Bapu’s from the North.’
‘What about Jingee? He’s a Tamil and he and Bapu get along fine.’
Groot considered Babcock’s argument.
Snapping his big fist at the persistent fly, Babcock added, ‘I tell you, don’t worry. Bapu’s probably been spotted by some girl he’d promised to come back and marry.’
‘Marry?’ Groot glanced at Babcock relaxed in the ditch. ‘Bapu’s got a girl here?’
Babcock frowned. Why did this fidgety Dutchman never understand his jokes?
But Mustafa, his back to the pine-tree, agreed with a grunt as he pulled off the grasshopper’s other wing.
Babcock lifted the straw hat off his face. Groot also looked at Mustafa. It was rare to hear him make any noise, or to communicate in any way with the other men.
Nodding his big square head, Mustafa said, ‘There’s girls waiting to catch me back in Alanya.’
‘Back where?’ Babcock sat up and studied the Turk.
‘Alanya. My home.’
‘And you’ve got a girl there?’ Babcock shot an amused look at Groot.
‘Many, many girls.’
Babcock pulled his ear. ‘Some ugly big pig like you’s got a girl?’
Mustafa’s dark eyes hardened as he glared at Babcock.
Babcock did not want to fight Mustafa over some senseless remark. But he did want to know more about this sullen Turk and, grinning, he pressed, ‘Come on, tell us something, man.’
‘Tell you –’ Mustafa jerked a leg from the grasshopper, ‘– what?’
‘About your girl. Home. Yourself.’
Mustafa looked suspiciously from Babcock to Groot. ‘Why you two want to know about me? Who you going to tell about me?’
‘Nobody. But if we’re going to be together …’
Groot waved his hand for Babcock and Mustafa to be silent. ‘Somebody’s coming.’
Babcock listened, hearing in the distance a rattling sound accompanied by an odd, eerie wail.
* * *
The rattling grew louder on the far side of the rise in the dusty road. Babcock, Groot, and Mustafa lay on their bellies in the ditch, listening to what sounded like somebody singing in a high-pitched voice, a song rhythmless to their ears.
A small black donkey and a two-wheeled cart appeared over the hill, a peasant sitting slumped high on the cart’s bench with a soiled white mantle wrapped around his head and shoulders.
Groot whispered. ‘Farmer.’
Babcock glanced in the opposite direction. ‘Let’s ambush him for the cart.’
Mustafa grunted agreement.
Groot kept his eyes on the rumbling cart. ‘What about Bapu? What if he gets the elephant?’
Babcock pulled a knife from his belt. ‘Then we’ve got ourselves an elephant as well as a donkey cart.’
The peasant’s strange, high-pitched wail grew louder as the little black donkey clip-clopped past the ditch.
The three men wrinkled their noses as the cart passed them, a strong odour wafting from its wooden boards.
Babcock muttered, ‘Cow shit.’
Groot whispered, ‘Dung cakes. Indian burn dung cakes for fuel.’
Rising to his knees, Babcock motioned Mustafa and Groot to follow. ‘You two take Grandpa. I’ll grab the animal.’
Mustafa drew a leather garrotte from his pocket, his fists clenching both ends of the thin weapon.
As the three men crept from the ditch, a short distance down the road the cart slowed and the peasant turned in the seat. Lowering the mantle from his head, he raised the fingers of his right hand, making an obscene gesture at the men.
Babcock bolted upright from his crouch. ‘Bapu!’
Groot and Mustafa stopped and stood upright.
Laughing, Bapu snapped the reins as Land Group ran down the dusty track after the rattling donkey cart.
Chapter Twenty-One
A TAMIL TRADER
Sea Group
A full moon reflected silver across a western pocket of the Bay of Bengal as Adam Home sat alongside Jud on the narrow bench of the masulah which Sea Group had taken from the coastal village of Attur. Jingee and Kiro lay on hemp bags of rice, lentils and betel leaves stowed aboard the thin-shelled vessel. Its four oars were turned inward from the hull. Horne held the arm of the teakwood rudder. Jud gripped the bowline attached to the lateen sail. The night’s wind filled the triangular canvas, carrying Sea Group northwards along the Coromandel Coast, towards the anchorage called the Madras Roads.
Sea Group had been lucky in Attur. So far everything was going smoothly. Too smoothly. Would they have to pay for this run of good luck? Horne felt easier when good fortune was balanced by at least the threat of trouble.
Wearing a dhoti knotted around his groin like the other three men, with no shirt or shoes, Horne sat in the balmy night with one bare foot resting on the bench, reviewing the progress they had made since disembarking from the Eclipse early this morning.
The landing had been at precisely the right inlet. The hike to Attur, quick and easy. They had received a warm reception from the Ranga Pilar family who had given them the exact boat Horne had wanted. Now they were enjoying a strong coastal wind. Was Land Group faring this well?
Reviewing the plans he had synchronized for the two groups, Horne remembered that the mission was meant to benefit the East India Company in some way not revealed to him.
The wind caressed his cheek as he thought about the power and size of the Honourable East India Company: their headquarters was halfway around the world from this isolated spot; it was run by the Court of Directors, twenty-four men elected by a Court of Proprietors, merchants and bankers who owned the Company’s so-called ‘stock’.
Horne did not consider himself to be a businessman but he was intrigued by that revolutionary new commercial concept called ‘stock’. It had been devised by the East India Company to raise money for voyages to the Orient, a plan in which they sold pieces of each voyage’s profits to investors and called it ‘stock’ in the voyage.
Would the idea of selling ‘stock’ spread to other trading companies? Would more companies become as large as the East India Company with tentacles reaching around the world? Would other companies also commission their own Marine? Mercenary armies? Would battles for power and world markets develop among those companies? Would wars break out as they did between nations?
Enjoying the night’s breeze, Horne watched Jud holding the line to the triangular sail and wondered what he was thinking. Jud had told him how he had lost his wife in childbirth and how desolation had driven him to a bad life, the reason he had ended up in prison. What did the East India Company mean to Jud? Did he think of it as anything more than a strange group of faceless white men who owned ships, built gaols, traded for spices and silks and tea? Would Jud profit from serving the Company? Being a Bombay Marine?
Looking at Jingee and Kiro curled peacefully on the hemp bags, he thought that, yes, his seven men from the Bombay prisons had already benefited from the Company and this mysterious mission. They had been freed from gaol, exonerated.
He had, however, warned all the men about the possibility of being caught and tried for treason. Feeling the Bay’s gentle current tremble the rudder in his hand, he smiled as he remembered Babcock’s simple, straightforward answer.
‘We were in prison when you found us. You’re the only one with something to lose.’ Babcock had added, smiling, ‘So us prison rats have got to watch over you.’
Horne had not previously considered that he was the only man of the squadron who had not been in prison, and remembering how Babcock had teased him that they would protect him, Horne wondered if he had not only found seven new Marines but also seven new friends. He recalled his doubts about forming any kind of personal attachments to people. Had he been wrong?
* * *
Jingee lay on the hemp bags unable to sleep, still too excited by the reception his relations in Attur had given him and the three foreigners whom they had called topiwallahs – men who wore hats.
The moment Jingee had stepped across the threshold of his cousins’ home in Attur, he had felt as if he had come back to India after a long journey to a distant land, or that his three years in the prison of Bombay Castle had been some awful dream where there had been no sunlight, no jasmine, no saffron, no brilliant colours like yellow and green and pink – all small but important parts of the world to him.
Little had changed in the village of Attur – nor in the Ranga Pilar house – since Jingee had last been there four years ago. The village’s maze of white plastered walls. Bushes draped with laundry drying in the sun. The palmyra doors opening to the family’s courtyard. A garden of mango and lemon and tamarind trees. The smell of incense lingering in the salons curtained with blue-and-white striped cotton to block the midday sun.
The Pilar family’s fortune had been secured more than a hundred years ago, during the days of the Dutch control of Porto Novo on the Coromandel Coast. The great-great-great grandfather and founder of the clan, Ananda Rangai Pilar, had been the dubash to Holland’s factor in India. Since that time the family had prospered and spread to adjoining towns and villages, their interests including fishing, brass works, pottery, but always as before – acting as agents for wealthy topiwallahs.
A cousin to Ranga Pilar, Jingee had been warmly welcomed by the men of the family. The women kept a proper distance, sprinkling the ground with rose water, spreading blankets, producing an array of food as brightly coloured as their billowing silk saris: spiced lamb nestling in a bed of yellow rice, layers of pastry and lamb, a delicate masala cooked in a clay oven and tasting of turmeric, mint, ginger, an explosion of flavours which had reminded Jingee how much he had to learn about cooking if he was to serve Captain Horne a truly fine meal.
As Jingee lay on the hemp bags under the stars twinkling over the Bay of Bengal, he remembered how Horne’s request for a surf boat had been received with mirth by his cousins. But when the Pilar brothers had seen that the topiwallahs were serious, they had taken them to a beach shed, letting Horne have his choice of boats. They had next escorted him to a circle of native fishermen sitting cross-legged in a circle mending nets. The old men had explained how to row a rope-sewn boat through the three stages of the tricky Madras surf.
Horne’s voice jolted Jingee’s reminiscences. Sitting up on the bags, he saw the Captain pointing out into the night’s darkness.
Kiro, awakened by Horne’s voice, sat alert next to Jingee. They both saw the dark outline of the ship to the east.
Horne lashed the rudder to its coir line, moving aft to the hemp bags lined along the hull.
As Horne began moving bags to make a place to conceal himself, Jud and Kiro took their places by two oars. Jingee pushed the last bags behind Horne, draping fishnet over them, and hurried to pull a robe over his dhoti.
* * *
‘Ahoy! Ahoy there!’ Jingee swung a lantern back and forth in an arc. ‘Ahoy!’
High above the masulah in the night, a voice answered from the frigate, a reply spoken in English and magnified by a speaking trumpet. ‘What pass do you show?’
Jingee kept waving the lantern. ‘I come from the village of Attur.’
Jud and Kiro stood at the two oars, their eyes cast down to the hemp bags in front of them, both posing as servants to a Tamil trader. When the waves bumped the masulah against the English ship, Kiro extended his oar, preventing repeated impacts from damaging the surf boat’s thin shell, but never raising his eyes to the ship.
An officer in a notched hat appeared in the light of the frigate’s port entry, the gold braid on his uniform glittering in the lantern’s glow; two seamen dropped a rope ladder to the masulah, and the officer began the descent, followed by two of the ship’s Marines wearing red jackets, tall shako hats, their muskets fixed with steel bayonets.
Jingee welcomed the officer with a deep, ostentatious salaam. Accepting the greeting with a curt nod, the fair-skinned Second Lieutenant directed the Marines to opposite sides of the bobbing boat as he held out one hand – palm upward – to Jingee, demanding, ‘Your pass.’
‘I need no pass. I am Ragi Pilar, merchant from Attur.’ Jingee looked haughtily from the Lieutenant to the Marines, one of whom was moving towards Jud while the other was stepping over bags to where Horne was hidden in the stern.
‘Haven’t you heard in Attur, Mr Pilar, that there’s a war being fought?’
Jingee insisted, ‘I am only a trader, sahib.’
The Lieutenant glanced at Kiro and Jud. ‘These two are your men?’
Jingee dismissed them with a wave of the hand. ‘Sickly and eat too much, both of the feringhi dogs.’
‘Why are you travelling at night?’
‘My father is an old man, sahib. I sat with him in the garden until sunset. Then I hurried to leave because I must reach Madras before dawn. I have a stall in the Bazaar.’
‘Attur? That’s the village down the coast.’
Hearing bayonets slicing the hemp bags, the sound of rice and lentils spilling onto deck, Jingee shrieked, ‘Sahib, stop your men! They’re ruining my cargo!’
Ignoring Jingee’s plea, the Lieutenant asked, ‘Did you see any ships on your trip north from Attur? French ships at any point along the coast?’
Jingee’s attention was divided between the mention of French ships and the two British Marines stabbing bayonets into bags, approaching the spot where Horne was hidden under the fishnet.
Wringing his hands, Jingee pleaded, ‘Lieutenant, your men have made enough damage. Please stop them.’
‘You have no trading permit?’
‘My stall is in the Black Town, sahib. I require no document to sell to my people.’
Looking from Jingee to the ripped bags spilling provisions across the boat, the Lieutenant called wearily, ‘Bullitt, back aboard ship. Kettlestone, there’s nothing here.’
The Marine, Kettlestone, moved towards the ladder, but the other man, Bullitt, kept stabbing, driving his bayonet into the bags, one hand pushing down on the musket’s butt.
‘Let’s go, Bullitt!’
Jingee watched the three men finally climb overhead into darkness, waiting until the rope ladder was pulled up behind them.
Jud and Kiro put their strength into the oars, moving the masulah quickly away from the frigate as Jingee fell to his knees in the stern, digging frantically amongst the torn hemp and scattered foodstuffs. ‘Captain sahib! Captain sahib! Are you hurt?’
The boat listed. Jingee turned. He saw a figure raising itself from the Bay, muscled arms pulling the dripping body into the boat.
‘Captain sahib!’
Gulping for air, Horne fell across the ripped bags. ‘What’d they say about French … ships?’
‘You heard, Captain sahib?’
Horne nodded, still gulping for air after holding his breath beneath water. ‘I heard … just as I was going under the … fishnets.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
THE UNTOUCHABLES
Land Group
The black donkey clip-clopped along the narrow road winding through the Chingleput Hills, the sky dark and twinkling with stars, the scattered settlements looking more prosperous the closer Land Group moved to Fort St George.
Bapu held the leather reins loose in his hands; Groot sat beside him, his blue cap pushed back on his sun-bleached blond hair as he asked questions about India. Babcock and Mustafa slept in the bed of the bumping wagon, unbothered by the two men’s voices, the cart’s jerky movements, or the lingering smell of dung cakes.
‘Who’s the ruler of India?’
‘The Grand Mughul. He holds court in the Diwan-i-am in the city of Agra.’
‘Does the Mughul have a parliament or council that makes the laws?’
‘The Mughul’s word is the one law of India. That is why Tamils here in the So
uth do not like the Mughul. They’ve remained faithful to the old Hindu religion while many Northerners have taken the Muslim ways of the Mughul. India is a country of different religions. The Hindus. The Muslims. A third religion here is the Sikhs. Now you Europeans are bringing us a fourth. Christianity.’
Remembering how Bapu had been slow in the learning sessions with Horne, Groot was surprised to hear how clearly, how intelligently the bandit leader spoke about his country. Bapu had explained that a district sheriff in Rajasthan had taught him to speak English.
Groot said, ‘I understand that India is divided by castes. How many castes are there?’
‘Four.’
‘Which caste are you?’
‘By birth, I am a Kshatriya, the second highest caste. I am descended from the line of warriors called the Rajput. But I do not fool myself. I have no rights, no privileges, no powers of my caste. I live no better than a Sudra. The Sudras are the fourth, the lowest caste. The third is the Vaisya, the caste of traders and merchants. I think Horne’s man, Jingee, is a Vaisya. There are also the people called the Panchamas. That means the “fifth”. The Panchamas include people who fall outside the four castes. They are also called the Untouchables.’
‘Untouchables?’
Bapu nodded, his swarthy face looking peaceful as he huddled over the donkey, his closely-spaced eyes held on the road. ‘People will not touch the Panchamas for fear of becoming polluted.’
‘Polluted by what?’
‘Bad spirits. There are also lowly people called the Unseeables. They carry bells to warn members of the high castes to look away when they are approaching them. But the lowest people in India are called the Chensu Carir. They are so offensive that they are condemned to roam the country, carrying their few belongings tied to the backs of scrawny donkeys. They are not allowed to stop at any one spot and make a home. You will see them alongside the road, picking ants from the earth to feed to their children.’
