Flood of Fire

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘So this is it? The end?’

  ‘Well, Mr Reid, we knew, didn’t we, that it would have to end one day? Apparently that day has come and we must accept it.’

  A lump rose to Zachary’s throat.

  ‘But you promised, Mrs Burnham, that when the time came we would end it properly.’

  ‘Well it is impossible now, don’t you see? He will be here this evening.’

  She put a hand on his arm. ‘Look, Mr Reid – it is as hard for me as it is for you. No – truth to tell, it is much harder for me. I have only my old life to go back to – levées, church, improving causes and laudanum to put me to sleep at night. But you are young, you have your life ahead. You will go on to find happiness with Paulette, or someone else.’

  ‘Paulette be damned!’ snapped Zachary.

  Over the last few months, as his intimacy with Mrs Burnham had deepened, so had Zachary’s feelings towards Paulette grown increasingly rancorous: what was most vexing to him was that she should put it about that he had seduced her, whereas the truth was that his behaviour towards her had never been anything other than honourable. Why, he had even proposed marriage once, only to be rudely rebuffed! If such were the wages of righteousness then he could scarcely be blamed for having turned to adultery.

  ‘I don’t give a fig for Paulette!’

  ‘No! Do not say that! Paulette may have made mistakes but she is a good girl – I am convinced of it. She would make a good wife for you.’

  Zachary had to fight back an urge to stamp his feet, like a petulant child.

  ‘I don’t want to marry her! I don’t want to marry anyone.’ A look of concern came over Mrs Burnham’s face. ‘Oh but Mr Reid, of course you must marry, and soon at that, or else your old ailment may again claim you. If any good has come of our connection, it is surely that that chapter is closed. Now that you have cured yourself you must not, on any account, allow yourself to relapse. All the most enlightened men are agreed on this subject – better the bordello than the indulgence of selfish, solitary pleasures.’

  ‘Surely, Mrs Burnham,’ said Zachary, ‘you are not urging me to resort to knocking-shops and bawdykens?

  ‘By no means,’ said Mrs Burnham. ‘What I am urging you to do is to conquer the primitive who lurks inside you. We are in an age of progress and in order to belong to it you must destroy everything that is backward in yourself. And I am convinced that if you set your mind to it you will not find it difficult. With hard work, prayer, regular exercise, a soothing diet and cold baths you can surely vanquish the affliction. You must become a man of the times, Mr Reid – you must change yourself. If you succeed the whole world will be at your feet! It is what I expect of you; it is what you deserve.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you to say so, Mrs Burnham,’ said Zachary. ‘But what I really deserve is for you to make good on the promise you had made to me – about how our connection would end.’

  ‘Now, now, Mr Reid.’ Her tone had changed now; there was a note of command in it that he had not heard in a while. ‘You’re not a child; you mustn’t make a tumasher of it.’

  With a wave of a handkerchief she ushered him towards the door. ‘You must be off before the harry-maids come back.’

  For a moment Zachary stood his ground, in mulish defiance, so she leant closer and whispered into his ear: ‘Remember, Mr Reid – if my husband should have the faintest suspicion he will destroy us both. So please, you must get ahold of yourself.’

  Slowly Zachary’s feet began to move. On reaching the door he turned to her again: ‘Goodbye, Mrs Burnham.’

  She was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Reid.’

  He opened the door and stepped out.

  *

  It wasn’t till the end of January that Kesri learnt where the Bengal Volunteers were going. It was Captain Mee who told him: ‘Havildar, I have some important news. The Burra Laat, Lord Auckland, and the Jangi Laat, General Sir Hugh Gough, have received formal instructions from London. Our orders are to proceed to southern China.’

  This stunned Kesri. China had seemed to him so unlikely a destination that he had discounted all the rumours. But when Captain Mee asked if he wanted to reconsider his decision to volunteer he answered without hesitation. ‘No, Mee-sahib. I’ve given my word and I will go. But about others I don’t know.’

  ‘You think we’ll lose a lot of men?’

  ‘Let’s see, sir,’ said Kesri. ‘Some we are better without.’

  Kesri mustered the company the next day and Captain Mee made the announcement in his usual businesslike way, speaking through an interpreter. He ended by telling the sepoys that if they wanted to change their minds they had three days to do so. Later, when it was Kesri’s turn to speak to the company, he elaborated on this a little, explaining that anyone who wanted to withdraw from the unit would have to return the travel battas and other emoluments they had received for volunteering. This too would have to be done within three days; after that no withdrawals would be permitted: anyone who developed second thoughts would be treated as a malingerer.

  Kesri knew that the prospect of having to return battas and emoluments would be a deterrent to most of the sepoys. He did not expect many withdrawals – but in this he was wrong. Nine men, almost a tenth of the company, came to see him and asked to be sent back to their units. He released them immediately and had them removed under escort, so that they would have no further contact with the company: better to be rid of them now than to have them lingering and spreading their poison.

  After the third day had passed, Kesri reminded the company that the time for withdrawals was over. From then on he kept the men under even closer watch. Mutiny or disaffection was not what he was afraid of – in the enclosed circumstances of Fort William signs of recalcitrance would be easy to detect and quell. What worried him more was another possibility: desertion. Now that the eastern expedition was public knowledge, the men were free to apply for permission to leave the fort for short periods. Kesri knew that in the company’s present state of morale, a few desertions were inevitable and resigned himself to dealing with them when they came.

  But the disclosure of the expedition’s destination did have one fortunate consequence: Kesri was free at last to visit the paltani-bazars and Sepoy Lines, to make a start on something that he had had to postpone all this while: the business of putting together the company’s contingent of camp-followers – a body that would exceed the fighting men in number when all the necessary dhobis, darzies, cobblers, bhistis, bhandari-walas, porters and baggage handlers had been recruited. On top of that there were the auxiliaries and daftardars to be considered, which would consist of another sizeable contingent, including medical attendants, clerks, interpreters, accountants, gun-lascars, golondauzes, fifers, drummers and the like.

  Recruiting the camp-followers was a tedious business but it was not without its rewards. The followers were usually provided by sirdars, ghat-serangs and other labour contractors, many of whom made handsome profits from the army’s contracts and were willing to pay good dastoories in order to secure them. The officers generally left this matter to the senior NCOs and clerical staff who were often able to collect quite substantial sums from the contractors. This was an accepted perquisite and Kesri knew that he could count on it to bring in a tidy little sum.

  There were no such benefits attached to the choice of auxiliaries, who were all employees of the military establishment. But in this matter too Kesri was able, with Captain Mee’s support, to pick and choose his men. He was particularly careful when it came to choosing the drummers and fifers, who were provided by the army’s Boy Establishment. These youngsters, some of whom were as young as ten or eleven, were mainly Eurasians. Some were the illegitimate sons of British soldiers and came from orphanages; some were descended from the legendary ‘topaz’ corps – the Goan and Portuguese artillerymen who had served the British during their early conquests in India.

  Although the ‘banjee-boys’, as
they were known, were relatively few in number, Kesri knew that they played a disproportionate role in keeping up morale. They often became mascots for their units, and the sepoys sometimes grew so attached to them that they treated them like their own sons.

  Kesri insisted on auditioning the boys himself, calling on them to step out of line, one by one, when they mustered for inspection. During one audition a boy accidentally dropped his fife; he was eleven or twelve but tall for his age, with amber eyes, brown hair and a snub nose. He carried on bravely, but at the end of the performance his lower lip began to quiver. Kesri understood that he was afraid that he would not be picked so he beckoned to him to step forward.

  Naam kya hai tera? What’s your name?

  Dicky Miller, havildar-sah’b.

  Do you know where the expedition is going?

  Ji, sir. China.

  And you’re not scared?

  The boy’s amber eyes suddenly brightened. No, sir! he replied, puffing out his chest: Main to koi bhi cheez se nahin darta! I’m not scared of anything!

  His eagerness drew a laugh from Kesri and he made sure that the boy was included in the company’s contingent of fifers and drummers. And when the fifers made their first appearance at the parade ground he knew he had made a good choice: with his bright eyes and jaunty step young Dicky Miller was just the kind of lad who was likely to keep up the unit’s spirits.

  *

  After his abrupt dismissal from Mrs Burnham’s sewing room, Zachary walked back to the budgerow with his head a-whirl, hardly aware of what he was doing. He had known all along, of course, that his visits to the boudoir would end one day, but he could never have imagined that it would happen so suddenly – and now that it had, he realized that a proper period of preparation would have diminished his pain and bewilderment only by a very small measure, which was that he would not have had to cope also with the bitterness of being denied the last night of leave-taking that he had been promised.

  The truth was that despite all of Mrs Burnham’s warnings he had never abandoned the hope that their liaison would somehow continue, in secret: it had never crossed his mind that he might one day be thrown overboard without a plank or raft to hold on to. But along with anger, bitterness, grief and jealousy, he was aware also of a powerful sense of gratitude towards Mrs Burnham for all that she had given him, money being the least of it; nor was his admiration of her in any way diminished by his abrupt discharge.

  This too served to deepen his confusion, making him wonder about the nature of their connection: what exactly was it that had come into being between them? It was not love, surely, for that word had never been used by either of them; nor was it only lust, for her voice, her words and the things she talked about were at least as bewitching to him as her body. She had opened a window into a world of wealth and luxury where the finest and most voluptuous pleasures were those that were stolen – and it was that very act of thievery, as when he was in her bed, that made them so delectable, so intoxicating. It was as though she had placed his feet on the threshold of this world: all that remained was for him to make his way in – and he was determined to do it, if only to prove to her that he was capable of it.

  But how?

  Defeated by the question, he went off to a bowsing-ken in Kidderpore and did not return till late at night.

  On waking the next day he realized that it behooved him to go to the big house to pay his respects to the Burra Sahib. But he kept putting it off, unsure of whether he would be able to maintain a normal demeanour, fearing that he would betray himself with some chance word or gesture.

  But as the hours went by it became ever clearer that it was by staying away that he was most likely to draw suspicion to himself. So in the late afternoon he screwed up his courage and walked over to the mansion to ask for Mr Burnham.

  A khidmatgar led him to a withdrawing room, where the Burra Sahib was conferring with an important-looking gent. As Zachary stood waiting, hat in hand, the force of the tycoon’s presence began to work on him like a spell: Mr Burnham’s commanding stature, his wide, masterful chest, his shining beard, and even the swell of his belly helped to create an aura such that to gain his good opinion seemed a prize worth striving for.

  Nor, somewhat to his own surprise, was Zachary beset by pangs of guilt or jealousy as he had feared he might be. To the contrary he was aware instead of a peculiar kind of sympathy, a sense of kinship even, born of the knowledge that neither he nor Mr Burnham would ever be able to lay full claim to his wife’s heart, which had perhaps forever been lost to her first love.

  When at last Mr Burnham turned to him, Zachary shook his hand with unfeigned warmth.

  ‘I’m very glad to see you, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad to see you too, Reid. Are you finished with the budgerow yet?’

  ‘Not quite, sir, but I will be very soon.’

  ‘Good! I’m glad to hear it. Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll come by to take a look.’

  With that Mr Burnham turned on his heel and disappeared into his daftar.

  This exchange, brief though it was, was hugely energizing for Zachary; he began to work harder than ever before, polishing, hammering, carving, holystoning. Sometimes, when he stopped to rest, his mind would wander, and then it would seem to him that the last few months had passed in a kind of delirium in which nothing had been real except the feverish voluptuousness of his nights with Mrs Burnham: whether he was with her or not, her voice had always been in his head; even when he was in his own unkempt bed, he had felt himself to be cradled in her satiny sheets.

  Had his memories of those nights been a matter of the mind alone then he would have been able to deal with them without too much difficulty. But his body too had acquired a great trove of memories, and having grown accustomed to the fleshly pleasures of the boudoir, it often cried out insistently for release. But in this matter he was unyielding. Mrs Burnham’s words on the subject were loud in his ears and following her advice he began to eat judiciously, subsisting largely on crackers and bland, unspiced foods. He started to exercise vigorously, with dumb-bells and weights, and after rousing his body to a great heat he would shock it with a long, cold bath. At night, when the fear of lapsing became especially powerful, he would tie his hands to the bedstead, to prevent them from straying, as recommended by Dr Tissot. One evening he even attended a prayer meeting in the city, and for the first time in his life he understood what the preacher was talking about, what he really meant when he talked about Man’s fallen nature, and the devil that lurked in every heart; he too was among the worshippers who left the meeting armed with a precious trove of fear and dread.

  And sure enough, just as Mrs Burnham had predicted, his mounting fears and anxieties began to work a slow but steady change in him; he started to see why it was more important to hoard than to waste, he understood why accumulating was more important than spending, and slowly he came to be filled with a great disgust for the life he had led before – a life of profligacy and poverty, in which he had wasted his mind and body in pointless pursuits. He longed to leave that life behind him – and again arose that confounded question: but how?

  One day he saw the Burnham carriage rolling by, with both master and mistress seated within, and he yearned to prove to both of them that he was not ‘just a mystery’; that he too could be a Burra Sahib with a mansion, a carriage and ships to his name.

  But how?

  He could think of no answer. After many hours of fruitlessly racking his brain he went off to Kidderpore and bought himself a bottle of rum.

  Ten

  Now that they knew where they were going, the balamteers talked of little else but China. And the more they spoke of it the faster the rumours flew: it was as if the very name – Maha-Chin – were enough to stir up elemental fears in them. They knew nothing about China of course, except that the people there were different in every way, not least in appearance – they looked like Gurkhas, some said, and this too was cause for disquiet. The sepoys were wel
l aware of the Gurkhas’ fearsome reputation as fighters; many of them had relatives who had fought in the East India Company’s wars against the Gurkha empire some twenty-two years before. One of the naiks in B Company was the son of a sepoy who had died at the Battle of Nalapani, where the Gurkhas had inflicted a severe defeat on the British. Like all professional soldiers, the sepoys had long memories: they knew that a few decades earlier the Gurkhas, for all their martial prowess, had been thoroughly defeated and subjugated by the army of Maha-Chin ka Faghfoor – the Emperor of China.

  All of this created misgivings and these were compounded by speculation and rumours: some sepoys put it about that the Chinese had supernatural powers and were masters of the occult; others said that they possessed secret weapons and were ingenious in spreading confusion among their enemies.

  Kesri was not impervious to these rumours: he had personally experienced many strange things on the battlefield and did not doubt that unknown forces could intervene in times of war. Why else did soldiers offer prayers before fighting? Why else did they carry protective amulets and have their weapons blessed? To speak of ‘luck’ and ‘chance’, as the British officers did, was merely an evasion to Kesri: what were those things but names for the interventions of kismat? And if the Angrezes really believed that supernatural and divine forces played no part in war, then why did they go to their churches to pray on the eve of a battle? Why did they allow their sepoy orderlies to take their weapons to the temple to be blessed?

  But of course these thoughts could not be voiced to anyone, least of all the naiks and lance-naiks: instead Kesri told them stories about his wartime experiences in Burma, where the people were also akin to the Chinese and the Gurkhas. It was true, he said, that they were fierce and skilful warriors, and that they used all kinds of arts and ruses to confuse their enemies. But in the end the Burmese, who had in the past vanquished the armies of the Emperor of China, had themselves been defeated: there was no reason to be awed by Chinese soldiers, said Kesri; like everyone else they could be beaten.