Chai was the beverage of choice not just for Bahram but for the whole of the Achha Hong, and everyone in Bahram’s entourage listened keenly for the voices of the peons who came through periodically, chanting: Chai garam, chai garam! Particularly eagerly awaited was the mid-morning tumbler of chai, which was usually served with a snack. Of these the one that was most commonly provided was a Uighur speciality called a samsa – these were small triangles of pastry, stuffed usually with minced meat: baked in portable tandoors they were sold hot in the Maidan and were easy to procure. Being the ancestor of a popular Indian snack, they were consumed with much relish in the Accha Hong and were spoken of familiarly by their Hindusthani name – samosa.
Like everyone else in the Achha Hong, Neel too was soon looking forward eagerly to his mid-morning samosa and chai-garam. But to him the sound of these unfamiliar words was just as savoury as the items that bore their names. He found that he was constantly learning new words from the others in Bahram’s entourage: some, like ‘chai’, came from Cantonese, while others were brought in from the Portuguese by Vico – like ‘falto’ for example, meaning fraudulent or false, which became phaltu on Achha tongues.
Even as he was settling in, it became clear to Neel that No. 1 Fungtai Hong was a world in itself, with its own foods and words, rituals and routines: it was as if the inmates were the first inhabitants of a new country, a yet unmade Achha-sthan. What was more, all its residents, from the lowliest of broom-wielding kussabs to the most fastidious of coin-sifting shroffs, took a certain pride in their house, not unlike that of a family. This surprised Neel at first, for on the face of it, the idea that the Achhas might form a family of some kind was not just improbable but absurd: they were a motley gathering of men from distant parts of the Indian subcontinent and they spoke between them more than a dozen different languages; some were from areas under British or Portuguese rule, and others hailed from states governed by Nawabs or Nizams, Rajas or Rawals; amongst them there were Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Parsis and also a few who, back at home, would have been excluded by all. Had they not left the subcontinent their paths would never have crossed and few of them would ever have met or spoken with each other, far less thought of eating a meal together. At home, it would not have occurred to them to imagine that they might have much in common – but here, whether they liked it or not there was no escaping those commonalities; they were thrust upon them every time they stepped out of doors, by the cries that greeted them in the Maidan: ‘Achha! Aa-chaa?’
To protest the affront of this indiscriminate lumping-together served no purpose: the urchins cared nothing for whether you were a Kachhi Muslim or a Brahmin Catholic or a Parsi from Bombay. Was it possibly a matter of appearance? Or was it your clothes? Or the sound of your languages (but how, when they were all so different)? Or was it perhaps just a smell of spices that clung indifferently to all of you? Whatever it was, after a point you came to accept that there was something that tied you to the other Achhas: it was just a fact, inescapable, and you could not leave it behind any more than you could slough off your own skin and put on another. And strangely, once you had accepted this, it became real, this mysterious commonality that existed only in the eyes of the jinns and jai-boys of the Maidan, and you came to recognize that all of you had a stake in how the others were perceived and treated. And the longer you stayed under that roof, with the Maidan at your door, the stronger the bonds became – because the paradox was that these ties were knotted not by an excess of self-regard, but rather by a sense of shared shame. It was because you knew that almost all the ‘black mud’ that came to Canton was shipped from your own shores; and you knew also that even though your share of the riches that grew upon that mud was minuscule, that did not prevent the stench of it from clinging more closely to you than to any other kind of Alien.
*
The familiar sound of the chapel clock was as reassuring to Bahram as the view from his daftar’s window: when he looked outside, at the Maidan, the scene was much as it had ever been – teams of touts swarming about, trying to find customers for the shamshoo-dens of Hog Lane; sailors and lascars pouring in through the landing ghat at Jackass Point, determined to make the most of their shore leave; bands of beggars standing under the trees and at the entrances to the lanes, clattering their clappers; porters scuttling between godowns and chop-boats; barbers plying their trade at their accustomed places, shaving foreheads and braiding queues under portable sunshades of bamboo matting.
Yet, despite the appearance of normalcy, it had been clear to Bahram from the moment he entered the Pearl River that things had indeed changed in China. In the past he would have left the Anahita at Lintin Island, at the mouth of the river: this was where cargo ships always went, on making the voyage over from India. But this time there was not a single ship to be seen at the island, only two old receiving hulks, one American and the other British. In years past it was from the decks of these mastless vessels that opium had been spirited away by fast-crabs. To watch those slim, powerful boats shooting through the water, sixty oars rising and falling in unison, had once been one of the most thrilling sights of the Pearl River. Now there was not a single fast-crab anywhere to be seen on the estuary. The hulks, whose decks had been hives of activity in the past, were abandoned and seemed almost to be keeling over.
Having been forewarned, Bahram had left the Anahita at Hong Kong, anchored in the narrow strait that separated the island from the headland of Kowloon. This too would have been inconceivable in the past, for ships had usually avoided that channel for fear of piracy. This year the whole opium fleet was anchored there, so there was at least the comfort of knowing that they would be able to provide some security for each other.
The conditions at the river’s mouth had led Bahram to expect that Canton too would be drastically changed: he had been heartened to find Fanqui-town carrying on more or less as usual. It was only when his eyes strayed towards the floating townships of the Pearl River, as they did now, that he was reminded of one important respect in which the city was irrevocably changed, at least in relation to himself. By force of habit his eye went straight to the place where Chi-mei’s boat had always been stationed: it was off to the right, where the Pearl met the North River to form a wide expanse of water known as White Swan Lake – over the last couple of decades Chi-mei had somehow succeeded in holding on to that mooring-place, even though she had changed vessels several times. In the early years, when her kitchen-boats were nondescript and modest in size, Bahram had been hard put to pick them out from the hundreds of vessels that were moored along the river-bank. But with the passage of time her boats had become bigger and more distinctive, and the last had been so eye-catching that he had been able to spot it without difficulty from the window of his daftar: it was a brightly painted vessel, with two decks and a stern shaped like an upcurved fishtail. His eyes had become habituated to seeking it out when he went to the window: when there was smoke spiralling up from the cooking fires, he knew that Chi-mei had lit her stoves and the day’s work had begun – it was as if the rhythms of that boat were a mysterious but necessary counterpoint to those of his own daftar.