Well it is my lot and I must bear it. I console myself with the thought that I shall have some small measure of revenge when my painting is done.
But do not imagine for a moment, Pugglecita mi amor, that I have forgotten about the task that you and your benefactor enjoined upon me. I daily nurture the hope that I will meet someone who may be able to cast some light upon Mr Penrose’s camellias.
And it would be remiss of me to conclude this without acknowledging receipt of your letter and thanking you for keeping me abreast of the happenings on the HMS Redruth. I was delighted to read about all the lovely plants you have found on this island of yours! Who would have thought that a place of such barren aspect would be so rich in greenery? And who, for that matter, would have imagined that my own sweet Puggly would one day take on the guise of an intrepid explorer?
As for the query with which you ended: why, of course, you can certainly depend on me to do whatever I can to help you with your spoken English! But in the meanwhile, I do strongly urge you to exercise some care in your choice of words. There is nothing wrong of course in speaking words of encouragement to the crew of the Redruth, especially when they do their job well, but you must be prudent in how you phrase what you say. Knowing you as I do, I understand very well that your motives were wholly innocent when you congratulated the bosun for his fine work on the on the ship’s prow. But you should know Puggly dear, that it is not wholly a matter for surprise that he was taken aback by your well-meant sally: I confess that I too would be quite astonished if a young lady of tender years were to felicitate me on my dexterity in ‘polishing the foc-stick.’ Far be it from me to reproach you for your spontaneity, Puggly dear, but you must not always assume that it is safe to transpose French expressions directly into English. The English equivalent of baton-a-foc, for instance, is definitely not ‘foc-stick’ – it is ‘jib-boom’.
And no, dear, nor were you well-advised to tell the baffled bosun that your intention was only to compliment him on his skill with ‘the mighty mast that protrudes from the front’. You should know, my dear Princesse de Puggleville, that sometimes it is not wise to persist in explaining oneself.
*
Bahram’s methods of work were not easy for Neel to deal with. Back in the past, when he had himself employed a host of scribes and secretaries, in his own daftar, he had seldom needed to communicate at any length with his crannies, munshis and gomustas, since they were far better schooled than he in the time-hallowed canons that dictated the form and content of a zemindar’s letters. Later, after his conviction for forgery, when he was awaiting transportation in Calcutta’s Alipore Jail, he had earned himself many favours by composing missives for other inmates – but these too had required little effort, for his fellow convicts were mainly unlettered men, and no matter whether they were writing to a relative at home, or to a chokra in the next ward, they had deferred to Neel’s literacy and left it to him to invent their words and shape their thoughts.
Such being his experience of letter-writing, Neel was caught unawares by the demands of Bahram’s correspondence: the Seth’s letters rarely followed any set forms and usages, being mostly intended to keep his associates informed of the situation in southern China. And nor could Neel expect any deference from the Seth, who seemed to think that a munshi was a minor flunkey – one who belonged, in the order of importance, somewhere between a valet and a shroff, his principal duties being those of tidying up his employer’s verbal attire, and of picking through the coinage of his vocabulary to separate what was of value from what was not.
Neel’s job was further complicated by the Seth’s habits of dictation: he always composed on his feet and his restless pacing seemed to add to the turbulence of his words, which often came pouring out in braided torrents of speech, each rushing stream being silted with the sediment of many tongues – Gujarati, Hindusthani, English, pidgin, Cantonese. To stop the Seth when he was in full flow was inconceivable, and to pose a question about this phrase or that, or to ask the meaning of one word or another, was to risk an explosion of irritability – queries had to be deferred till later, or better still, referred to Vico. In the interim all Neel could do, to make sense of this gurgling snowmelt of sound, was to pay close attention, not just to what Bahram said, but also to the gestures, signs and facial expressions with which he amplified, enlarged upon, and even negated the burden of his words. This unspoken idiom could not be lightly ignored: once when Neel rendered a sentence as ‘Mr Moddie affirms that he would be glad to comply’, Bahram took him to task for his negligence – ‘What-re? You didn’t see, how I was doing with my hand, like-this, like-this. How you take that to mean “yes”? You cannot see it is “no”? Just dreaming or what?’
And then there was the window, which was a perennial source of disruption in the daftar: even though Neel’s desk was in the far corner of the room, there was always a rich medley of sound to cope with, wafting in from below: the barrikin of barrowmen and the drunken bellowing of sailors on the dicky-run; the keening of moochers and the clattering of clapperdudgeons; the whistling of tame songbirds, being promenaded in their cages and outbursts of gong-banging to mark the passage of consequential personages – and so on. The cacophony that welled out of the Maidan changed from minute to minute.
If the window was a source of disruption for Neel, it was far more so for his employer, who would often break off in mid-sentence and stand there as if hypnotized. Outlined against the frame, in his dome-like turban and wide-skirted angarkha, the Seth’s form was so regal that Neel was sometimes led to wonder whether he was deliberately striking a pose for the benefit of the strollers on the Maidan. But Bahram was not a man who could stand still for long: after staring moodily into the distance, he would again begin to pace the floor, furiously, as though he were trying to outrun some hotly pursuing thought or memory. But then, glancing outside once more, he would spot some friend or acquaintance and his mood would change: leaping to the window he would thrust his head out and begin to shout greetings, sometimes in Gujarati (Sahib kem chho?), sometimes in Cantonese (Neih hou ma Ng sin-saang? Hou-noih-mouh-gin!); sometimes in pidgin (‘Chin-chin, Attock; long-tim-no see!’); and sometimes in English (‘Good morning, Charles! Are you well?’).
When his attention returned to his letter, he would frequently find that he had forgotten what he had intended to say. His face would cloud over and his tone would grow sharp as if to imply that the interruption was somehow Neel’s fault: ‘Achha, so then read the whole thing to me – from the beginning.’
The arrival of the mid-morning samosa and chai was the signal for Neel to leave the daftar. From then on the Seth’s attention would be claimed by a procession of other employees – shroffs, khazanadars, accountants, and the like. Neel, in the meanwhile, would repair to his tiny, smoky cubicle, beside the kitchen, to make a start on the job of turning the Seth’s thoughts and reflections into coherent prose – in Hindusthani or English as the case demanded. Although frequently difficult and always time-consuming, the process was rarely tedious: often, while copying out the finished compositions in his best nastaliq or Roman hand, Neel would be struck by how strangely challenging Bahram’s correspondence was. In the Seth’s letters, there were none of the flourishes, formulae and routine expressions that had played so large a part in his own correspondence, back when he was himself the master of a daftar; Bahram’s concerns were all about the here and now; whether prices would rise or fall, and and what it would mean for his business.