Sea of Poppies

The Chrestomathy is a work that cannot, in principle, ever be considered finished. One reason for this is that new and previously unknown word-chits in Neel's hand continue to turn up in places where he once resided. These unearthings have been regular enough, and frequent enough, to confound the idea of ever bringing the work to completion. But the Chrestomathy is also, in its very nature, a continuing dialogue, and the idea of bringing it to an end is one that evokes superstitious horror in all of Neel's descendants. Be it then clearly understood that it was not with any such intention that this compilation was assembled: it was rather the gradual decay of Neel's papers which gave birth to the proposal that the Chrestomathy (or what there was of it) be put into a form that might admit of wider circulation.

It remains only to explain that since the Chrestomathy deals exclusively with the English language, Neel included, with very few exceptions, only such words as had already found a place in an English dictionary, lexicon or word-list. This is why its entries are almost always preceded by either the symbol of the Oracle (a +) or the names of other glossaries, dictionaries or lexicons; these are, as it were, their credentials for admittance to the vessel of migration that was the Chrestomathy. However, the power to grant full citizenship rested, in Neel's view, solely with the Oracle (thus his eagerness to scrutinize its rolls). Once a word had been admitted into the Oracle's cavern, it lost the names of its sponsors and was marked forever with its certificate of residence: the symbol +. 'After the Oracle has spoken the name of a word, the matter is settled; from then on the expression in question is no longer (or no longer only) Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Hind. [1], Laskari or anything else – in its English

incarnation, it is to be considered a new coinage, with a new persona and a renewed destiny.'

These then are the simple conventions that Neel's descendants have adhered to, m arking a + upon every girmitiya that has found a place within the Oracle's tablets. Who exactly made these marks, and at what date, is now impossible to ascertain, so dense is the accretion of markings and jottings upon the margins of Neel's notes. Previous attempts to untangle these notations caused so much confusion that the present writer was instructed merely to bring the markings up to date, and in such a fashion that any interested party would be able to verify the findings in the most recent edition of the Oracle. This he has attempted to do to the best of his ability, although many errors have, no doubt, evaded his scrutiny.

When the mantle of wordy-major was placed upon the shoulders of the present writer, it came with a warning from his el ders: his task, they said, was not to attempt to re-create the Chrestomathy as Neel might have written it in his own lifetime; he was merely to provide a summary of a continuing exchange of words between generations. It was with these instructions in mind that he has laboured to preserve the timbre of Neel's etymological reflections: in the pages that follow, whenever quotation marks are used without attribution, Neel must be presumed to be the author of the passage in question.

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abihowa/abhowa (*The Glossary[2]):'A finer word for "climate" was never coined,' writes Neel, 'joining as it does the wind and the water, in Persian, Arabic and Bengali. Were there to be, in matters of language, such a thing as a papal indulgence the n I would surely expend mine in ensuring a place for this fine coinage.'

abrawan (*The Glossary): 'The name of this finest of muslins comes, as Sir Henry notes, from the Persian for "flowing water".'

+achar: 'There are those who would gloss this as "pickle",' writes Neel, 'although that word is better applied to the definition than the thing defined.'

agil (*Roebuck[3]): 'Many will raise their eyebrows when they learn that this was the lascar's equivalent of the English sailor's "fore" or "for'ard", just as peechil was his equivalent for "aft". Why not, one might ask,agey and peechh ey, as would seem natural for most speakers of Hind.? Could it be that these essential nautical terms were borrowed from the languages of Cutch or Sind? Often have I asked but never been satisfactorily answered. But to this I can testify, in corroboration of the good Lieutenant's definition, that it is indisputably true that the Laskari terms are always agil and peechil, never agey-peechhey.'

alliballie muslin (*The Glossary): 'There are those, including Sir Henry, who would consider this a muslin of fine quality, but in the Raskhali wardrobe it was always relegated to one of the lower shelves.'

+almadia: An Arab riverboat of a sort that was rarely seen in India: Neel would have found it hard to account for its presence in the Oracle.

alzbel (*Roebuck): 'Thus does the ever-musical Laskari tongue render the watchman's cry of "All's well": how well I remember it…'

arkati (*The Barney-Book[4]): 'This word, widely used by seamen to mean 'ship's pilot', is said to be derived from the erstwhile princely state of Arcot, near Madras, the Nawab of which was reputed to have in his employ all the pilots in the Bay of Bengal. Scholars will no doubt cavil at Neel's unquestioning acceptance of Barrère and Leland's derivation, but this entry is a good example of how, when forced to choose between a colourful and a reliable etymology, Neel always picked the former.

+atta/otta/otter: Such are the many English spellings for the common Indian word for 'wheat flour'. The first of these variants is the one anointed by the Oracle. But the last, which had the blessing of Barrère and Leland, was the one most favoured by Neel, and under his own roof, he would not allow the use of any other. The memory of this was passed along in the family even unto my own generation. Thus was I able recently to confound a pretentious pundit who was trying to persuade an unusually gullible audience that the phrase 'kneading the otter' was once a euphemism of the same sort as 'flaying the ferret' and 'skinning the eel'.

[1] Whether this abbreviation refers to a specific language (Hindi?/Urdu?/Hindusthani?) or merely to all things Indian has long been a subject of controversy within the family. Suffice it to say that the matter can never be satisfactorily resolved since Neel only ever used this contracted form. Chrestomathy, is a reference always to Lt. Thomas Roebuck's pioneering work of lexicography: An English and Hindostanee Naval Dictionary of Technical Terms and Sea Phrases and also the Various Words of Command Given in Working a Ship, &C. with Many Sentences of Great Use at Sea; to which Is Prefixed a Short Grammar of the Hindostanee Language. First printed in Calcutta, this lexicon was reprinted in London in 1813 by the booksellers to the Hon. East India Company: Black, Parry & Co. of Leadenhall Street. Neel once described it as the most important glossary of the nineteenth century – because as he put it, 'in its lack, the age of sail would have been becalmed in a kalmariya, with sahibs and lascars mouthing incomprehensible nothings at each other.' It is certainly true that this modest word-list was to have an influence that probably far exceeded Lt. Roebuck's expectations. Seven decades after its publication it was revised by the Rev. George Small, and reissued by W. H. Allen & Co. under the title: A Laskari Dictionary or Anglo-Indian Vocabulary of Nautical Terms and Phrases in English and Hindustani (in 1882): this latter edition was available well into the twentieth century. The Laskari Dictionary was Neel's favourite lexicon and his use of it was so frequent that he appears to have developed a sense of personal familiarity with the author.

[2] It needs here to be explained that the word Glossary, whenever it occurs in the Chrestomathy, is a reference to an authority that was, for Neel's purposes, one of the few to be empowered with the right to award certificates of migration into English: to wit, Sir Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell's Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Neel appears to have acquired a copy of this famous dictionary when it first began to circulate among a privileged few, in the 1880s, before it came to be known by the name Hobson-Jobson. Although his personal copy has never been found, there can be no doubt that the frequent references to 'Sir Henry' in the Chrestomathy are directed always towards Sir Henry Yule – just as 'the Glossary,' in his usage, stands always for the dictionary for which that great lexicographer was chiefly responsible.

[3] The name Roebuck, when it occurs in the

[4] The phrase Barney-Book, when it occurs in the Chrestomathy, is always in reference to Albert Barrère and Charles Leland's Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant, which was yet another of Neel's girmit-granting authorities. He possessed a well-worn copy of the edition published by the Ballantyne Press in 1889. His choice of shorthand for this work appears to be a reference to Barrère and Leland's tracing of barney to the gypsy word for 'mob' or 'crowd'. This in turn, they adduced to be, in one of those wild leaps of speculation for which they were justly famous, a derivation from the Hind. bharna – 'to fill' or 'increase'.