'Get his bleedin arse out o' me sight.'
In a small adjoining room, Neel was handed a bundle of folded clothing. A sepoy enumerated the articles as he handed them over: one gamchha, two vests, two dhotis of dungri weave, one blanket; better take care of them, they're all you'll have for the next six months.
The unwashed dungaree cloth was thick and rough, its texture more like jute sacking than woven cotton. When shaken loose, the dhoti proved to be half the size, in length as well as breadth, of the six-yard stretch of fabric to which Neel was accustomed. Tied at the waist, it would fall no lower than the knees and was clearly meant to be worn as a langot – but Neel had never had occasion to tie a loincloth before and his hands fumbled so much that one of the sepoys snapped: What are you waiting for? Cover yourself! – as if it were by his own choice that he had been stripped of his clothes. The blood rushed to Neel's head and he thrust his pelvis forward, pointing at himself with a lunatic's abandonment: Why? What have you not seen? What's left?
A look of pity came into the eyes of the sepoy: Have you lost all shame? And Neel nodded, as if to say yes, that's right: for it was true that at this moment he felt no shame at all, nor any other form of responsibility for his body; it was as if he had vacated his own flesh in the process of yielding it to the tenancy of the prison.
Move, come on! Losing patience, the sepoys took the dhoti out of Neel's hands and showed him how to knot it so that the ends could be pulled between his legs and tucked in at the back. Then, using their spear-butts as prods, they hurried him down a dim corridor into a cell that was small but brilliantly lit, with candles and oil-lamps. In the centre of the room, a bare-bodied, white-bearded man sat waiting on an ink-stained mat: his torso was covered with an intricate network of tattoos and on a folded square of cloth in front of him lay an array of glistening needles. The man could only be a godna-wala, a tattooist: when this dawned on Neel he spun around, as if to make a lunge for the exit – but the gambit was familiar to the sepoys who wrestled him quickly to the ground; holding him immobile, they carried him over to the mat and positioned him so that his head was resting on the tattooist's knee and he was looking up at his venerable face.
There was a gentleness in the old man's eyes that allowed Neel to find his voice. Why? he said, as the needle came towards his forehead. Why are you doing this?
It's the law, said the tattooist peaceably. All transportees have to be marked so they'll be recognized if they try to escape.
Then the needle hissed against his skin, and there was no space in Neel's mind for anything but the spasms of sensation that were radiating outwards from his forehead: it was as if the body that he had thought to have vacated were taking revenge on him for having harboured that illusion, reminding him that he was its sole tenant, the only being to whom it could announce its existence through its capacity for pain.
The tattooist paused, as if in pity, and whispered: Here, eat this. His hand circled over Neel's face and pushed a little ball of gum between his lips. It will help; eat it…
As the opium began to dissolve in his mouth, Neel realized that it was not the intensity of the pain that was dulled by the drug, but rather its duration: it so blunted his consciousness of time that the operation, which must have taken hours of painstaking work, seemed to last only for a few concentrated moments. Then, as if through a dense winter fog, he heard the tattooist's voice whispering in his ear: Raja-sah'b… Raja-sah'b…
Neel opened his eyes to see that his head was still in the old man's lap; the sepoys, in the meanwhile, had drowsed off in the corners of the cell.
What is it? he said, stirring.
Don't worry, Raja-sahib, the tattooist whispered. I've watered the ink; the mark will not last beyond a few months.
Neel was too befuddled to make sense of this: Why? Why would you do that for me?
Raja-sahib, don't you know me?
No.
The tattooist brought his lips still closer: My family is from Raskhali; your grandfather gave us land to settle there; for three generations we've eaten your salt.
Placing a mirror in Neel's hands, he bowed his head: Forgive me, Raja-sahib, for what I had to do…
Raising the mirror to his face, Neel saw that his hair had been cut short and two rows of tiny Roman letters had been inscribed unevenly upon the right side of his forehead:
forgerer
alipore 1838.
Thirteen
Zachary's room, in the Watsongunge boarding house, was just about wide enough to turn around in, and the bed was a string pallet, on which he had spread a layer of his own clothes, to protect his skin from the barbed roughness of its coconut-fibre ropes. At the foot of the bed, so close that he could almost rest his toes on its edge, was a window – or rather a square hole that had long since lost its shutters. The opening looked out on Watsongunge Lane – a winding string of grag-ghars, poxparlours and boarding houses that unspooled into the shipyard where the Ibis was being careened, caulked and re-fitted in preparation for her next voyage. Mr Burnham had been none too pleased to know of Zachary's choice of lodging: 'Watsongunge? There's no more godless place on earth, save it be the North End in Boston. Why would a man step into a galavant like that when he could enjoy the simple comforts of the Reverend Johnson's Mission House for Sailors?'
Zachary had dutifully gone to take a look at the Mission House, but only to come away after catching sight of Mr Crowle, who had already taken a room there. On Jodu's advice he had decided to go instead to the boarding house on Watsongunge Lane: the fact that it was a few minutes' walk from the shipyard had served as his excuse. Whether or not his employer was satisfied by this reasoning was not quite clear to Zachary, for of late he had begun to suspect that Mr Burnham had set a spy on him. Once, answering a knock at a suspiciously late hour of the night, Zachary had opened his door to find Mr Burnham's gomusta standing outside. The man had leant this way and that, as if he were trying to see if Zachary had smuggled anyone into his room. When asked what he was doing there, he claimed to be the bearer of a present, which turned out to be a pot of half-melted butter: sensing that it was a snare of some kind, Zachary had refused to accept it. Later, the proprietor of the boarding house, an Armenian, had informed him that the gomusta had asked if Zachary was ever to be seen in the company of prostitutes – except that the word he'd used apparently was 'cowgirls'. Cowgirls! As it happened, after his meeting with Paulette, the thought of buying a woman had become repugnant to Zachary so the gomusta's snooping had gone unrewarded. But he'd carried on undeterred: just a few nights ago, Zachary had caught sight of him, skulking in the lane, wearing a bizarre disguise – an orange robe that made him look like some kind of duppy mad-woman.