Flood of Fire

by Amitav Ghosh

There were times when Shireen felt herself to be drowning in the peculiar kind of loneliness that comes of living in a house where the servants far outnumber their employers.

Calcutta was the one place he had heard of – it is known here as Galigada.

Spurring his horse ahead, he trotted past the part of the caravan that was reserved for the camp-following gentry – the Brahmin pundits, the munshi, the bazar-chaudhuri with his account books, the Kayasth dubash, who interpreted for the officers, and the baniya-modi, who was the paltan’s banker and money-monger, responsible for advancing loans to the sepoys and for arranging remittances to their families. These men were travelling in the same cart, chewing paan as they went.

On hearing of my part in it, he’d said that he wanted to yam-chah (drink tea) with me.

Yum cha

Every morning he would dutifully study the serpent that crept out of his bottom, and whenever he found it to be dull in colour or less than properly ‘coiled and ready to strike’ he would report the matter to his trainers and change his diet according to their prescriptions.

Shit

The other girls were kept indoors as much as possible, to protect their complexions, but Deeti’s chances of a good marriage were slight in any case because of her ill-aligned stars, so it was decided that she needed to know how to work the land.

But that night his training proved unequal to the task: he woke suddenly to find that he had succumbed to a swapnadosha – a ‘dream-mishap’.

As for booty taken in battle, the splitting of the spoils was always scrupulously fair. Why, after a major battle in Mysore, the English general had kept only half the loot for himself! The rest was divided fairly amongst the various ranks of officers and sepoys.

As you know, in the old days the armies of Hindustan were like jungles – men went into them to hide, so that they could change their origins. After a few years of fighting, ordinary julaha Muslims would pass themselves off as high-class Afghans, and half the men who called themselves Rajputs were just junglees and hill-people. Our badshahs and maharajahs put up with it because they were desperate for recruits.

Jammu labour

But the Gurkhas’ warnings were ignored because the Qing did not entirely trust them; nor were they convinced that the Firingees the Nepalis spoke of were the same people as the Yinglizis who traded at Canton.

The Burmese were experienced in jungle warfare and did not offer the set-piece battles at which the British excelled; nor was the terrain such that the British could fully exploit their advantage in artillery.

Football

Sentences of ostracism had been passed before in the paltan, not just among the sepoys but also among the officers: when they did it to one of their own they’d say that he had been ‘sent to Coventry’; among them too it amounted to a sentence of expulsion.

He disputes everything, even the way the English use the word ‘China’. There is no similar term in Chinese he says; the English have borrowed it from Sanskrit and Pali.

Compton says that for centuries people in Guangdong have taken comfort in the thought that saang gou wohng dai yuhn – ‘the mountains are high and the Emperor is far away’.

It isn’t that Guangdong lacks for men with experience of working on Western ships. But most of them are reluctant to reveal that they have travelled abroad for it is considered a crime to do so without informing the authorities.

Among sepoys it had long been said that alcohol was the white soldier’s secret weapon: it was what made him such a fearsome fighter. It was widely believed that this was the reason why British units were almost always chosen to lead charges in the battlefield – because the stiff doses of liquor that they were given beforehand made them almost suicidally reckless.

it turned out that Colombo, for all its fame as a port, did not have a proper harbour; ships had to anchor at a roadstead, well out to sea. That was where they were provisioned and unloaded, by flotillas of bumboats, bandar-craft and lighters.

Hence hambantota

‘Captain Chillingworth is laid down with severe indispositions: one day stool is like porridge next day like curds. Tongue has also become black and furry, like bandicoot’s tail.

Shit

whose names had been recorded by the captors as Chan-li and Chi-tu: it turned out that they were actually Chinnaswamy and Chhotu Mian, from the Madras and Bengal presidencies respectively.

The Nemesis was made almost entirely of metal; there was so much iron on her that a special device had to be fitted on her compass to correct the magnetic deflection.

You see, said Compton bitterly. This is what happens when merchants and traders begin to run wars – hundreds of lives depend on bribes.