Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh

As for Deeti, the more she ministered the drug, the more she came to respect its potency: how frail a creature was a human being, to be tamed by such tiny doses of this substance! She saw now why the factory in Ghazipur was so diligently patrolled by the sahibs and their sepoys—for if a little bit of this gum could give her such power over the life, the character, the very soul of this elderly woman, then with more of it at her disposal, why should she not be able to seize kingdoms and control multitudes? And surely this could not be the only such substance upon the earth?

He could see only the roof of the Raskhali Rajbari, and on it, outlined against the dimming sky, his son’s head, leaning on a parapet, as if in wait: he recalled that he had said he would be back in ten minutes, and this seemed to him now the most unpardonable of all the lies in his life.

Afterwards, when she lay enveloped in his arms, he said, in his rough, hoarse voice: Ká sochawá? What’re you thinking? . . . Thinking how you saved me today; sochat ki tu bacháwelá . . . It was myself I saved today, he said in a whisper. Because if you had died, I couldn’t have lived; jinda na rah sakelá . . .

It was as if the poppy had become the carrier of the Karamnasa’s malign taint.

And when you come back, will you bring me bangles? Hamré khátir churi lelaiya?

There was something about this that seemed so absurd to Neel that he had to drop his head for fear of betraying a smile: for if his presence in the dock proved anything at all, it was surely the opposite of the principle of equality so forcefully enunciated by the judge? In the course of his trial it had become almost laughably obvious to Neel that in this system of justice it was the English themselves—Mr Burnham and his ilk—who were exempt from the law as it applied to others: it was they who had become the world’s new Brahmins.

The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.’

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.

In the fo’c’sle lay all the filth and vileness and venery of being a man, and it was necessary that it be kept contained to spare the world the stench of the bilges.

He was hanging from the shrouds in an attitude she knew all too well: exactly so had they played together in the tall trees of the Botanical Gardens across the river. She was aware of a twinge of envy: how she would have loved to be up there, hanging on the ropes with him; but instead, here she was, on the stepladder, swathed from head to toe, while he was free and at large in the open air—the worst of it was that it was she who had always been the better climber.

My salams to all of you, he shouted, waving to the unheeding shore: Jodu is on his way . . . oh you whores of Watgunge . . . you crimps of Bhutghat . . . Jodu’s turned a lascar and he is gone . . . Gone!

now, as she watched the banks through the screen of her ghungta, her eyes sifted through the greenery as if by habit: there, beneath the upthrust elbow-roots of a mangrove, was a little shrub of wild basil, Ocimum adscendens; it was Mr Voight, the Danish curator of the Gardens at Serampore—and her father’s best friend—who had confirmed that this plant was indeed to be found in these forests. And here, growing thick along the banks, was Ceriops roxburgiana, identified by the horrible Mr Roxburgh, who’d been so unkind to her father that the very sound of his name would make him blanch; and there, on the grassy verge, just visible above the mangroves, was a spiky-leafed shrub she knew all too well: Acanthus lambertii. It was at her own insistence that her father had given it this name—because she had literally stumbled upon it, having been poked in the leg by one of its spiny leaves. Now, watching the familiar foliage slip by, Paulette’s eyes filled with tears: these were more than plants to her, they were the companions of her earliest childhood and their shoots seemed almost to be her own, plunged deep into this soil; no matter where she went or for how long, she knew that nothing would ever tie her to a place as did these childhood roots.

at home too, during village weddings, it was always the women who sang when the bride was torn from her parents’ embrace—it was as if they were acknowledging, through their silence, that they, as men, had no words to describe the pain of the child who is exiled from home.

Listening to her now, he knew why Bhojpuri was the language of this music: because of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing, and separation—of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home.

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.

Whatever the case, he saw now that it was a rare, diffcult and improbable thing for two people from worlds apart to find themselves linked by a tie of pure sympathy, a feeling that owed nothing to the rules and expectations of others. He understood also that when such a bond comes into being, its truths and falsehoods, its obligations and privileges, exist only for the people who are linked by it, and then in such a way that only they can judge the honour and dishonour of how they conduct themselves in relation to each other.

Why had no one told her that love’s twin was not hate but cowardice?

By this time, the drumbeat in Kalua’s head had attuned itself so accurately to the subedar’s paces that he knew exactly when the lash was uncoiling through the air, and he knew, too, exactly when to pull his hand free. As the subedar came rushing forward, he torqued his torso on the fulcrum of his waist and snatched the lash out of the air as it was curling towards him. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it snaking back so that it looped itself around Bhyro Singh’s ox-like neck. Then, with a single, flowing sweep of his arm, he pulled the lash tight, jerking it with such force that before anyone could take a step or utter a sound, the subedar was lying dead on the deck, his neck broken.