*
For Neel and Ah Fatt, the journey to Singapore was exceptionally slow: the Bugis schooner they had boarded at Great Nicobar was on its way back from the Hajj, and was obliged to make many stops along the Sumatran coast, to drop off the pilgrims. As a result the trip was prolonged by several days. They reached Singapore at low tide, so the schooner had to drop anchor in the outer harbour. Instead of waiting for the tides to change, the passengers pooled their coins together to hire a Chulia lighter to take them upriver to Boat Quay.
The mouth of the river was clogged with vessels – proas, sampans, junks, lorchas and dhows. In this ragtag flotilla of sea-and river-craft one vessel stood out: a medium-sized three-master of superb craftsmanship. She was anchored off the river mouth and was so positioned that the lighter had to pass close by her starboard beam. The ship’s chiselled lines and rakish profile seemed to call special attention to the damage she had suffered; through the bandaging of nets that swathed her prow the evidence of her injury was clearly visible: there was a huge cavity where her jib-boom and figurehead should have been.
Many heads turned to stare at the decapitated ship and Neel noticed that Ah Fatt, in particular, was mesmerized by the sight of the damaged vessel – he gazed at it so fixedly that his knuckles turned white on the gunwales.
By the time they reached Boat Quay it was dark. They crossed the river, intending to seek out one of the many doss-houses where lascars, coolies and other working men could rent some floor space for a couple of coppers. But then Ah Fatt changed his mind. Walking along the embankment, he said ‘Hungry! Come, we find kitchen-boat.’
Kitchen fires were burning on many of the small boats that lined the shore, and on several of them groups of people – mainly Chinese men – could be seen eating and drinking. Ah Fatt stopped to appraise each in turn but none seemed to satisfy him. After walking on for a bit he came suddenly to a halt and gestured to Neel to follow him across a gangplank: his decision was made without hesitation, although on what basis Neel could not tell, for this boat seemed, if anything, somewhat darker and less frequented than the others.
‘Why this one? How is it any different?’
‘Never mind. Come.’
The boat was manned by a round-faced younger woman and a couple who looked as though they might have been her grandparents: they seemed to have finished for the day, and the older man was reclining on a mat when Ah Fatt shouted a few words across the gangplank. Whether these were greetings or questions, Neel could not tell, but their effect, in any event, was magical, instantly transforming the somnolent boat: the older couple broke into welcoming smiles while the younger woman beckoned energetically as she answered Ah Fatt.
‘What is she saying?’
‘She say Uncle and Aunt go to sleep now, but she happy make food.’
The warmth of the welcome seemed all the more surpising to Neel because both he and Ah Fatt looked like penniless vagabonds, in their threadbare pyjamas and soiled tunics, with their bundles slung over their shoulders. ‘What did you say to them?’ he asked. ‘Why do they seem so happy to see you?’
‘Spoke in boat language,’ said Ah Fatt, in his laconic way. ‘They understood. Never mind. Time to eat rice. And drink. We drink Canton-grog.’
The kitchen-boat was of a curious shape: it looked as though its mid-section had been carved out, leaving it with a raised stem and stern. At the rear was a wooden ‘house’ with a heavy door, and at the other end, between the bows, there was a thatch-covered area with open sides: this was where customers ate, sitting around a couple of raised planks that served as tables. The carved-out mid-section was where the cooking was done: the cook had only to rise to her feet to put the food upon the ‘tables’.
After they had seated themselves, Ah Fatt leant into the well of the kitchen space and had a brief exchange with the young woman. The conversation ended with him pointing to the roof of the ‘house’, where clusters of live chickens dangled upside down, trussed by their feet. The woman reached up and picked a chicken off the roof, plucking it from its covey as though it were a fruit on a vine. There was a brief squawking and flapping and then the bird, now headless but still trussed, was dropped over the side of the boat, to flap its wings in the river. Slowly the sound died away and a minute later bits of offal went into a fish-basket that was suspended beside the boat, producing a boiling, thrashing noise. There followed the hissing of hot oil, and soon a dish of fried liver, gizzards and intestines appeared before them.
The tastes were so vivid that Neel dispensed with chopsticks and fell upon the food with his hands. Yet Ah Fatt, despite having declared himself to be hungry, seemed hardly to notice the dish – no sooner had he finished talking to the cook than his eyes and his attention returned to the jibless vessel across the river.
‘Why do you keep staring at that ship, Ah Fatt?’ Neel said at last. ‘What’s so special about it?’
Ah Fatt shook his head as though he had been woken from a trance. ‘If I tell, you not believe me.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
‘That ship belong… my family. My father.’ Ah Fatt gave a hoot of laughter.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Only that. It belong my father family.’
A fiery, sour-smelling liquor had appeared before them now, and Ah Fatt poured some into a small white cup. Then he took a sip and laughed, in the way he sometimes did when he was embarrassed or uneasy. Whether this was a sign of seriousness or frivolity, Neel could not tell, for with Ah Fatt the outward manifestations of inner states were not as they were with other people: in the few months that he had known him, Neel had discovered that where Ah Fatt was concerned, bouts of apparently childlike silliness could sometimes be symptoms of seething anger, while a spell of brooding silence could betoken nothing more portentous than a fit of drowsiness.
Now despite the laughter, Neel could sense that Ah Fatt was not joking, or at least, not entirely: between him and the ship across the river there was some powerful but conflicted connection, some link that he was trying to resist.
‘What’s the ship’s name then?’ he said, on a note of challenge, half-hoping that Ah Fatt would not know the answer.
The reply came back without a missed breath: ‘Name: Anahita. In Father’s religion, that the name of the goddess of water. Like our A-Ma. Before, had statue in front, of goddess. It was – what do you call it -?’
‘… the figurehead?’
‘Figurehead. Gone now. Family will be sad. Especially Grandfather, who built ship.’
‘ “Grandfather”?’ said Neel. ‘On your father’s side, you mean?’
‘No,’ said Ah Fatt. ‘On side of Father’s Elder Wife. Seth Rustamjee Mistrie: famous shipbuilder of Bombay…’
He was interupted by the cook, who stood up to hand over a dish of browned chicken feet. Ah Fatt picked out a piece and offered it to her with his chopsticks, and after a few moments of laughter and joking, she allowed him to slip it between her teeth. Then she slapped his hand away, with a giggle, and he turned back to Neel.
‘Sorry,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘Long time see no woman. No chance do jaahk.’ He laughed and poured more liquor into their cups. ‘Only see you. Two of us, feet tied like chickens.’ He pointed at the trussed birds on the boat’s roof and laughed again.
Neel nodded: ‘It’s true.’
Through their time at sea they had been so closely bound and confined that it was impossible to move or turn except in tandem. Neel had never spent so much time with another human being, in such close proximity, never before experienced such extended intimacy with another physical presence – and yet now, as often before, he had the feeling that he knew nothing at all about Ah Fatt.
‘Do you mean to tell me,’ said Neel, ‘that you’re related to Seth Rustamjee Mistrie?’
‘Yes,’ said Ah Fatt. ‘Through Father. His Elder Wife is Seth’s daughter. For a long time even I did not know…’
Ah Fatt was almost at the end of his boyhood when he found out that he had connections, relatives, in faraway Bombay. As a child he had been told that he was an orphan, that his mother and father had died when he was a newborn, and that he was being brought up by his widowed Eldest Aunt – his Yee Ma. This was the story that was told to everyone who knew them, on the Canton waterfront and in Fanqui-town. There was nothing about Ah Fatt’s looks to betray his paternity, not even his complexion, a sun-weathered tint being not uncommon among boat-people. Growing up, he did not think of his family as being different from the others around him, except in one respect, which was that they had a rich benefactor, ‘Uncle Barry’, a ‘White-Hat-Alien’ from India, who happened to
