into English. The English equivalent of baton-a-foc, for instance, is definitely not ‘foc-stick’ – it is ‘jib-boom’.
And no, dear, nor were you well-advised to tell the baffled bosun that your intention was only to compliment him on his skill with ‘the mighty mast that protrudes from the front’. You should know, my dear Princesse de Puggleville, that sometimes it is not wise to persist in explaining oneself.
*
Bahram’s methods of work were not easy for Neel to deal with. Back in the past, when he had himself employed a host of scribes and secretaries, in his own daftar, he had seldom needed to communicate at any length with his crannies, munshis and gomustas, since they were far better schooled than he in the time-hallowed canons that dictated the form and content of a zemindar’s letters. Later, after his conviction for forgery, when he was awaiting transportation in Calcutta’s Alipore Jail, he had earned himself many favours by composing missives for other inmates – but these too had required little effort, for his fellow convicts were mainly unlettered men, and no matter whether they were writing to a relative at home, or to a chokra in the next ward, they had deferred to Neel’s literacy and left it to him to invent their words and shape their thoughts.
Such being his experience of letter-writing, Neel was caught unawares by the demands of Bahram’s correspondence: the Seth’s letters rarely followed any set forms and usages, being mostly intended to keep his associates informed of the situation in southern China. And nor could Neel expect any deference from the Seth, who seemed to think that a munshi was a minor flunkey – one who belonged, in the order of importance, somewhere between a valet and a shroff, his principal duties being those of tidying up his employer’s verbal attire, and of picking through the coinage of his vocabulary to separate what was of value from what was not.
Neel’s job was further complicated by the Seth’s habits of dictation: he always composed on his feet and his restless pacing seemed to add to the turbulence of his words, which often came pouring out in braided torrents of speech, each rushing stream being silted with the sediment of many tongues – Gujarati, Hindusthani, English, pidgin, Cantonese. To stop the Seth when he was in full flow was inconceivable, and to pose a question about this phrase or that, or to ask the meaning of one word or another, was to risk an explosion of irritability – queries had to be deferred till later, or better still, referred to Vico. In the interim all Neel could do, to make sense of this gurgling snowmelt of sound, was to pay close attention, not just to what Bahram said, but also to the gestures, signs and facial expressions with which he amplified, enlarged upon, and even negated the burden of his words. This unspoken idiom could not be lightly ignored: once when Neel rendered a sentence as ‘Mr Moddie affirms that he would be glad to comply’, Bahram took him to task for his negligence – ‘What-re? You didn’t see, how I was doing with my hand, like-this, like-this. How you take that to mean “yes”? You cannot see it is “no”? Just dreaming or what?’
And then there was the window, which was a perennial source of disruption in the daftar: even though Neel’s desk was in the far corner of the room, there was always a rich medley of sound to cope with, wafting in from below: the barrikin of barrowmen and the drunken bellowing of sailors on the dicky-run; the keening of moochers and the clattering of clapperdudgeons; the whistling of tame songbirds, being promenaded in their cages and outbursts of gong-banging to mark the passage of consequential personages – and so on. The cacophony that welled out of the Maidan changed from minute to minute.
If the window was a source of disruption for Neel, it was far more so for his employer, who would often break off in mid-sentence and stand there as if hypnotized. Outlined against the frame, in his dome-like turban and wide- skirted angarkha, the Seth’s form was so regal that Neel was sometimes led to wonder whether he was deliberately striking a pose for the benefit of the strollers on the Maidan. But Bahram was not a man who could stand still for long: after staring moodily into the distance, he would again begin to pace the floor, furiously, as though he were trying to outrun some hotly pursuing thought or memory. But then, glancing outside once more, he would spot some friend or acquaintance and his mood would change: leaping to the window he would thrust his head out and begin to shout greetings, sometimes in Gujarati (Sahib kem chho?), sometimes in Cantonese (Neih hou ma Ng sin-saang? Hou-noih-mouh-gin!); sometimes in pidgin (‘Chin-chin, Attock; long-tim-no see!’); and sometimes in English (‘Good morning, Charles! Are you well?’).
When his attention returned to his letter, he would frequently find that he had forgotten what he had intended to say. His face would cloud over and his tone would grow sharp as if to imply that the interruption was somehow Neel’s fault: ‘Achha, so then read the whole thing to me – from the beginning.’
The arrival of the mid-morning samosa and chai was the signal for Neel to leave the daftar. From then on the Seth’s attention would be claimed by a procession of other employees – shroffs, khazanadars, accountants, and the like. Neel, in the meanwhile, would repair to his tiny, smoky cubicle, beside the kitchen, to make a start on the job of turning the Seth’s thoughts and reflections into coherent prose – in Hindusthani or English as the case demanded. Although frequently difficult and always time-consuming, the process was rarely tedious: often, while copying out the finished compositions in his best nastaliq or Roman hand, Neel would be struck by how strangely challenging Bahram’s correspondence was. In the Seth’s letters, there were none of the flourishes, formulae and routine expressions that had played so large a part in his own correspondence, back when he was himself the master of a daftar; Bahram’s concerns were all about the here and now; whether prices would rise or fall, and and what it would mean for his business.
And yet, what exactly was this business? The strange thing was that despite all the time he spent with Bahram and all the letters he wrote for him, Neel had only a hazy idea of how his enterprise functioned. That most of his profits came from opium was clear enough, but exactly how much of it he traded, who he sold it to and where it went – all this was a mystery to Neel, for Bahram’s letters rarely made any reference to such matters. Could it be that unbeknownst to Neel, there were certain code words in the letters? Or could it be that he filled in some details in his own hand, in Gujarati, on the margins of the sheets that Neel handed to him? Or was it that certain letters were written for him by his other daftardars, men who were better acquainted with the functioning of the business? The last seemed the likeliest possibility, but somehow Neel was not persuaded of it: it seemed to him, rather, that all of Bahram’s employees – with the possible exception of Vico – knew only as much as they needed to and no more. Bahram’s daftardars were like the parts of a watch, each doing what was required of him but unaware of the functioning of the whole: only the Seth himself knew how the ensemble was put together, and for what purpose. And nor was this an accident: it was rather a function of some inborn skill that enabled him to manage his subordinates in such a way that they each worked efficiently within their own spheres while he alone was responsible for the whole.
This too made Neel think back on his own experience of presiding over a daftar, and it was only now that he understood exactly how bad he had been at the job: most of his employees had known more about his affairs than he had himself, and all his attempts to curry favour with them had had exactly the opposite effect. This realization, in turn, engendered an appreciation of Bahram’s talents that soon developed into a kind of exasperated admiration: there was no denying that the Seth was often maddening to work for, with all his little peccadilloes and eccentricities; yet there could be no doubt that he was a businessman of exeptional ability and vision: indeed it seemed quite likely to Neel that Bahram was, in his own sphere, a kind of genius.
It was evident too that Ah Fatt had been right to describe Bahram as a man who was widely liked, even loved. From his employees he commanded an almost fanatical loyalty, not only because he was a generous paymaster and fair in his dealings, but also because there was something in his manner that conveyed to them that he did not consider himself to be above, or better, than anyone on his staff. It was as if they knew that despite his wealth and his love of luxury, the Seth remained at heart a village boy, reared in poverty: his irritability was regarded as more endearing than offensive, and his occasional outbursts and dumbcowings were treated like vagaries of the weather and were never taken personally.
Nor was Bahram’s popularity restricted to the Accha Hong: writing notes of acceptance was another of Neel’s duties so he knew very well how much the Seth was in demand at the enclave’s gatherings.
The intensity of Fanqui-town’s social whirl was a source of constant amazement to Neel: that a place so small, and inhabited by such a peculiar assortment of sojourners, should have a social life at all seemed incredible to him, let alone one of such intensity. Astonishing, too, that all this activity was generated by such a paltry number of participants – for the foreign traders and their Chinese counterparts, counted together, added up to no more than a few hundred men (but then, as Vico once pointed out to Neel, these buggers were, after all, some of the world’s richest men; ‘and over here, they are all squeezed together, with hardly room to turn around. No families, nothing to do – they have to make their own fun, no? When no wife there is at home, who thinks of sitting down at his own table? And what kind of falto will go to bed early when there is no one who will scold?’).
Nor was it only the Seths and tai-pans and big merchants who knew how to enjoy themselves: while the
