The Last Dickens

Chapter 21

Bengal, India, July 1870

THE OPIUM DACOIT HAD BEEN CAPTURED. NOW HE HAD TO BE interrogated for more information relating to the crime-including the whereabouts of the stolen opium. Outside the room where this was to take place, Mason and Turner, of the Bengal Mounted Police, tried to be patient.

“I'm surprised he'd be found holed near his family village,” Mason said. “An obvious place for an escaped thief to hide!”

Turner sneered. “Not obvious enough, was it, Mason? We wasted a whole afternoon encamped in the mountains waiting for him, while Dickens tripped over him like a lucky fool.”

“Do you think the inspector from the Special Police will have some luck in there? Turner?”

“A lucky fool. That's Frank Dickens!”

“ARE YOU INNOCENT of that opium dacoity?”

The thief nodded.

“I understand that is what you have been explaining to our mounted officers,” said the special inspector. “Yet you are a registered dacoit. Lie down there, my son.”

The thief lay on the chabutra, the inspector offering a gentle hand to position him so that his feet were on the higher edge of the platform, his head the lower. He trembled in fear at what he knew was coming.

“The budna, please,” the inspector said to his assistant. Then he frowned at the prisoner as if apologizing for some minor personal rudeness.

“I HEAR HE'S mute as an Egyptian Sphinx.”

“Don't mumble,” Turner grunted in response, then added: “He's no mute.”

“He's barely said a word since he was arrested,” Mason pointed out. “That's what I meant. Even when they flogged him something awful. You think he'd dare to, after seeing how we captured his friend, with your carbine and my sword? ‘Course he had to jump through the train window-lost his head, that one.”

Turner grunted.

“Dickens says.”

“What?”

“Superintendent Dickens says the thief's scared. That he's hiding more than the theft.”

“Dickens doesn't-that damned stuttering scamp!” Turner replied. “He's the one who called in the inspector. I could have done the duty just fine-give me a whip and a rod on any dark-skinned heathen where you will, don't need no Special Police at all.” Turner pushed his chair away and paced down the hall.

“Turner? Where are you going? We're still to collect the prisoner when the inspector's finished.”

THE INSPECTOR HELD the budna, a copper vessel with an elongated spout, over the prisoner. He slowly poured water onto the upper lip of his subject. The water ran down the small cracks of his lips and collected in pools around his nostrils sending the man into spasms of drowning.

MASON STOOD FROM his chair, trembling. “You hear him shouting, Turner? It chills your blood.”

Turner wheeled back around and looked into the small square window on the door where the screams emerged-suddenly, he looked frightened. “What do you think he'll say, Mason?”

THE THIEF'S EYES filled with tears and looked as if they might burst.

“Sit up now,” said the still-smiling inspector, handing the copper vessel to his assistant.

It took a few minutes for the thief to find his breath again. “Take me to the baboo! Please!” he said as soon as he could form the words. “I shall confess all, your honor, and tell of my other thefts, but no more, for God's sake! Take me to him!”

“At once, my son.” Gently the inspector helped the prisoner to his feet. “And will you tell us where you've hidden the opium?” he added.

“Yes! Yes!” said the thief.

AS THE THIEF was interrogated, Frank Dickens was seeking different answers, answers he did not believe the thief could provide. For these, he needed to journey to the village where the thief's partner in the crime, the notorious Narain, had lived.

This was no pleasant journey. The natives held two sets of poles, front and back, of the palanquin, or palki, on their shoulders as they ran. Inside the palki, tossed inside a thin blanket, was the wearied traveler. Frank tried to sleep as the natives chanted to the Kali goddess for their strength. When will they be rid of their gods and goddesses, wondered Frank as he swayed inside the rickety structure. It was not the night heat, nor the bearers’ primitive singing that kept him from sleeping as the journey continued through the night but the foul odor of the slow flame of dirty rags and rotten oil that lighted the way for the palki at the front of the vessel.

A while later, they had stopped. Frank stirred, realizing he had fallen asleep and wondered what he had been dreaming. In India he never seemed to remember his dreams. It was morning and Superintendent Frank Dickens had reached the distant Bengalee village of his destination. There was no magistrate or native official to greet him, for he deliberately had not made his sojourn known in advance.

On the road toward a crumbling temple in the distance, the fertile fields teemed with the reddish purple opium poppy. The poppy replaced most of the food crops, and left the surrounding land dry and brittle.

Crossing the opium fields, his police uniform sparkling from its brass on this sunny morning, he saw the ryots, or peasant farmers, men, women, children. They were scraping residue from the opium poppies with an iron sittooha into an earthen pot. Later, the drug would be packed into balls for shipment by natives in long rows at British-controlled warehouses. Frank felt a wave of nausea run through him as he passed the pungent poppies. A ryot looked up from his hoe and suddenly dropped it and ran. Dickens found the patch of land he'd been working and saw that the crop here was in fact rice. He frowned. The opium was mandated, the rice illegal.

The British government paid the ryots to grow the poppy instead of other crops, but they also ordered it, when they had to, by the point of bayonets.

This was one of the poorest villages, Dickens knew, fraught constantly with the threat of famine because of the loss of their natural agriculture. Three years earlier, during the Orissa famine, starvation spread quickly across villages like this. Parents, it was said among the policemen and English officials, had eaten their own children. The government did not want the opium cultivation to get a bad reputation with the moralists back home in England, and so the army delivered as much food as they could to the poorest villages. Still, more than five hundred thousand acres in Bengal at any time were dedicated to the opium poppy, and no amount of rations could make up for the loss of agriculture.

The adjacent river, once bustling with trade to and from Calcutta, trickled quietly now that the English had finished building the railroads for faster transport of opium and spices. Instead of the commerce of the past, men, women, and children now bathed and played there. Elders prayed and chatted as the children splashed about. Everyone in the village went outside at this early hour because later it would be even hotter.

Asking for directions from a group of near naked natives, Frank, stopping to wipe his brow and take water, reached a mud hut in a narrow lane. On the side of the house was a pile of dried plants, dead animals, and rubbish. An even stronger odor attacked him from higher up. Stuck to the walls of the house, clumps of cow dung were being heated in the sun and dried for use as fuel. Under the veranda, a striking young woman, bareheaded and barefoot, was preparing food. She had not lit a fire-a sign she was in mourning. A naked toddler held onto both of her legs for balance. Flies were swarming around the woman, the child, the grain, the ghee.

“You are the widow Narain?” Frank Dickens asked, stepping forward.