The Strangler Vine (5 page)

A broad native swathed in enormous wrappings, whom I had never seen before, was standing over me. He had a fine luxuriant black beard, and skin like polished mahogany. ‘A fine good morning to you. I am Mir Aziz, sahib. I have been for many years in the service of
Bahadur Company
– that is to say the Honourable East India Company. And I am come to conduct you to Mr Blake.’

I sat up slowly, and the blood thundered into my ears. I stood, trying to stave off the dizzying nausea that overwhelmed me. I stumbled, and the native caught my elbow, holding it just long enough to prevent me from falling over, and letting it go as soon as I was steady. I called for my
khitmatgur
, but there was no sign of him. It appeared he had absconded in the night along with some coins and the last of my silver cutlery. My guide affected not to see my embarrassment and withdrew as I dressed and attempted to make my toilet. I gathered the remainder of my possessions, namely my weapons – a matchlock rifle, sabre and light pistol – several packs of clothing, a small air-tight drum containing two dress uniforms and a small trunk. Outside on a bullock cart was my tent,
charpai
, folding chair, and a beautiful copper shaving basin with a cedarwood folding tripod base for which I had paid a small fortune. I was relieved to see the
syce
was still there, though scarcely in a better state than I.

‘Sar,’ said the native who called himself Mir Aziz, looking over my belongings. ‘I beg your pardon most humbly, but it will not be possible to bring these things. It is only pack-horse that we are bringing. Tent and charpai and’ – he pointed my basin and my trunk – ‘too heavy, too big.’

I stood for a moment, gathering myself. ‘Sar,’ he said more softly. ‘Tent is requiring three men just to carry, three men to put up every night. We are five in number. Too few. Blake Sahib has small tents. Perhaps you have not been informed of this.’

I was feeling too ill to argue and eventually I simply waved my assent. The basin, the tent and the bed were deposited by the bungalow steps. The trunk and the chair, however, I would not leave.

It was still dark and raining lightly as we made our way through the city. By the time we reached the large tangled banyan tree outside the Botanical Gardens, the sun’s rays were streaking the sky. Six lanterns, each in a thick penumbra of circling insects, lit three waiting figures wrapped in blankets. Mir Aziz rode up to them and murmured something. I hung back, embarrassed. I was two hours late. The middle figure pushed his blanket from his head, and I saw it was Mr Blake. I could hardly tell him from the other two natives.
I saw we would be five, a small party indeed. Beyond them I could see perhaps five further pack-horses.

I dismounted clumsily, turned to one side and vomited. I gave the reins of my horse to my
syce
, who was to deliver him to the new owner. Mr Blake glanced in my direction, muttered something in Hindoostanee to Mir Aziz, and strode off abruptly to mount his horse. I had intended to apologize. I decided not to.

Mir Aziz said, ‘Your horse.’ He pointed at a small, dumpy, bay-coloured pony. It was clear that given my height I would look absurd on it. I wondered if it would even carry me. I looked wistfully at my own handsome skittish gelding, who would never manage ninety miles in three days. Then he said, ‘Many apologies, sahib, but there is no place for box or chair.’

One of the other natives climbed on to the cart and threw my trunk on to the ground, where it crashed heavily and made an alarming cracking sound. I gave an incoherent shout and ran to it. On to the ground had spilled several boxes of Windsor soap, my eau de cologne – now broken – the last of my silver cutlery, some clothing and all the books I had saved and borrowed and scavenged over the years.

‘I will not leave them.’

‘Better to leave precious things in Calcutta, sahib.’

I knew it too well. But there was no one in Calcutta to whom I could bear to entrust them.

Mir Aziz took pity on me. ‘Chair we must leave, but it is being possible to make pack for precious things, sahib.’ He said something to one of the other natives. Two pieces of sailcloth were brought from the pack-horses, and Mir Aziz laid them on the cart and gestured for me to open the box. It was clear I could not bring everything. In desperation I grabbed Mountstuart’s writings, a few volumes of Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton’s
The Last Days of Pompeii
,
Pericles and Aspasia
by Walter Savage Landor, and Macpherson’s
Pickwick
s.

‘We can be purchasing more sailcoth in Barampore or Chinsurah, to cover more durably,’ said Mir Aziz quietly as he wrapped my books and tied them firmly. I paid off the
syce
with the last of my coins, watching him lead away my horse. As I stood there, one of
Blake’s two natives shouted something to the other, and they both laughed. I looked up, certain I had recognized a couple of the words.

‘What does he say, Mir Aziz?

He nodded and looked away. ‘He is saying we will make good progress today, sahib.’

Blake rode past, not giving me a look.

‘I do not believe that is what he said, Mir Aziz. Tell me, please.’

He gazed at me for a moment, clearly considering whether or not to conceal the truth. ‘He is saying you are a
pai-makh balaak
– a milk-faced boy – and you will not be able to keep up.’

I looked at the remains of my possessions strewn in the dirt about the broken trunk: my chair, a silver-plated carving knife, a couple of forks, a broken china plate, a pair of boots, some brightly coloured neckties, and several volumes splayed out where they had dropped. It seemed a fitting end to my time in Calcutta.

It took all the effort I could muster simply to stay upon my horse and to restrain myself from vomiting – though I had to stop by the roadside a few times to void my guts. I was somewhat distracted by the rain. It rained so relentlessly, so intensely, that I began to imagine that we must melt back into the earth from which we had come. Then I thought of Frank – earth to earth … dust to dust – and was filled with such a terrible emptiness that my eyes ran and I choked.

The Grand Trunk Road stood proud of the landscape around it. Through the thick, grey, incessant drops I could just make out a bare, swampy delta of birdless mangrove and marsh, twisted bushes and occasional thickets of bamboo. The road was flooded in some places and in others the rains had filled potholes with mud, and the horses – ponies rather, stout little
Pegus
from Burmah – stumbled into them and lost their footing. Mr Blake rode always out in front, his stiff back shrouded like a native in a cotton blanket, a constant reproof to me. He would not allow any falling back, and we made our thirty-odd miles, but not without a struggle. By the time we were done I was an empty vessel and shook with fatigue, a situation I could blame only upon myself. Then it became clear that we would not be staying in a
dak
bungalow such as Europeans usually stayed in, as there were none to be seen, but in small native tents which Mr Blake expected me to help to erect. Of course, with only a few natives, I realized that I would have to abandon any notion of Calcutta levels of service and that if I did not help we would all become even wetter and hungrier than we already were. And so I laboured, tired, sick, resentful and drenched. Yet it also reminded me of how at home my brothers and I had built our shelters in the woods and caught coneys and never a servant in sight, and it was just Calcutta’s customs that had given me such notions about
servants. But then my anger at that hateful man resurged and that true thought fought with a burst of irritation that as a white man in this land I should be forced to labour thus, until I was quite dizzy with frustration. Once the tents were up they provided shelter of a kind, but since they were already wet the rain cascaded through them. I sat alone in mine, dining off cold rotis because it was not possible to light a fire, not daring to open my book packages lest they were already pulp. Then I lay down, shivering, the dense rain a windy chorus, my thoughts all of Frank and the poor fist we had both made of things.

The next two days were much the same as the first, save that the mangrove gave way to thickly sprouting paddy fields and to our left the great grey Ganges began its lugubrious meander north. My uniform quickly became dirty and chafed against my skin. My helmet left sores on my neck. I was as tired as I have ever been. I had little idea where we were going, knowing only that we were to travel north-west up the Grand Trunk Road as far as Benares, then west on the road to Poona and Nagpore as far as Jubbulpore, the headquarters of the Thuggee Department and the last place Xavier Mountstuart had been sighted. The distance was a mere 700 miles. The monotony was alleviated by two things. One was a stop at the market in Chinsurah, where Sameer, the youngest of the natives, went to exchange a pony that had gone lame, and where with Mir Aziz’s aid I raised a loan and bought more oiled sailcloth, binding it round my two packs in a little cupboard-like stall in the bazaar.

The second was – though I was loath to admit it – Mr Jeremiah Blake. The truth was, he was quite unrecognizable from the shivering, peeling, hobbling invalid of the week before. The transformation seemed to me extraordinary. He was firstly not as old as I had supposed – not young of course, but not the doddering, used-up creature he had seemed. The puffy, rashy red skin was almost gone, he was clean-shaven and his face was sunburnt. I suppose some might have called him handsome – in a coarse and common way. It was not a gentleman’s face, there was something pinched about it, and it bore the marks of hard living: a broken nose, an old white puckered scar through an eyebrow. His formerly greasily
straggling hair had been cut, shorter and plainer than was the fashion, and one could now see that his right ear was ragged, not like a pugilist’s ear, but a tom cat’s, as if something had torn bits from the top of it. Occasionally he would run a finger over these indentations. He retained an almost imperceptible limp. His eyes were deep-set and hooded. I found his gaze most unnerving, and others did too. I could not make out what colour his eyes were, some mud shade I suppose. He carried about him an air of what, for lack of a better word, I called insolence, but which I felt as the days passed was more a sceptical irritation with the world. He was very guarded. To my dismay he lived as much as he could as a native – wore native dress, a
kurta
and dhotis or white cotton pajamas, with slippers, and carried a curved native sword, the
tulwar
, which some older Company officers preferred. A part of me envied him the looseness and coolness of his clothes, but I would not have dreamt of giving up my uniform. He ate like a native too – with his fingers, tearing the roti with his one hand, then using it to scoop up the meat and rice prepared by Nungoo, the large and slow-moving fifth member and cook of our party. And he sat cross-legged upon the ground as the natives did. Having lost my folding chair, I too now had to sit upon the ground with the natives, and I could not but view it as one more of the petty humiliations that Mr Blake had forced upon me. For what was quite unchanged was that he was just as silent and rude to me as he had been before. Not once in these days did he address a word to me; indeed he spoke little at all, and invariably in Hindoostanee.

‘Was Mr Blake very angry at my late arrival and conduct?’ I asked Mir Aziz on the third day.

‘
Chote
Sahib, Mr Blake is showing no anger, nor is he speaking of it.’

On the fourth day, the rain stopped. The air was still thick and humid, but it was a relief to wake to near silence. By the light of a lantern I unpacked my books and found that apart from some dampness and a little foxing on the page edges, they had survived. As the sun rose there were patches of blue and the landscape seemed washed clean. I felt my mood lighten. I looked about me. It was, I
reflected, a relief to be out of Calcutta. The landscape was now dense flat scrub clothed in its fresh post-monsoon growth, with occasional thickets of
jangal
. Pale brown monkeys chattered in the trees. Flocks of goats and sheep and moth-eaten pariah dogs wove on and off the highway. In the distance one could see the beginnings of low brown hills. The road itself was lined with trees, and every few miles there would be a small, tumble-down, thatched Hindoo temple or an old tomb with a small
tank
for water next to it and sometimes a holy man or
sadoo
in attendance. At regular intervals we came upon old stone monuments, thirty feet high, like fat stone fingers pointing heavenward. Mir Aziz told me that they were
kos
minars, giant milestones placed there by the Moghul emperors who had also planted the trees to provide shade and shelter for travellers. Now and again there would be a line of stalls selling food and tobacco to travellers camping nearby, and a dak post where groups of bearers sat waiting to carry messages or post up the road. A little way from the road one could see small villages of bamboo and mud, huts green with moss and mould after the rains. The tentative thought came to me that all might not be lost; being in the Mofussil might not be so unbearable and we might after all find Mountstuart.

Mr Blake’s oddities might form part of my entertainment, but he was at the same time the great shadow over my reviving spirits. I had intended to apologize to him for my conduct on the first day, but the way in which he ignored me, and the deliberateness of his use of Hindoostanee to isolate me, soon suffocated that resolve. His whole manner, moreover, seemed designed to repel interlocutors. He never rushed but he was always engaged in some activity, and even when he was eating or sitting by the fire at night, he seemed entirely preoccupied. On that fourth day, I forced myself to approach him, but I had to interpose myself between him and his horse in order to gain his attention.

‘Mr Blake, I know you did not wish me to accompany you on this journey. But at the very least you might do me the courtesy of letting me know your plans.’

He had his saddle upon his shoulder, carrying it from one pony to
the next. He paused, scratched the top of his ear, and said, ‘Lieutenant Avery, your job is to keep up, not to hinder me, and to keep your bone-box shut. If you do that I shall be perfectly satisfied. And you never know, you may even learn something.’

I muttered something unrepeatable under my breath.

‘You feel you’ve been ill-used? You were lucky to leave Calcutta when you did.’

‘And how do you figure that, sir?’

‘You’re no city type, and where you were you had few prospects. The cholera epidemic will only get worse. You’re badly in debt and your servants were stealing from you.’

‘You know nothing, sir. My servants were perfectly honest and my finances quite secure, thank you!’ This was not at all how I had expected the exchange to go.

‘All griffins are in debt,’ he said, which was true. ‘But the last five buttons on your jacket are patkong, a cheap alloy, not silver. Your laundryman or tailor replaced them. There’s a market for silver buttons in Calcutta.’

Looking closely at my buttons I saw that the last five were almost but not precisely identical to the others. I could not believe I had not seen this before. I walked back to my fresh pony, humiliated, my heart overflowing with the purest dislike of him.
He is an oaf, a coarse oaf! And I hate him
, I thought. When I looked up, Mir Aziz was watching me.

‘If you are being kind enough to permit me, Chote Sahib,’ he said, ‘I may tell you that we are indeed on course in our travels, and I would be most pleased to show you the maps of our route.’ It was half in my mind to rebuff him, but there was something in his manner that forestalled me. The words were not offered in pity or two-faced flattery, but rather with a grave courtesy. I checked myself.

‘I would be most grateful if you would,’ I replied.

Thus, by design or by accident, Mir Aziz became my guide. He imparted information to me and helped me accustom myself to the road. It was a state of affairs that would have caused disapproval in Calcutta, but I was grateful for it. Within a few hours he had pointed
out a dozen small things to make the journey less discomfiting. He showed me how to pitch my tent to avoid the worst of the insects and how best to arrange my nets for sleeping. When I mutinously refused Nungoo’s curries and native dishes – in Calcutta such dishes were often disgusting and not often found on European tables – he told me to eat and maintain my strength, and I did, dreaming of bread and butter all the while. When he saw the rashes from my uniform, he suggested I take to looser civilian attire.

‘I thank you, but as we are on Company business, I believe I should wear its livery,’ I said, loud enough to ensure that Blake could hear.

Mir Aziz was not tall, but he was broad and strongly set and square-shouldered. His skin was like polished wood and his thick bushy eyebrows were held in a permanent half-frown of concentration which gave him a wise and considered aspect. His eyes had that dark liquid quality so characteristic of the natives; he had a strong, sharp nose and a splendid black beard with a few silvers hairs in it. When the wind got up, he would part it carefully, pushing one half up on to one side of his head, and the other on to the other side, and tie the two sides against his yellow
pugree
with a scarf. His speech might sometimes be florid, but he never spoke with the gushing flattery and insincerity that I had encountered in Calcutta. What his precise role was on our journey, however, was not by any means clear and on the subject he was most enigmatic.

‘I am, as goes the saying of the Romans of old, general factotum,’ was all he would say. ‘I am doing and making everything.’ One day he offered to shave me and did so with great facility and skill. After he dressed my face with various unguents, taken from a small wooden box, he gave me a powder and a small vial, ‘
Multanni mitti
and rose-water, Chote Sahib. It is being treatment for painful skin.’ Blake, I noted, consulted Mir Aziz frequently – though he did not take advantage of Mir Aziz’s barbering.

What surprised me most about Mir Aziz was how susceptible he – a Mahommedan and also so evidently sensible – was to Hindoo superstitions. He spoke often of good and bad omens, of tigers roaring and ravens cawing, of demons and evil spirits. The
two other natives, Sameer and Nungoo, were just as impressionable. When we saw an elephant there were great expressions of rejoicing. I said to Mir Aziz that I had thought elephants were sacred only to the Hindoos, because of their paunchy little elephant god.

‘But it is bringing us good fortune too, Chote Sahib, to Musselman, Sikh, Jain – and Christian too.’

Another night, after eating, Sameer produced a noise unheard in polite company – and evidently unacceptable in Mir Aziz’s. The older man insisted that he leave the camp, taking a piece of burning ember with him, douse it, then hit himself with a slipper five times. Looking much abashed, Sameer did precisely as he was told; indeed he and Nungoo took instruction from him without question.

These two spoke almost no English and behaved to me with just enough courtesy so as not to appear actually insubordinate. I had never been in such constant close quarters with natives and was sure they took pleasure in serving up insults I did not understand in their own tongues, but I did not wish to be forever asking Mir Aziz for translations and so I ignored them. Sameer was little more than a boy – slight, quick-moving with a mouth full of white teeth, constantly bordering on insolent and skilled with the horses. It was he who had called me a milk-faced boy that first morning, a quip I dismissed when I saw the difficulty he was having in growing a pair of wispy moustaches. When the weather improved he took to galloping ahead of us, shouting something that sounded like ‘
Chullo bai! Chullo bai!
’ and scattering travellers on foot.