Flowers in the Blood (9 page)

“It has never been used.”

“Why not?”

“Can you figure it out?”

I strolled around the structure, musing at this monstrous brick egg. “How does it get filled?”

My father pointed up. “Through that hole at the top.”

I scampered up one of the two sets of staircases that spiraled to the peak. In the distance the river looked like a ribbon wrapping the banks of the city in a bow-shaped curve. I ran down to my father. “I know! Nobody wanted to make the effort to climb all that distance carrying sacks of grain.”

“That is partially correct.”

I tiptoed inside. The muskiness tickled my nose and I began to sneeze. A millisecond after I stopped, the sound came back to me in a crashing echo. I clapped my hands: this was better still. Papa had entered the door on the opposite side and whispered, “Dinah, can you hear me?”

I started. “Papa!” I shouted, hearing several reverberations before he spoke again.

“Quietly, in your lowest voice.”

“Like this?”

“Yes. Have you figured out the rest of the secret?”

“The echoes frightened them.”

His laugh rang out like bells of a cathedral.

I looked up and tried to imagine the grain raining down among the shafts of light and filling the upside-down cone. Then I walked out, blinked from the harsh light, and tripped over a mound of earth. I leaned against the door to regain my balance. “The doors!” I shouted. “They open to the inside. If the gola was even partway filled, the bottom would be so packed, the doors could not open. How could anyone make such a gigantic mistake?”

“Everybody makes mistakes. Many vast plans have gone awry during their execution, especially if ignorant men blindly follow their leaders.”

“Why didn't anyone question the plan?”

“I do not know, Dinah. There is something to remember here. Obedience to duty has value, but mindless heeding may be foolhardy. Besides, even if some of the laborers doubted the captain, he probably would not have listened. The British rarely believe anything an Indian tells them.”

I wondered if he also was remembering the judge who warned the jury not to trust the words of our servants.

Atop the elephant, I laid my head in Papa's lap. He stroked my hair, murmuring, “How very clever you are.”

The next morning, I awoke much earlier than usual, due in part to the strangeness of the bed, which did not sway like the one on the ship. Because there was no chamber pot in my room, I went to look for the washing area I had sleepily used the night before. I opened the door where I thought it was, but discovered my father's room. A head lifted from the pillow. I saw only a long braid and large almond eyes before I ran back to my room.

In a few minutes I heard the slap of bare feet on the wooden floors and a door closing smoothly. Only then did I dare get up and try again to find the pot. After I had used it, I saw that my father's door was open. There was no evidence of a visitor. Standing in my nightgown, I shivered in the cool river breeze. I climbed on his bed as unobtrusively as possible.

“Did you have a bad dream?” my father asked when he found me in his bed.

“Sort of.”

He did not seem angry. His face was softer, more filled out, and he smiled more warmly than he had in Calcutta. “Let's get up, then,” he said with more manly vigor than I had heard in a long time.

After drinking a third cup of tea, he opened the window and breathed deeply. A strong wind blew his hair in front of his eyes. He pushed it back, grinned, and took the napkin he held in his hand and waved it in the breeze.

“Good, the wind is from the northwest. This dry weather is perfect.”

“For what, Papa?”

“Ah, that you will see, my child, for this is why we have come to Patna.”

 

Standing before the rickshaw, my father made certain I wore my
topee
to protect my head from the sun. He himself wore a cork helmet that snapped under the chin. Abdul handed up a leather box tied firmly with straps, and Yali slipped me a package containing fruit and cakes. We proceeded along a narrow but firmly packed path running perpendicular to the river. Soon we stopped amid a collection of mud huts clustered under tall shade trees, each with an untidy garden. Beyond them stretched miles of verdant fields that from a distance seemed to have been sprinkled with streaks of icing sugar. As we came closer I peered more intently, and I could see the whiteness was the petals of millions of gorgeous flowers undulating in the breeze.

“What are they?” I asked as Papa helped me down. I ran to the head of a blooming row and breathed in the lavish fragrance.

“Poppies.”

“Poppies!” My hand brushed a cluster of fringed blossoms that were so ripe the petals flew off like frightened moths. They fluttered a long while in the air currents before settling on the reddish earth. Dazzled by the effect, I moved a few feet down the row and tried again. “Oh!” I cried in delight, running down the slender path between the rows, my fingertips jostling the feathery petals lightly, but having the effect of a scythe. “Poppies! Poppies! Poppies!” I shouted to the wind. A shower of white billowed up around me as I made my way back up a second row.

Breathless, I met up with my father again. I shook the petals from my hair and grinned. “Why have we come to see them?”

“Because these flowers are my business, the Sassoon family trade.”

“You own these fields?”

“Not exactly. The government owns them, but we will buy most of the crop when it comes to auction in Calcutta later in the year.”

“So you sell flowers?”

“Yes, Dinah.”

“I don't see how you can get them to China before they die.”

He threw his head back and laughed so hard he had to wipe his tearing eyes. “Today you will learn everything there is to know about poppies.” He plucked a flower. “This is
Papaver somniferum,”
he said in a reverential tone, “the most prized flower in the world. Not only is it beautiful, it contains a secret substance that eliminates pain, cures diseases, and makes men happy.”

“Everyone must want it, then.”

“Yes, and they will pay dearly for it.” He twisted the stem, almost the thickness of my little finger, back and forth. The translucent petals vibrated prettily. “Our little secret is that it is quite easy to grow and process. We purchase it for a handful of rupees and sell it for baskets of silver.”

My mother had told me tales of weaving straw into gold, explaining these were mere stories, but the idea of converting a plant to a valuable mineral was true! My father plucked the petals and held up the naked, unripened seed capsule. Its pale green flesh, the color of a baby frog, glistened with dew.

“Watch this.” He took a knife from his pocket and made three vertical slashes in the fat bulb. “This is called 'lancing.' “ A sticky milk, like white blood, began to ooze out.
“Lachryma papaveris.”
He studied the droplets as though they were precious works of art. “The tears of the poppy. Every spring, when the petals begin to drop, the villagers cut the bulbs in the afternoon, leaving the sap to drip slowly out during the night. The next morning the congealed blackish fluid is scraped off before the heat makes it stick too tightly. This they do about ten times, until the head is exhausted and bleaches out. Later you will see what becomes of the residue.”

Intrigued, I followed my father on his rounds. We passed through miles of fields. Large flocks of birds wheeled like hovering clouds overhead. “They are after the wheat or maize, which is alternated with the poppies,” my father explained. He pointed out a distant platform raised upon poles to a height of twenty feet over the fields. When we came closer, I could see a small boy stationed there. After several birds began diving at the grain, the boy lifted a simple sling and selected a stone from a basket. With a graceful arch of his back, an unerring stone met its mark.

“Oh, no,” I cried in sympathy at the plummeting bird.

“It must be done as a, warning to the rest of the flock. Look.” I followed Papa's gaze as the dark cloud looped up and back, away from the boy on the platform.

“Who cares for these fields?” I asked as we walked out to inspect an area.

“Ryots
, or cultivators, lease them from the crown. The ryot plows his field, removes the weeds and grass before dividing it into beds with those higher dykes between them.” He showed me a tank about ten feet deep, dug at one end of the field and pulled out a leather bucket attached to a rope. “Water is taken from here and used to irrigate the fields, which is necessary because most of the poppy cultivation is done after the monsoon. The seed is sown in November, the juice collected in February and March. Come, I will show you how that actually is accomplished.”

At the far end of the field, dozens of women were scarifying the seed pods that had already been scraped that morning. A lady in a billowing pink sari greeted my father respectfully, her hands cupped in a triangle, her head bowed. My father showed me the instrument she carried. It had four two-pointed blades bound together with cotton thread. “This is called a
nutshur.
Only one set of points is used at one time as the capsule is cut vertically from base to summit.”

He returned the tool to its worker and pointed to a collector who was working on another row. With swift, decisive movements the man used an iron scoop to collect the brown sap that had oozed out during the night, and as it became filled, he emptied it into an earthen pot strapped on his side. From time to time he wet the scoop and his fingers with linseed oil carried in a small jar tucked into his dhoti. “On dry days like today, he needs the oil to prevent the adhesion of the sticky juice. On moist days, his work is easier, but a portion of the sap is washed away, or worse, it becomes watery. That results in a lower grade, called
passewa
, for which we get less money.”

“Can't you dry it to get the water out?” I wondered.

Papa beamed. “How your questions please me! You must have flowers in your blood. Come see what happens next.”

The rickshaw-wallah spit out his betel juice and readied to take us. My father offered me water from a jug and gave me a slice of melon as we headed back toward the town by another route. On the outskirts of Patna we came across an enormous mass of brick buildings with red tiled roofs. A wonderful fresh-mown smell permeated the exterior, where men wielding wooden paddles stirred shallow trays of the tarry exudate.

“Here the gum dries in the sun for one to three weeks to remove the water content.”

“So the drier the sap, the shorter the time it must cook in the sun,” I said matter-of-factly.

“I shall have to put you to work,” he said, grinning. He pointed to men bending over a table in the shade of a shed. They seemed to be kneading sticky rolls of black bread. “When dried, the opium is formed into three loaves.”

Opium. This was the first time I had heard that word connected with the day's activities. Where had I heard it before? Mother . . . the trial. I recalled my mother's silver-and-ivory hookah that had been thrown on the pyre of her possessions. An image formed: my mother's languorous body stretched out on the chaise, her dimpled mouth sipping the fragrant smoke from the ivory mouthpiece. The smell of opium mingling with roses, clove incense, and her own particular musk could be recalled more readily than the elusive image of her oval face or shimmering eyes. The memory of Mama and the hookah mingled with the green of the scored poppy husk and ripe black sludge in the processing trays.

“Mama drank opium,” I stated somewhat inaccurately, because I had confused the sipping sounds from the mouthpiece that led to the tubes with the inhalation of smoke.

My father stared at me with such cold fury, I knew I was right.

“Unfortunately, it caused her to be ill.”

“Why? You said it cured disease and made people happy. Didn't you want Mama to be happy?”

“When you are older you will learn that it is possible to take too much of a good thing” was his perplexing response.

“Like eating too many jelebis.”

“In a way.”

“Or having too many friends.”

“I don't understand . . .”

“If you have too many, you might not know which are good friends and which are bad,” I dared, since I was still trying to sort out questions about Nissim Sadka.

“Some people are more easily fooled than others,” he replied elliptically.

“I won't be fooled. I never liked any of them!”

“I'm sure you won't.” My father's frown should have warned me off, but I only went back to the first topic.

“Why didn't you tell her to stop when she took too much opium?”

“That's enough, Dinah.”

“But she would have listened to you.”

“She didn't.” He turned his back to indicate the subject was closed.

Since my mother always seemed to defer to my father, I found this difficult to comprehend, but said nothing more as we passed behind the guards who observed the workers, many of whom were young children. A man wearing a gun weighed out a quantity of the black mass and handed it to a man who carried a numbered ticket. Next down the line, a woman sat on a high stool in front of two basins. The first basin contained sufficient opium for three balls. The lower one held water. She lifted a brass hemispherical cup, into which she worked the ball, moistening it as she rolled it into a neat six-inch sphere. Then it was passed to a child who had a tray with two compartments, one containing thin pancakes of pressed poppy petals, the other a cupful of sticky opium-water. After rolling the ball in the water, the boy crunched it with the petals and a mixture of coarsely powdered poppy stalks, capsules, and leaves. The last man weighed the ball, adding to or decreasing the mass to make a consistent product. A young runner then carried the finished balls outside and placed them on pallets in the sun.