Sea of Poppies (48 page)

Jodu laughed so hard he almost fell out of the kursi. There was only one thing, he realized, with a twinge of regret, that could have made the joke still more enjoyable, and that was if Paulette had been there to share it with him: this was the kind of silliness that had always delighted them both.

It did not take long for Neel to discover that his cell-mate's torments were ordered by certain predictable rhythms. His paroxysms of shivering, for instance, would begin with a mild, almost imperceptible trembling, like that of a man in a room that is just a little too cold for comfort. But these gentle shivers would mount in intensity till they became so violent as to tip him off his charpoy, depositing his convulsing body on the ground. The outlines of his muscles would show through the grime on his skin, alternately contracting into knots and then briefly relaxing, but only to seize up again: it was like looking at a pack of rats squirming in a sack. After the convulsions subsided, he would lie unconscious for a while and then something inside him would stir again; his breathing would grow laboured and his lungs would rattle, yet his eyes would remain closed; his lips would begin to move and form words, and he would pass into the grip of a delirium that somehow permitted him to
remain asleep, even as he tossed from side to side, in a frenzy of movement, while shouting aloud in his own language. Then a fire would seem to come alight under his skin and he would begin to slap himself all over, as if to snuff out the spreading flames. When this failed, his hands would become claws, gouging into his flesh as if to rip off a coating of charred skin. Only then would his eyes come open: it was as if his exhausted body would not allow him to wake up until he had tried to flay himself.

Horrible as these symptoms were, none of them affected Neel as much as his cell-mate's chronic incontinence. To watch, hear and smell a grown man dribbling helplessly on the floor, on his bed, and on himself, would have been a trial for anyone – but for a man of Neel's fastidiousness, it was to cohabit with the incarnate embodiment of his loathings. Later, Neel would come to learn that not the least of opium's properties is its powerful influence on the digestive system: in proper doses it was a remedy for diarrhoea and dysentery; taken in quantity it could cause the bowels to freeze – a common symptom in addicts. Conversely, when withdrawn abruptly, from a body that had grown accustomed to consuming it in excess, it had the effect of sending the bladder and sphincter into uncontrollable spasms, so that neither food nor water could be retained. It was unusual for this condition to last for more than a few days – but to know this would have provided little comfort to Neel, for whom every minute spent in the proximity of his dribbling, leaking, spewing cell-mate had a duration beyond measure. Soon, he too began to shiver and hallucinate: behind the lids of his closed eyes, the lashings of shit on the floor would come alive and send out tentacles that dug into his nose, plunged into his mouth and took hold of his throat. How long his own seizures lasted Neel did not know, but from time to time he would open his eyes to catch sight of the faces of other convicts, gaping at him in amazement; in one of these moments of wakefulness, he noticed that someone had opened the gratings of the cell and placed two objects inside: a jharu and a scoop, like those used by sweepers for the removal of night-soil.

If he was to keep his sanity, Neel knew he would have to take hold of the jharu and scoop; there was no other way. To rise to his feet and take the three or four steps that separated him from the
jharu took as intense an effort as he had ever made, and when he was finally within touching distance of it, he could not prevail upon his hand to make contact: the risk involved seemed unimaginably great, for he knew that he would cease to be the man he had been a short while before. Closing his eyes, he thrust his hand blindly forward, and only when the handle was in his grasp did he allow himself to look again: it seemed miraculous then that his surroundings were unchanged, for within himself he could feel the intimations of an irreversible alteration. In a way, he was none other than the man he had ever been, Neel Rattan Halder, but he was different too, for his hands were affixed upon an object that was ringed with a bright penumbra of loathing; yet now that it was in his grip it seemed no more nor less than what it was, a tool to be used according to his wishes. Lowering himself to his heels, he squatted as he had often seen sweepers do, and began to scoop up his cell-mate's shit.

Once having started, Neel found himself to be possessed by a fury for the task. Only one part of the cell did he leave untouched – a small island near the waste-bucket, where he had pushed his cellmate's charpoy in the hope of keeping him confined in a single corner. As for the rest, he scrubbed the walls as well as the floor, washing the refuse into the gutter that drained the cell. Soon many another convict was stopping by to watch him at work; some even began to help, unasked, by fetching water from the well and by throwing in handfuls of sand, of a kind that was useful in scouring floors. When he went into the courtyard, to bathe and wash his clothes, he was offered a welcome at several of the cooking-fires where meals were being prepared.

. . . Come, here . . . eat with us . . .

While he was eating, someone asked: Is it true that you know how to read and write?

Yes.

In Bengali?

In English too. And also Persian and Urdu.

A man approached, on his haunches: Can you write a letter for me then?

To whom?

The zemindar of my village; he wants to take some land away from my family and I want to send him a petition . . .

At one time, the daftars of the Raskhali zemindary had received dozens of such requests: though Neel had rarely taken the trouble to read them himself, he was not unfamiliar with their phrasing. I'll do it, he said, but you will have to bring me paper, ink and a quill.

Back in his cell, he was dismayed to find much of his work undone, for his cell-mate, gripped by one of his paroxysms, had rolled across the floor, leaving a trail of filth behind him. Neel was able to prod him back into his corner, but was too exhausted to do any more.

The night passed more peaceably than those before and Neel sensed a change in the rhythm of his cell-mate's seizures: they seemed to be waning in their intensity, allowing him longer intervals of rest; his incontinence, too, seemed somewhat moderated, possibly because there was nothing left in him to eject. In the morning, while unlocking the gratings, Bishu-ji said: It's Aafat you'll have to clean next. No way around it: once he feels the touch of water, he'll start to improve. I've seen it happen before.

Neel looked at the starved, emaciated body of his cell-mate, with its caking of ordure and its matted hair: even if he bathed him, overcoming his revulsion, what would be achieved? He would only soil himself again, and as for clothing, the only garment he seemed to possess was a drawstringed pyjama that was soaked in his own waste.

Shall I send someone to help you? Bishu-ji asked.

No, said Neel. I'll do it myself.

Having spent a few days in the same space, Neel had already begun to feel that he was somehow implicated in his cell-mate's plight: it was as if their common destination had made their shame and honour a shared burden. For better or for worse it was he who would have to do whatever had to be done.

It took a while to make the necessary preparations: bartering his services as a letter-writer, Neel acquired a few slivers of soap, a pumice stone, an extra dhoti and a banyan. To persuade Bishu-ji to leave the gratings of the cell unlocked proved unexpectedly easy: as prospective transportees, neither Neel nor his cell-mate were expected to participate in work-gangs, so they had the courtyard
mostly to themselves in the first part of the day. Once the other inmates were gone, Neel drew several buckets of water from the well and then half lifted and half dragged his cell-mate across the courtyard. The addict offered little resistance and his opium-wasted body was unexpectedly light. At the first dousing, he stirred his limbs feebly as if to fight off Neel's hands, but he was so weakened that his struggles were like the squirming of an exhausted bird. Neel was able to hold him down without difficulty, and within a few minutes his twitching subsided and he lapsed into a kind of torpor. After scouring his chest with a pumice stone, Neel wrapped his slivers of soap in a rag and began to wash the man's limbs: the addict's frame was skeletal and his skin was covered with scabs and sores, caused by vermin, yet it was soon apparent, from the elasticity of his sinews, that he was not in late middle-age, as Neel had thought: he was much younger than he appeared, and had evidently been in the full vigour of youth when the drug took control of his body. On reaching the knot of his drawstring, Neel saw that it was too tangled to be undone, so he cut through it and ripped away what little was left of his pyjamas. Gagging at the stench, Neel began to sluice water between the man's legs, breaking off occasionally to draw breath.

To take care of another human being – this was something Neel had never before thought of doing, not even with his own son, let alone a man of his own age, a foreigner. All he knew of nurture was the tenderness that had been lavished on him by his own care-givers: that they would come to love him was something he had taken for granted – yet knowing his own feelings for them to be in no way equivalent, he had often wondered how that attachment was born. It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened: was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one's care – just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?

After swaddling his cell-mate in a dhoti, Neel propped him against the neem tree and forced a little rice down his throat. To put him back on his verminous charpoy would be to undo all the cleaning he had done, so he made a nest of blankets for him in a corner. Then he
dragged the filthy bedstead to the well, gave it a thorough scrubbing and placed it, top down, in the open, as he had seen the other men do, so that the sunlight would burn away its pale, wriggling cargo of blood-sucking insects. Only after the job was done did it occur to Neel that he had lofted the stout bedstead on his own, without any assistance – he, who by family legend had been sickly since birth, subject to all manner of illness. In the same vein, it had been said of him, too, that he would choke on anything other than the most delicate food – but already many days had passed since he'd eaten anything but the cheapest dal and coarsest rice, small in grain, veined with red and weighted with a great quantity of tooth-shattering conkers and grit – yet his appetite had never been more robust.

Next day, through a complicated series of exchanges, involving the writing of letters to chokras and jemadars in other wards, Neel struck a bargain with a barber for the shaving of his cell-mate's head and face.

In all my years of hair-cutting, said the barber, I've never seen anything like this.

Neel looked over the barber's shoulder at his cell-mate's scalp: even as the razor was shaving it clean, the bared skin was sprouting a new growth – a film that moved and shimmered like mercury. It was a swarming horde of lice, and as the matted hair tumbled off, the insects could be seen falling to the ground in showers. Neel was kept busy, drawing and pouring bucketfuls of water, so as to drown the insects before they found others to infest.

The face that emerged from the vanished matting of hair and beard was little more than a skull, with shrunken eyes, a thin beak of a nose, and a forehead in which the bones had all but broken through the skin. That some part of this man was Chinese was suggested by the shape of his eyes and the colour of his skin – but in his high-bridged nose and his wide, full mouth, there was something that hinted also at some other provenance. Looking into that wasted face, Neel thought he could see the ghost of someone else, lively and questing: although temporarily exorcized by the opium, this other being had not entirely surrendered its claim upon the site of its occupancy. Who could say what capacities and talents that other self had possessed? As a test, Neel said, in English: ‘What is your name?'

There was a flicker in the afeemkhor's dulled eyes, as if to indicate that he knew what the words meant, and when his head dropped, Neel chose to interpret the gesture not as a refusal but as a postponement of a reply. From then on, with his cell-mate's condition improving steadily, Neel made a ritual of asking the question once a day and even though his attempts to communicate met with no success, he never doubted that he would soon have a response.