The Linnet Bird: A Novel (71 page)

I’d sent our
chuprassi
with a chit to Meg, and she’d replied immediately that she would be delighted to see me. Now she came into the parlor with slow, elastic steps, her smile making her bony cheekbones even more prominent. Today it was the smile I remembered from the Watertons’, and I was genuinely pleased. Perhaps I had been wrong in my first judgment of her. She seemed different today, more aware and responsive.

“Linny! I’m so pleased you decided to come,” she said, her eyes glowing.

“Are you sure you’re not busy?” I asked. “I realize I should have sent my card yesterday, but—”

Meg waved a hand. “Busy? What is there to be busy with? Here, sit next to me.”

“Meg, I have so much to ask you. About your travels with Mr. Liston. You must have been able to see so many sights.”

But again she waved her hand through the air as if what I said were unimportant. “One can’t spend one’s life running about; surely you’ve realized that it takes all our efforts just to keep going here, haven’t you?”

“But did you not pursue your book on shrines? Or your sketches of local customs? You seemed so passionate . . .”

Meg looked pensive for only a moment. “I’d almost forgotten. How is it you still remember those silly ideas?” She shrugged. “I was young and impressionable all those years ago.”

“It was only six years.”

“Six years in India—for a woman—is like twelve at home. Surely you’ve changed as well, Linny? Are you the same person you were when you arrived?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then,” she said, almost triumphantly, as if she were pleased at this.

She pulled a small bamboo table close to the horsehair settee, then set the hookah on it. She placed the mangowood box next to it, taking a small oil lamp from a corner table and lighting it. “Now we’re ready,” she said, clapping her hands at a boy standing near the door. “Tell the cook to prepare some tea and have it brought in shortly,” she ordered, and the boy bowed and scurried away. “This makes one terribly thirsty,” she said.

“Just watch me, if you like, then you can have a turn,” she went on. “Some people feel a tiny bit funny, at first, as if they’re back on the rolling sea, but it quickly passes. Just ignore it,” she said, smiling, “and relax.”

She pulled a long hairpin out of her carelessly piled dark blond hair, then scooped a tiny globule of the black opium onto the tip of the pin. She held the pin over the lamp for a moment, and when the opium was soft, fit it into the small opening of the pipe. Putting the mouthpiece to her lips, there was a loud hissing as she sucked deeply, then silence as she held her breath for a long moment. She suddenly released it in a long plume of vapor that burst from her nostrils. The smoke swirled slowly around my head, and I breathed in its dark, sweet, slightly decayed odor.

Meg rested her head back against the shiny horsehair cushion of the settee, the mouthpiece still in her hand. She looked at something far beyond my sight.

I waited as long as I could. “Meg?” I finally whispered.

The woman’s eyes blinked once, then slowly swiveled in their sockets. Only a rim of green showed around the black centers.

“Shall I try it now, Meg?”

Silently, and with obvious effort, Meg prepared the hookah for me. I put the mouthpiece between my lips and sucked up the warm air through the bead of opium. The smoke went softly into my lungs. I immediately felt dizzy, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

After a timeless period I heard myself say, as if from a distance, “Yes. I see.”

Time emptied into a shadowy twilight, emptying and then folding inward on itself in a gentle pattern, emptying and folding, over and over, without end. I was one of the loose bits of colored glass caught between the two flat plates and two plane mirrors in the instrument I had held to my eye as a child in Liverpool, standing in a dusty aisle of Armbruster’s Used Goods.

I was nothing but a tiny piece of a larger sliding, changing, endless pattern. I thought I felt the very beat of my life in my veins and embraced that false signal.

I
FELL INTO
the habit of stopping to spend an hour or two with Meg and the hookah every other day. After the first few puffs, we fell silent, and I reveled in the peaceful, dreamy lethargy that spread warmly through me. I learned to set the pattern for my visions, letting myself hover, then float, up and away, back to the beautiful Kashmir valley. That’s how it was at the beginning. I could direct the shape of my dreaming.

Sometimes I would be astride a horse in front of Daoud, with the assuring broad warmth of his chest against my back; at other times I felt his arms around me, the hardness of his body against the length of mine. But these sensations aroused no bodily passion in me. It was just a wonderful timeless reverie that blended and deepened. Daoud seemed to tell me things, flowing, poetic statements, and yet he never spoke. In the communication I felt totally happy, my mind floating in a sea of warmth. Eventually the dream faded, and I returned to the couch in Meg’s drawing room, riding on a favorable breeze of euphoria.

I was grateful to Meg. I thought, in those early courtship days with the poppy, that she had saved my life.

Going home in my darkened palanquin, curtains drawn, I felt that my blood had been replaced by a lighter-than-air, buoyant fluid, and I knew that if I opened the curtains I would fly out, weightless, into the still, muggy air of Calcutta.

But best of all, Daoud’s face didn’t disappear for a number of hours after my visits to Meg. He seemed real and alive, just in the front of my forehead, like a portrait in the secret compartment of a brooch.

A
FTER A FEW WEEKS,
I knew that it was unfair and impolite of me to visit Meg simply to smoke her hookah, although she didn’t seem to mind. I knew she smoked it every afternoon, whether I was there or not.

“Meg,” I asked her one day before we took up the hookah, “would it be possible for me to get some opium for myself?”

“Certainly. There are large English companies that cultivate it in the fields in northern India. Patna produces the best variety. Mr. Liston made a trip there, to Patna, on business, and he says that they have a tremendous factory there, with halls for drying the opium juice, and then balling it—with each ball the size of a small room. Can you imagine? There’s also a storage hall with shelves going up to the roof, five times the height of a man, where tons of it can be stored. Most of it is eventually processed into cakes and then sold in vast quantities to China. The Company’s way of leveling a deficit, actually.” She poured the tea she always had waiting. “Has your husband never talked to you about the problem with the Chinese?”

I shook my head. Somers and I didn’t talk about anything anymore. In fact, we didn’t speak to each other at all, unless we were in the same room, with David.

“To meet the enthusiasm for Chinese silk and tea at home, England had to pay in silver bullion. Now we want our silver back, and while the Chinese don’t want our textiles in exchange, they’re all too eager to pour it back out for opium. Arthur says several thousand tons of opium go up to Canton each year. All quite aboveboard. After all, the results of opium are no more than the pleasure derived from a glass of wine, or, for the men, their cigar after dinner.”

“Is it sold here, in Calcutta, then, or did you bring it from Lucknow?”

Meg shrugged, studying me. “It’s as easy to buy as tea, Linny. You just don’t get out enough. Goodness. I’ll have my box wallah bring some over, and you can arrange with him the quantity you want, and when you’d like it delivered. It is quite dear, mind. You can’t pay with chits; it must be rupees. Are you allowed your own money?”

I smiled tightly. “I’ll have rupees.”

“All right, then. Look for my man on Friday morning. His name is Ponoo. That’s his day to visit me; I’ll ask him to go on to your house afterward.”

P
ONOO WAS A SQUINTING,
neckless little man, missing all the fingers from his left hand. As well as opium, he carried tinned anchovy paste, French hair ribbons, and cooking utensils. I had occasionally used one of these peddlers when I didn’t want to leave the house because of the raging heat or a debilitating monsoon.

Ponoo arrived just after ten on Friday, holding out a small can and naming a price. I quickly placed the rupees I had taken from the safe in Somers’s room into his fingerless hand. Somers didn’t know I knew about the safe, but of course I did. The safe and where he kept the key. Did he really think I never ventured into his bedroom while he was away? The safe was behind a false wall in his desk; I had discovered it out of sheer boredom one long rainy afternoon the first year of our marriage. He never gave me any money; I had to rely on signed chits to pay for everything, as did all the other wives. The chits were all sent directly to him, so he would know exactly what I had bought.

In the safe were documents and business papers and a locked strongbox. It didn’t take me long to find the key to the strongbox in the pages of a book in Somers’s bookshelf. I had been stealing from Somers since the first few months of our marriage, hiding the money away in a place it would never be found, in a tin box to protect it from insects and damp. I don’t know why, except that it made me feel good. Every time I took a few bills from the stacks of rupees in the strongbox I felt the same power I had as a girl, slipping tiny objects under my bonnet and down my boots while a puffing man turned his back to wash himself and redo his buttons. Obviously Somers didn’t keep track of the amounts he put in and took out. I knew after the first time that he didn’t count—if he had, I would never have been able to steal any more, as he would have blamed either the servants or me, and I couldn’t have let any of them be punished for what I’d done. I would have been beaten, and Somers would have made sure I never saw the strongbox again.

After the box wallah left I gave Malti more rupees and sent her to the bazaar to buy a hookah, ignoring her puzzled look. She returned with a small but splendid one, the stand and cup gleaming silver embossed with intricate dragons, and the mouthpiece an exquisitely carved piece of green jade.

I promised myself that I would have only an occasional puff, when I was feeling particularly low. I stuck to my resolve for a week, but then smoked more and more. Ponoo became a regular Friday caller.

I was careful to use my hookah only when David was asleep or outside with Malti, and never when Somers was home. Even with Meg’s assurances about the popularity and acceptance of the magical black balls, I felt uncomfortable about the enjoyment I derived from my White Smoke.