Flowers in the Blood Page 9

  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.

  Our tour finished inside the godown, a cool, dark storehouse where the dried cakes were lined in frames. “They will remain here through the summer. The boys will watch to be certain they are not attacked by weevils, turning them to prevent mildew. By next October they will be completely dry, hard, and in condition to be packed into cases of forty cakes each. The cases will be auctioned in Calcutta, where the Sassoons will buy them for delivery to the Chinese market.”

  My heart pounded fiercely. “Are you going back to China?”

  “Of course—” My stricken face alarmed him, and he put his arm. around my quaking shoulders. “That's a long time off, after the auction in October. Let's not think of it now.”

  An Indian manager—a gomastah—dressed primly in a suit with a vest approached my father and handed him a sheaf of accounting papers. Papa loosened his grip on me and eased himself away. The two men walked off to a corner of the godown and conferred about the figures.

  A tide of emotions swept over me. What would I do without a mother or a father? My stomach contracted. The air in the musty godown clogged my throat. I made my way to the nearest door—

  opposite the one we had entered—feeling frightened and sorry for myself.

  A muffled, almost animallike howl startled me.

  I looked up to see, across the yard, a boy being beaten with one of the wooden paddles used to stir the raw opium. One worker held him down and tried to silence him while another struck his shoulders, his buttocks, and the back of his legs so forcefully I could hear the crack of the wood against his frail bones. Another boy heaved and sputtered as buckets of water were poured over him as he stood in a deep vat.

  I ran for my father.

  “Papa!” As I grabbed his arm, several documents fell to the mucky ground. Not caring, I urgently pulled him toward the yard.

  “Dinah! What is—?”

  “Come. A boy is hurt—”

  “Hurt? An accident?” he asked as he let me lead him.

  By the time we got there, the first boy was slumped against the wall. Huge welts were splayed on his back and chest. The thin skin around his ribs had burst. Blood trickled in rivulets, pooling at his waist. The other boy, still standing in the tub, was being brushed with harsh twig brooms. Everyone froze as my father looked at the injured children, then back at me. The brutality ceased. Now my father would punish the cruel bosses.

  “That is enough” was all he said as he led me away. “It's not what you think, Dinah. Those boys are thieves. The workers are recovering what was stolen and making certain the culprits have learned their lesson.”

  Tears welled in my eyes. “But how—?”

  “Listen to me, Dinah, those boys rolled around in the poppy residue, coating their bodies with opium. If a boy can escape unnoticed to the bazaar, bad men will wash him down to distill and collect the residue, paying him four or five annas. You would not object to someone being beaten for
stealing my purse, would you? Well, that powder is almost as valuable as gold. Why, one godown alone contains more than ten lacs of opium. If we let one boy off lightly, the others will take the risk. By beating one, we prevent a hundred more crimes.”

  I trembled with exhaustion as much as confusion as my father carried me to the home of the gomastah, where we were given a simple meal of rice and fish. I slept the whole way back to our lodgings, awaking only when Yali prepared me for bed. I let her tuck me in, pretending to sleep until she snored rhythmically beside me on the floor. Then I got up and opened the door to my father's bedroom. He slept alone. I climbed in beside him and fell asleep. After that I spent every night with him until we made our way back to Calcutta and everything changed again.

  6

  For several weeks my father and I made similar forays to inspect the opium operations as far west as Benares, as far east as Monghyr. This was the first time I felt my father entirely sympathetic to me and I made every effort to meet his expectations by being a good companion, which meant watching his signals for when he wanted to chat and when he wanted me to be silent. Almost every Sabbath we lit candles with others who shared our faith. Instead of living in Calcutta where there were two synagogues and about a thousand Jews, these enterprising souls were often the only Jews in their communities. Abraham Cohen in Bhagalpur, Samuel Duek in Dinapur, Hilali Moses in Ghazipur, and Yoram Moses in Gorakhpur each talked with my father about daughters or nieces who would soon require husbands.

  The granddaughter of one of the Moses brothers was so attentive to his every whim, I asked my father, “Do you like her?”

  “She is a fine young lady.”

  “Will you marry her?”

  “No, Dinah. It is too soon for me to consider taking another wife.”

  “But you will . . . someday,” I said, hoping this would not irritate him.

  “Possibly, but it will not be the Moses girl, don't worry. Besides, you are such good company.”

  He could not have said anything that would have pleased me more.

  The cyclical processes of the opium business began to lose their fascination, and as the Gangetic plain began to absorb the penetrating blasts from the sun, the days at my father's side wilted me to the point I moved sluggishly, my strength and curiosity drained like a much-scored poppy. I began to dream of my high, cool bedroom on Theatre Road, where the servants prepared fresh tatties, reed mats soaked with water and placed at the windows to cool air currents as they entered the room, and where there were new books to read. I missed my grandparents—even Aunt Bellore and the other Sassoons.

  Sometimes we traveled overland on Grand Trunk Road, down baked, parched roads. A few trips could be made by railway, which, when it speeded along, were tolerable. I remember one car filled with pale, panting English soldiers in shirtsleeves who gave me sweets and seemed amused when I told them I was helping my father in “the opium business.”

  “Only one more place to visit and then we return home,” Papa sighed. “Won't you like that?”

  “Oh, yes! I cannot wait to see Jonah and Asher and—” I thought it wise not to mention my grandparents.

  The day before Passover, we arrived in Monghyr, where we would stay the whole holiday week with the Josephs, a Jewish family who managed the Sassoon interests in the area. Monghyr was situated inside an old Moghul fort. Within the fort, a rocky spur projected into the river. My father and I climbed out on it to examine the temples. Across the river we could see carts drawn by bullocks with wide, curving horns and huge eyes, moving as though in a trance, and barefoot men with burdens on their heads, their dark limbs accentuated by their white garments. My father held my hand. I was content.

  The morning of the first seder, my father asked if I wished to remain with the Josephs to help prepare for the evening meal.

  “No, I prefer to be with you.”

  He seemed flattered by my loyalty. “Today we will ride in palanquins,” he announced.

  “What's a palanquin?” I asked.

  “You must have seen the enclosed litters. They're mounted on poles carried by four bearers.”

  “Oh, those boxes with shutters. Why will we need them?”

  “The track out to this refinery is too rocky and narrow for a carriage and too hot for the Josephs' horses,” he explained.

  I found I liked riding lying down. As we bumped along, I made a list of the ways we had traveled so far: by boat, by train, by elephant, by cart, by several types of carriages, by horseback, by foot, and now by palanquin. I thought about the seder table laden with the traditional foods and the familiar ritual, and I imagined returning to Calcutta with so many stories to tell. For that hour, at least, all was right with the world, I decided, and fell asleep.

  This new gomastah—a tall Indian with squinty eyes—was not as cordial as most of the others had been. With a sullen expression he led us to the godowns. My father randomly selected four finished balls, took them outside, and laid them on planks in the sun. He poked, sniffed, weighed, and checked them scrupulously. From the distance I

  kept, I could see the manager fidgeting and wondered what might be happening, since my father had not behaved this way before. Using a pronglike tool, my father took a sample from four balls and prepared them in separate pots. Very slowly he measured water, mixed it with the opium, and set the combination over a small fire he had made on the earth.

  The process took almost an hour, during which the opium samples were simmered, strained, and kept boiling until, by evaporation, each bowl was reduced to the thick consistency of syrup. The odor was reminiscent of something as soothing as the cleft of Yali's bosom. No, not Yali. Mama. I felt a wave of exhilaration, followed by a churning in my stomach. I backed away from the smoke and leaned against the scratchy plaster surface of a far wall while my father continued with his perplexing maneuvers.

  From a satchel he lifted out a heavy tube with an elliptical earthenware cup at one end. He placed a pea-size sample into the bowl, bent over the flame, and drew a breath. His face turned red. He sputtered and coughed. After wiping his eyes, he cleaned the bowl and placed another hunk in it, repeating the process. This time he spat on the ground, wheeled around, and shouted, “Soo-er ka baccha,” which meant something like “son of a pig.” Anyway, his angry meaning was obvious. He took a long breath, then continued to chastise the manager in a gruff, slow voice. The gomastah quaked and apologized throughout his tongue-lashing. In order to increase the weight of the article—and consequently his profits—this processor had adulterated the juice of the poppy by mixing it with molasses. Later I learned that other swindlers used sugar, poppy seed, clayey mud, even cow dung for the same purpose.

  At the end of his tirade my father swept the remains of the opium balls he had sampled onto the ground, then stamped them into the dust. “Men have been killed at Lintin Island for delivering excrement like this! I shall not risk my men or my name any further with you. Not only that, I will make a report, reminding every Calcutta merchant to avoid your chests this year—and the next as well.”

  Papa gathered up his gear and turned his back to the man, who continued to sputter excuses. As my father led me away abruptly, he muttered, “We are finished here. Might as well return to Monghyr and rest before the seder.”

  When we reached the end of the lane where we had left the palanquins resting in the shade of a banyan tree, he was vexed to discover one set of bearers had bolted. He threw up his hands and cursed the remaining palanquin-wallahs.

  Not wishing to remain a moment longer than necessary, he placed me in the only sedan. “I shall walk alongside.”

  Traveling in the heat of the day, I soon dozed off, but awoke to the sound of conversation. Opening the curtains, I could see my father was now accompanied by five men who said they were making a pilgrimage to Hardwar, where hordes descended in April to celebrate the solar New Year with temple visits and river baths. One pilgrim said he hoped to see a depression in a stone that was supposed to be a footprint of Vi
shnu, the god of preservation.

  “What is another name for the Ganges?” I called out.

  “Samsara-visa-nasini, destroying the poison of illusion,” the man nearest me responded.

  Several others crowded around me, surprised to see a young white girl. “Hansa-swarupini, embodied in the forms of swans,” a hefty pilgrim suggested in a funny, high voice. So pleased was I by this poetic addition that I repeated it twice.

  Another man, whose face I could not quite glimpse because he was on my father's far side, called out, “Ajnana-timira-bhanur, a light amid the darkness of ignorance.”

  The man's hand lifted in a gesture I almost took for a blessing until, horrified, I realized he was about to strike my father. A flutter of my curtain blocked my view. My palanquin ceased moving; the bearers had frozen. “Thugs!” they shouted. For a second my body floated above my mattress as they flung away their poles. The hovering moment ended with a crash.

  I must have been knocked senseless for a few minutes, for when I opened my eyes, my litter was jumbled with broken crockery and splintered wood. When I reached to free myself, a sharp pain in my elbow traveled down my arm. My forearm was no longer attached at the correct angle. The sight of it caused me to reel back until a trickle of water from a broken jug stirred me. I listened for any sound of the pilgrims or our bearers. There were only the squawks of crows, the shrill cries of mynahs.

  Gasping with pain, I managed to sit myself up and push my feet outside. “Papa?” I looked over where I had seen him last. Only a dusty residue rose from the steaming road. In the distance I thought I saw a human figure, but it was just the wavy currents of heat. The bearers had dispersed. The pilgrims had vanished—and my father with them.