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By Root 1314 0

But in the meanwhile, I do strongly urge you to exercise some care in your choice of words. There is nothing wrong of course in speaking words of encouragement to the crew of the Redruth, especially when they do their job well, but you must be prudent in how you phrase what you say. Knowing you as I do, I understand very well that your motives were wholly innocent when you congratulated the bosun for his fine work on the on the ship’s prow. But you should know Puggly dear, that it is not wholly a matter for surprise that he was taken aback by your well-meant sally: I confess that I too would be quite astonished if a young lady of tender years were to felicitate me on my dexterity in ‘polishing the foc-stick.’ Far be it from me to reproach you for your spontaneity, Puggly dear, but you must not always assume that it is safe to transpose French expressions directly into English. The English equivalent of bâton-à-foc, for instance, is definitely not ‘foc-stick’ – it is ‘jib-boom’.

And no, dear, nor were you well-advised to tell the baffled bosun that your intention was only to compliment him on his skill with ‘the mighty mast that protrudes from the front’. You should know, my dear Princesse de Puggleville, that sometimes it is not wise to persist in explaining oneself.

*

Bahram’s methods of work were not easy for Neel to deal with. Back in the past, when he had himself employed a host of scribes and secretaries, in his own daftar, he had seldom needed to communicate at any length with his crannies, munshis and gomustas, since they were far better schooled than he in the time-hallowed canons that dictated the form and content of a zemindar’s letters. Later, after his conviction for forgery, when he was awaiting transportation in Calcutta’s Alipore Jail, he had earned himself many favours by composing missives for other inmates – but these too had required little effort, for his fellow convicts were mainly unlettered men, and no matter whether they were writing to a relative at home, or to a chokra in the next ward, they had deferred to Neel’s literacy and left it to him to invent their words and shape their thoughts.

Such being his experience of letter-writing, Neel was caught unawares by the demands of Bahram’s correspondence: the Seth’s letters rarely followed any set forms and usages, being mostly intended to keep his associates informed of the situation in southern China. And nor could Neel expect any deference from the Seth, who seemed to think that a munshi was a minor flunkey – one who belonged, in the order of importance, somewhere between a valet and a shroff, his principal duties being those of tidying up his employer’s verbal attire, and of picking through the coinage of his vocabulary to separate what was of value from what was not.

Neel’s job was further complicated by the Seth’s habits of dictation: he always composed on his feet and his restless pacing seemed to add to the turbulence of his words, which often came pouring out in braided torrents of speech, each rushing stream being silted with the sediment of many tongues – Gujarati, Hindusthani, English, pidgin, Cantonese. To stop the Seth when he was in full flow was inconceivable, and to pose a question about this phrase or that, or to ask the meaning of one word or another, was to risk an explosion of irritability – queries had to be deferred till later, or better still, referred to Vico. In the interim all Neel could do, to make sense of this gurgling snowmelt of sound, was to pay close attention, not just to what Bahram said, but also to the gestures, signs and facial expressions with which he amplified, enlarged upon, and even negated the burden of his words. This unspoken idiom could not be lightly ignored: once when Neel rendered a sentence as ‘Mr Moddie affirms that he would be glad to comply’, Bahram took him to task for his negligence – ‘What-ré? You didn’t see, how I was doing with my hand, like-this, like-this. How you take that to mean “yes”? You cannot see it is “no”? Just dreaming or what?’

And then there was the window, which was a perennial