River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [130]
The title of this short booklet was translated for Neel as ‘The-Red-Haired-People’s-Buying-and-Selling-Common-Ghost-Language’. It was more commonly known however as ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ – Gwai-lou-waah – and it sold very well, far better than its author could ever have imagined, and the proceeds had allowed Compton to set up his own print-shop in Canton.
Several years after its publication the popularity of ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ was still undiminished: many vendors and shopkeepers kept a copy at hand, for reference, so its cover was a familiar sight in Fanqui-town. It featured a drawing of a European in eighteenth-century costume, with knee-breeches, stockings, a three-cornered hat and a buckled coat. The figure held a thin cane in one hand, and in the other something that might have been a handkerchief – this at least was the surmise of Compton himself. Handkerchiefs had once been an object of fascination for people in China, he explained to Neel; many had believed that Europeans used them to store and transport their snot – in much the same way that thrifty Chinese farmers carried their excrement to the fields.
The cover of ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ had caught Neel’s eye long before he met Compton and he had sometimes wondered about the booklet’s contents. He was astonished to learn that it was a glossary – and was delighted also to discover that the author was none other than his part-time employer.
Of the book itself, Neel understood very little since it was written entirely in Chinese. But being besotted with words of all kinds, Neel had fallen headlong in love with Chinese writing: for him Canton offered no greater pleasure than the ubiquitous presence of the ideograms, on shop-signs, doorways, umbrellas, carts and boats. He had already learnt to recognize a few of them: the character for example, which was easy to remember because its two legs represented its meaning – ‘man’. Similarly ‘big’, which was, in its mysteriously evocative way, merely a man with arms extended; and ‘dollar’, the sign for which was omnipresent in Fanqui-town being featured on innumerable shop-signs. Having once come to know the characters, he saw them everywhere: they would leap out at him from the most unexpected places, waving their limbs as if to catch his attention.
In leafing through ‘Ghost-People-Talk’ Neel was surprised to find that the first entry featured two ideograms he had learnt to recognize: one was the character for ‘man’ and the other the sign for ‘dollar’. The pairing of ‘man’ and ‘dollar’ puzzled him. Was it perhaps a subtle philosophical statement?
Compton laughed at this. ‘Mat-yeh?’ he said. ‘What, don’t you see? “Dollar” is maan in Cantonese.’
Neel was greatly taken by the ingenuity of this: instead of using phonetic symbols, Compton had suggested the pronunciation of the English word by using a character that sounded similar when pronounced in the Cantonese dialect. For longer and more complicated words, he had joined together two or more one-syllable Cantonese words: thus ‘today’ became ‘to-teay’ and so on.
‘And all this you did yourself?’
Compton nodded proudly and added that it was his practice to revise and enlarge the booklet every year, thus ensuring its continuing sale.
Thinking about this later, in the privacy of his cubicle, Neel realized that there was something providential about his meeting with Compton: it was as if Fate had conspired to bring him into the orbit of a kindred spirit, a man who valued words just as much as he did himself. Looking through Ghost-People-Talk it occurred to him to wonder why no glossary of pidgin existed for the benefit of people who spoke English. Or for that matter Hindusthani? Surely the foreigners who sojourned in Fanqui-town needed to understand the enclave’s lingua franca just as much as their hosts did? And if an English version of Ghost-People-Talk could be produced, surely it would also command a substantial market?
In the middle of the night, he sat up in his bed. Of