River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [225]
‘Sir, I know I cannot go to Canton,’ she said to Fitcher, ‘but could I not travel with the plants a part of the way?’
Fitcher scratched his beard and mumbled, ‘Ee could go as far as Lintin Island; ee’d be all right as long as ee don’t get up to no flay-gerries there.’
‘Really, sir?’
‘Yes. The junk can tow the gig behind it and the men’ll bring ee back afterwards.’
‘Oh thank you, sir. Thank you.’
She ran on deck and signalled to the gig to wait.
The junk was close by, wallowing in the water: when the gig pulled up, Baburao lowered a wooden shelf for the plants. Paulette held her breath as the pots were being winched up, and was hugely relieved when the operation was concluded without mishap. Then a ladder was thrown down for her and she climbed up on deck.
This was the first time Paulette had stepped on Baburao’s junk, and her initial response was one of disappointment. The Redruth had been anchored off Hong Kong long enough that she had come to recognize some of the unusual vessels that plied those waters: caterpillar-like passenger boats, long and thin, with seats arranged in rows; ‘funeral-boats’, piled high with coffins; two-masted ‘duck-tail’ junks, with tiered houses; and perhaps the most eye-catching of all – whale-like ‘pole-junks’, over a hundred feet in length, with mouths that looked as though they were sieving food from the water.
In a place where such vessels abounded Baburao’s junk was not a craft likely to attract much notice: she was a sha-ch’uan – a ‘sand-ship’ – which his grandfather had acquired very cheap, somewhere up north. The ship’s name was too long for Paulette to remember, but it didn’t matter anyway, because in her hearing Baburao always referred to his junk as the Kismat – the word was the exact equivalent, he said, of the Chinese characters painted on the junk’s bows.
Like every other vessel on the Pearl River, the Kismat sported an enormous eye on each side of her bows – a gigantic oculus that seemed to be keeping watch for prey and predators. In size she was smaller than both the Ibis and the Redruth, being only about sixty feet in length, yet she had more masts than either of those vessels, being fitted with no less than five. Their arrangement was as odd as their appearance: they leant this way and that, like the tapers on a wind-blown candle-stand. Only two of the masts were planted squarely in the vessel and even these were slanted at strange, irregular angles, one leaning forward and the other tilting back. As for the three smaller poles, they looked more like sticks than masts, and were attached not to the deck but to the deck rails, being placed seemingly at random around the edges of the hull. The placement of the rudder was equally strange, to Paulette’s eyes at least, for it was fitted not into the centre of the stern, but on one side of the hull, and was controlled not by a wheel, but by a huge tiller that stuck out over the roof of the deckhouse.
In short, with her raised stern, her miscellaneous masts and barrel-shaped hull, the Kismat projected an image of wallowing ungainliness. But this was deceptive: once the mats were up on the masts, the junk provided as smooth a ride as any vessel of her size.
The journey started with a ceremony that seemed, in the beginning, to be very like the pujas Paulette had seen in Calcutta, with incense being offered to T’ien-hou and Kuan-yin (who were benevolent goddesses, explained Baburao, like Lakshmi and Saraswati in India). But then the ritual suddenly exploded, quite literally, into a spectacular tamasha with popping fireworks, banging gongs and the lighting of innumerable strips of red-and-gold paper (to frighten away the bhoots, rakshasas and other demons, said Baburao helpfully). All this, combined with the noise of alarmed ducks, crying babies and snuffling pigs, created an atmosphere such that Paulette would not have been surprised to see the junk flying off like a rocket. But instead, as the noise built to