River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [32]
Bahram was never at ease discussing such things and he began to stutter: Kya? … what do you mean?
There is nothing shameful in this, you know, said Zadig; it is not just the jism that has its needs but also the rooh, the soul – and a man who feels himself to be alone in his own home, does he not have a right to seek companionship elsewhere?
Would you call it a right? said Bahram.
Right or not, I don’t mind telling you that I – like many others who must travel constantly – have a second family, in Colombo. My ‘wife’ there is a Ceylonese burgher and although the family I have had with her is not mine by law, it is as dear to me as the one that bears my name.
Bahram looked at him quickly before dropping his eyes. It is very hard, isn’t it?
There was something in his tone that made Zadig pause. So you have someone too?
With his head lowered, Bahram nodded.
Is she Chinese?
Yes.
Is she what they call a ‘sing-song girl’ – a professional?
No! said Bahram vehemently. No. When I met her she was a washerwoman, a widow. She was living on a boat, with her mother and daughter; they made their living by taking in laundry from the residents of the foreign enclave …
Bahram had never talked about this with anyone: to speak of it was such a release that having started he could not stop.
Her name was Chi-mei, he told Zadig, and he, Bahram, was a newcomer to Canton when he met her; as the youngest member of the Parsi contingent he was often asked to run errands for the big Sethjis; sometimes he would even be sent to the waterfront to inquire after their laundry. That was how he first came across Chi-mei; she was scrubbing clothes in the flat stern of her boat. A scarf was tightly tied over her hair, but a few ringlets had escaped their bindings and lay curled on her forehead. Her face was pert and lively, with glinting black eyes, and cheeks that glowed like polished apples. They locked eyes briefly and then she quickly turned her face away. But later, when he was about to head back to the factory he glanced at her over his shoulder and caught her looking in his direction again.
When he was back in his room, her face kept coming back to him. This was not the first time that Bahram had been plagued by fantasies about the girls who worked on the waterfront – but this time his longings had a keener edge than ever before. Something about the way she had looked at him had lodged in his mind and kept pulling him back towards her sampan. He began to visit the laundry-boats on invented errands and it happened a couple of times that he saw her blush and look away on catching sight of him: this was his only way of knowing that she had come to recognize him.
He noticed that her sampan seemed to have only two other occupants, an old woman and a little girl: there were never any men around. He was obscurely encouraged by this, and finding her alone one day he seized his chance: ‘You name blongi what-thing?’
She blushed: ‘Li Shiu-je. Mistoh name blongi what-thing ah?’
It wasn’t till later that he understood that she’d told him to call her ‘Miss Li’: at that moment it was enough to know that she was fluent in Fanqui-town’s idiom.
‘Me Barry. Barry Moddie.’
She rolled this around her tongue. ‘Mister Barry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mister Barry blongi Pak-taw-gwai?’
Bahram knew this phrase: it meant ‘White-Hat-Ghost’ and was used to refer to Parsis because many of them wore white turbans. He smiled: ‘Yes.’
She gave him a shy nod and slipped away into the sampan’s cabin.
Already then, he knew that there was something special about her. The boat-women of Canton were utterly unlike their land-bound sisters: their feet were unbound and often bare, and there was nothing demure in their demeanour: they rowed boats, hawked goods, and went about their work with just as much gusto, if not more, than their menfolk. In monetary matters they were often unashamedly grasping, and newcomers like Bahram were always warned to be careful when dealing with them.
Unlike some of the other washerwomen Chi-mei never asked for cumshaws or bakshish. She bargained