River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [58]
‘Yes, but …’
Neel clapped his hands to his head and sat down again, beside Ah Fatt. He knew nothing about Bahram Modi except what he had heard from Ah Fatt, and these accounts had given him plenty of cause for misgiving. At times he had been reminded of his own father, the old Zemindar of Raskhali: between the two of them also there had been little communication, for the zemindar had spent much more time with his mistresses than at home. Their meetings, being infrequent, had involved much preparation and a great deal of anxiety: always, when the time came to enter his father’s presence, Neel would find that his tongue was stilled by a peculiar combination of emotions – a mixture of fear, anger and a dull mulish resentment – all of which came flooding back now, at the thought of meeting Bahram.
And yet what a relief it would be to have a job, to stop living like a fugitive.
‘Father want to see you tomorrow,’ said Ah Fatt.
‘Tomorrow!’ said Neel. ‘So soon?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you tell him about me, Ah Fatt?’
‘I tell him I meet you by chance here, in Singapore. All I know is you have done munshi-work before. He say he want see you tomorrow. Talk about job.’
‘But Ah Fatt …’
Neel was for once at a loss for words, but Ah Fatt, in his strangely intuitive way, seemed to know what was going through his mind.
‘You will like Father, Neel. All people love Father. Some say he great man. He see many thing, know many people, tell many story. He not like me you know. And I not like him.’ He smiled. ‘Only one time I am like Father.’
‘When?’
Ah Fatt held up his pipe. ‘You see this? When I have big-smoke, I become like Father. Great man who all people love.’
Five
The coast of China was only a week away when Paulette learnt that apart from a trove of living plants the Redruth was also carrying a ‘painted garden’ – a collection of botanical paintings and illustrations.
The reason why this discovery came so late was because the pictures were not on display: they were neatly bundled in ribbon-tied folders and hidden away in the dingy little storeroom where Fitcher kept his plant presses, seed jars and other equipment. This was no accident: Fitcher was not artistically minded and the aesthetic merits of the pictures meant little to him. He regarded them primarily as tools, but of a special kind – for him they were clues to guide him in the search for new and unknown species of plants.
To use paintings to look for plants struck Paulette as a marvellously inventive yet curious procedure: what could be more unlikely than to search for new species not in Nature, but in the most rarefied realms of human artifice? But this was an old and proven method, Fitcher explained, and he was by no means its inventor: it dated back to the earliest European plant-hunters to work in China – among them a British botanist by the name of James Cuninghame, who had visited China twice in the eighteenth century.
In Cuninghame’s time, travelling in China was a little easier for foreigners than it was later to become: on his first visit he had had the good fortune to spend several months in the port of Amoy. He had discovered there that Chinese painters were exceptionally skilled at the realistic depiction of plants, flowers and trees: this was fortunate for him because in those days no one could hope to bring live specimens from China to Europe by sea; the collector’s aims were rather to amass stocks of seed and to assemble ‘dried gardens’. To these Cuninghame had added another kind of collection, the ‘painted garden’: he had returned to England with over a thousand pictures. These illustrations had elicited much admiration while arousing also a great deal of scepticism – to eyes accustomed to European flora it had seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that flowers of such extravagant beauty could actually exist. There were some who said that these painted flowers were the