River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [73]
Shortly after the sighting the officers called all hands on deck and put them on high alert: the waters around Hainan were notorious for pirates, and every vessel that came into view had to be treated as suspect. Lookouts were posted agil and peechil and the topmen were sent scrambling aloft.
Tabar lagao! Gabar uthao!
With stu’nsails on the yardarms and sky-sails atop every mast, the Anahita leapt before the wind, her cutwater plunging between swell and trough, her beams banking steeply as she tacked. The island vanished as the ship swung out to sea, but only to reappear towards sunset, when a cloud-wreathed mountain was spotted again.
The sight exhilarated Bahram, reminding him of another journey and another island he had visited, on the far side of the globe, some twenty-two years before.
Tell me, he said to Zadig. Do you remember that time? When we met the General?
Zadig laughed: Of course, Bahram-bhai. Who could forget it?
It happened in February 1816, when Bahram and Zadig were on their way to England on the HCS Cuffnells. Two months after leaving Canton they reached Cape Town where they were met by a startling piece of news: Napoleon Bonaparte had been exiled to a tiny island in the Atlantic. This came as a surprise, since the rumour, at the time of their departure from Macau, was that the Duke of Wellington had hanged the Emperor from a tree, at Waterloo. They were now astonished to learn that Bonaparte was being held captive on St Helena. This was their next port of call and the possibility of catching a glimpse of the erstwhile dictator caused a ferment of excitement among some of the ship’s passengers.
Bahram’s knowledge of European politics was quite limited at the time, and he was not among those who were greatly affected by the news. But for Zadig it was as if a bolt of lightning had struck the timbers beneath his feet: at the time of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, Zadig was a boy of fifteen, living in his family house, which was in Masr al-Qadima or Old Cairo. He remembered vividly the panic that had gripped this suburb when it came to be known that a French army had seized Alexandria and was marching on the capital. When the dust of battle rose above the pyramids, he was among the many who scaled the Church of the Mu’allaqa to listen to the sound of cannonfire, booming across the river.
Bonaparte’s victory had affected Zadig in many ways, large and small: he had started taking French lessons, for instance, and he and his cousins had begun to ride horses, which was something that they, as Christians, could not have done before: he was never to forget his first trot around Cairo’s Ezbekiya Gardens. It was then also that he acquired the skills that would launch him in his trade, being taken on as an apprentice by a French watchmaker.
Among Zadig’s relatives there were many others whose lives were altered by the invasion: a couple of his cousins happened to have a smattering of French and they became interpreters for the invading army; others had found jobs in the newly established printing press. One perennially impoverished uncle, Orhan Karabedian, an artist, experienced a particularly dramatic change of fortune. As a painter of icons he had always found it hard to make ends meet, subsisting mainly on church commissions; now he was besieged by French officers who wanted souvenirs of Coptic Egypt – it made no difference to anyone that he was an Armenian and not a Copt.