The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [16]
“Don’t touch!” Mr. Daniels said, pulling down my outstretched hand. “That’s Strychnos nux vomica. Be careful—it has an alluring smell, especially at night. It almost tempts you to break open that green shell, doesn’t it? It looks like your Colombo bael fruit, but it isn’t. It’s a strychnine. These with their flowers facing down are angel’s trumpet. The ones facing up, wickedly beautiful, are devil’s trumpet. And here’s Scrophulariaceae, the snapdragon, also deceptively attractive. Even if you just sniff these, you will feel woozy.”
Cassius inhaled deeply and staggered back dramatically and “passed out,” crushing a few frail herbs with his elbow. Mr. Daniels went over to move his arm away from an innocent-looking fern.
“Plants have remarkable powers, Cassius. This one’s juice keeps your hair black and your fingernails growing at a healthy rate. Over there, those blue ones—”
“A garden on a ship!” Mr. Daniels’s secret had impressed even Cassius.
“Noah …” said Ramadhin quietly.
“Yes. And remember, the sea is also a garden, a poet tells us. Now, come over here. I think I saw the three of you smoking bits of that cane chair the other day…. This will be better for you.”
He bent down and we crouched with him while he plucked some heart-shaped leaves. “These are Piper betel leaves,” he said, placing them on my open palm. He moved on, picked up some slaked lime from a cache and combined it with slivers of areca nut he had in a jute bag, and handed the mixture to Cassius.
Within minutes we were proceeding along that modestly lit path chewing betel. We were familiar with the mild street intoxicant. And as Mr. Daniels had pointed out, it was safer for Ramadhin than smoking a cane chair. “If you go to a wedding, they sometimes add a sliver of gold to the cardamom and lime paste.” He gave us a small hoard of these ingredients, along with some dehydrated tobacco leaves, which we decided to save for our predawn strolls, when we could spit the red fluid over the railings into the rushing sea or down into the darkness of the foghorns. The three of us walked with Mr. Daniels along the various paths. We had been at sea for days, and the range of colours had been limited to white and grey and blue, save for a few sunsets. But now, in this artificially lit garden, the plants exaggerated their greens and blues and extreme yellows, all of them dazzling us. Cassius asked Mr. Daniels for more details about poisons. We were hoping he might tell us about an herb or a seed that could overpower an unlikable adult, but Mr. Daniels would say nothing about such things.
We left the garden and returned through the blackness of the hold. When we passed the mural of naked women, Cassius once again asked, “What is that, Uncle?” Then we climbed the metal ladder back to deck level. It was more difficult going up. Mr. Daniels was almost a flight above us, and by the time we got to the top he was outside smoking a beedi that was rolled in white paper rather than a brown leaf. He stood with it cupped in his left hand and seemed suddenly keen to lecture us about palms from all over the world. He imitated how they stood and how they swayed, depending on heritage or breed, how they would bend with the wind in their submissiveness. He kept showing us the various palm postures until he had us laughing. Then he offered us the cigarette and demonstrated how to inhale it. Cassius had been eyeing it, but Mr. Daniels gave it first to me and the beedi went back and forth among us.
“Unusual beedi,” Cassius said slowly.
Ramadhin took a second puff and said, “Do the palm trees again, Uncle!” And Mr. Daniels proceeded to distinguish for us more of the various postures. “This of course is the talipot, the umbrella palm,” he said. “You get your toddy from it, and jaggery. She moves this way.” Then he imitated a royal palm from the Cameroons, which grew in freshwater swamps. Then something from the Azores, followed by a slender-trunked one from New Guinea, his arms becoming its