Májha dhára mé hai bera merá

Kripá kará ásrai hai tera

My raft's adrift in the current

Your mercy is my only refuge…

'Damned coolies,' muttered the Captain, through a mouthful of lamb. 'Bloody Doomsday couldn't put a stop to their caterwauling.'

A ship could take as long as three days, depending on the weather and the winds, to sail downriver from Calcutta to the Bay of Bengal. Between the river's estuary and the open sea lay the island of Ganga-Sagar, the last of the holy waterway's many pilgrimages. One of Neel's ancestors had endowed a temple on the island, and he had visited it several times himself. The erstwhile Halder zemindary lay about halfway between Calcutta and Ganga-Sagar, and Neel knew that the Ibis would pass his estate towards the end of the second day. This was a journey that he had made so often that he could feel the zemindary's approach in the river's bends and turns. As it drew near, his head filled with shards of recollection, some of them as bright and sharp as bits of broken glass. When the time came, almost as if to mock him, he heard the lookout cry out, above: Raskhali, we're passing Raskhali!

He could see it now: it couldn't have been clearer if the schooner's hull had turned into glass. There it was: the palace and its colonnaded verandas; the terrace where he had taught Raj Rattan to fly kites; the avenue of palash trees his father had planted; the window of the bedroom to which he had taken Elokeshi.

'What is it, eh?' said Ah Fatt. 'Why you hitting your head, eh?' When Neel made no answer, Ah Fatt shook him by the shoulders till his teeth rattled.

'The place we pass now – you know it, not know it?'

'I know it.'

'Your village, eh?'

'Yes.'

'Home? Family? Tell everything.'

Neel shook his head: 'No. Maybe some other time.'

'Achha. Other time.'

Raskhali was so close that Neel could almost hear the bells of its temple. What he needed now, was to be elsewhere, in a place where he could be free of his memories. 'Where's your home, Ah Fatt? Tell me about it. Is it in a village?'

'Not village.' Ah Fatt scratched his chin. 'My home very big place: Guangzhou. English call Canton.'

'Tell me. Tell me everything.'

Hou-hou…

Thus it happened that while the Ibis was still on the Hooghly, Neel was being transported across the continent, to Canton – and it was this other journey, more vivid than his own, that kept his sanity intact through the first part of the voyage: no one but Ah Fatt, no one he had ever known, could have provided him with the escape he needed, into a realm that was wholly unfamiliar, utterly unlike his own.

It was not because of Ah Fatt's fluency that Neel's vision of Canton became so vivid as to make it real: in fact, the opposite was true, for the genius of Ah Fatt's descriptions lay in their elisions, so that to listen to him was a venture of collaboration, in which the things that were spoken of came gradually to be transformed into artefacts of a shared imagining. So did Neel come to accept that Canton was to his own city as Calcutta was to the villages around it – a place of fearful splendour and unbearable squalor, as generous with its pleasures as it was unforgiving in the imposition of hardship. In listening and prompting, Neel began to feel that he could almost see with Ah Fatt's eyes: there it was, the city that had conceived and nurtured this new half of himself – a seaport that lay far inland, in the recesses of a nook-shotten coast, separated from the ocean by an intricate tangle of swamps, sands, creeks, marshes and inlets. It was shaped like a ship, this river port, its hull outlined by a continuous bulwark of towering, grey walls. Between the water and the city's walls lay a shoulder of land that was as turbulent as a ship's wake: although it fell outside the city limits, this stretch of shore was so thickly settled that nobody could tell where the land stopped and the water began. Sampans, junks, lorchas and smug-boats were moored here in such numbers as to form a wide, floating shelf that reached almost halfway across the river's width: everything was jumbled, water and mud, boats and godowns – but the confusion was deceptive, for even in this teeming, bustling length of silt and water, there were distinct little communities and neighbourhoods. And of these, the strangest, without a doubt, was the small enclave allotted to the foreigners who came to trade with China: the extra-Celestials who were known to the Cantonese as Fanquis – Aliens.

It was on this spit of land, just beyond the south-western gates of the walled city, that the Aliens had been permitted to build a row of so-called factories, which were nothing but narrow, red-tiled buildings, part warehouse, part residence and part accounts office for the shroffing of cash. For the few months of the year during which they were allowed to reside at Canton, the Aliens had perforce to confine their devilry to this one narrow enclave. The precincts of the walled city were forbidden to them, as to all foreigners – or so at least the authorities declared, claiming that such had been the case for almost a hundred years. Yet anyone who had been inside could tell you that of certain kinds of Alien there was no lack within the city walls: why, you had only to walk past the Hao-Lin temple, on the Chang-shou Road, to see monks from dark, westerly places; and if you stepped inside the precincts, you could even see a statue of the Buddhist preacher who had founded the temple: nobody could dispute that this proselyte was as foreign as the Sakyamuni himself. Or else, if you ventured still further into the city, walking up the Guang-li Road to the Huai-shang temple, you would know at once, from the shape of the minaret, that this was not, despite the outward resemblance, a temple at all, but a mosque; you would see too that the people who lived in and around this edifice were not all Uighurs, from the western reaches of the Empire, but included, besides, a rich display of devilry – Javanese, Malays, Malayalis and Black-Hat Arabs.

Why, then, were some Aliens allowed in and some kept out? Was it the case that only a certain kind of Alien was truly an extra-Celestial being, to be kept under careful confinement, in the enclave of the factories? So it had to be, for the Fanquis of the factories were undeniably of a certain cast of face and character: there were 'Red-faced' Aliens from England, 'Flowery-flag' Aliens from America, and a good sprinkling of others, from France, Holland, Denmark and so on.

But of these many kinds of creature, the most easily recognizable, without a doubt, was the small but flourishing tribe of White-hatted Aliens – Parsis from Bombay. How was it that the White-hatted ones came to be counted as Fanquis, of the same breed as the Red-faces and Flowery-flags? No one knew, since a matter of appearance it surely could not be – for while it was true that some of the white-hatted faces were no less florid than those of the Flowery-flags, it was true also that there were many among them who were as dark as any of the lascars who sat imp-like upon the mastheads of the Pearl River. As for their clothes, the White-hats' garments were in no whit the same as those of the Fanquis: they wore robes and turbans, not unlike those of Black-hatted Arabs, presenting an aspect utterly unlike that of the other factory-dwellers – whose wont it was to strut about in absurdly tight leggings and jerkins, their pockets stuffed with the kerchiefs in which they liked to store their snot. No less was it plain for all to see that the other Fanquis looked somewhat askance upon the White-hats, for they were often excluded from the councils and revelries of the rest, just as their factory was the smallest and narrowest. But they too were merchants, after all, and profits were their business, for the sake of which they seemed perfectly willing to live the Fanqui life, migrating like birds between their homes in Bombay, their summer chummeries in Macao, and their cold-weather quarters in Canton, where the vistas of the walled city were not the least of the pleasures forbidden them – for while in China, they had to live, as did the other Fanquis, not just without women, but in the strictest celibacy. On no measure did the city's authorities so firmly insist as on the chop, issued annually, that forbade the people of Guangzhou to provide the Aliens with 'women or boys'. But could such an edict really be enforced? As in so many things, what was said and what transpired were by no means the same. It was impossible, surely, for those self-same authorities to be unaware of the women on the flower-boats that trolled the Pearl River, importuning lascars, merchants, linkisters, shroffs and whoever else was of a mind for some diversion; impossible, equally, that they should not know that in the very centre of the Fanqui enclave there lay a filth-clogged mews called Hog Lane, which boasted of any number of shebeens serving not just shamshoo, hocksaw and other liberty-liquors, but all manner of intoxicants of which the embrace of women was not the least. The authorities were certainly aware that the Dan boat-people, who manned many of the sampans and lanteas and chop-boats of the Pearl River, also performed many small but essential services for the Fanquis, including taking in their washing – of which there was always a great deal, not just by way of clothing, but also of bed- and table-linen (the latter particularly, since food and drink did not fall within the purview of the luxuries denied to the poor devils). Such being the case, the business of laundering could not be transacted without frequent visits and outcalls – which was how it happened that a young White-hat of devilish charm, Bahramji Naurozji Moddie, came to cross paths with a fresh-faced Dan girl, Lei Chi Mei.