‘A draught, mister?’
Before he registered what he was doing, the pipe was in his mouth – he was breathing in, the hostess was smiling wider, saying something he didn’t understand, and everything was sweet and dizzy and lovely and awful all at once. He coughed, then sucked in hard again; he had to see how addictive this stuff was, if it really could make one sacrifice all else.
‘Fine.’ Ramy gripped his arm. ‘That’s enough, let’s go.’
They walked briskly back through the city, this time with Ramy in the lead. Robin didn’t speak a word. He couldn’t tell how much those few draughts of opium had affected him, whether he was only imagining his symptoms. Once, out of curiosity, he had thumbed through a copy of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which described the effect of opium as communicating ‘serenity and equipoise’ to all the faculties, of ‘greatly invigorating’ one’s self-possession, and of giving ‘an expansion to the heart’. But he felt none of those things. The only words he would use to describe himself now were ‘not quite right’; he felt vaguely nauseated, his head swam, his heart beat too fast, and his body moved far too slowly.
‘You all right?’ Ramy asked after a while.
‘I’m drowning,’ Robin mumbled.
‘No, you’re not,’ said Ramy. ‘You’re only being hysterical. We’ll get back to the Factories, and you’ll drink a nice tall glass of water—’
‘It’s called yánghuò,’* said Robin. ‘That’s what she called the opium. Yáng means “foreign”, huò means “goods”. Yánghuò means “foreign goods”. That’s how they refer to everything here. Yáng people. Yáng guilds. Yánghuòre – an obsession with foreign goods, with opium. And that’s me. That’s coming from me. I’m yáng.’
They paused over a bridge, beneath which fishermen and sampans went back and forth. The din of it, the cacophony of a language he’d spent so much time away from and now had to focus on to decipher, made Robin want to press his hands against his ears, to block out a soundscape that should have but did not feel like home.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘About Hermes.’
Ramy sighed. ‘Birdie, not now.’
‘I should have told you,’ Robin insisted. ‘I should have, and I didn’t, because somehow I still had it all split in my head, and I never put the two pieces together because I just didn’t see... I just – I don’t know how I didn’t see.’
Ramy regarded him in silence for a long moment, and then stepped closer so that they were standing side by side, gazing out over the water.
‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘Sir Horace Wilson, my guardian, once took me to one of the opium fields he’d invested in. In West Bengal. I don’t think I ever told you about it. That’s where the bulk of this stuff is grown – in Bengal, Bihar, and Patna. Sir Horace owned a share in one of the plantations. He was so proud; he thought this was the future of the colonial trade. He made me shake hands with his fieldworkers. He told them that someday, I might be their supervisor. This stuff changed everything, he said. This corrected the trade deficit.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’
Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.
‘It’s sick,’ he whispered. ‘It’s sick, it’s so sick...’
‘But it’s just trade,’ said Ramy. ‘Everyone benefits; everyone profits, even if it’s only one country that profits a good deal more. Continuous gains – that’s the logic, isn’t it? So why would we ever try to break out? The point is, Birdie, I think I understand why you didn’t see. Almost no one does.’
Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?
Griffin was right to be angry, thought Robin, but he was wrong to think he could do anything about it. These trade networks were carved in stone. Nothing was pushing this arrangement off its course; there were too many private interests, too much money at stake. They could see where it was going, but the people who had the power to do anything about it had been placed in positions where they would profit, and the people who suffered most had no power at all.
‘It was so easy to forget,’ he said. ‘The cards it’s built on, I mean – because when you’re at Oxford, in the tower, they’re just words, just ideas. But the world’s so much bigger than I thought—’
‘It’s just as big as we thought,’ Ramy said. ‘It’s just that we forgot the rest of it mattered. We got so good at refusing to see what was right in front of us.’
‘But now I’ve seen it,’ said Robin, ‘or at least understand it a bit better, and it’s tearing me apart, Ramy, and I don’t even understand why. It’s not as if – as if—’
As if what? As if he’d seen anything properly horrible? As if he’d seen the slave plantations in the West Indies at the height of their cruelty, or the starved bodies in India, victims of utterly avoidable famines, or the slaughtered natives of the New World? All he’d seen was one opium den – but that was enough to act as synecdoche for the awful, undeniable rest.
He leaned over the side of the bridge, wondering how it might feel if he just toppled over the edge.
‘Are you going to jump, Birdie?’ Ramy asked.
‘It just doesn’t feel...’ Robin took a deep breath. ‘It doesn’t feel like we have the right to be alive.’
Ramy sounded very calm. ‘Do you mean that?’
‘No, I don’t, I just...’ Robin squeezed his eyes shut. His thoughts were so jumbled; he had no idea how to convey what he meant, and all he could grasp at were memories, passing references. ‘Did you ever read Gulliver’s Travels? I read it all the time, when I lived here – I read it so often I nearly memorized it. And there’s this chapter where Gulliver winds up on a land ruled by horses, who call themselves the Houyhnhnms, and where the humans are savage, idiot slaves called Yahoos. They’re swapped. And Gulliver gets so used to living with his Houyhnhnm master, gets so convinced of Houyhnhnm superiority, that when he gets home, he’s horrified by his fellow humans. He thinks they’re imbeciles. He can’t stand to be around them. And that’s how this... that’s...’ Robin rocked back and forth over the bridge. He felt like no matter how hard he breathed, he could not get enough air. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
‘I do,’ Ramy said gently. ‘But it does no one any good for us to get into histrionics about it. So step down, Birdie, and let’s go and have that glass of water.’