Ghosts

Rain had been running in from the South China Sea in great grey-smeared columns for days and the Delta was sinking. Canals were brim-full, lapping at shining roads, waves of mud-water washing over the banks. Blunt-nosed barges, decks below the water line, loaded to the gunnels with sand and gravel, rooted upstream like furrowing pigs. Rain dripped off tin and off the brims of conical straw hats, and the guesthouses smelt of cold rust and mildew and the noodle soup tasted of river-water and the streets smelt of sodden chicken feathers, and sometimes a cold-shivering breeze ran in across grey water.

But the rain of the morning had stopped now, and the people of Cantho were quickly filling the streets, skipping over mud-puddles yapping at each other in the strange sing-song of Vietnamese. The market under the barn-roofs beside the river was roaring in the steaming dampness over broken eggs and rotten onion skins and pools of fish scales and slime. I bought a bundle of lychees from a fat woman in loose, checked pyjamas sitting on an upturned yellow bucket.

The river was broad and white here, and great hoardings advertising paint and beer reared up from the low green line of vegetation on the far bank. A few rusting ferries guttered back and forth, churning cappuccino-white wakes; sharp, narrow boats with long-tail outboards shrieked like hornets along the line of the flow, and against the inside bank a plague of rot-black dinghies jostled, shunted, elbowed back and forth, the boatmen – and women – standing tall in the stern, working the heavy oars.

I was looking for a ghost.

In a little park with dripping borders and corroded coke cans in the long grass I met a pair of tiny old men with black eyes and deep smile lines. They asked if I was French, hoping. They wore cheap nylon trousers and battered leather shoes, polished as best as possible, and shifted and twitched like birds as they spoke. They seemed not to have spoken French for a long time, and were delighted to discover that they still could. After each sentence emerged intact their eyes would flare with surprised delight and they would glance at one another, grinning.
“Nous avons appris le Français à college” – black eyes glittering with childlike pride. But now, malheureusement, they said, les jeunes wanted only to learn English; there would soon be no French-speakers left in old Indochina.

Once, waiting in line under grey-furred fans in a bank in Indonesia, a tiny old woman hobbled up to me. She circled for a moment, squinting up with clouded eyes, then she said something in a language I did not understand. But I recognised it, and caught the meaning.
No, I said, I was not Dutch; and I could not speak the language of the Dutch, but, as madam could hear, I spoke Indonesian very well… She did not reply, but made a clicking noise of disappointment with her tongue and shuffled away, shaking her head sadly. Perhaps I had been her last chance to use a language that had long since died in the islands.

There was nothing sad or disappointed about the sparky, bird-like old men in the little park beside the river in Cantho. We discussed the complications of international borders between countries like Cambodia, where the cars travelled on the right, and Thailand, where they drove on the left. What on earth, they wanted to know, happened in the middle of the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France?

I left them, smiling, and twittering and waving between the wet rose bushes and went back to the concrete path beside the river. The French-speaking old men, like the crooked old Dutch-speaker in Indonesia, were fading echoes, ghosts in their way, but I was looking for a different spectre. I had read some travel-writer’s account of a visit to Cantho two decades earlier when the place had been full of them.

***

From a rattling bus with vomit stains streaked from the open windows, shuddering over the salty yellow coast-plains of Gujarat, I saw a black man walking among the narrow-faced Indians in the fly-buzz bazaar of some tiny dog-town east of Bhavnagar. There was no doubt about it: he had a head of tight-cropped curls and a broad African face. He was taller than the men around him, and he squinted as he walked. Then I saw another, dressed in shabby, dust-marked clothes, leaning in a yellow doorway. I twisted my head almost too sharply as we rolled by, sure that his broad black brow had been marked with a dab of Hindu vermillion.

I saw more of these strange African Gujaratis later, and only learnt about their history later still: they had been slaves, brought across by Arab traders in centuries past, and locked into the strange amber of India’s caste system as an Untouchable sub-set. Looking at the map I could see the way their ancestors had come, run up the hard Yemeni coastline from the Horn of Africa in snap-sailed dhows.

At least there was a clear explanation for the black Gujaratis. When I met a Pakistani boy in Gilgit whose hair was so intensely ginger, and whose face so thickly freckled that he would have drawn stares in Scotland, I had to conjure wild fancies of wayward Victorian British soldiers seeking warmth at some lonely Hindukush posting, or better still some lost bloodline from the armies of Alexander the Great… The same for a child making mischief among the touts and peanut-sellers in the smoking bus station in Chittangong. His eyes were black but his hair was yellow and his skin fair. Ghosts.

***

Everyone knew the nature of the ghosts in Cantho, but while the travel writer in the 1980s had reported them milling around him, tugging at sleeves, begging for coins, I searched among the market traders without success, half-imagining a fairer head, a lighter eye here and there, before reluctantly letting it slide every time.

I turned back along the riverfront, towards the park, hoping the old French-speakers would still be there. The boatmen were rocking back and forth beyond the railings, craft nudging at each other, oarsmen balancing against the wavelets. Some of them called to me in broken English – did mister want a tour, a boat trip? I shook my head, and had almost turned away when I saw him, standing taller and prouder than the rest, high at the stern of his boat like a roman charioteer. His brow was high and his hair curled and burnished by the sun, and though his eyes drew to almond points at the corners, his skin was glossy-dark and his nose broad above a perfect, full-lipped mouth. He grinned a bright grin at me – “Boat trip mister?” He was perhaps thirty years old, and I flicked over the decades on my fingers. I grinned back at him, wondering if his father had made it home to whatever quarter of America he belonged. And if he had, did he know - could he imagine this handsome, half-black, half-Vietnamese charioteer, leaning hard against the oars as a fresh tower of rain began its slow march in across the Delta?

© Tim Hannigan 2008