Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best manga ereader .TXT) 📗

he frequents and use him like a pair of spectacles you look through to see the hidden design laid out on every low table, the meaning of the distance or proximity between the celadon teacup and the white one. The variations usually took years to learn, but blackmail gave Hardeep formidable teaching ability; his blackmailer boasted that it only took him about a month to absorb all the teacup arrangement codes necessary for tracking sea shipments without moving from his spot in the shade under the bamboo trees.

If you ask me, R. Pandi, his associates were stupid to have let him host a quarter of the bankroll. He was a notably fragile link in that smuggling chain from the beginning. We haven’t found that he had a reputation for financial greed … it seems he had that much going for him. But he was too impulsive and had no discipline at all. That’s what the people who knew him well said about him. Lucky for him, then, that the only activity he liked more than drinking was successfully falsifying document after document, undaunted by intricacy or time frame. The Sichuan tea handlers couldn’t find anything to dislike about Hardeep and Shilpa as a couple—that was another factor in their favour. They get mentioned in a few letters as a local golden couple, and that must have been the first impression they gave as an attractive, well-mannered pair come over from Assam to talk tea in fluent Mandarin. That was the only reason he rose up the ranks the way he did, and after the East India Company crushed the cooperation among their competitors, Hardeep had nothing to do but buy liquor. Yes, as you said, he got to keep the money. He got to flee to Newcastle and live in lavish anonymity. And the wife he’d done it all for stayed where the money was. Run after the East India Company agent? Not Shilpa Kapoor. Let the letters she’d written to him be read aloud to her night after night; she could listen to it all stone-cold sober. This would usually happen at around one in the morning, with Hardeep putting on a simpering voice to impersonate her. “Ha ha,” she said, and “I don’t care,” and “Well, I’m going to be happy anyway.” She applauded her own turns of phrase. It was too late to do anything else. For about a decade Shilpa and Hardeep were serious about putting the money to good use. We have a lot of the documentation for funds and scholarships; they looked at and approved plans for schools and orphanages. It looks like the scammers of every age find a way to make our money do the most damage where we want and need it to do the most good—so in the age of private philanthropy, falling prey to scammers meant sponsoring altruistic fronts for some hair-raising shit.

The atonement funding paper trail dwindled to nothing after about a decade, as if Hardeep and Shilpa ultimately conceded that they simply didn’t have an eye for an honest endeavour. And why would they, if that “birds of a feather flock together” saying holds true? Shilpa already had some emeralds, but those were love gifts, so she bought herself some more; they were best suited to her colouring. She didn’t wear them; they were last-ditch emeralds. The sort her type of woman would put on before being led to the guillotine and displayed before a baying crowd. Shilpa dwelt on her new emeralds and dwelt in them. She inspected their inclusions through a jeweller’s eyeglass. She was worried that they’d been switched for fakes when she wasn’t looking. When she wasn’t worrying about that she worried that someone would come and take her emeralds from her outright. Someone might even kill her for them. And she didn’t necessarily think they’d be wrong to, so she wouldn’t even be able to come back as a protesting ghost. So Shilpa took to hiding her emeralds in her mouth. This was noticed, especially when she spoke. Hardeep was so drunk all the time he just thought her teeth had turned green and went on forcing her to relive the litany of passionate declarations she’d never made to him. Of course, once you start hiding emeralds in your mouth, you’re done for. It’s no great leap from there to sleeping with your emeralds in your mouth, which is how Shilpa Kapoor choked one night. She’d hidden away for the night in a wardrobe full of fur coats. Nobody heard her choking, or so they say, and she wasn’t found until morning. None of this made too much of a dent in those scavenged millions you mentioned. Not the emeralds, not the liquor, not the attempts at philanthropy, not anything else they bought. But that doesn’t actually matter, R. Pandee, because we don’t know where those two hid the rest of those millions. If you want full updates on the search, though, I’m sure my mother or one of my aunts or uncles could fill you in. You’ve written to someone whose family hasn’t moved house for centuries in case the treasure is somewhere in the house. We’re not a small family, so we branched out down the street and then down the neighbouring street, and so on. Charles Dickens heard about us and tried to find out more whilst in the region, but he backed down after a bunch of brown-skinned and muscle-bound Tyneside lads visited him at his hotel and advised him to write a sequel to Oliver Twist instead.

My mum’s chronicles would probably be quite different. She wants to give the pilfered fortune back to those it was taken from; it’s just that she has to find it first. So off she goes around the world, chasing clues and visiting charlatans who promise to help her reclaim our family honour. We haven’t spoken for years. This Sichuan Affair of ours is a truly deep-rooted daftness.

Respectfully speaking, R. Pan D