Vico’s connections in Fanqui-town were no less impressive than Bahram’s: he knew people in every factory and was often out till the small hours of the morning. His love of food and liquor were legendary in the Achha Hong and no one liked to boast about it more than he himself: he was one of those men whose pretensions consist only of exaggerating the grossness of their own instincts and appetites; to listen to him was to imagine that he liked nothing better than to spend his days in bed, eating, drinking, farting and fornicating.

So consistent was his description of this fictional self that it took Neel a while to understand that Vico was, in some ways, the opposite of what he pretended to be: industrious, energetic, a faithful husband and a devout Catholic. That he was also a man of many resources, endowed with all kinds of unexpected affiliations, was made apparent only through throwaway remarks and references – for example to his connection with Father Gonsalo Garcia, the East Indian missionary who had been crucified near Nagasaki, in Japan, along with a number of other Catholics, including five other members of the Franciscan order. The martyr had been beatified by Pope Urban VIII and in his birthplace he was already venerated as a soon-to-be saint: as it happened, this was none other than Vico’s own village – Bassein, near Bombay – and his was one of several local families who were reputed to be distantly related to the family of the venerable friar.

Because of their network of co-religionists, in rural China, members of the Catholic missionary orders were often extremely well informed about what was happening in the country: some of them occasionally visited Canton, to tend to the needs of the Catholics of the foreign enclave, and despite their reputation for secrecy, they were not impervious to the magic of Vico’s charmed connections.

Vico’s connections were often useful to Neel too, for apart from note- and letter-writing, the most important part of his job was khabar-dari – news-gathering. Through his first few weeks in Canton, Neel despaired of being able to cater to the Seth’s insatiable appetite for news. Knowing no one in the city, and possessing no sources of news other than the Canton Register and the Chinese Repository he was reduced to scouring old issues in the hope of finding something of interest to report. Of the two publications, the Repository was the more scholarly, the bulk of it being dedicated to long articles on subjects like the habits of scaly anteaters and witchcraft among the Malays. Such matters were of no interest to Bahram: he had as much scorn for abstractions as for useless facts.

‘Don’t want any bloody professory, understood, munshiji? News, news, news, that’s all. No bloody “hereuntos” and “thereunders”: just the khabar. Samjoed?’

The Canton Register was both newsy and polemical, and was therefore of more interest to Bahram, especially because the editor, John Slade, was also a regular at the Chamber of Commerce. But this meant that he was often aware of the Register’s contents even before they saw print.