Seth Rustamji was still unpersuaded. No, he said, this is too big a departure from the firm’s practices. I can’t allow it.

So Bahram went back to his old accounting job but his performance was so poor that Seth Rustamji called him back into his daftar and told him, bluntly, that he was becoming a complete nikammo – a worthless man. In the shipyard he had proved worse than useless; at home he seemed unable to get along with most of the family – if he carried on like this he would soon become a burden on the family.

Bahram lowered his head and said: Sassraji, everyone makes mistakes. I am just twenty-one; give me a chance to go to China and I will prove myself. Believe me, I will always try to be worthy of you and your family.

Seth Rustomji had looked at him long and hard and then given him an almost imperceptible nod: All right, go then, let’s see what comes of it.

And so Mistrie and Sons had financed Bahram’s first voyage to Canton – and the results had astonished everyone, not least Bahram himself. For him, of all the surprises of that journey, none was greater than that of the foreign enclave of Canton, where the traders resided. ‘Fanqui-town’, as old hands called it, was a place at once strangely straitened yet wildly luxurious; a place where you were always watched and yet were free from the frowning scrutiny of your family; a place where the female presence was strictly forbidden, but where women would enter your life in ways that were utterly unexpected: it was thus that Bahram, while still in his twenties, found himself gloriously and accidentally entangled with Chi-mei, a boat-woman who gave him a son – a child who was all the more dear to him because his existence could never be acknowledged in Bombay.

In Canton, stripped of the multiple wrappings of home, family, community, obligation and decorum, Bahram had experienced the emergence of a new persona, one that had been previously dormant within him: he had become Barry Moddie, a man who was confident, forceful, gregarious, hospitable, boisterous and enormously successful. But when he made the journey back to Bombay, this other self would go back into its wrappings; Barry would become Bahram again, a quietly devoted husband, living uncomplainingly within the constraints of a large joint family. Yet, it was not as if any one aspect of himself were more true or authentic than the other. Both these parts of his life were equally important and necessary to Bahram, and there was little about either that he would have wanted to change. Even Shireenbai’s unemotional dutifulness, her scarcely hidden disappointments, seemed indispensable within the contours of his existence, posing as they did, a necessary corrective to his natural ebullience.

Such was Bahram’s success that he could very well have hived off from the Mistrie firm and set up a trading firm of his own – but this he was never seriously tempted to do. His compensation, for one thing, was so generous as to leave no room for complaint. But even more than his earnings, Bahram enjoyed the perquisites that went with serving as a representative of one of Bombay’s most highly regarded companies: the fact of being able to command some of the finest lodgings in Canton, for example, and of having a near-unlimited allowance for his personal expenses. And then there was the comfort and prestige of having at his disposal a ship like the Anahita, which his father-in-law had built with his own hands, specifically for his use, so that it served almost as his personal flagship: few traders, in Canton or elsewhere, could boast of travelling in such unmatched luxury.