Sundara

Sundara lies two or three weeks south of the Pearl River ports when the monsoon allows the passage, a port of the Sultan holding somewhere near a hundred thousand people where three trades meet: the produce of the jungle concessions inland, the spice traffic, and the pearls brought in by diving communities who hold their beds by custom and close them at seasons no buyer has ever bought open. It is a large and old city, and the British are a very small part of it.

The British concession is a handful of streets, a customs house and a wall inside the Sultan's port, carrying two or three hundred Britons through a season, most of them sailors and godown men. Two authorities run it side by side. A British agent keeps the wall, an officer of the Sultan stands beside him, and the local families whose labour moves every cargo matter more than either. The arrangement is renewed by lease, duty and personal dealing every few years, and the warmth between the parties can fade in a single season though no treaty is ever broken. Sundara takes a duty on opium and treats it as one more taxable import.

The climate is the concession's other master. Godowns hold great value under roofs that the heat and wet will take back within a few years, and the forest never seems far off. A British chapel, an older local house of worship and a shrine at the water that is older than both share the streets by a customary agreement about whose day is whose. A new agent who disturbs the calendar learns of it when the godown does not open and the boats are not there.

The nights a godown most needs foreign guards are the nights its own guards keep at the shrine, and the night the monsoon breaks is the most famous of them, when the rain comes down in sheets at dusk, the lamps burn amber in the wet, and every thief along the coast knows the warehouses are short of men. Companies that stand those nights well are rehired season after season.