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The Spice Merchant of Mattancherry: Twenty Years on the Water
Harun ran his thumb over the stitching of a burlap sack, listening to the first squall rattle the corrugated iron of the warehouse wharf. Across the water, the low silhouettes of container ships swung against their moorings in the Cochin channel, while the air inside the depot hung thick with the medicinal camphor of cracked cardamom and pungent black tellicherry pepper. In his breast pocket rested a printed telex from an import house in Hamburg: they expected forty metric tons dispatched before the monsoon closed the bar, and they demanded last season's pricing. Had Harun been a younger man, he might well have capitulated to preserve the contract.
Twenty years earlier, when his uncle first surrendered the keys to the vaulted warehouse, trade had seemed a matter of clean arithmetic.