The Salt-Hedge Clerk
oil-painting
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Interactive choice novel — your decisions shape the story
Characters
Meet the 3 characters who bring this story to life: Jaani (tritagonist), Meera Lowe (protagonist), Harcourt Penrose (deuteragonist).
Jaani
tritagonistcourage
A mid-30s widowed Bengali smuggler who runs salt and letters across the Hedge for her village and whose name is the one Meera has written most often in the private ledger.
Meera Lowe
protagonistintegrity
A mid-20s Anglo-Indian customs clerk who has kept a private ledger of every smuggler she let slip through the Hedge, telling herself balance is a kind of goodness until the auditor arrives.
Settings
The story unfolds across 4 distinct locations: Customs Post 17; The Thorn Wall; Saltpan Village; The Salt Godown.
Customs Post 17
A single-room brick outpost on the Inland Customs Line at dusk, oil lamp on a plank desk, private ledger closed beneath a logbook, iron safe in the corner, thorn branches scraping the shutter from outside.
The Thorn Wall
A night stretch of the Great Hedge of India — a ten-foot living wall of thorn bush, babul and acacia, broken only by a single guarded gap where a cart path crosses, moonlight picking out the barbs.
Saltpan Village
A Bengali village half a mile east of the Hedge at night, mud-brick houses lit by wick lamps, drying salt stacked under reed awnings, a single courtyard where Jaani's children wait for her footsteps.
