A Far Horizon (8 page)

Soon after this, Govindram had also married and left Delhi in the company of Omichand, for whom he already worked. In those early days the fat merchant was a seller of dried fruits and almonds and wished to try his luck in Bengal. Eventually they settled in Calcutta. After some time news reached Govindram in a roundabout way that Jaya’s husband had ordered her from his house, divorced and destitute. She had been discovered in the arms of one of her stepsons. So shamed was Jaya’s father by her behaviour that he
refused to take her back. It was rumoured she had sought the protection of a famous singer. Next it was said she had entered the
zenana
of a nobleman in Murshidabad, sold into concubinage by the famous singer.

Govindram had already been in Calcutta some years when he found Jaya one day on his doorstep, already several times married and widowed. She had come to hear of him through the growing reputation of Omichand, and sobbed at the sight of him. He too had wiped his eyes in shock, for Jaya was greatly changed. The excesses of flesh and ravishment were already well in place. She had been the only woman to escape from the palace of Murshidabad during a bloody battle. Every woman in the nobleman’s
zenana
had been slaughtered while Jaya hid in a chest of beaten silver. She had returned to the entertainment area of Calcutta and eventually married an English soldier of the lowest rank. From the moment she rediscovered him, Govindram had enabled her to escape her demeaning existence and live with dignity.

‘Demonteguy did not want to make use of my Rita without marriage‚’ Jaya reminded Govindram.

‘In this she is lucky,’ Govindram agreed. After the death of Sati’s father, Rita had lived on her own, hiring herself out as companion to several elderly ladies in White Town. Her small house on the edge of Black Town was also well known to the gentlemen of Calcutta. Many intimate friendships but no offers of marriage came her way until Demonteguy.

‘My Rita is not as an Indian woman who must think of
suttee
or living a life like the dead. In the
ferenghi
world, widows remarry. I also have done it three times. Only my karma is bad, as you know. All my husbands are dead along with my other babies. English blood is not suited to this climate. Hardly did I marry my husbands than they got fevers and died. Only in Rita is my blood strong; it has kept her alive.’ Jaya immersed herself in a new outburst of sobbing.

‘I shall fight them in court.’ She quietened suddenly. ‘There was no trouble until this will.’

‘Then why did you make it?’ Govindram asked.

Soon Mohini and Sati returned, a trail of servants behind them carrying further edibles. Mohini fussed about her husband. ‘Here is
prasad
from the Kali Mandhir. This afternoon I went there for you. It is time you also visited. Pray to the Goddess, it will take only a moment and please her,’ Mohini ordered.

‘We will also do a
puja
for Sati’s health.’ Mohini turned to Jaya.

‘Then see it is done properly this time. Last time that
badmash
priest took only money and did nothing,’ Jaya replied.

‘How do you know he did nothing?’ Govindram enquired.

‘Because last time when you went to Murshidabad I gave money for a
puja
for your well-being and what happened? You came back sick from that place,’ Mohini replied, pushing Jaya from the conversation.

‘Murshidabad.’ Jaya’s eyes became dreamy with memory.

‘What is so good about the place? When you lived there all you thought of was escape,’ Mohini snapped.

‘Some things were not so bad,’ Jaya answered. Distilled by time, Murshidabad offered itself to memory now in a series of sensual images: clothes, jewels, caresses and the indolence of hot afternoons. There were the constant thrusting demands of the raja, the oiled hands of the masseuse and the perfume of unguents; flesh and its multifarious satisfactions had possessed the day and possessed her also. Above all his women, for a short time, the raja had desired her. At first she had fought these demands, but soon all she waited for, all she could think of, was that he should fill her body. Even now, as the flesh sagged about her, her insides were fired by the memory of those sensations. She could not explain this to a woman like Mohini.

‘That is not what you told us,’ Mohini replied. ‘Before your eyes one hundred and twenty women were slaughtered while you hid in a trunk, and you say it was not so bad? I do not understand you.’

Jaya shrugged. It was useless to waste words on Mohini. She watched Govindram pick up her will and store it away in a small wooden chest, which he locked with a substantial key. She wondered
if she should bring all her diamonds to Govindram to store safely for her in his home. But the thought of Mohini’s sarcastic remarks abruptly ended this idea. She could imagine Mohini’s expression if she ever saw the diamond jewellery Jaya had secured under her clothes as she fled the raja’s palace.

Since that long-ago day she had managed, in one place or another, to hide the fabulous gems away. Now she had dug the treasure out of the mud wall of her hut behind which it had lain for so many years. None of her husbands had known of the existence of these rare gems, nor had they known of the raja or her incarceration in his seraglio.

The idea of a will had come to her suddenly and would not go away. The lawyer had demanded to see her assets so that he might weigh and list them correctly. After he had examined the diamonds, Jaya had re-buried them in the wall and gone immediately to pray at the Kali Mandhir, but the balance of things already seemed changed. Vulnerability stalked her. The gleam in the lawyer’s eye as he turned her gems in his hand remained in Jaya’s mind. Now she was forced to look constantly over her shoulder. She had never felt so exposed. Yet each time her eyes settled on Sati, the urgency of the matter overwhelmed her. There was nothing else in her life she could do for the girl. She looked up to the heavens as if for help, but saw only the white crescent of a waning moon in the still bright sky.

*

Sati sat down once more beside Govindram and met his solemn gaze. She saw her grandmother had been crying, although she had managed to finish the sherbet and the small plates of food set before her. On the wall above them two adjutant storks now perched where the monkeys had been chased away. There was comfort in the Black Town clamour, with its teeming lanes raw with stench and the odour of cooking between the closely packed houses. There was the soft shooting of greenery everywhere: bamboo, plaintain, mango and the pliant pampas grass. About cool ponds urchins splashed, women scrubbed laundry, and old men gossiped in the evening stretched out on string beds under the trees. Here kingfishers dived for minnows;
goats and buffalo came to drink. Lepers wailed for alms, women oiled their hair under the sun, shaking out a polished mass. Everywhere the press of bodies thronging the narrow serpentine lanes held Sati’s life together. She could never be part of White Town; each step she took within that place threw her back upon herself. The pulse of Black Town throbbed deep in her veins, even if she was not to its liking.

She knew then that it was here she must stay. Although the blood of both towns ran in her veins, she saw that a choice was before her. Her mother, by marriage, had crossed a line to settle uneasily in an alien world. Yet wherever she went, whatever she did, however miscast, Rita carried the certainty of a past identity. She did not, like Sati, tread the soil of Black Town or White Town seeking a name with which to empower herself. She did not search for healing.

It came to Sati suddenly then. Just as she had been born where two lines met upon the ocean, so, where the seam of two cultures joined, there must be a crack. Thin as a hair, it ran right through her, denying her real wholeness. Yet it was through this crack, absent in those who grew all of a piece, that Durga squeezed. And in this place, like those cracks in the earth where springs take life, was something indestructible. Along that fault line within herself was a secret place of transformation. In that place she might at last be born, deep within herself. She looked up at the sky and saw the sun had set and the moon was but a sliver. Soon it too would roll from the earth to return again, reborn.

T
he Great Hall of the Durbar and its surrounding courtyard was ablaze with light. About the crowded place candelabra were massed like an exploding galaxy. Their radiance
dispelled
the night, tut could not illuminate the dwindling life of Alivardi Khan.

‘See, he lies upon a bed,’ Drake observed. ‘It cannot be long.’

‘This will be a last public view of the old man,’ Holwell agreed, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the shrivelled figure. Life flamed within the jewels upon the dying nawab.

‘He is much shrunken,’ Drake remarked. The old man resembled a mummified corpse he had once seen in Egypt.

‘Any amount of pomp cannot amend that which must come to all men,’ the Chief Magistrate observed.

‘Nevertheless, he is a poor sight.’

‘But an exceptional reign,’ Holwell answered, unable to overcome a begrudging respect for Alivardi. ‘Not like your other Moors; one wife and no drink or concubines. His
zenana,
they say, is filled with old women and the harems of those he has conquered. He touches none, but only offers sanctuary. For a Moor such behaviour is highly eccentric.’

‘Not a life the grandson follows, for sure,’ the Governor replied.

They stood within the huge courtyard, the precious inlay upon its walls agleam in the light of flares. The colonnaded hall, its arched walls open to the night, shimmering with mirrors and hangings of silk, lay up a short flight of steps before them.

Siraj Uddaulah sat some distance away, resplendent beside the supine old man. The light refracted upon his diamonds, rubies gleamed in his turban like pellets of frozen blood. Gold thread encrusted his robes in intricate patterns, set with precious stones. He was tall and hard-bodied, with a thin, ravaged face that, in repose, had the beauty of a woman. A face of weakness and hidden thoughts and unrestrained emotions. His eyes moved over the crowd, bored yet assessing. Something emanated from him, disquieting in its menace.

‘An unstable fellow. Terrible tales are told of his cruelty,’ Drake whispered.

‘You cannot measure their heathen barbarism by our rules, for they have no rules in such matters,’ the Chief Magistrate replied, his eyes upon the gleam of Siraj Uddaulah’s jewels.

‘Inbreeding results in unstable minds,’ Holwell continued. ‘
Alivardi
has no son. Since his three daughters married their first cousins, Siraj Uddaulah is both grandson and great-nephew to Alivardi. The old man was besotted with the child and refused him nothing. The result is what you see.’

Although he spoke disparagingly, the Chief Magistrate, observing the pageantry before him, overwrought with ostentation, was aware of how little he could ever know of the convoluted life of the Murshidabad court. Here he was far from the centre of European power, and the dissipated depths of Murshidabad’s intrigues were unchartable. He never liked these meetings with Bengal’s nobles, dangerous, arrogant, arbitrary creatures, who looked upon him and his fistful of power as less than the sum of an ant. At the realisation of his paltry worth, the Chief Magistrate suddenly grew silent. The irritating whine of a mosquito bothered him more than he stirred the great body of India. He waved away in sudden rage a large moth that
fluttered about him. A great many winged creatures of the night flapped about the standing candelabra.

The air was perfumed with incense. Around him Murshidabad’s noblemen spoke in a language he did not understand, underlining the Chief Magistrate’s isolation. No place could be stranger than where he stood now, or more distant from all that was known. He remembered once, as a child, standing upon a beach, gazing at a boat far out upon the ocean. As it slipped from view over the horizon he had felt the strangeness of the phenomenon. He knew the craft sailed on, although he could see nothing. Now, remembering, confusion filled him. He had lived his adult life beyond that far horizon and was himself as good as dead to those who had stayed at home. And in this wretched place of exile he was no more than a transitional being, forced to live each day before the dense mass of India as if he faced his own shadow. Already the Chief Magistrate’s linen was sodden beneath his serge coat at the extremity of his thoughts. He was glad to hear the Governor’s voice returning him to reality.

‘If the next nawab through all this interbreeding has holes in his head, we must expect less logic than ever from Murshidabad. It will not be easy with regard to Fort William’s affairs.’ Drake mopped his perspiring face with a handkerchief. The night simmered beneath the blaze of lights in the Hall of Audience.

‘We must play our cards right. Siraj Uddaulah is full of bluff; not an ounce of real courage, unlike his grandfather,’ Holwell answered.

‘Let us make our way forward before the old man, bed and all, is taken away,’ the Governor urged, for there seemed some indication that this might happen.

At a signal their band struck up, marching before them with pipes and drums. A detachment of red-coated soldiers, carrying the flag, followed to impress the court. Drake and Holwell made their way across the courtyard and up the steps to where Alivardi lay. The nobles drew back to observe them. Holwell held his head high as the sheen of silks and jewels slid past. As they drew near the royal dais,
further progress was barred. Siraj Uddaulah held up a hand to deny them access to his grandfather.

*

The prince averted his eyes from the curled wigs of the Hatmen and stared at the chandeliers. He had no wish to recognise men he intended to wipe from the face of India. Within the opalescence of inlaid marbles and the fluid gleam of silks, the Hatmen moved in their heavy clothes, dark and stiff as a species of beetle. They embodied everything that was alien and unknown. With their upstart ways and naive minds they were dismissed by most with contempt. His grandfather’s conciliatory policies had only encouraged these boastful men. Slowly, insidiously, like rot that begins at the edge of strong wood, these people had rooted themselves along the shore of the country. Although their Governor might come in pomp to Murshidabad, and in his own settlement assume the air of a deity poised between Heaven and earth, he was in truth an unexceptional man who had risen through the ranks. He was liable for dismissal or supercession with each dispatch from England. Siraj Uddaulah leaned back in his chair and continued to observe the chandeliers.

Seeing their dismissal, Drake and Holwell bowed carelessly; beside Siraj Uddaulah, Alivardi Khan appeared almost comatose. The old man’s fair skin, proof of his Turkish origins, had a yellow pallor. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, his body wasted on the bone. A thin beard straggled over the jewels that weighed upon him like armour. The nawab opened his rheumy eyes as the Englishmen backed away. He turned to his grandson, whispering weakly to him.

Had they been able to hear the old man’s words, the Governor and the Chief Magistrate might have had cause to congratulate
themselves
. As he strained his eyes to follow the progress of the retreating Hatmen, Alivardi Khan was possessed by a sudden clear vision that cut through his fading mind. He saw the Hatmen as one day possessing all of India. Words of warning rustled like dry leaves in his throat as he stared up at his grandson.

‘Beware, my child. The Hatmen are like a hive of bees of whose
honey you might reap the benefit. But if you disturb their hive they will sting you to death. Imagine a plain covered with grass. Should you set fire to it there is a chance of stopping its progress. But if you set the sea on fire, who can put that out? Such a fire would consume our whole world. Do not listen to proposals of violence.’ A thread of saliva trickled from the old man’s mouth.

Siraj Uddaulah continued to observe the dark-coated figures of the Hatmen moving amongst the crowd. ‘They are dogs, to be kicked out of India on their backsides.’ He looked defiantly at his grandfather. ‘A slipper is all that is needed to govern them. Slap them with it whenever it is needed.’

‘Do not forget the trade and silver bullion they bring,’ Alivardi Khan cautioned, his voice a hoarse whisper. ‘This we cannot do without. There must be balance in all things.’

Siraj Uddaulah looked away, his mouth hard. Upon his arm the old man’s hand resembled the claw of a bird. Siraj Uddaulah knew the upstart Hatmen just as well as his grandfather. They abused the privileges they had been given to the detriment of local traders. Their taxes culled money from Bengal. He had an especial hate of Holwell. Since the man’s appointment as Chief Magistrate and Zamindar, coupled with his seat upon the Fort William Council, he had accrued unprecedented power.

Upon his promise to Leadenhall to raise revenue, the Chief Magistrate had looked for ways to revise the existing taxation. He had employed a new structure of payment in the Cutcherry. He had done away with corporal punishment, imposing instead stiff fines. And as the issuer of not only trading permits but permits to farmers to till the land, and the sealer of leases and rents on all such land, the opportunities for bringing the resentful to court were limitless. His commercial agents toured the villages exacting dues, dispensing privileges, constructing monopolies of power. Even prostitution was no longer ignored but fruitfully taxed by the Chief Magistrate. He had quickly raised the yearly revenue of the settlement, as the Company demanded. Leadenhall was pleased with him, but the Hall
of Audience at the Murshidabad court was crowded each day with the complaints of impoverished merchants and shopkeepers. Bengal’s coffers were empty from years of warring with the Marathas, protecting the state and the lives of those Englishmen within it. And all the while the English grew more and more replete, like animals glutted upon a fat carcass. Siraj Uddaulah narrowed his eyes at the retreating Hatmen.

*

At the back of the hall a sudden disturbance began. The great crowd cleaved in two. The merchant Omichand, his retinue of attendants spilling about him in untidy fashion, waddled forward upon his short legs. He gave the impression of an ornately wrapped moving parcel, as wide as it was high. Servants followed him carrying bamboo cages containing a two-headed cat and a rare peacock, gifts for Alivardi’s menagerie. It annoyed the Chief Magistrate that they had been forced to travel to Murshidabad in tandem with the greatest rascal in Calcutta. His lion-shaped craft had dogged their houseboats all the way up the river. And now, at court, his presence drew more attention than the Englishmen. Siraj Uddaulah reluctantly beckoned Omichand forward, much to the Chief Magistrate’s disapproval. White Town was not even sure of the fat merchant’s real name. Rightly or wrongly it rolled off the tongue as Omichand. No other Indian was allowed residence in White Town, but since Omichand had financed the building of the majority of Calcutta’s great mansions, there was no way to deny him.

As agent for the East India Company, Omichand’s hand steered all official business and the buying of native goods. His money brokered White Town’s private deals. Gamblers at whist or five-card loo whose world was demolished in an evening were the next morning firmly enmeshed in Ominchand’s net. Young writers of the East India Company, hot after fortune but bereft of capital, were forced to turn to him. The Company paid its servants no more than a pittance but condoned the profit of private trade that did not impinge upon them. This kept down all Company outgoings to a sensible level. It
also allowed the scent of fortune to lure into employment young men who might otherwise catch a whiff of death from along the coast of India. Omichand understood this devious manner of recruitment, not far removed from his own turn of mind. Siraj Uddaulah frowned in resignation; he could tolerate Omichand little better than the Chief Magistrate, yet he ordered the bamboo cages placed before his grandfather, who held the fat merchant in high esteem.

‘Already Siraj Uddaulah controls this court,’ the Chief Magistrate growled, assessing the atmosphere once they were a safe distance away. He had watched Omichand’s stumbling progress towards Alivardi Khan with dismissive amusement. His derision of the fat merchant was at least a familiar sensation and he clung to it now like ballast in a choppy sea. The sinuous cosmos of Murshidabad, slippery as silk and arch with knavery, was as debauched in mind as it was in body. Not a single known moral peaked above its duplicity. There was nothing to grasp or grapple with that the Chief Magistrate recognised. Not for the first time he marvelled at the place he had arrived at in his life.

He had been apprenticed as a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital but was filled with an urge to escape his mundane life in England. Tales of fortune and the exotic made him determined to reach India. His father had speculated unwisely in business, leaving him nearly bankrupt. Overnight, the middle-class comforts Holwell had enjoyed vanished; struggle and the constant spectre of poverty took their place. The idea of India had come slowly to Holwell. Not far from his home on the outskirts of London was the grand house of a Company man. It was said he had gone out to India a pauper and returned with a bottomless fortune. Many disparaging remarks were made about the man and his new money, but the fact of his wealth remained. His home rose proudly, all turrets and gables in a great acreage of grounds. His wife’s jewels turned heads and his stables were renowned. His sons were dressed like princes. Once Holwell had accompanied a friend to an exhibition of Indian artefacts, and stood in a daze before the opulence. Gold in profusion, beaten and
studded with gems, silks sheer as water or encrusted with jewels, furniture of crystal or silver carved into the shapes of animals, and great sweeping fans of peacock feathers filled the cases around him. All this he knew had been gathered from the homes of those who had returned from India.

He took a post as surgeon’s mate aboard a ship of the East India Company bound for Calcutta, but found it a loathsome experience. Before embarking, he had studied his medical books and prepared himself to deal with the unavoidable evil of scurvy. To the displeasure of the captain, he had laid out a small garden on board and harvested cress, lettuce, radishes and scurvy grass until a breaker had washed the garden overboard. The sufferers from scurvy had then immediately increased. He had advised the burning of damp gunpowder and juniper shrubs, and the spraying of vinegar to cleanse the air, all to little avail. But above all on that loathsome voyage the Chief Magistrate remembered the drinking water. It had been shipped with them in great oak tuns and not only began to smell but heaved with the bodies of worms. Each time a cup was dipped into the cask, the pink fleshy mass of bodies writhed like loose flayed skin. Eventually a glowing iron or a heated cannonball had to be immersed into the tun. Sometimes this cleared the water, the worms falling to cushion the bottom of the cask. Most of that voyage he had existed on beer or wine, the Chief Magistrate remembered.