The Holder of the World (12 page)

7

AT ATTILA CSYCSYRY’S
Suchikhana, the stuffy, smoky, infernally hot den of male privilege in Fort St. Sebastian, the men were drunk and complaining. Pedda Timanna had been spotted in White Town, bold as you please, riding in his palanquin despite traditional prohibitions against black trespass and ostentation, and stopping briefly at a white man’s house.

The ban against the baboons should never have been lifted, said the men as one: Chief Factor Prynne said so from the front table where he was served his single glass of claret; so did his chief detractor from the rear table, the Alsatian gunner of promiscuous employment who called himself the Marquis de Mussy but had been born a baker’s son from Aachen named Klaus Engelhardt; so did, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, Dr. Ruxton, Higginbottham, and some young factors, some foreign visitors from the Portuguese or French forts, some English travelers or interlopers and other free-lance traders. It had taken Gabriel Legge several weeks to finally join the drinking contingent at Count Csycsyry’s Suchikhana; he’d gone there as a guest of the cynical and disaffected Marquis de Mussy.

It had started as a typical night at Count Attila’s, with the usual crowd seated in their rigid hierarchies, reflecting their usual animosities. The Marquis was a pirate, as were many others. A liquor concession in an abstemious country under the grip of the orthodox Grand Mughal Aurangzeb himself is an oasis open to lions and gazelles alike, and not to be lightly barred on grounds of moral repugnance.

In Black Town, the Muslim overlords tolerated so-called punch houses for the Christians and gentiles, meaning Hindus and various forms of unacceptable half castes, so long as no
araq
, the staple English arrack, a potent rice or molasses liquor, was sold to the faithful. Attila Csycsyry, an oft wounded, now philosophical Transylvanian Protestant who’d followed the Turk-hating mercenary trail that led, finally, to the Coromandel Coast, did not, exactly, run an arrack house. To his thinking, arrack houses were notorious bhang dens, where alcoholics spiced their drinks with hemp and opium, where knife fights broke out and ended in murders.

He was, to himself, a publican. But on Company land, public houses were not permitted. And so, an ever-resourceful immigrant in a concession of traders, he had appropriated a name known to all, Suchikhana, meaning “water room.” Attila was a water bearer, an honorable profession in the land of a desert-born faith. He was a purveyor of civilized European wines, brandies, beer, whiskeys and, for habitués who tasted, then tolerated, then demanded, the barbaric local brews: rums, palm
tari
, which the English called toddy, and the deadly arracks, which he brewed in his own distillery on the cleared land just west of the fort. He drew the line at bhang.

The Suchikhana was part social club and part meeting hall for those who rejected the Company’s paternalistic and poorly rewarded attentions. Freemen, pirates, interlopers, adulterers, dropped by early in the afternoon when they were not sacking Surati merchants’ ships or bribing the Nawab’s men, and they were transported home in carts or litters by Csycsyry if they couldn’t stagger to the door. The Suchikhana was a place for privateers to barter information on schedules, routes and flag protections for ships laden with enough gold to be worth their taking.

What to Cephus Prynne and the Company Council was piracy was to Gabriel and the more disaffected factors a kind of zesty entrepreneurial initiative. He enjoyed his evenings drinking with YellowBeard Huyghen, ThroatCut de Azvedo and Cutlass da Silva, men who had made themselves over. Once upon a time, de Azvedo had been a physician and rabbi’s son. YellowBeard Huyghen had been a butcher in Batavia. Over liquor made from palms, from rice, from molasses, they told stories of sea voyages too fantastic to have occurred to men with tame names like Samuel or Thomas or Cephus. Even Gabriel’s own tales, those that had astounded the hidebound Puritans of Salem and won the hand of Hannah, he now saw as secondhand. In the story competitions Gabriel remained silent, remembering the better ones for retelling at home.

One such traveler was an Antonio Careri, a Venetian autodidact and physician who claimed he was following in the footsteps of his uncle, Gemelli Careri, who had experienced many marvels in the jungles around Count Attila’s Suchikhana.

“Seems there was this woman, you see,” the Italian began, “washed up on an island. No human beings around, only this lovesick buck baboon …”

The men started laughing; they knew the joke or many like it.

“So the weeks go by, and she yields, and the months go by and she has a half-monster child, and then years go by and a second comes along, hideous as the first.…

“Then one day, a ship passes. The baboon and the pups are in the cave where he keeps them. She signals and they save her. Seems the baboon wakes up from his toddy drinking and looks out just as the lady is being rowed out to the ship. So what do you think he does?”

“I know what I’d do,” said Dr. Ruxton.

“What about you, Mr. Legge? What would you do?” asked Cephus Prynne.

“If I were a baboon?” He didn’t like the question, the pointedness of Prynne’s interrogation. The Chief Factor’s verbal amusements all held implicit threats, or testings.

“I should have no choice, Mr. Prynne. A baboon cannot speak, cannot swim, cannot fire a cannon.”

“Perhaps throw a coconut out to sea?” Mr. Prynne laughed.

“Or resign himself to loss,” said Gabriel. “Raise his pups with hate in their hearts.”

The Italian picked up his story. “In rage and grief, it is written, the baboon carried the unnatural issue to the beach and sacrificed them in her sight. So horrified were the sailors at the vision that they threw the woman overboard, lest her corruption damn the ship’s body.”

It was for Dr. Ruxton to provide the moral. “And so again she is washed up on the beach. The baboon forgives her. They go back to the cave. Such is it ever with those who step over the border.”

“In a kingdom west of here,” the Italian visitor began again, “a great baboon much attracted to a serving girl began courting her at night. So persistent was he that finally her father yielded his permission, thinking he would soon tire of her, or she of him. But passion did so infect the beast he could not navigate soberly in the dark. Every morning, upon awakening, the girl’s father found his tiny hut a shambles of carnality, and the girl helpless to forbid it.”

“Aye,” agreed Samuel Higginbottham, who had heard many tales of baboon bibis, and was glad to have his suspicions about local women once again confirmed.

“A Portugee happened to pass through the village one day, and spotted the wench bathing in the river. Much attracted to her, he lingered nearby until after dark, thinking to seize the maiden for himself—only to see this great lurching beast burst through the window with a loud crash of pots and breaking tables.

“The young man was much offended by the girl’s poor taste in lovers and so demanded of her father the meaning of such outrage. But you know the Zentoo mind—”

“Slaves of the basest passion—”

“Pariahs, excrement, devil’s spawn—”

“Doubtless, good sirs. But I refer only to their cowardice when confronted by their clearest duty. The father holds out his hands and says, ‘What can I do? This creature has taken my daughter’s honor and makes all this noise when he does not find her at home.’

“ ‘Why don’t you kill him?’ the Portugee demanded.”

“Indeed, as any man would do,” Cephus Prynne opined. It was generally agreed that therein lay the difference between European, even Portuguese, and Asiatic sensibility. The Asiatic, without a concept of manhood, lacked all notion of patriotism, loyalty, honesty, decency and honor. No honor is taken where none exists. God would not permit the theft of what He intended be preserved.

The group had now warmed to a congenial topic. The Asiatic mind and its failings.

Antonio Careri was not to finish his story that night. How might he have ended his “Portugee-Bests-the-Baboon” yarn? I have read endless variations of these racist anecdotes. The white man, being more manly, easily disposes of the dark-skinned, subhuman competitor. But he does not live happily ever after with the distressed damsel whom he has rescued. He discovers just in time that she has been tainted by life among the baboons, and he throws her—this time to drown—back into the sea.

The baboon stories swirled around Gabriel Legge in the smoky Suchikhana. The storytellers indulged in asides on Pedda Timanna and Henry Hedges. Pedda Timanna was crafty and dishonest, they claimed; an ingrate, a braggart and a traitor; a leech, a parasite, a scorpion. It was the view of Chief Factor Prynne that the Company coffers in Fort St. Sebastian had been depleted through the self-aggrandizing ventures of Henry Hedges, the late factor whom Gabriel had been dispatched to replace. The results of Henry Hedges’ submission to luxury—some claimed for love of a woman—were certainly plain to see. A badge of shame, some drinkers hissed; the moral fiber of the Company would be strengthened by a show of mass arson.

Gabriel Legge, who was the new man in the post, hence the beneficiary of collective wisdom, took from the storytellers’ spite his own determination to rise above it. He would assemble such a fortune that he would not have to spend his evenings ranting about the depredations of a black merchant or a white sensualist. He would buy his way out of the petty hierarchies.

That evening a misguided concept of personal liberty fueled Gabriel Legge. He would never exhaust the space provided by the half-filled drawers of the carved dressers and armoires at his disposal, nor could he ever in twenty years wear all the clothes that Hedges had left behind. But that was personal folly. Prynne might claim that Hedges had appropriated Company funds to indulge his weaknesses, but as Gabriel had studied Company records, he had perceived the shortfalls were more ingrained in the system. The real trouble lay in the mismanagement of Cephus Prynne himself and his inability to drive the hard bargains with local suppliers upon which Company profits rested.

While others joked and gossiped, Gabriel thought of ways to make an ally of Pedda Timanna. Since Pedda Timanna had his eyes and ears in every
mittah
, he had to know how weak the Chief Factor’s hand really was and how desperate he was to show even short-term and empty profits to deflect the pressure he was under from the Council at Fort St. George.
Do not show fear or weakness in your dealings
—that was drummed into the head of every young factor even before leaving Leadenhall Street. So Timanna was pressing Prynne hard for greater trade concessions, demanding higher cash advances for procuring the quantity of salampores and embroidered muslins that London wanted. Worse, he was refusing to accept in full or partial payment the unsalable European goods—woolens, brimstone, tin, gloves—that Prynne had foolishly imported.

Timanna had just returned from Pondicherry, where he’d been scouting better deals with the French, probably so he could buy more ships and more houses. He already owned, Prynne had had confirmed, in Black Town, eight gardens, five houses—two of which had spectacular views of the ocean—two lots, three godowns, or warehouses, four shops and two ships. His ships carried export cargoes of textiles and surplus English woolens to Malacca and Acheh. Moneylending to him was a hobby, and he indulged it with dedication. At least one European, a woman now dead, was rumored to have mortgaged to him a pouchful of diamonds and invested in his Malaccan trade.

India hands like Prynne and Ruxton hated Pedda Timanna not simply because he was wealthier than they, but for something far worse: he flaunted his self-respect.

He was a merchant-adventurer, not a beholden middleman like Kashi Chetty or Catchick Sookian. His power came from his indifference to European factors and the frugality of their Europe-centered trade. The Fort St. George Governor, John Goldsborough, and Council treated Cephus Prynne, who’d been banished to a nowhere post like Fort St. Sebastian, with disdain. Prynne, in turn, treated Indian power brokers with condescension. Scorn made them intimate.

“He seems a most formidable adversary,” said Gabriel.

“Then I hope you were listening, Mr. Legge,” the Chief Factor announced with practiced emphasis, “for the dwelling in White Town that Pedda Timanna stopped at last night was none other than your own.”

“I believe my wife was entertaining Mrs. Ruxton and Mrs. Higginbottham. I shall inquire as to the nature of his visit. If such occurred.”

“I was taking tea on my terrace last evening. The moon was full. Quite full enough, Mr. Legge.”

And so saying, bowing courteously to one and all, the Chief Factor took his leave.

H
ANNAH SLEPT ALONE
;
Gabriel was on one of his walks, to clear his head after drinking. He and his drinking companion, the Marquis, had stumbled home in the dark—a familiar pattern these last few nights—wakening first Bhagmati, who slept on the terrace outside her mistress’s door on a rolled-out mat. She slept in her working clothes and was up at once, rolling her floor-length hair in a loose braid, then pinning it on top of her head in the few moments it took Gabriel to climb the stairs. Then she managed to disappear, leaving the terrace and the opened bedroom door to Gabriel and Hannah, with the Marquis standing at a distance behind.

Hannah had been cautioned by Martha and Sarah to avoid the Marquis. He was a man of sinister plans, a mercenary who had fought for fat fees on behalf of any Muslim nawab or Hindu raja who had enough jewels to hire him. The querulous subcontinent had made the baker’s son immensely wealthy. As a hand-me-down, a belated wedding gift, the Marquis had passed on to Gabriel a
huqqa
of solid gold enameled with garnet-dark poppies and azure-winged butterflies, an amber-embedded alabaster carpet weight as tall as the cook’s toddling child, a leaf-shaped mirror of jade and rock crystal, a sword inscribed in a curly alien script with an invocation to fight or die.

“Wife!” She knew not to answer.

“I say, my good Christian Massachusetts Bay Puritan wife. Have you missed me?”