The Holder of the World (14 page)

Every now and then, a Legge Reclamation Project is announced. A parapsychologist and a credible-looking ex-SEAL in a wet suit and an Atlanta Braves cap come on CNN and announce the discovery of a Mughal pagoda off Marblehead or Truro.

I know who’s behind it.

“Bugs,” I say, “give it a rest.”

“It’s off Marblehead, I know it is,” he tells me, sipping his Evian.
It, it it
, the Emperor’s Tear. He’s in Aspen this time with the discard of an Asian dictator. Though our professional relationship has been over for years, I’m still the only person he can talk to about it. And he’s the only person who knows nearly as much as I do.

“Don’t confuse some crystal gazer with a diamond cutter, Bugs.”

9

EVERY NOW AND THEN
we hear of a gentleman robber, a polite soft-spoken white-collar wannabe who enlists respect from his victims and sympathy from the public: Gabriel Legge, the Robin Hood of the Coromandel Coast, seems to have been that kind of pirate.

On one expedition in the Laccadive Islands, legend has him holding Captain William Kidd’s feet to a cookout fire to inflict on Kidd the same pleasures he had on the islanders, forcing them to dance on hot coals or to water wrestle with sharks in a shallow pool.

At St. Mary’s in Madagascar, where freebooting New England slave traders had their headquarters, Gabriel is known to have bilked the gentleman slaver Adam Baldridge of eighty thousand pounds destined for his bank account in London, and to have humiliated him soundly by stripping him naked and tying him to a mast to be jeered by two hundred freed slaves destined for the American market.

In Zanzibar, he gambled for and won a Frenchman’s ship,
Le Rêve Doré
, and discovered, in its airless, lightless hold, footed chests of jewels and gold urns and a writhing, moaning cargo of freaks and monsters—three-eyed maidens; identical jugglers joined in the head, the chest, the back; two-headed, four-armed girls who spoke separately, even in different languages; a three-headed youth with seven arms who made love to three separate women simultaneously; six-legged goats; old women with necklets of youthful, breast-shaped goiters—waiting to be shipped to the Sun King’s court in Versailles. “Twynnes and monsters,” he wrote, whom he dispatched mercifully by sword, “lest their deformitie rowse unseemlie lust.”

The expedition that Gabriel liked to recount to his friend Attila “the Turk-hater” Csycsyry involved Peter the Great’s “grand ambassador,” Golovin, and a ship’s carpenter, Pyotr Mikhaylov. Gabriel had met the two Russians when he had been shipwrecked off the coast of Java, and he had been picked off-sea by a Dutch East Indiaman carrying the two Russians on board. The carpenter, a jolly, gigantic man with a reformer’s fiery, violent ideas, had ranted against the boyars, the landed aristocracy of his country, against the clergy of all nations, and especially against the Turks. He had dreamed of exterminating the Turks. It seemed strange indeed that a carpenter and an ambassador should be traveling together, and that the ambassador conveyed a worshipful attitude toward a simple tradesman.

Pyotr Mikhaylov, agreeing with Gabriel, had been for the freeing of the slaves, and for the stringing up of the slavers’ captains. “Free them all!” he shouted, sloshing the potent clear liquid into beer-sized mugs, “bring on the carpenters, the builders, the sailors, the poets.” True to his word, he had freed and Russified an Abyssinian the Dutch had bought for resale.

The story always came to a climax with his assertion that the young carpenter, drunk on what he called “little water,” had said, “Someday you will tell your children you drank vodka with Peter, Czar of all the Russias.”

GABRIEL’S SEVENTH
expedition is written up in many histories, French, Dutch and English. In keeping with the bilingual nature of his partnership with the Marquis, the caper goes by two names: Sauvez le Singe! or Save the Monkey! Pedda Timanna had let drop to Gabriel, while bartering diamonds and wild cinnamon for bullion, that the Dutch East India Company had just seized a fort on the Coromandel port islet of Vishnuswaram, and that the Hindu Nayak who ruled this islet, fearing ouster or at least humiliating subjugation by the Dutch, was hiring mercenaries and promising them a percentage of his gold-filled coffers. The Nayak, it was rumored in punch houses like Attila Csycsyry’s and in the high-ceilinged chambers of Fort St. Sebastian, was an easy-to-fleece “heathen foole,” who saw as his only mission in life the saving of a temple that his ancestors had built to a “heathen devyl with animal bodye” they called Lord Hanuman.

The Company consultation-book entries on Sauvez le Singe! go into some detail about both the Nayak’s military vulnerability and the Dutch motivation. The Nayak, a profoundly, or shortsightedly, religious man, had spent little on fortification and much on temple beautification. His one decrepit fort, situated at the mouth of the one easily navigable channel that separated his islet from the bigger, stronger island of Ceylon, had fallen easily to the Dutch Company’s soldiers, who had courted Ceylon with generous trade treaties in exchange for a temporary base to launch their Vishnuswaram operation. The prize the Dutch were after was the revenue of lavish donations collected each year from the more than two hundred thousand pilgrims and miracle seekers who came to pray to Lord Hanuman.

The Nayak, though resigned to the immutabilities of fate, was desperate to save the sacred temple from spoliation by infidels. Samuel Higginbottham had it on good authority from a Portuguese interpreter, Antonio de Melho, working in San Thomé, that the Compagnie Royale de France’s factory in Pondicherry, too, was casting a rapacious eye on the temple coffers in Vishnuswaram. Saving the islet for England was an act of high patriotism.

BUT WHAT
mesmerized Hannah more than the profit-hungry
firangis’
motives was the sturdiness of a religious faith that allowed hundreds of thousands of devotees to worship a godhead that chose to reveal itself as a scarlet-faced, yellow-furred, long-tailed monkey.

On the long nights of Gabriel’s absence, and the long days of her newfound isolation from the society of Company wives, it was Bhagmati who became Hannah’s only link to the outside world. And that outside world, increasingly, was a world of stories and recitations, for Bhagmati was as unwelcome on the streets of Fort St. Sebastian, and especially White Town, as the wife of Gabriel Legge had become.

It started with a simple request. She could not sleep, the moon burned brightly through the coir-matted window, and she knew that Bhagmati, too, was lying awake on her mat outside the door.

“Talk to me, please,” she said.

They now spoke a common language, she and her servant, which the Company women had warned about. Bad enough, they said, when you can’t understand what they’re saying in that yanna-yanna-yanna language they speak, but it’s worse when you
do
. They should of course understand simple English, but on no account should you permit them to address you in their chatter. Should that happen, it means you’ve lingered too long in the halfway house from home, all the accommodations you’ve made are suddenly manifest, your blood has thinned, your brain and your palate have made some sort of infernal adjustment. You can eat their food, endure their weather, tolerate their heathen ways. You find yourself getting ideas across to them, somehow, and comprehending their responses.

“Who is this Hanuman I’ve heard about?” she asked. A simple question with military and economic implications.

“Lord Hanuman?” the servant asked. She squatted in the moonlight in her white sleeping sari. In the semidark, her voice was deeper, not that of a twenty-year-old, or however old she was, but of a storytelling mother putting a child to sleep. With Bhagmati as guide, Hannah felt she had tumbled headlong into a brilliantly hued subterranean world peopled with shape-changing monsters and immortals that exaggerated or parodied hers. But thanks to Gabriel’s voyages, she knew it was real.

Bhagmati could neither read nor write, but she was so agile memoried and charismatic tongued that she could recite to Hannah hour-long fragments of the epic poem she and her people lived by. In the epic, the god Vishnu comes down to earth for the seventh time to save mortals from demons, assuming on this seventh descent the bodily form of Prince Rama, the rightful heir to the throne of aged King Dasaratha, and worthy husband of a beauteous orphan named Sita.

“Bhagmati—did all this happen, exactly as you’re telling it? Or is it just a play, a poem?”

“Exactly as I say,
memsa’ab
. The place he came to earth is known. The forest is marked.”

“All right.”

Like a child, she wanted reassurance. The Bible, too, was very specific. It was said you could trace the cities in the Holy Land in a few months if the Ottomans permitted. Every place-name in the Bible. There were pious men in Salem who had done it.

Bhagmati began her telling: In the course of Prince Rama’s tribulations on earth, he is unjustly banished to a forest for a term of fourteen years. While in the forest with Sita and a loyal younger brother, Lakshman, he comes home from his food-gathering errands one day to find that the demon-king Ravanna, the ten-headed, twenty-armed cruel and lustful ruler of Lanka—Ceylon—has abducted the beautiful Sita.

Ten heads of course were possible. Two-headed men were often paraded through town; two-headed cows and six-legged goats wandered the streets of Black Town at will. She had watched the impaling of Two-Headed Ravanna. Two-headed babies frequently washed up on the beach. Gabriel had carried on conversations with the ghastly three-headed man with seven arms. The Coromandel was madly fertile. Where three is possible, somewhere there is ten. In Massachusetts Bay, life had been so hard, the summer so short, that freaks of nature were given less opportunity to emerge and no comfort to thrive. And, of course, the authorities would not permit it.

In the long battle to free Sita from captivity in Lanka, Prince Rama is given crucial military help by General Hanuman and his monkey warriors. Hanuman, born of the wind god Parvana, has the power to fly, to seize clouds, uproot trees, relocate mountains. He can cross the waters that separate the tip of India from Lanka in one vigorous leap. He can torch the demon capital with his burning tail.

She had seen the rolling fire spreader those nights of her earliest memory. The stories of Bhagmati ignite the memories she has tried to suppress. Abduction, betrayal, vengeance. Like the Nipmuc, Hanuman can cure burns and battle wounds with his knowledge of the pharmacological properties of rare herbs, and he can sooth anguished hearts with his poetry.

If Hanuman was an artist-physician, Hannah is glad that Gabriel was fighting for, and not against, the temple-defending Nayak.

But more than the story of Hanuman, it is the story of Sita’s captivity that consumes Hannah. Rebecca had embraced her alien lover. Rebecca chose to stay in her Lanka with her Ravanna. But Mary Rowlandson, the virtuous Puritan woman, had been dragged from Lancaster. Did Sita step out of her fenced garden because she heard, as Hannah herself had only faintly heard in Salem but now heard louder on insomniac nights, a knocking on her door, as though every bird, every flower, every sail at the horizon’s edge were calling to her?

In Bhagmati’s honey-toned recitation Sita is the self-sacrificing ideal Hindu wife. But the shape she assumes in Hannah’s fantasies is of a woman impatient to test herself, to explore and survive in an alien world.

Hannah finds herself attracted to the events in Sita’s life. Like Hannah, Sita was a foundling. The Fitches recovered her from their doorstep; a childless king, Janaka, had unearthed the girl infant with his plow and named her Sita, or “furrow.” Sita adjusted to life as a king’s adopted daughter and a prince’s wife as willingly as Hannah had to her girlhood in Salem. And then, because of machinations against her husband, her life changes abruptly. She has to choose between continuing her life in a palace wracked with malice, jealousy and intrigue or breaking away and trying out new surroundings and whatever they will bring.

Sita chooses the new, and new temptations. She banishes herself from court life and sets up pastoral domesticity free of court customs and taboos. But one day she sees a beautiful deer grazing outside the hut. She has to own that deerskin; it is a passion such as she has never known.

Bhagmati had her way of stopping the tale, of extending her fingers in every direction as if to say, “Hedges-sa’ab. He had to have.” And Hannah got the intended message: in attachment is death.

Sita pleads and nags Rama into pursuing the animal deep into the forest. Rama, ever alert to dangers, even, perhaps, aware that Sita’s lust is unnatural, makes his brother pledge himself as Sita’s protector. And, of course, the deer
is
a demon in disguise dispatched by Ravanna. As Rama’s arrow pierces the demon-deer’s throat, it utters a cry for help in Rama’s voice so loud that it is heard by Lakshman and Sita in the hut. Sita, again driven by new emotions—this time fear and rage rather than greedy longings—forces Lakshman to break his pledge to protect her and go off to Rama’s rescue.

Before leaving, Lakshman draws a white circle around the hut within which Sita is to confine herself, and be safe, while she is alone. White Circle, White Town, Hannah thinks. As soon as Lakshman is out of earshot, Ravanna, assuming the shape of a holy wanderer and alms gatherer, appears just outside the white circle. Sita brings the holy man water and food, but in her dutifulness steps out of the white circle. Ravanna seizes her by her long hair, hoists her into a flying chariot, and carries her off to Lanka.

Ravanna’s simple lust for her grows into love so potent and humbling that he offers to rid himself of his other wives, his riches and his monumental ego just for her acceptance and approval. Sita tells him that she scorns him as a swan scorns a crow. She negotiates a twelve-month moratorium, at the end of which period she knows that she will either be cannibalized by Ravanna or rescued by Rama. And Rama, with the able help of Hanuman and his monkey warriors, does rescue Sita. But while Mary Rowlandson’s freedom had cost twenty pounds in goods, Sita’s freedom is dearer. Scores of mortals and demons are slain, the villain is felled with a weapon borrowed from the gods, and a kingdom is laid waste.

The real difference between Mary Rowlandson and Sita, perhaps, is that Sita’s story doesn’t end with her rescue. The complications, the variations, are only beginning.

Sita’s reunion with Rama is brief and unhappy. To Rama her claim that she guarded her wifely honor from the attentions of her captor is not sufficient to absolve her of her crime of having allowed herself to be kidnapped and imprisoned. Worse, Sita chose survival instead of suicide while in prison.
Ravanna has desired you and gazed upon your beauty. Honor has required me, your husband and king, to avenge this evil. Now the same honor requires me to renounce you
.