The Holder of the World (18 page)

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest …

JOHN KEATS
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

P
ART
T
HREE

1

IN THE CARNIVAL CROWD
that had gathered to witness the cutting off of Thomas Tringham’s nose stood a sturdy mendicant in soiled khadi cotton, with a begging bowl and a long staff to lean on and the holy wanderer’s saffron daub on his forehead. He was deep inside enemy territory, not because of his obvious Hinduism—the vast majority of inhabitants of Muslim lands were Hindu—but because this master of guerrilla strategies and of incognito disguise was Raja Jadav Singh, King of Devgad, a Hindu-ruled disfigurement on the Muslim map of South India, and a deeply embedded thorn in the flesh of Emperor Aurangzeb.

Devgad was an oblong parcel of swamp, jungle and Deccan escarpment that cut a narrow swath a hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, from the arid highlands of south-central India, east and south to the Coromandel Coast. Revenue from the various European factories within its territory, as well as tributes from the dozens of vassals and the thousands of individual villages, kept the Raja rich and able to wage, in turn, continuous war by every means possible, except classical confrontation, against the Emperor. His successes against the more powerful Aurangzeb had forced the aged and arthritic Mughal to abandon his palaces in Agra and Aurangabad in order to come south and personally direct the fighting.

Devgad had resisted the Grand Mughal’s designs for inclusion only because of the Raja’s unswerving hatred of all Sunni Muslims. He had himself been raised in the palace of a Shia king. His father, though devoutly Hindu, was the King’s
subedar
, a kind of fort commander, who took to calling himself a king. It was a small, obscure fort and efficiently run; hearing no objection from the Shia overlord so long as he remained loyal and productive, he, his wife and the boy’s tutors taught his son to
be
a king.

The text that was pounded into him by his tutor was the Sanskrit classic, Kautilya’s
Arthashastra
, the
Art of State-Craft
. In deference to his concept of patriotism, the young Jadav Singh struck the coins of his realm in Sanskrit, not Persian. From Kautilya, he learned the art of survival in a ruthless but elegant age: the weaker king, in order to survive, must seek the protection of the more powerful, or he must strike an alliance with his equals, or he must retire behind fortified walls and wait him out. If defeated, he accepts the most humiliating terms, suffers silently, then plots his revenge. Defeat and humiliation, and the thirst for vengeance, he learned from the fate of his father.

When the young and intolerant Aurangzeb, the Great Mughal, had defeated the Shias, he proved to be less forgiving of heretics and infidels than any of the five previous emperors in the hundred and seventy-five years of his illustrious lineage. Even minor forts were cleansed of subversive elements. He installed Hasan Beg, the father of the current vassal-nawab, Haider Beg, to take over the Coromandel Coast of Roopconda, and to kill or drive from power all Shia sultans, and to expel all Hindus from positions of assumed power. Jadav Singh’s father had been turned out of the fort, humiliated. The son had sworn revenge and had carried the pledge forward to the Nawab’s son, and to the Grand Mughal himself.

Raja Jadav Singh had not come down from Devgad to witness an English factor’s punishment, though he never forgot the expression of disbelief on the pale
firangi
face just before the sword came down on the stately triangle of pinched flesh. Months later he confided to Hannah that in the moment before Tringham’s grimy white shirtfront exploded into glistening scarlet, he understood something about the
firangi
arrogance, which enabled even flawed, pathetic little men like Tringham to dream of plundering lands they did not know, and did not hate. They really didn’t think that laws applied to them. They tried to walk the world like gods, without armies or servants or gold to protect them, and without the principle of vengeance to ennoble them.

That day, Jadav Singh, exercising the eccentric right of a holy man, had stepped in front of the washerman’s donkey upon which the poor, accommodating but denosed Tringham was forced to ride backward, and whispered into his ear, “Turn your hate into action, friend. Join the enemies of your enemies. Avenge this day!”

The Raja’s reason for billeting himself in disguise in the nearby fort of Panpur (the seat of a vassal who, after the slaughter of his sons and the enslavement of his three wives, had fled Roopconda for the protection of the Raja) was to harass the
firangi
trade in the weakly defended coastal outposts of Fort St. Sebastian and New Salem, to stir up resentment against the Company and thus, eventually, diminish the revenue the
firangi
paid the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb.

The Panpur vassal had proven himself loyal and reckless, capable of sufficient vengeance to recommend him as a
subedar
. While Higginbottham plotted only the death of Gabriel Legge, Raja Jadav Singh had been waiting in Panpur fort, almost within sight of Fort St. George, for just the right moment to hurt Higginbottham, the Marquis, Legge, the Nawab and the Emperor.

2

IT’S RAINING
. For weeks without break it’s been raining. I couldn’t have imagined such rains in Cambridge or Boston. Venn says, looking through all my notes on Hannah, Gabriel and the Coromandel Coast, that a perfected X-2989 program, sucking all data into itself like an informational black hole, might be able to generate three milliseconds of virtual reality running time.

Life is extremely wasteful of data, in other words, says Dr. Venn Iyer.

Mr. Abraham is reluctant to be outdoors in this muddy season. He takes off his squeaky-new leather sandals, rolls up the flared legs of his made-to-measure trousers and leads me down a flooded alley. Only mad dogs and American scholars, Mr. Abraham sighs. A cycle rickshaw whizzes by and spatters mud on his starched and ironed shiny garments. I offer to pay the dry-cleaning bill and realize at once from the jerky way he pulls ahead that I have offended him.

We are in this alley because three hundred years ago, when this busy, built-up mile was just sandy seafront, a washerman’s hut stood near here. Hannah lay in that hut, enfeebled not quite by fever but perhaps by a premonition that her time on the Coromandel was not yet over. The present moment, however perilous, could not equal in terror the premise of her return. (Like Venn, I believe less and less in accident, more and more in design. She did not make the boat’s sailing because it was not yet time for her to return.)

It was a cyclone that finally awoke her. A cyclone with the fury of divine judgment lashed the tiny port village. Around nine o’clock in the morning, the high winter sky precipitously blackened. For two hours or more, winds from the north sucked birds out of trees, blew thatch off the huts, then attacked the remaining walls, washing everything into the sea. Houses toppled off shaky foundations. Paddy fields turned into salty lagoons. Then winds from the east more malicious than the winds from the north lacerated the coast. Ships tore free of their anchors and beached themselves in jungles leagues inland. Water rose as high as a cliff and swallowed dunes. Within moments, the water cliffs flooded the customhouse. The river surged over the bridge and swirled into the crowded alleys lined with stalls. By noon the sea spread itself over five villages and three market towns in the hinterland. That afternoon the winds blew first from the south, and then from the south-southwest, and carried debris-loaded seawater back into the Bay of Bengal.

The harsh, gritty wind lacerated her face. When she covered her cheeks with her hands, she felt warm blood on her palms.

“This is no country for Christians!” she cried. This was not the place she wished to be entombed. But where could she run to? She saw the folly of a governess’s job in Cambridge. There would surely be no welcome there for a pirate’s widow, and no place in old Salem for an Indian lover’s daughter.

An angry mob was already within earshot. Bhagmati hurried the grief-dazed Hannah, no longer disguised as anything but a half-dead
firangi
, around uprooted trees and waist-deep mud pools. They had to make their getaway before the pathways were flooded. They found a donkey, braying senselessly for its lost master. Bhagmati prodded the beast, with Hannah’s body upon it, toward the bridge.

That night the bridge broke. An Englishwoman on a donkey and her servant were on the bridge when winds wrenched it off its base (Coromandel consultation-book entry, but never confirmed), lifted it and dashed it back into frothy river water. That bridge has been rebuilt and broken and rebuilt many times since. The bridge has been officially named and renamed over and over again. One of its longer-enduring names was the Robert Clive Bridge. But among local people, since the night that Hannah and Bhagmati sailed downriver on broken-off waterlogged planks, it has been called the Bridge of Drownings.

I visualize the sundered bits of barks and timber, bodies of victims and animals swirling downstream. The stone bridge is forever collapsing. The “Widow” Legge is forever cut off from White Towns on fortified hillocks. She floats, cold numb fingertips clinging to a splintered bark. The donkey eddies with desperate velocity until the waters suck it down. Men with hysterical faces in flimsy boats grab at her. How insulated her life has been that she has not witnessed such hate before!

“Bhagmati!” she screams. “You, the Lucky One! Make me lucky!”

Hands hurl a jute sack over her head. She hears herself scream, feels herself hauled into a country boat like a fisherman’s catch and dumped on top of other bagged and wriggling humans.

3

HANNAH CAME TO
on a low divan in an airy tower room in a hill-fort. The divan was the only piece of familiar furniture in the room. There was a large wooden chest with iron clasps pushed against one wall and a silken carpet patterned with hunting scenes on the stone floor. Heavy bolsters and outsize cushions were piled on an embroidered floor rug, and brass urns, pitchers and spittoons ranged in neat rows under a high window slit.

After the grand excesses of Henry Hedges’ English furniture, the dark austerity of the tower room—she would not allow herself to call it a prison—startled her. She would have to accustom her limbs to fold and her spine to flex into new positions so she could recline, lounge and squat like the locals. In hallways and courtyards out of her view, soldiers and servants were issuing instructions in a language that she hadn’t heard before. She squatted on the thin rug, cheek pressed into the stone wall, knees drawn up to her chin in despair. For the first time in her life she longed for the rule-bound sternness and security of the Fitch household.

Bhagmati’s soft singing seeped into the darkening room. Hannah pushed the portal with her shoulder; the portal gave way, revealing Bhagmati in the circular landing of the turret. She had her back to Hannah, her eye to a musket chink in the pocked stone wall.

“Whose prisoners are we?” Hannah asked.

Bhagmati swiveled around, startled by the panic in Hannah’s voice. “We are not prisoners,” she explained, calming Hannah. “We are in Panpur Palace. We are the guests of Raja Jadav Singh. The Lion of Devgad. Panpur is his vassal.”

Hannah had heard Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham speak covetously of the quality of indigo grown on Panpur plantations. She’d associated Panpur exclusively with squalid villages that somehow harvested a valued commodity that Gabriel, the English Company and the Compagnie Royale fought over. That Panpur had a fort, a courtyard with fountains, landscaped gardens with canals and a monarch capable of inspiring apparent devotion made her realize how myopic had been her life in Fort St. Sebastian.

“A raja?” She was used to saying “nawab.”

“The Grand Mughal calls Raja Singh the Rat of the Coromandel.”

“What do you call him?”

Bhagmati laughed. “My lord.”

The servant woman appeared young and beautiful, regal in her posture! She had changed into fresh, fragrant garments. The bared lustrous skin of her arms smelled of floral oils and woody essences. Her hair, still wet from a bath or from the rain-churned river, cascaded in raven waves. Even her voice had a new confidence.

In the formal diplomatic dealings on the Coromandel Coast, English people were most often in contact with Muslims, who ruled in the name of the Emperor Aurangzeb through their nawabs and their laws and customs agents. Muslims seemed a more knowable people than Hindus; Muslims’ aversions and their attractions struck familiar chords with devout Christians. They had a heaven, a hell, a book, a leader, a single god; they knew sin and tried to repent. Their dietetic codes were harsh, but logical.

The idea of Hinduism was vaguely frightening and even more vaguely alluring to Hannah. English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism. Muslims might be cruel, but true obscenity attached itself to Hindus, whose superstitions and wanton disregard of their own kind—burning young widows, denying humanity to those they called untouchable—excited contempt. Muslims had restrictions, which were noble and manly; Hindus had taboos, which were superstitious and cowardly. Hindus were unreasonable, and unreachable, so tradition-bound that their minds were considered undeveloped, except for a wily ruthlessness among the trading castes. What little good she knew of the religion came from Bhagmati’s stories; what little she saw in practice alarmed her. It seemed to feature the worship of various horrific and comic images. They worshiped the male sex organ; they worshiped an elephant-headed, fat-boy god. They had more gods than people, and, God knew, they had enough people.

Venn bristles at Hannah’s misconception of Hinduism. He believes in a cosmic energy that quickens and governs the universe. He explains to me impatiently the Hindu concepts of Brahman and Atman. “Not gods,” Venn protests, “but vivid metaphors. The ‘gods’ are visualizations of the Brahman’s aspects and attributes.” I simplify the concepts for myself into Cosmic Soul and Individual Soul.

The antagonisms between the three religions naturally reinforced each other’s prejudices of the other two, but Christians and Muslims tended to concentrate their opprobriums against the common Other. If anything, Hannah had a Christian’s skepticism about other faiths, bolstered by a Muslimized intolerance for idolatry.

And now she was in a totally Hindu world. Bhagmati seemed no longer a servant. Perhaps she, Hannah, was about to become one.

In other words, at the age of thirty, Hannah was a pure product of her time and place, her marriage and her training, exposed to a range of experience that would be extreme even in today’s world, but none of it, consciously, had sunk in or affected her outer behavior. I want to think, however, that the forces of the universe (for want of a more precise concept) were working within her. I don’t have any other way of explaining what she was about to do, or become.