The Holder of the World (23 page)

“Even the Great Mughal cannot do that.”

“The
angrezi
are your people. Do not think I am unaware of the name of Captain Legge. You are the prostitute of infidels and idolaters, and you reject the offer of my protection.”

All of this was said without rancor, not as a taunt, but as a kind of incontrovertible preamble. The tone of voice hinted at a fondness for paradox, that this lowest of outcasts should even be sitting before him, polluting his tent on the eve of battle.

This was the moment, if she was ever to have one, when the gods that controlled the universe had conspired to put her Christian-Hindu-Muslim self, her American-English-Indian self, her orphaned, abandoned, widowed, pregnant self, her
firangi
and bibi self, into a single message, delivered to the most powerful man those separate worlds had ever known. She stood.

“It is you, Great Mughal, Your Majesty, if you forgive a mere woman’s speech, a prostitute’s speech, who calls the condition of servitude protection. It is you, Noble Badshah, who confuses a cruel and vindictive nature with a generous spirit. I speak as one who has lost everything, who owns nothing, and who desires nothing for herself.

“I have come late in my life to the feeling of love. Love for a man, love for a place, love for a people. They are not Devgad people or Roopconda people, not Hindu people or Muslim people, not Sunni or Shia, priests or untouchables, servants or kings. If all is equal in the eye of Brahma as the Hindus say, if Allah is all-seeing and all-merciful as you say, then who has committed atrocities on the children, the women, the old people? Who has poisoned the hearts of men?”

“The blame belongs with the rat of Devgad” came the response.

“The blame lies with anyone who confuses protection with power.”

“No idolater can thwart the Lashkar-i-Islam.”

“I agree. Your army is most formidable. Your enemy is weak.” She waited for his satisfied agreement. Then she cried out, from her heart, “Oh, Great Emperor, build your city, build your mosques and your palace, but stop this war before it destroys the world! You speak of mercy, but where is the quality of your mercy?”

“Mercy before Allah, not mercy before men. Allah judges men, and the Emperor is but a man who must also be judged. The duty of the Emperor is to bring the infidel before the throne of judgment. There is no escaping the judgment of Allah.”

“Duty! Duty, judgment! I have heard enough of duty. And of judgment. You cloak your lust for vengeance and for gold and diamonds in the noble words of duty and judgment and protection and sacrifice. But it is the weakest and the poorest and the most innocent who suffer, who sacrifice, whose every minute of every day is obedience to duty—”

The Emperor slapped the floor. He stood. He reached slowly above him and lifted the diamond off the top of the world. He held it in front of him, the pale candlelight reflecting off a thousand facets as he spoke.

“I do not fight for treasure and glory in this life. This diamond is the tear I shed as I discharge my duty. That is why it is called the Emperor’s Tear. The dutiful and the innocent, if they are pure and if they submit, will be judged by the all-seeing, all-merciful Allah. The sum of their lives will be weighed in the scales of judgment.”

He restored the diamond to the crown of the world, the seat of the universe.

11

HOW COMFORTING
a world that can be divided into halves. The Dar-ul-harb and Dar-ul-islam. Infidels and believers. She had come from softer versions of the Emperor’s world, of her lover’s world, of the factors’ world, that retained many of the attitudes of light and dark, fallen and saved, caste and outcaste, but failed to act on them quite so decisively. And so life had robbed her of easy consolations.

The only certainty had been her vision—a very clear vision, stronger than a wish or a dream—of peace. She’d trusted in her
firangi
status, and while it had gained her a hearing and allowed her to keep her ears, tongue and head (“How I was trembling!” Bhagmati told her in their tent that last night. “No man, no matter how powerful, may speak to the Grand Badshah like that!”), her message had failed.

The Emperor had sent attendants with chests of jewels. “For the Tigress who bested my General” came the message. She returned them, without regret. “For your white skin, for the luster of your spirit, for the one-in-a-lakh, I give you these pearls. I call you Precious-as-Pearl.”

She sent them back, too, with her gratitude. To accept would be to acknowledge his attempt to influence her.

This time, the return of the necklace of pearls was rejected, and they were re-presented with the indication that returned gifts were received as serious insults. Dutifully, she wore the necklace, acknowledging even to herself that no queen of England had ever seen its equal.

When the necklace had been satisfactorily adjusted, the attendant read the Emperor’s proclamation. “
When the battle horns are sounded, His Imperial Majesty wishes you to view with him the destruction of the rat-worshiping idolater
.” The invitation was forcefully delivered, her head was covered, her face veiled, and she was escorted by guards in polished armor to view the train of elephants dragging travois of cut stone and platform logs, and a hundred of the finest stonemasons of Agra and Aurangabad, who were to lay the foundations of a new city with walls and parapets around the Emperor’s battle tent.

In one rainy season, Hannah Legge had gone from woolen-clad English married woman on the Coromandel Coast to pregnant sari-wearing bibi of a raja; a murderer, a widow, a peacemaker turned prisoner of the most powerful man in India. Her only friend was her former servant, perhaps the only friend she’d ever had apart from the innocent days with Hester Manning, and the language they communicated in was more Bhagmati’s than hers.

She wasn’t Hannah anymore; she was Mukta, Bhagmati’s word for “pearl.” And she gave Bhagmati a new name: Hester, after the friend she had lost. The friend who had indirectly brought her to the Coromandel Coast.

The Emperor watched from his palanquin.

“The pearls are indeed most rare and perfect. I wear them out of respect,” she said.

“
Angrezi
eat the flesh of the shellfish, that is what I hear.”

“Yes, we do.”

“It is unclean. You may wear the pearls, but I ask you never to eat unclean food again.”

Against all of her instincts, she bowed her head. The Emperor was a builder of cities, a designer of human lives, a converter to Islam of everything in his path.

“Your Majesty, it is not too late. I beg you to reconsider—”

“The rat and his mice have already left their burrow.”

“Let me meet with him. Let me carry a message. I will tell him of your strength—”

He raised his hand and immediately her arm was seized by one of the attendants.

“Word has been sent,” he said. Then he smiled. “Word of my serious illness. Word of the panic of my troops. Word of our helplessness.” He raised his frail arm, opened his trembling hand as far as his fingers could unfurl, and took in the vista of elephants, the thousands of laborers, the soldiers still busy polishing and sharpening their steel. “Look, Precious-as-Pearl, do you see the panic?”

He was still laughing as she was led away.

THEY WERE STILL
the Emperor’s guests, or his special hostages; the officers who passed their tent on the way to the tents of the haram women were told not only to stay away, but to keep their voices down and their language respectable. But they knew their survival was provisional. They knew that even the exaggerated respect was a possible future bargaining point, raising their desirableness. After the coming battle, which could only end in total defeat for the Raja, the Emperor would be generous with his rewards, harsh with his judgments. In the lust of executions that would follow, who would speak for two women from the Raja’s own fort, for the prostitute carrying his child, and her faithful servant?

She knew precisely the route the Raja would take; he would leave at night, march through the day, and be ready to strike in the final quarter of the night. He was out there now in the moonless night, camped in the forest beyond the ring of the Emperor’s clearing.

She left the sweltering tent, just to fix the bright stars in her head. She had failed in her mission; this was the final night of the life she had known. She prayed for the first time in years, for the strength of survival.

The night was crammed with noises, the snuffling of horses, the lowing of cattle, the distant trumpeting of elephants, coughs, songs, drums and laughter from the haram tents. Every creature in the world was taking its pleasure tonight.

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

JOHN KEATS
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

P
ART
F
OUR

1

IT HAS TAKEN ME
a year and a half to assemble these notes, to make my travels, take my pictures, attend the auctions. Yes, I bought
The Apocalypse
, or
The Unravish’d Bride
, that terrible tableau of Jadav Singh’s suicidal attack on the fort of Aurangzeb, at a small auction of “colonial memorabilia” in Bangkok. With its steep forty-thousand-dollar estimated price, it practically shouted Bugs’s name. Venn bought it for me at half the price, an act of South Indian patriotism, he said, and Bugs never guessed a thing.

I’ve always seen it as a painting about a woman misplaced in time. The man who’d titled it for the museum appreciated its carnage.

Historians take note: the Devgad battle was Aurangzeb’s last great victory. The flea on the Coromandel Coast, the English concession, proved to be carrying a kind of plague. He died of a thousand small wounds, an emptied treasury from fighting Sikhs on the northwest, Marathas on the east, the freebooters and sharp traders of the various European chartered companies on the southern coasts, and his own infirmities. He died at eighty-nine, seven years after finding and losing the Pearl-of-His-Crown, having alienated all competent heirs. He carried the soul of the Mughal Empire with him to his grave; what lingered was the vacuum that invited the British in.

One year in the life of Venn Iyer and his colleague Jay Basu and X-2989—given their hours, their brilliance, their funding, the speed of computers—is of course vastly more impressive than a single book. Three months ago, as a paid subject, I put on the designer headgear and the electronic gloves and walked in virtual reality for ten seconds on a Boston street, sat in a classroom at UCLA, and spent ten seconds with a Century 21 agent in Kansas City. I don’t mean I watched them—I was with them; they responded to me. Those crowds on the Boston street parted to let me pass. I reached out and touched a faucet, touched the sleeve of a student beside me, and felt them both. When I walked up the stairs, I got winded. Venn says I talked and the various monitoring devices showed I was physically reacting to virtual space, not to the lab.

And frankly, I was disappointed; X-2989 is one of the discoveries more exciting in principle than in application. Of course I couldn’t say it, and I had long ago understood the baseline importance of pure tedium. The theory worked. The technology is as cumbersome as those room-sized mainframe card-sorting computers of forty years ago, but Americans are nearly as good as Japanese at applied technology; they’ll miniaturize it, pump up its power, and twenty years from now little girls in Burma will be working on assembly lines turning out time-space laser disks. Venn and Jay will pocket their awards, MIT will prosper on the patent and maybe buy out Harvard, and the rest belongs to the heirs of the Coromandel factors, the franchisers and marketers jockeying for market share.

They had assembled a past with its own integrity. From raw, programmed data, they had created images; the images had their own brief identity. (The individual programs began fading as the data were used up. It’s an eerie feeling, watching faces and buildings slowly dissolve, lose their color and texture, lose their edges and dimension, and revert to gray.) It’s a primitive technology with infinite applications. It solves man’s oldest or second-oldest preoccupation, to master time, which seems even harder than mastering space.

But this wasn’t another 3-D movie house, and we weren’t kids with our special glasses, jumping back whenever fists and spears burst from the screen. I retrieved thirty seconds from lives I’ve never lived—but which now I have. But why did I intercept a lady in her yellow jacket demonstrating faucets in a Kansas City bathroom?

WHEN IT LOOK
at all my notes, the five hundred books consulted, the endless paintings, engravings, trade records, journals, the travel and the documentary picture taking, and stack them up in my study, they look impressive. And from them I have reconstructed a life through three continents and thirty years. And when I look at the raw data Venn’s program has ingested to create ten seconds from just three years ago, with no character, no narrative, I think, who am I fooling?

He talks about the bare sets of old movies, the generic “New York Street” and “Frontier Main Street,” even old television series, the telltale sparsity of convincing clutter (even “Hill Street Blues,” his touchstone of sufficient data, will look austere and artificial in a decade, he says), and he sees it as a kind of informational senility, a loss of image diversity. I talk about asset hunting, the fact that data are not neutral. There are assets and debits. There are hot leads and dead ends. To treat all information as data and to process it in the same way is to guarantee an endless parade of faucets in Kansas City.

He’s still looking for his crystal garden. The data plasma that will generate a fully interactive world. He guesses that the rules that govern information are subject to formulas; anything that has ever happened can be reproduced without all the tedious inputting of raw statistics. The process is merely the next step beyond the most powerful computer ever imagined, for now we are talking about the recapturing of past reality, not just the retrieval of information. Everything that has ever happened is still out there, somewhere, like light from distant stars.

I have seen it. I have seen the crystal, the biggest, most perfect crystal in the world. I have held it.

LAST WEEK
, on a Sunday night when even Jay Basu might be home (he’s a fan of “Murder, She Wrote”), we went down to the lab, through the elaborate security. Imagine if the program fell into commercial hands before MIT patents it! I have a “subject’s clearance.” The first thing I saw was
The Unravish’d Bride
hanging on the wall above Venn’s desk, not that he has ever learned to sit at one.

“I think what I have may interest you, Beigh. This is my present to you.”

He has absorbed my manuscript and all the documents, the travelogues and computerized East India records, the lavishly illustrated
namas
, or chronicles, of the emperors of the Mughal dynasty. He is a thorough researcher; all this is to be expected, even on his own time. Literary prose, as he calls my book, poses certain hierarchical problems for a computer, or for his program, but he thinks, just thinks, he may have found a way of rendering even my words into images. And the diamond is the clue: the fact that it is the biggest and most perfect crystal in the world may just be an accident, a kind of informational pun, but it gave him an idea.

“Would you like to find the Emperor’s Tear?” he asked.

It’s necessary that I undergo the search; the program is interactive, and when Venn tried it, all he got was a postcard view of modern Madras. The program will give you what you most care about; your mind is searching through the program though you don’t realize it—it is interacting with my thousand-answer questionnaire—until it finds a place it wants to jump in.

While he did his adjusting, I took down Hannah’s—Pearl’s—picture from the wall. The blond woman in a sari, the garish Mughal jewels, the diamond fused into the cupped hands of a proud potentate, the destruction, the fiery sky, the wounded, dying Jadav Singh. Venn slipped the helmet, the goggles, the special gloves on me.

“
HANNAH
!” I scream against the cannons and flying bullets. I can barely breathe from the sulfur clouds, my eyes burn, and I reach out to hold her, my hand closes on her shoulder and she turns, my hand is brown, with a tinkling gold bangle. She is a beautiful woman, more Pre-Raphaelite than I had imagined, with crinkly golden hair. I try to pull her my way, but she shakes her head, “No, no, Hester—don’t you see?” and now I do, though clouds of smoke are rolling in and the light is still faint, and a fine, misty rain is falling. What I see is the old man standing with his back to the battle, facing the inner courtyard where the small figure of the bent warrior is slumped, his face bloody, and the old man is holding the diamond aloft, turning its facets to capture the light of a hundred fires.

He turns—I know that face from a hundred portraits of Aurangzeb, or ‘Alamgir, the World-Holder’—a look of demented satisfaction on his face. Victory is his, vengeance and retribution and an open road to unlimited plunder and mass conversion, and suddenly his mouth opens wide, he tries to scream but the battle sounds are too loud, his attendants are all focused on the wave of Devgad warriors shooting at the fort from kneeling positions in the plowed-up field.

Now we are running along the parapet; I squeeze past the rows of sharpshooters, bumping them, they curse me as I pass, and suddenly I feel her warm hand and hear her command, “Hester, take it,” and a heavy warm glasslike object is in my hand, and we are flying down the deep stone stairs set so far apart that descent is a kind of leaping into a darkened void, each landing jars my knees and my ankles, but I am fast and strong, I have never run like this, breathless now, pulling Hannah behind me, and we are out into the field in the middle of a firefight, fair game for either side.

I scream with agony from the hot white flaming explosion in my shoulder that has spun me around and dropped me to the cool, wet soil. Hannah is on her knees, crying, Hester, Hester, Bhagmati, pray, pray, we must get back.… I try to hold the diamond out, but it is slippery with my blood.

“Mukta!” I scream, the pain blacking me out, and now a second bullet fired down on me from the parapet rakes my leg, puncturing the fleshy portion of my calf, and I think almost with satisfaction, Well, that settles it, no more running for me.

“Go, I command you,” but I can’t raise my head, and my voice is like a metal file rasping through my shoulder, astonishing pain, my words are pain, my breathing is pain, but I am like a dreamer aware of her dream even as she can’t escape it. I feel in the folds of my sari for the knife I know I have, and it is there for me.

Hannah, my Pearl, is no longer visible. Light is spreading but it is not the light of dawn; it is the light of extinguishment.… I plunge the knife deep in my belly, watch with satisfaction, and now with the mastery of my pain, the blood bubble from my beautiful brown flesh. More, I think, and plunge the knife deeper, plunge it as Hannah had into the back of Morad Farah, and make a burrow inside me. I feel the organs, feel the flesh, the bowels of history, and with my dying breath I plunge the diamond into the deepest part of me.

VENN SAYS
he was about to pull me out of it, the screaming, running, writhing, my tears, my adrenaline and heart rate and endorphins all indicated a near-death experience; even the plunge in my blood pressure and pulse was consistent with mortal trauma. He understood me—apparently I was shouting partially in his language, which, of course, I don’t know.

My shoulder still throbbed, and it continues to ache at night, and sometimes I feel in my gut that I really am incubating an enormous diamond.

“I know where the diamond is,” I said, for suddenly the name Hester Hedges in the graveyard of Fort St. Sebastian makes perfectly good sense. She was given a Christian burial, maybe out of respect to the wishes of Henry Hedges, in which case only Hannah would have known, or could have arranged it. Or Hannah had named her a Christian, to be buried and not cremated, in order to preserve her body as a carrying case. The litter bearers would have gathered the dead Hindus off the field the next day and burned them in a mass funeral pyre. Jadav Singh was borne back to Devgad for the proper public grieving and ceremony, and the new Mughal administrator moved into the palace, cleansed it of what he called idolatry, and ruled it in the name of the Great Badshah for about thirty years, when it fell into British hands.

If Hannah had carried the gem back to the coast, and then to America, it would have turned up by now. It’s not here; it’s in India. I think the world’s most perfect diamond lies in the remains of Bhagmati, “Hester Hedges,” just under the feet of Mr. Abraham, under the hooves of goats and cows.

AS THE FOCUS NARROWS
, the facts grow surer. We have the shipping and housing records, we have the letters and journals and the
Memoirs
, and of course we have
The Scarlet Letter
. Who can blame Nathaniel Hawthorne for shying away from the real story of the brave Salem mother and her illegitimate daughter? But they lived in Salem until 1720, when Rebecca Easton died: Rebecca and her five half-Nipmuc children; her daughter Hannah Easton, now called Pearl, and the proof of
her
“Indian” lover, the quick, black-haired and black-eyed girl called Pearl Singh. Hannah/Pearl stayed on in Salem until her death in 1750 at the age of eighty. Pearl Singh, born in 1701 somewhere in the South Atlantic on the long voyage home, saw in her old age the birth of this country, an event she had spent a lifetime advocating, and suffering for.

Hannah/Pearl returned to Salem with the infant and immediately began the search for her mother. She found her in a workhouse for the mad and indigent in Providence Plantations, speaking some tribal gibberish and insisting on wearing her outmoded woolens with the shameful I boldly sewn in red to her sleeve. It meant “Indian lover,” though there was no sign, apart from the progeny, of the Indian’s existence. She claimed he’d been killed raiding chicken coops to feed his children. And her daughter had a badge as well, her black-eyed, black-haired, lively daughter, named Pearl Singh. The town gossips named them White Pearl and Black Pearl.