The Holder of the World (15 page)

Sita proves her purity to her husband and to her society in a trial by fire. The god of fire, Agni, embraces her and expels her unscorched.

Bhagmati always halted her recitation with Sita, embodiment of wifely virtues, stepping triumphantly out of the flames. It wasn’t censorship; it’s all that Bhagmati knew, or had ever been taught. Hannah couldn’t visualize the family reunion after that fiery ordeal. Did the Hindu Sita, like the Puritan Mary Rowlandson, question the rules that her husband had pledged to uphold? Could a woman who had strayed leagues and sea channels away from the restrictive protection of the white circle, who had traveled in flying chariots, resisted the heady courtship of a ten-headed demon, discovered the potency of self-reliance, return to the passive domesticities of her very young girlhood?

ORALITY
, as they say these days,
is a complex narrative tradition
. Reciters of Sita’s story indulge themselves with closures that suit the mood of their times and their regions.

Venn’s mother, (Mrs.) Padma S. Iyer, M.B.B.S. (Vellore), M.D. (Johns Hopkins), who now operates her own fertility clinic in Boston, was born a half hour’s automobile ride from the old White Town of Fort St. George. Her version of Sita’s story ends with Sita throwing herself back into the fire (in Padma’s newfound vocabulary), “to spite Rama and the hegemonic rules of Rama’s kingdom, Ayodhya.”

Venn’s friend Jay Basu, who came from Calcutta to MIT only last year to work on the X-2989 project, was taught a more drawn-out conclusion by his grandmother. In his version, too, Sita passes the trial by fire. Rama, relieved, installs her in the palace as his queen and gladly fulfills his conjugal duties and passions. At night he lies awake torturing himself with imagined violations Ravanna may have committed on Sita. No, it’s worse: he can forgive Ravanna his rape. His fear is that Sita might have enjoyed it. After the first, no future lover leaves a mark:
Rama doesn’t know
.

Distrust, his own and that of his advisers, drives him to banish Sita, now pregnant with twin sons, to the forest. Years pass. Sita makes a life of pastoral contentment for herself. The twins grow up regal and strong. Remorse and loneliness bring Rama into the forest where he accidentally rediscovers Sita. Eager to restore serenity to himself, and his family to the palace where it belongs, he begs Sita for one more trial by fire.

This time Sita refuses. If during her first exile, the forest had disclosed to her only its dangerous blandishments, then during her second exile the forest has disclosed to her its wise secrets about eternity and redemption. This time she stands up to Rama and the unfair institutions of Ayodhya. She flings herself to the ground. And miraculously the Mother Earth that had given her birth now swallows her whole, leaving no trace of Sita the mortal.

I MAKE ONLY
one demand of Venn and his mother, and of Jay and his grandmother. Where is Sita’s version of her captivity in Lanka? I want to hear Sita tell me of her resistance to or accommodation with the multiheaded, multilimbed carnivorous captor. Did Sita survive because of blind or easy faith in divine Providence? Or did she genuinely believe that deprived of Rama’s protection, she’d transformed herself into a swan whom a crow wouldn’t dare touch? I may not have Sita’s words, but I have the Salem Bibi’s; I know from her own captivity narrative what Sita would have written.

10

HANNAH WAS
on the roof of her house scanning the waves for the
Esperance’
s press of jaunty white sails when Samuel Higginbottham, whom, since Cephus Prynne’s demise, she had gone to great lengths not to run into on her provisioning trips, dismounted in a pale haze of dust at the edge of her garden. She moved back from the roof’s parapet; she intended not to be at home to any factor or Company agent in Gabriel’s absence.

She called Bhagmati to help prepare a lie: Mistress Legge was feeling poorly and could not come down. Gabriel had instructed her to isolate herself from Martha and Sarah, from anyone with Company associations who might grill her about the Marquis’s missions. But Bhagmati, she could see, was out in the courtyard, arguing strenuously with a dark young woman in cream-colored clothes.

From the arm gestures, which practically shouted “Be off with you, fly, fly!” Hannah assumed the woman was either an acquaintance of her servant’s who had gained admission to White Town under false pretenses, or a vague relative of Bhagmati’s, someone she didn’t want around. This woman, at a distance, at least, looked saucy and self-confident; she stood with a hip crooked, one hand resting on it, leaving the other free for gestures. And her gestures seemed to take in Hannah up on the balcony, who had thought herself unseen. But Samuel Higginbottham had also caught sight of her pacing the roof before he had dismounted, and now ordered her down with a presumptuous slap of his fist on his open hand.

She leaned over the parapet and took her time scrutinizing the dusty Englishman. Promotion to the position of Chief Factor had given his florid round face a new square-jawed sobriety. She remembered him as he had appeared to her that first day on the beach: a slow clumsy man, overtly fearful of Cephus Prynne’s caustic tongue, and fitfully arrogant with Pedda Timanna, Kashi Chetty and Catchick Sookian. Was promotion to Chief Factor in a Coromandel outpost what he had dreamed of and prayed for all along? Was this the dusty fate he had plotted to embrace? She felt grateful for Gabriel’s wildness.

From the roof she taunted him. “And what business might the Chief Factor have with a married woman?” Let him think her rude. She was no longer a factor’s wife. Why should she rush down, offer him water and food, make him welcome? She remained within the protective magic circle she had drawn for herself. If she stepped outside that invisible circumference, if she raced down, she would lose her advantage. Sarah and her husband were adversaries now. Fate had changed alignments.

“This business concerns your husband,” the Chief Factor retorted.

“Then you ought to return when my husband is present.”

His jaw lost some of its chiseled sternness. She noticed how contrived his stiff-spined deportment was and pitied his desire to appear authoritative for people he considered his subordinates. His features—the thinness and straightness of the nose, the arch of the brows—were in such prim and agreeable alignment that in spite of the grim expression he had assumed they gave his pale thin face a near prettiness. (The portrait of Chief Factor Samuel Higginbottham, mounted on horseback, in full imperial glory [c. 1699] with ships’ spars and bales of calico in the background, was personally commissioned by the Company’s own master portraitist and today is in the special collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.)

“What business takes your husband away?” He glanced away from her.

“I’m not a fool, Mr. Higginbottham. I do not disclose my husband’s affairs. And … my husband is not a knave.”

All at once, in a reproachful monotone, the Chief Factor unburdened himself of the message he had come to deliver to Gabriel. The Company, he informed Hannah, was pledged to protect, on pain of severe chastisement of its personnel, all ships belonging to the Emperor Aurangzeb.

Hannah stopped him. “Gabriel Legge is not adverse to helping the Badshah should he require help.”

But it was as if she had not spoken at all. Samuel Higginbottham continued to recite his message. The Company was pledged also to protect the ships of all Indian merchants, be they Muslim, Hindu, Armenian, Christian, if they had the Emperor as their liege lord. Any piracy of the Emperor’s fleet would therefore have to be considered a hostile act against the Company.

Gabriel was fighting Europe’s war, saving the monkey on a tiny island off the Pamban Channel. But why allay the Chief Factor’s fears just yet? Why allay them at all? He was right to dread the Mughal Emperor’s rage. Martha Ruxton had told her a hundred frightening anecdotes about the Emperor. After Captain Avery, the English pirate, had sacked the
Ganj-i-Sawai
off the Malabar Coast, the pious Muslim Emperor had put all Englishmen and Englishwomen in Surat in irons. And when men like William Kidd or Cutlass Culliford harassed haj-bound shiploads of the Emperor’s dearest subjects, the Emperor had had Company agents whipped and threatened to cut them out of trade. Where men like Higginbottham and other factors saw damnation in the ebb and flow of profit margins, the aging Badshah talked only of vengeance and sacrilege.

It was unthinkable that a noble Englishman, the fairest of God’s creatures on earth, should be stripped and tied to a post in the middle of a public square and flogged by men under a distant authority, more practiced in carving the entrails of goats than the chastisement of a gentleman’s shoulders. The first condemned Surat factor, white skinned, blue veined, suety from long hours in some local punch house, had died of apoplexy when the flogger raised his arm.

“Day and night our men and women suffer tyrannical insultings at the hands of these slavish heathens.”

“And you seek to alleviate suffering?”

The Chief Factor flinched. Hannah was grateful that it was the uneasy Higginbottham and not the cold, self-possessed Cephus Prynne who had borne the warning for Gabriel. “Commerce is our mission. Conquest the necessary means.”

“You have delivered your message,” Hannah said. “The response will be conveyed by my husband himself, when he sees fit.”

When she regained her shaded post behind a pillar, she commanded visions of the sea and of the now-vacant courtyard where Bhagmati directed boys in the watering of trees. The cheeky interloper was gone, and Higginbottham was but a dusty dot on the southern horizon.

THE NAYAK
kept his word on rewarding the Marquis’s mercenaries. Gabriel came back with sea chests filled with riches. He came back, but Hannah didn’t see much of him. He was traveling the hinterland with Pedda Timanna. Count Attila and the Marquis dropped titillating hints of business deals; Gabriel and Pedda Timanna were bribing washermen and bleachers to boycott the Company; they were seeking an audience with the Nawab for trade concessions; they were closing deals that would cut heavily into Catchick Sookian’s, Kashi Chetty’s and the Company’s textile-exporting profits. Especially the Company’s.

When she delivered the Chief Factor’s threat to the Marquis, he gloated and preened. Hannah understood that the threat had had everything to do with diminishing profits and nothing to do with privateers sacking Muslim pilgrim ships. Would Higginbottham develop the backbone to become another Cephus Prynne? Men like Higginbottham and the Marquis had no home, no loyalties except to themselves. Their homelands were imaginary. For them there was no going back, and no staying on. They were in a perpetual state of suspension, which was not the same as floating free. They were ghosts, trapped in space meant for full-fleshed and warm-blooded humans. She would need to root herself, she was not sure where nor how, before she too became ghostly.

I HAVE CHECKED
the consultation books of Fort St. Sebastian for this period. The entries are in the plump, passionate handwriting of Thomas Tringham, the writer whose beloved hound Hannah had helped bury on that first day on the Fort St. Sebastian beach. The handwriting reveals the panic that the frugally worded summaries are intended to conceal.

The summaries are of the Chief Factor’s separate consultations with “Kasey” Chetty and Catchick Sookian about the appointment of a chief merchant with whom the factory would deal exclusively and to whom the Chief Factor would delegate the authority to settle trade disputes among the “natives.” Kasey Chetty is led to believe that if he can influence Nawab Haider Beg to arrange for the English an imperial
farman
—a land grant decreed by Emperor Aurangzeb himself—he will be favored above other candidates. Catchick Sookian is led to believe that the Company automatically ranks Armenians higher than natives because Armenians are Christian-born and vehement in their faith and perforce more reliable and manly; and that if he can organize a joint-stock association among native merchants who traditionally resist commonly held stock and commonly run trading operations, the position of chief merchant is guaranteed him. The Chief Factor impresses upon Sookian the Company’s paradoxical need both to increase the volume of exported textiles and to decrease its outlay of cash credits.

The negotiations with Pedda Timanna were clearly unfriendly. The entries are mainly lists of debts owed to him by the late Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham in their official and personal capacities. These debts total 250,000 pagodas, exclusive of the four diamonds and six rubies mortgaged by Martha Ruxton. There is a summary of the debt-settlement proposal made to Pedda Timanna originally by Prynne and later amended by Higginbottham. This proposal requires the creditor to forgive 40 percent of the sum owed and to accept English woolens as payment of the remaining 60 percent.

Higginbottham’s amendment promises Pedda Timanna a permit to buy one residential property in White Town and to enter Fort St. Sebastian in a palanquin. Pedda Timanna’s response, too, is summarized. He thanks the Chief Factor for his “generous application” and “blushes that he must needs decline it.” There is no mention of the fact that he has been entering White Town by palanquin at his will for a considerable period. His circumstances are too humble to permit high discounts and the Coromandel climate too brutish for the resale of woolens. He expects that the Company being “honourable” and its factors “noble” his application will be “well received and will terminate agreeably.” Meanwhile he is considering an offer from the Compagnie Royale de France to remove himself and his family to the French settlement of Pondicherry. There is no specific reaction recorded to Higginbottham’s amendment, whether he considered the invitation to own a house in White Town an insult or merely insufficient.

Higginbottham took to his bed for six days when he heard that Pedda Timanna was moving to Pondicherry. Sarah had to petition the Fort St. George Council for special exemption from the Council rule that required the Chief Factor to be on the premises of his factory every day. She gave out that Samuel was “indisposed by the insupportable heat.” But her husband’s ailment was graver than sunstroke or dysentery. He accused himself of the crime of “tameness” in dealing with Indian merchants. Cephus Prynne would have threatened and blustered his way into restraining Pedda Timanna from moving his assets to Pondicherry.

The French were a more hated enemy than the Dutch or the Danes. Capitulation to the Compagnie Royale was tantamount to personally handing William Ill’s head on a platter to Louis XIV. Higginbottham’s self-doubt atrophied into a suicidal melancholy. Sarah could not get him to eat or bathe or make love to her. On the seventh day in desperation she visited Hannah in the hope that she could talk Pedda Timanna into accepting the Norwich woolens in spite of the Coromandel’s heat.

She appealed to Hannah. Samuel was fast becoming a broken man, she sobbed. If she, Hannah, had any influence with Pedda Timanna, whom she, Sarah, had never spoken against and always considered a higher sort than other natives … then now was the time. They have had their differences, but after all, they were all English, all working for the Crown. They had that, didn’t they? Thank God, they had that sense of belonging.

Perhaps she looked closely into the eyes of Hannah and saw no blazing insignia of attachment, no Cross of St. George reflected in them, no light from a higher allegiance. She realized she had humiliated herself needlessly, fallen back on her serving girl’s faith in her wheedling good looks and other men’s power.

“Let me see the woolens,” said Hannah. They were fine and high-quality gray woolens, light by New England standards, and for a moment she held them to her face and bare arms. Woolens like this in Salem would belong only to the merchant aristocracy. Sarah misinterpreted nostalgia for commerce.

“You will do it, then?” she asked.

“I will take a dress length off this bolt,” said Hannah. “On personal consignment.”

With a shipload of Norwich bales, and her husband’s future riding on their sale, two yards at a discount price had not been Sarah’s intent. In fact, she took it as an insult and hurled the entire bolt at Hannah.

With that bolt of gray wool, Hannah turned out a somber wardrobeful of Puritan outfits: a coat for Gabriel, tunics for herself, complete with white-lace trim.

Hannah pleaded with Gabriel and later with the Marquis not to let Samuel die of despair. Wasn’t Cephus Prynne’s death enough revenge? There could never be enough revenge; the Marquis laughed. But he was charmed by her concern. He called it her womanly aspect. He promised he would help Samuel out of his difficulty. And then he laughed again. His help would make the vengeance all the sweeter.

He bribed or bullied Kasey Chetty and Catchick Sookian into forming a new joint-stock association and lodging the common fund of a paltry seventy-five thousand pagodas in the Company’s treasure. Zentoos, he joked, don’t like to trust their money to anyone outside the family. This mixed-caste and multiracial association would be catastrophic. They would bicker and squabble over who was to sign contracts, who to keep the books and disburse the money. By helping Higginbottham he was ensuring Higginbottham’s inglorious ruin, brought on not by external agency, not by external assault with its possible recourse to glorious defeat, but by glaring incompetence in the area of his greatest vanity: knowing the locals and how to outsmart them.