The Holder of the World (19 page)

4

THE PANPUR FORT
was protected by a steeply built-up embattlement, a brick wall and a moat. The Bay of Bengal was in view and offered protection on its eastern flank. A wide river separated the nominal jurisdictions of Muslim Roopconda and Hindu Devgad, to which the Panpur fort and outlying villages paid their levies. English factors passed easily over these religious and political borders, enjoying trading rights in both jurisdictions, but among locals the borders were strongly defended.

Hannah could look out of the high window and see crocodiles bare their immense jaws in the green water of the moat. At a distant line of trees, and across the swollen river, Nawab Haider Beg’s soldiers in their showy Roopconda uniforms were cutting down trees and setting up their tents. Cannons were trained in the fort’s direction. Gunners, most of them
firangi
, directed the cannons’ placement. Horses and elephants were being exercised by stable hands. Eunuchs carried caldrons of water into the women’s tents. Sword sharpeners enjoyed a lively business. Slaves were setting up clay ovens, and cooks lighting fires to feed an eventual army.

“The Nawab’s men?” Hannah asked, astonished.

“The Nawab’s men are also the Emperor’s men,” Bhagmati explained. “He knows the Lion rescued the English widow.”

She felt a shudder of wonder, that the life of Emperor Aurangzeb, the Seizer of the World, was crossing the life of a Brookfield orphan. She understood; somehow she was the cause of the Nawab’s encirclement. Bhagmati explained the strategy: the Nawab would wait. He wasn’t sure if Jadav Singh was inside, and a full-scale assault on a modest fort was unmanly unless the prize was worthy. To wage war simply over the rumored presence of a white woman was ungallant. This was a war of intelligence, of spies, of courtesans and servants and eunuchs bribed, of notes passed across lines under saddles, inside bodices. Hannah looked down at her clothes. The coarse khadi and veils were stiff with dried mud. Her feet were black, bruised, naked. A smell of slime and rot came off her wet, weed-tangled hair. She felt herself the servant woman.

“They say the Badshah came south to fight the Raja himself,” Bhagmati said. She laughed a brief bitter laugh. “But even in wartime you want to bathe and change.”

She put on a clean sari, the same as Bhagmati’s. That afternoon, as the one-time servant taught her erstwhile mistress the art of pleating and folding a sari, the two women shared confidences. Bhagmati had had a vital life, distinct from waiting on
firangi
households. Why had Hannah not sensed that before? Perhaps Rebecca’s embracing of the wilderness had started like this: a moment’s sharp awareness,
My God, they’re alive!
She remembered her mother, suddenly, wearing the beaded belt her lover had given her, showing it to Hannah for admiration. They’re humans; they have a richer life than I do.

“You wear the sari well,” said Bhagmati. They had giggled, going through the elaborate process, getting it even. If Martha Ruxton could see her now! And Samuel Higginbottham!

Bhagmati had been born with the name of Bindu Bashini. Hannah spun the alliterative name like a ball on the tip of her tongue. Her own mother, she realized suddenly, must have taken a Nipmuc name. A new name for a new incarnation. Rebecca Easton was dead. Hannah Easton Fitch Legge was dying.

Bindu Bashini had been born into a merchant family in faraway Hughli. Hooooghleee. Bhagmati’s father had procured taffetas, floretta yarns, raw silks and the finest muslins for the English Chief Factor to ship out from Hughli. Hannah pictured another English factory run by another chief factor on the banks of another wide river sludgy with silt meandering into the Bay of Bengal. She pictured Bindu Bashini’s father and brothers as the spitting image of Pedda Timanna, touring the wharf on palanquins.

As a child Bindu had lived in a large mud hut crowded with parents, grandparents, widowed great-aunts, uncles and aunts-in-law, girl cousins, boy cousins and servants. She learned to sew, sing, cook, paint auspicious
alpana
designs on holy days, swim in the hyacinth-choked pond behind the hut, and chant a weekly prayer to Lord Shiva so he might direct a kindly, preferably motherless, husband her way.

“Why motherless?” asked Hannah.

“Fewer beatings.”

Then, at age ten, the unspeakable had happened. On her way upriver by barge to Nadia with three widowed aunts and a bachelor cousin for the funeral of a great-grandfather, she and her family had been set upon by river pirates. The cousin and two bargemen had been killed, the women robbed, and Bindu Bashini herself violated and thrown into the river. She’d been meant to drown. A dishonored Hindu girl couldn’t go back home. To have been abused was to have brought shame to the family for its failure to protect her.

She had swum against the current. She had scrambled up the muddy, sloping riverbank. She had survived. Mahouts washing an elephant had saved her. The elephant had lifted her from the water. Individual effort thwarted divine fate. She had neither wanted to, nor known how to, drown. So her relatives—all of them decent, affectionate men and women in untested times—had done the disowning in accordance with neighborly pressure and Hindu custom. Only cowards chose shameful life over honorable death.

“And so that’s the reason you worship the elephant god?” Hannah asked, remembering the crude drawings of elephant heads on human bodies she’d seen in Bhagmati’s sleeping room.

She smiled, but shook her head. “I don’t worship elephants,” she said.

Bindu, twice a victim, had run from her family, from her village, from all the familiar taboos and traditions. She’d kept running. She’d found herself a series of servant jobs, starting with buffalo and elephant washing. She’d staved off starvation in a hundred shameful ways. When she was twelve, she found work scrubbing the cooking pots in the house of an English factor in Hughli. Let her proud merchant family share in her shame! The factor’s name had been Henry Hedges. It was fate. He treated her like a slave, and then he treated her like a queen. He’d craved her with the urgency of an addiction. And when he’d been moved from Hughli to Kasimbazar, he’d taken Bhagmati—his name for her, for her reborn self—with him, and from Kasimbazar to Dacca, to Madapollam and finally to Fort St. Sebastian.

When a man craves you like that, you feel very powerful, said Bhagmati. Dressed in similar clothes, sharing the same space and the same fate, the distance had vanished between them.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Hannah.

Would Henry Hedges have moved her to London? Certainly not at the beginning of their long, strange relationship. But toward the end, he was talking about it; he would train her in the English arts, in cooking his strange foods. “Joints,” she suddenly giggled, “Hedges-sahib loved joints on Sunday.” She might have gone. She trusted absolutely Hedges’ ability to keep foreignness at bay, just as she trusted Raja Jadav Singh to keep her safe. But when Hannah had offered to take her to England, she had refused to go. It wasn’t religious. She could not conceive of England without Hedges. She preferred to keep his shrine alive, to walk the parapets in his clothes, in her queenly silks, than to abandon him to the Coromandel Coast.

5

HANNAH GOT
a glimpse of Raja Jadav Singh and his
subedar
that evening. She was standing at the only window slit of her tower room when the two men, similar in attire and appearance, with the same mustaches, colorful turbans wrapped in the same manner, pinned in the middle with rubies and pearls, rode up the steep ribbon-narrow trail and over the drawbridge on frisky, short-legged
tattu
horses. They led a small band of wounded cavalry. For besieged men, they seemed absurdly lighthearted. The Lion glanced up in the direction of her tower, and though he couldn’t possibly have spied her—she took care to stand far back from the window slit—he let a smile hover on his lips.

Such a gentle-looking face, she thought; the eyes so large and luminous, the smile unforced.

Soon the party of warriors and attendants moved out of her limited focus. The shrieks of aghast wives, the tuneful laments of widows, the jangle of agitated anklets floated up from the courtyard.

Hannah felt she had entered a world whose simplest rules about the saintly and the villainous were unknown to her. She had no way to measure new experiences and nothing in her old life with which to compare them. She needed to hold on to objects, to be able to name and memorize the new.

Even above the shrieking, the obvious suffering, she heard music from the inner palace. That Indian music she sometimes heard on her solitary walks in Black Town. King David, she thought, remembering her Scriptures, was he not the Lion of Judah? Shepherd and king, cruel and kindly, a soldier, a musician. A voluptuary. The general he killed to claim the widow. The bitter old man who lost his rebellious son. Founder of the line of Christ.

But what were the designs of this Lion?
Singh
, she knew, meant “lion,” but she’d never taken Indian names literally. The lowliest servants in White Town had been named Rama and Vishnu, and every third person was a Mohammed. Had the Raja plucked her to safety from an angry mob on a raging river out of a royal instinct for chivalry? Or was he just another schemer—like Chief Factors Prynne and Higginbottham, like the unscrupulous Marquis and the self-serving Pedda Timanna, like Gabriel himself, who had tried in their selfish ways to “rescue” her? Was he merely using her, a
firangi
haj-insulter’s widow, to taunt his potent enemy, Aurangzeb, the Grand Badshah?

Or could she say, like Bhagmati, that it had not been her fate to die that day? The Raja, like Bindu Bashini’s elephant, was simply there, part of a design.

The next morning Raja Jadav Singh visited. Hannah was amazed at how rested he looked in spite of his recent skirmish with the well-armed soldiers of the Nawab. He addressed her in English. To her expressions of gratitude and then her simple question “Why?” he answered, “I was not looking to save you, or anyone. I am not in the habit of pulling bodies out of the water.”

His face had the warm tint of almond shells. His mustache outlined the sumptuous upper curve of his mouth. Hannah couldn’t guess how old he was, given the fine-grained luminosity of skin that had been massaged and pampered since birth. He could have been forty-four as easily as twenty-four. He walked, and talked, with a kind of softness that belied the deeds of a warrior; she thought of Gabriel, the Marquis and the men of White Town, whose every adventure was retold, and enlarged on each telling. The Lion’s escapades were immortalized in local ballads, sung by every child. He didn’t swagger like Gabriel; he didn’t preen like Cephus. He invited her to his musical evenings—he played the flute—for what were the pleasures of war without the tranquillity of music?

“Are you comfortable? These quarters are too isolated perhaps—”

“Most comfortable, Your Majesty.”

“There are women’s rooms, but they are perhaps not suitable.”

“Wherever you choose. I am your guest for only a short while, I suppose.”

“You may stay here under our protection for as long as you feel comfortable. We do not place limits on our welcome.”

“Then how will I know when I am no longer welcome?”

The question seemed to confuse him, the
firangi
’s quest for contracts and assurances. “How does the Raja’s favorite war-horse know he is no longer fit to ride? When he is no longer fed the sweetest grass, when he is no longer groomed every day, when his tail and mane are no longer braided … when the Raja no longer visits him every day.”

“If His Majesty is kind enough to warn me, I shall braid my hair for such visits.”

“The successful ruler is the master of the art of surprise,” said Raja Jadav Singh. He clapped his hands and a retinue of servants brought a full service of tea and fruits and the sweet milk curd favored along the coast. An enormous bamboo cage holding a small colorful bird was suspended from a hook above her window. Elaborate rugs were unrolled underfoot.

“We pray you will stay with us,” he said. “The name of the bird is Horse-Tail”—he smiled—“a miniature peacock, bred only here, specialty of Devgad.” So saying, he faced the bird, clapped his hands twice, then spread them in two imaginary fans. The small blue bird raised his straggly tail and suddenly filled the cage with his massive display.

YEARS LATER
, in
Memoirs
, she made a brief cryptic reference to what came to pass between the Lion of Devgad and the Brookfield Orphan. “An angel counseled me, a fantasy governed me: bliss descends on the derangers of reason and intellect.”

Cynics would say she didn’t take any of this seriously, she was slumming in a palace, she expected to die, or be rescued, or to leave. Until then, why not? Or she was suffering posttraumatic shock. Or he was an abusive male, and an absolute despot.

According to the record of Mughal miniature paintings, there was little privacy in the bedchambers of India’s
havelis
(mansions) and palaces. Attendants swarm around lovers, advancing aphrodisiacs and fanning peacock-feathered breezes. Legends grow around the gay gossip let slip by one child-attendant, and that child, decades later, relates the tale to an English traveler, who copies it down, half in jest, as though a proper English lady could ever—ever, even in England!—have done what the maid allegedly saw.

For what it’s worth: The Lady pushed the Lion of Devgad down on the carpet alive with lion hunters grasping griffins with amber manes. The Lion trembled under her touch at first, and then, as though he too was under a spell, submitted to her slow deliberate caresses.

The
Memoirs
say nothing of Raja Jadav Singh’s contemplative brows and panther-quick eyes, nothing of the horror or wonder Hannah may have felt on touching his war-scarred flesh. Only two images of Jadav Singh exist. One is as he appeared at battle’s end in the last of the Salem Bibi series of paintings, which I, dutiful asset hunter, tracked down in Salem’s Museum of Maritime Trade. The other is a likeness of him etched on a carnelian stone set into a ring of red gold. I own that ring now. On the carnelian, the Raja, caught in three-quarter profile, is a bold, smiling warrior.

OVER THE NEXT
few weeks, the Raja sent her odd, occasional gifts. A small songbird in a silver cage. An oval black stone the size of her hand. A copy of Kautilya’s treatise, in Sanskrit. A basket of custard apples.

She was becoming like Bhagmati, making a fetish of his gifts, feeling his presence in the tokens he sent.

Before this longing, she had conceived of emptiness as absence, detectable only by the circumference within which it was contained. Now the void became a pleasureful pain, subsuming all the old Salem virtues such as duty and compassion. She wanted the Raja and nothing else; she would sacrifice anything for his touch and the love they made.

What she felt for the Raja was of a different order from what she had felt for Gabriel, or not dared feel for Hubert. Gabriel and Hubert, for all their distinctive eccentricities, were men cast in one familiar mold, men who thrilled and disappointed within a predictable range. The Raja was an agent of Providence. He had saved her life, then saved her from the chilly, unfulfilled life of a governess.

In hours alone that passed alternately like centuries, and then like instants, she began to believe that the only woman she’d ever known who could understand these feelings was her mother. She, too, lifted her gray tunic to the Raja when he entered, even with Bhagmati in the room. Her life had shrunk to something so intense, so small, yet so vast, that it wiped out the possibility of consequence as thoroughly as it erased all previous histories.

She turned the tower room in Panpur fort into a museum of indirect tokens. She embroidered samplers with rhymes Hubert had once recited and with sentiments of which Susannah Fitch would surely have been ashamed.

And thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent
.

or

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!

When she bathed, she tattooed a pink alphabet of guilt all over her body with the fibrous roots Bhagmati had taught her to use as cleansing agents. She embroidered elaborate knuckle covers for Jadav Singh to use under his shields: scenes of Nipmuc warriors scalping amber-maned Puritans; a field of Massachusetts wildflowers (imagine the consternation of the first Sotheby’s catalog, trying to explain the origin of such transcontinental adumbration!). She hung shield covers, her pennants of love, in crowded rows from the ceiling. She fastened a sampler embroidered with snowdrops and crocuses on the window slit so she would not have to look out on the milling confidence, and strange cowardice, of the Nawab’s men. By day, she taught the songbird fanciful tunes from the Puritan service, as Rebecca had done with the Nipmuc women. But during the nights she suffered nightmares of war: the Nawab burned the Raja’s bright eyes with red-hot irons; the Nawab’s elephants trampled the Raja to death.

And then one evening Jadav Singh reappeared as though he had not been away harassing the Nawab’s scouts nor stealing the Nawab’s swift
turki
horses, and wooed her with sweetmeats and confidences.

To Hannah his life story was as alien as a gypsy’s. His birth had been prophesied to his mother after forty years of barrenness. Barrenness was a tragedy for all parents, but a queen’s barrenness was a catastrophe for all her subjects. Thrones vacated by the deaths of issueless kings were promptly usurped by Aurangzeb.

After thirty-eight years of barrenness (they had, of course, married as children), his father had taken on a second wife, the very young, very beautiful daughter of a minor Deccani raja. The elderly King became desperately aroused by the child-queen’s flat boyish body and lisping monotone of a voice. More than his throne, more than an heir, he craved his child-bride beyond all possibility of fulfillment. He banished his first wife to a small palace built of rose-tinged sandstone, delegated royal tasks to a war-weary general and an abstemious Brahman priest, and locked himself and his child-love inside a specially constructed pleasure suite. The second wife provided him with extreme and unholy pleasures, and eventually a son.

The first wife, however, got her revenge. After forty years of barrenness, his first queen gave birth to Jadav Singh, whom she had miraculously conceived by lying in her spurned bed with a court painter’s likeness of her husband, the King.

“More likely, I think, she lay in bed with the court painter,” giggled the Lion, for whom the unthinkable was quite expressible. He did not seem an especially pious man, not by the standards of Salem and the Coromandel, yet he was waging a war against the Great Mughal, a religious purist, on religious principles of his own.

“Then you also have a half brother,” Hannah said.

“No longer. I was obliged to kill him,” answered the King. He read apposite paragraphs from Kautilya, not bothering to translate, but appearing very moved.

I’VE COME
to trust the psychological integrity of oral narratives. The Queen Mother must have brought up the infant-king Jadav Singh with hate in his heart for his father. She had given him as toys jaws-of-death daggers and tiger claws of sharply honed metal. But that hate cannot be expressed openly; it is transferred to the man who banished the father, Hasan Beg, then his son and, finally, Aurangzeb. After he took over his father’s old throne, no longer a pretender but as absolute ruler, the old Queen Mother dictated domestic policy. She had the child-bride banished back to the jungle kingdom she’d come from. She ordered the death of the potentially troubling rival. In the ballads that survive about her, she is a multiarmed goddess riding a lion and hurling thunderbolts against the armies of the Grand Mughal.

But this is Psychoanalysis 101, and no one has successfully put Hinduism on the couch. We know that Hannah tried, because for her, the steadfast ferocity of Jadav Singh, his purity of heart and motive, while still maintaining an outer aspect of lover, artist, care giver and justice dispenser, were initially appealing. If he burned with a fire that he carried over from father to son, and even to the remote figure of Aurangzeb himself, it must be explained by some compelling vision of cruelty, one of those moments that call for vengeance even in the gentlest of hearts.

And when he couldn’t answer her questions, when he fell silent whenever she asked
But what did he do?
she felt his anger rise, his jaw start working. He would stalk out of her room and not return for days.

I know that reaction. It is the reaction of Mr. Abraham when I offered to dry-clean his clothes, the reaction of Venn when I tell him about some new discovery I’ve made about the Coromandel, or Hannah, or even the diamond. In India, it takes a classic apprentice five years to learn how to sit at the sitar before he’s allowed to play a note. It’s not just the reaction that says
How dare you know?
It’s something deeper:
How dare you presume to say you know?