The Holder of the World (20 page)

6

JADAV SINGH
continued to court her for one
pahar
, or one quarter of each night. Hannah seems not to have asked him where he went after she relinquished him. I ask myself how I’d have felt in Hannah’s situation, and a plausible answer forms itself at once. With Gabriel she had clung to Salem’s do’s and don’ts. She had pulled and pummeled the familiar rules, hoping they’d help make sense of her own evolution. With Jadav Singh, she’d finally accepted how inappropriate it was in India—how fatal—to cling, as White Towns tenaciously did, to Europe’s rules. She was no longer the woman she’d been in Salem or London. The
qsbas
and villages of Roopconda bore no resemblance to the fading, phantom landscapes where she’d lived in Old and New England. Everything was in flux on the Coromandel coastline. The survivor is the one who improvises, not follows, the rules.

What she had left Gabriel for just months before, she would accept from Raja Singh. She was no longer a wife. She was the bibi.

HANNAH AND JADAV SINGH
wooed each other in a cupola-roofed balcony overlooking the distant bay. Love made Hannah a selfish guardian of their privacy and isolated the King from the pleas and sorrows of his subjects. For fourteen days and thirteen nights the lovers abandoned themselves to pleasure. Attendants fed them pomegranates, sprinkled them with attar of roses and lit his
huqqa
. Musicians serenaded them with flutes, drums and stringed instruments from the courtyard below. For fourteen days the King mounted his lady without surcease. “Forever regal,” he called his instrument; “Unbow’d,” she corrected. No innocent posture, no contortion, failed to yield a new delight. Flower vendors in
kuttamarams
tossed fragrant petals to the shore, and the faintest of distant odors now caught her attention, the flapping of birds’ wings, the scuttling of mice in distant fields. The moon seemed to burn, and on dark nights, the stars crackled like embers.

“Don’t you hear them?” she’d ask. “Can’t you smell it?”

“Hush,” the King replied, “I’m listening to the fishes swimming.”

And while the lovers tossed and twisted in the sweet carnality of their embraces, the drought season deepened in Panpur. The glossy soil, silken with moisture, that had once supported crops enough to feed the thousand villages of Devgad now flaked into dust in tillers’ hands. Cattle grazed in tinder-dry meadows, udders dry and bleeding, the sickened falling to buzzards even before they died. Hyenas and foxes and even a man-eating tiger prowled the palace’s peripheries and carried off goats and children.

The Nawab Haider Beg sent his most ruthless commander, Morad Farah, a mercenary Moor from the Barbary Coast who’d battled infidels on both sides of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and up and down the Malabar Coast, to head an invasion force of horsemen, foot soldiers and engineers to erect batteries for light cannons and dig a tunnel under the Raja’s moat. Finally, the Nawab had his hard intelligence: Raja Jadav Singh was in the fort at Panpur. No rumor spreads quite so fast as that of sexual abandon. The Raja could have ridden his horse in plain sight under the Nawab’s nose, and still his existence would have been in doubt; let him hide behind a curtained cupola with his Salem bibi, and all of Hindustan would know before morning.

Morad Farah’s men had closed the river route to the interior and blocked the boat route through the roadway. The Emperor Aurangzeb’s battle standard flew over a city of tents. Soldiers leaned their muskets and spears against the beached canoes, awaiting the signal to ford the river and start the attack. The sound of their drunken curses carried cleanly across the water. Troupes of singers, dancers, whores and eunuchs moved between the camps. Sword sharpeners had set up their grinding wheels. Mahouts had already started to hang armored plates on the General’s battle elephant; grooms were rubbing down and readying for battle the noblemen’s horses. Grappling hooks, scaling poles and catapults were piled into carts for the assault that could be launched on a moment’s notice. And still the Raja did not order a response.

Morad Farah herded up Panpur’s cows and goats, seined the streams, and shot the birds nesting in the trees so his men would not complain of niggardly rations. Farmers who resisted were dragged by the hair to the tent of punishment; their feet and hands were severed by hatchet; their wives and daughters assaulted. This was efficient genocide: every dishonored daughter destroyed a father; every helpless father starved his family; every dead son condemned the souls of his parents to eternal return.

ON THE SECOND
quarter of the fourteenth night, the limbless trundled into Panpur fort’s Hall of Audience. Their wails were louder than the music of flutes and gourds.
Morad Farah has set fire to our huts! Morad Farah has dishonored our women! Morad Farah has rendered me a beggar the rest of my life!

Jadav Singh stirred uneasily in a bed strewn with blossoms. He sent his musicians away.

Morad Farah has razed three temples! Morad Farah has slaughtered cattle and smeared beef blood on the lips of pious Hindus!

Hannah bound his wrists with the silken
patka
he had worn fourteen days before as a girdle. “Stay, I beg you!” she commanded. “Don’t give in to gossip!”

She had not been raised in a world of savagery, not on the scale of India. The vast inequalities, as well as the injustice and superstitions of India, seemed to her unnatural and unbearable. And yet it was here in India that she felt her own passionate nature for the first time, the first hint that a world beyond duty and patience and wifely service was possible, then desirable, then irresistible. In her former life, the possibility of intense pleasure was as remote from her as the likelihood of abject suffering. In old Salem, from her mother’s shameful example and under the Fitches’ tutelage, she’d thought capitulation to pleasure, outside of convention, was a sin. In New Salem with Gabriel she’d equated being happy with not being unhappy. She had felt no love, not as she now understood it, for Gabriel. For the first time, she pitied him for never having known her, and she even wished him happiness with his bibi. In Panpur fort’s scorpion-rife rooms and lizard-infested terraces, she’d come to understand the aggressive satiety of total fulfillment.

And she knew, for the first time, the contradictions of a passionate nature. She wanted to run down to the interior courtyard, where the wounded and the dying and breast-beating parents, wives and husbands were congregated, and throw herself into nursing them all, not eating or sleeping until their flesh and bones were mended, ashamed of her happiness, wishing herself as mutilated as they. The next moment, she could not imagine their survival, their future, nor her possible connection to any of them, and not seeing herself or her lover belonging with them, she would have scourged them from the face of the earth.

The stench of living flesh carried across the courtyard, up the turrets to the balcony. The raped wives and daughters of limbless peasants broke into the zenana, beat Bhagmati and set fire to her Hedges shrine. They wanted to die, but there were no daggers to fall upon. Protective eunuchs, wakened from their sentry duty outside the zenana apartments, blocked the doors and pushed them away.

The world was rotting; there was no honor, no protection. These people were innocents, the troops were innocents, but corruption was everywhere. Peace brought profit to everyone, but peace was a curse word on the Coromandel Coast. She had traveled the world, a witness to unimagined visions, merely to repeat her mother’s folly, and to live her mother’s life over.

IT TOOK
the apparition of Bhagmati, her face and neck scratched, nose and lips split open, to wake the drowsing Raja. “The villagers have no food,” she cried, under the lovers’ balcony. “The soldiers will mutiny.”

The loyal
subedar
, his near double, had been killed outside the gates, his body thrown to the crocodiles. The Raja sent his most persuasive minister to Higginbottham, requesting English gunners and long-range guns in exchange for rebates on indigo prices, but the Englishman, loyal tool of the Nawab, refused to meet him.

From her pink stone palace in Devgad, two days to the interior, the Queen Mother goaded her son with real or imagined perils: the Emperor had razed Devgad’s holiest of temples! The Emperor had erected a mother-of-pearl mosque on the desecrated altar of God Vishnu!
Lion
, the Queen Mother pleaded through the humble mouths of messengers,
cease your slumbering! Return to assert your power
. The messengers were trapped by spies and led in chains to the tent of punishment to have their feet and hands cut off.

A cornered rat, Jadav Singh withdrew to a windowless cell in the corner of the fort, into a foodless and waterless period of meditation.

7

BEFORE DAWN
Jadav Singh had made up his mind to beg for a truce, then slip out of besieged Panpur before the truce was signed. Devgad, fifty miles to the interior, was more defendable and more fully provisioned. From Devgad he would launch the battle of his life against World-Taker Aurangzeb. The decision made him happy, a singing, smiling, flute-playing schoolboy once again.

“
Deception precedes triumph
, says the wise one,” quoted the Raja, the wise one being Kautilya. “
Ruses are the strategies of courage
.” He swept his arm toward the distant campfires of his enemies. “He believes only in power and showing his power. A fool flexes his muscles. The wise man hides his strengths.”

She coped with the Raja’s alien concept of heroism. Appear weak before a boastful enemy; hit hard, flee fast. Men like Gabriel and the Marquis, even desk-bound power brokers like Higginbottham and Prynne, savored the flaunting and strutting more than the confrontation itself. And what, the Raja might have asked her, had become of them?

HE SHED
the intimate folds of silk gauze and lover’s cotton and allowed his attendants, for the first time in a fortnight, to dress him in the robes of state. As his situation was obviously hopeless, he sent a petition for truce in exchange for Panpur fort and fifteen chests of gold, twenty chests of silver and a cash tribute of eight lakhs—eight hundred thousand rupees—to Morad Farah, whose foot soldiers were already crawling like roaches into the tunnel they’d dug under the moat. Others had already beached their landing boats on the Panpur side of the river. The petition was welcomed by the General on behalf of Nawab Haider Beg, and the treaty signing set up for Farah’s tent the following day.

Whereupon, the Raja knew, his exit would be barred, and immense suffering would be extracted from his final hours. Haider Beg would watch every minute, then report to his liege lord every delightful turn and twist of hot irons, extractions, crushings, beggings for mercy.

“His Excellency requests the lady accompany you,” said Morad Farah.

“My intention precisely,” the Raja replied.

SHORTLY AFTER
the first quarter that moonless night, Jadav Singh bundled Hannah and Bhagmati into one palanquin, and a servant, disguised in royal jama, turban and jewels as Devgad’s Lion King, into another, and set off for distant Devgad at the head of an army of six hundred foot soldiers and three hundred horsemen. If Haider Beg had not been born to greed, the special greed of a provincial nobleman, he would not have been so easily stupefied by the promise of gold, the anticipated delight of inflicting torture. He would have recognized in the abject generosity of a surrounded, defeated adversary a subterfuge worthy of Kautilya himself.

In the valleys, the rain-moist air hung like smoke, condensing on every leaf. Every tree, every slightly cooler surface (and in such heat, even inflamed human flesh was cooler than the air), became its own small rain cloud, squeezing moisture in thick, heavy droplets to the slippery red Devgad clay. Rivers formed at the base of every forest tree, cutting their way through the rutted clay to form rushing torrents behind high grass just out of sight. Hunting parties broke off from the main band and returned minutes later with deer impaled on poles. Banana leaves, inverted, delivered the condensation like long green flagons, songbirds hopped along the paths, unable to gain altitude, and even mosquitoes, landing on her flesh for a bite of blood, found themselves skidding on her skin, unable to lift their sodden feet and drenched wings to get away. She squeezed her sari end; the water hit the ground in hissing droplets. The horses were scraped for leeches, which seemed to rise like locusts from the very grass. She thought: If the earth can melt from heat and humidity, it will today; she could brew her tea by waving a cup in the air and setting it in the sun to boil.

And as soon as she accustomed herself to the hell of a dripping, canopied rain forest, the path rose steeply through bands of cloud into the true coastal premonsoon heat, to a near-desert oven blast that made her long for the restful infirmities of the forest. The salt-stiffened sari flared off her shoulder and wouldn’t drape.

Up ahead, the Lion kept up a steady pace, racing forward with his advance scouts, galloping to the rear to make certain of no pursuit. He rode beside her a few miles, dabbing her forehead with scented water.

“What will become of people in the fort?” she asked.

“They will understand. They helped me get away.”

Guilt did not enter his makeup, only duty, and his duty was to lead, to defend, to fight.

“The General will not waste his time on them. He is a general because he kills kings, not eunuchs and women.” All of this he announced with a boyish smile. It was as Bhagmati once said: men fight because war makes them young. Even the old Emperor, fifty years on the throne through filicides and fratricides and still roaring with fire.

Then she said something that startled Jadav Singh. “I would rather die, however horribly, than see others killed.”

He began to laugh.

And then she added, “Why would one people desecrate another god, if they weren’t horribly, desperately afraid?”

She was asking on her own behalf as well as Morad Farah’s, or the Emperor’s. It was the same fear her own people had exercised, back in the forests of Brookfield.

He sped off, again to the rear where his horsemen had called him. After two more hours, with the sun beginning its flat western trajectory directly in their eyes, it was time to break for the first night. But when they arrived at the small fort that was their goal, the
subedar
welcomed him, then gave the Raja less accommodating news. The Emperor’s men, indeed, had entered Panpur fort, suspecting that the Raja had fled, and the soldiers, so restless from inactivity and the promise of glorious battle, had been issued practice rounds of bullets, cannons and burning balls of pitch. Panpur was no more, the outlying villages were burned and corpses lay facedown in the paddy fields. Cows were butchered in front of the priests, then the priests in front of the statues of Lord Vishnu, then soldiers urinated on all the statues—Lord Hanuman, and elephant-headed Ganesh—or washed them in the blood of slaughtered cattle, then they razed the temples.

The villagers who’d survived were making their way to other forts, carrying bundles of rice, pitchers of water, their calves and their children slung across their shoulders.

“Then we must not stay here,” the Raja decided. They replenished what meager stocks they could carry and set out again, by the fading sun and then the moon, along the main path to Devgad fort. If Morad Farah was the great general he claimed to be, there would be an ambush along the defile where the paths all narrowed to scale the Deccan escarpment. If he was nothing but Aurangzeb’s mercenary butcher, he would linger in the captured villages, devising devilish entertainments and waiting for morning to launch an assault wherever the Raja’s army had camped for the night.

So they would not camp. The Raja would run the risk of ambush, but trust to his enemy’s baser character. And again he was happy, having calculated his enemy, having raised, in his own mind, the odds of battle. As happy as some Company factor figuring a profit.