Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [0]
Ideas swim like glittering fishes in The Holder of the World.… Mukherjee has stocked her new novel with interesting notions about East and West, imperialism, the constricted natures and larger possibilities of women and men, and the contrasting kinds of virtual reality achieved by computers and the written word.… She is as visionary as ever.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Bharati Mukherjee constantly reminds us of the interconnections among cultures that have made our modern world.… [She] draws us with vigor and scrupulous attention to detail across time and space, into the footsteps of not one but two extraordinary women.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“So beautifully does Ms. Mukherjee write … [her] prose combines with the multilayered narrative to produce an effect reminiscent of those jewel-toned miniature paintings created by Mogul artists to commemorate Hannah’s life: small, exquisite canvases teeming with people and festivities and disasters, canvases that meld together history and folklore into a harmonious work of art.”
—The New York Times
“Mukherjee writes with elegant lucidity … and she spins a rousing narrative of greed, lust, battles and betrayals.”
—Publishers Weekly
A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1993 by Bharati Mukherjee
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Fawcett Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-94255
eISBN: 978-0-307-79228-0
v3.1
To Anne Middleton,
and all travelers to uttermost shores
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Four
Chapter 1
About the Author
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time …
JOHN KEATS
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
PART ONE
1
I LIVE in three time zones simultaneously, and I don’t mean Eastern, Central and Pacific. I mean the past, the present and the future.
The television news is on, Venn’s at his lab, and I’m reading Auctions & Acquisitions, one of the trade mags in my field. People and their property often get separated. Or people want to keep their assets hidden. Nothing is ever lost, but continents and centuries sometimes get in the way. Uniting people and possessions; it’s like matching orphaned socks, through time.
According to A & A, a small museum between Salem and Marblehead has acquired a large gem. It isn’t the gem that interests me. It’s the inscription and the provenance. Anything having to do with Mughal India gets my attention. Anything about the Salem Bibi, Precious-as-Pearl, feeds me.
Eventually, Venn says, he’ll be able to write a program to help me, but the technology is still a little crude. We’ve been together nearly three years, which shrinks to about three weeks if you deduct his lab time. He animates information. He’s out there beyond virtual reality, re-creating the universe, one nanosecond, one minute at a time. He comes from India.
Right now, somewhere off Kendall Square in an old MIT office building, he’s establishing a grid, a data base. The program is called X-2989, which translates to October 29, 1989, the day his team decided, arbitrarily, to research. By “research” they mean the mass ingestion of all the world’s newspapers,