Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [100]
What remains of the palace complex sits on a two-hundred-foot-high hillock. Deccani Hill Fort, Devgad, says the guidebook. Vandals and colonials have gouged the jewels from mosaic work; Victorian Englishmen whitewashed the murals, then plastered them over. Squatters have taken over this fort, and Aurangzeb’s forts as well.
The hillock’s sides are revetted with stones and bricks so that the fort appears massive, impregnable. In Hannah’s days the palace buildings were plastered a spectacular white and decorated with tiles the color of emeralds, sapphires and topaz. On the walls of Jadav Singh’s palace, tile lions prowled chartreuse forests, peacocks danced in amethyst rain, crocodiles bobbed in lapis lakes. Secret passages connected Hannah’s palace to the Queen Mother’s, to the Vishnu Temple, to a subterranean hideout lined with treasure chests. Even the courtyard where palace servants slept was longer and wider than the houses of Salem aristocrats.
The local equivalents of Mr. Abraham gather around me, offering their expert services. In their retelling, the great Raja Jadav Singh of Devgad was Peter the Great of India, the most advanced, most sensitive, most intelligent leader of his time. The Gandhi-Nehru-Reagan (they’ve spotted me for an American) of the seventeenth century.
“Please,” I say. Some concepts don’t translate.
“And one more informations, madam,” one man confides. “His rani was an American woman! A Salem witch—true! She had magical powers, killed whole armies, operated on everyone, transplanted body parts before Christiaan Barnard. True, true!”
“What happened to this Salem witch?” I ask.
“She went over to the Great Mughal,” one answers. A second, more scholarly: “The Great Mughal installed her in his harem. She was called Farah the Fair and is buried in Aurangabad.” Another shouts, “Rubbish! She was a spy! Mata Hari before Mata Hari. She killed the Hindu god!”
“Then all the books are wrong?” I ask. Most books take a racy interest in a white divorcée, more rumor than fact, who consorted with a Hindu noble. They call her an adventuress of obscure origins, a pirate’s wife who comes off less well than the socially prominent Sarah Bradley, widow of the hanged pirate William Kidd. Tales from the Coromandel, it’s called, and I’ve done some borrowing from it here. Higginbottham’s Guy Fawkes debacle, for example. The impaling of Two-Headed Ravanna, the Denosing of Thomas Tringham. A book of casual cruelties.
“She was after the diamond only.” This gets my interest.
“What diamond?”
“Most perfect diamond ever.”
“Bigger than Koh-i-Noor.”
Casually, I ask: “And what do you think happened to this so-called perfect diamond?”
A loud chorus breaks out—England, America, Japan, Paris. This is a convention that Bugs Kilken has not yet polled.
“I think,” says the articulate young man I’ve already picked as a guide, “that the Salem Bibi came to Devgad to steal the Emperor’s Tear. The war was fought over a diamond and the demands of an American lady.”
10
VENN SAYS, I know what you want me to do: time-travel. Not just to October 29, 1989, but back three hundred years. He and Jay Basu and all the other strategists at MIT are looking for an information formula, an Einsteinian theory that will organize facts, the billions of facts that swarm around us like microbes, like pond scum, into some sort of pattern. He wants facts to grow like a crystal garden, he wants to create a supersaturated medium, a data plasma, in which just a sprinkling of data cues on top will precipitate a forest down below.
Yes, I say, that’ll do.
What’s in it for me? he asks.
How about the most perfect diamond in the world?
THE NIGHT that Hannah was consigned to the zenana, the women’s rooms, as a wife but no more than a wife, she had a vision. The life inside her compelled it; she would offer her life, if necessary, to end the war. Only a person outside the pale of the two civilizations could do it. Only a woman, a pregnant woman, a pregnant white woman, had the confidence or audacity to