Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [101]
She remembered Tringham’s nose, and the Raja’s reaction to the poor boy’s astonishment. Even the little people think they are gods. Only a person who thought she was God Almighty could have struck out through the jungles of India at night, heading back into Roopconda and the battle tent of the Great Mughal.
That night Hannah dressed herself with care in the dusty regal garments abandoned by the Deccani child-widow when she had been driven out of her prison-palace by the old Queen. Bhagmati tried to dissuade her with stories balladeers told all over Hindustan of the Emperor as father-killer, brother-killer, son-disinheritor, brutal converter of infidels and dedicated desecrator of temples and churches. And when she failed to dissuade, Bhagmati, reluctant guide and stout protector of the foolhardy foreigner, heaved aside the decorative panel in a wall that hid the opening to the secret passage out of the fortified hillock.
For a day and a night the two missionaries followed the debris of war lust through banana groves filled with frightened monkeys and ruined temples crawling with rats, over streams white with the bellies of floating fish and across villages of looted granaries and torched huts, until, on the morning of the second day, they came to the northern periphery of Jadav Singh’s kingdom, and there found Emperor Aurangzeb’s slaves leveling the lush and swampy plain into the foundations of a new fort, mosque and palace. And out as far as the eye could see, the forest was burning faster than woodsmen could cut or elephants could haul. With typical efficiency, the Emperor was building another city, perhaps to celebrate his victory over Devgad. Thousands of men and women carrying bowls of excavated mud trailed into the infinity of forest and grasses, miles away. All of the Coromandel factories, Devgad and Panpur palaces and their outlying fields and villages could be dropped inside this clearing. Only the elephants were of the proper scale; men looked too puny, their efforts almost laughable. Only the elephants looked capable of building the vision.
For years afterward Hannah mesmerized children with her stories of the Emperor’s field guns, swivel guns, brass guns in gaudy horse-drawn carriages; of siege trains and carts loaded with cannonballs weighing up to one hundred and twelve pounds and with gunpowder packed to stay dry in dewy or monsoon weather; of matchlocks together with their forked rest-pieces of heavy wood carried on the backs of anxious men with singed eyelashes and beards; of spears to hurl with great precision from afar, and of maces and sabers for fighting the enemy hand to hand when victory was near. In Hannah’s stories, the Imperial Army was made up of the curious or the conquered from all four corners of the universe and from Hindustan’s every kingdom and suba: Sunnis and Shias, Hindu Rajputs and Christians, Jews and Armenians, Turks, Moors, Afghans and Uzbeks, Chinese, Burmese, fuse and form for the pious Aurangzeb, what he described to Hannah as “the battering ram of Allah.”
HANNAH CAME to negotiate and was instead taken hostage by the Emperor. His spies had alerted him the moment she and Bhagmati had entered the secret passage in the child-queen’s palace in Devgad.
She flounced into the war camp with Bhagmati, demanding and expecting to get an audience with the Emperor at once so that she could free the two warrior-kings from their self-destructive obsession. Instead, the camp commander seized and bound her and hauled her off to the huge tent that housed the haram. There a Tatar slave woman with thick, tattooed arms stripped and scrutinized her for concealed weapons, then handed her over to two Kashmiri slave women who scrubbed and depilated her, hennaed her hair and palms, rubbed rose oil between her breasts and reddened her lips with carmine. The Kashmiri slaves handed her over to three Rajput women who fastened a tight angya as a bodice around her breasts, slipped a pishwaz over her head that hung like a knee-length dress of the sheerest muslin, squeezed her legs into brocaded izar