Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [102]
She had expected grandeur and a display of opulence. The very old man before her, still sharp featured and commanding, fairer than most Indians she had seen, with a long white beard, sat on a gilt throne in need of paint. She noted his fingers, the knuckles grotesquely large, the fingers splayed, unable to flex. The garish rings would have to be cut from his fingers.
She’d known, of course, that he was more than eighty, that he was older than America, older than the Massachusetts Bay Colony, more experienced in conquering and acquiring than anyone but the kings of Spain, France and England. All the same, from the gossip of terrorized villagers in Panpur and Devgad she’d imagined not the frail ascetic before her, but a warrior as virile as Morad Farah, a nobleman as debauched as the Nawab, a demon uglier and wilier than Ravanna. His face was lean and hard. Dignity and self-discipline and probably creeping joint disease had stiffened his spine. His qaba was cut from a coarse, cheap cloth she could not imagine Jadav Singh wearing. His only jewelry, apart from the rings, was a spinel-ruby pendant; an emerald secured an aigrette to his turban. He was as somber in manner as any Puritan of the same great age.
In this tent of informal audiences, he had allowed himself just one stark symbol of power. A mobile fit for an emperor who had seized all other empires contained in the universe, a globe of gold cupped in the cradle of a perfect golden replica of Aurangzeb’s hands, was suspended from the roof of the tent and came to rest just over the throne. Each ridge of fingernail, each wrinkle around an aged man’s knuckles, were etched with accuracy by the master goldsmith in the imperial atelier. On the sides of the gold sphere, a lion nuzzled a lamb. Embedded on the top of his gold universe, like the polestar, was a single diamond, the largest, most beautiful she had ever seen or imagined.
So he was more than a conqueror and acquisitor. He had instructed his master goldsmith to merge the metaphoric with the literal. She had come to speak logically, reasonably—politically—to a race of omniscient dreamers. How much easier it would be if she could have dehumanized him as the old Queen did, as the Raja did. To them, he was Ravanna, the demon-king of Lanka, in Muslim disguise.
He registered her presence with a kind of detached alarm, then turned to his attendant for an explanation. They spoke in Persian, obviously about the conditions of her apprehension, perhaps about her connection to the Raja, maybe even her killing of Morad Farah. The Emperor stared at her more closely with each new disclosure, then swiveled his whole body to address short questions to the attendant.
When he spoke, his voice was raspy. She felt the eunuchs reach for her again.
“His Imperial Highness will not order your execution,” the translator announced.
The Emperor spoke again.
“You will be given instructions. You will find it most convenient to be obedient.”
She began by loosening the cinch of her trousers and angya, then by tearing off her jewels, one set for every word she spoke, and flinging them at the Emperor’s feet.
“You despot! You tyrant!” she screamed. “You may have made me your prisoner, but I am not your plaything!” The look, first of rage, then of confusion, as the veiled translator conveyed her words, seemed to inflate, then compress, His Imperial Majesty. He raised a gnarled hand and recited a few words with the rhythm of verse.
Hannah’s head was whacked into a low bow and her arms jerked into the Mughal court’s ritual obeisance. She staggered and would have fallen on the carpet if a veiled attendant had not glided out of line and steadied her. When she regained her balance, she stared—with all the insolence she could summon—at the man who had discarded the only rules of fair play she knew