Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [106]
He was still laughing as she was led away.
THEY WERE STILL the Emperor’s guests, or his special hostages; the officers who passed their tent on the way to the tents of the haram women were told not only to stay away, but to keep their voices down and their language respectable. But they knew their survival was provisional. They knew that even the exaggerated respect was a possible future bargaining point, raising their desirableness. After the coming battle, which could only end in total defeat for the Raja, the Emperor would be generous with his rewards, harsh with his judgments. In the lust of executions that would follow, who would speak for two women from the Raja’s own fort, for the prostitute carrying his child, and her faithful servant?
She knew precisely the route the Raja would take; he would leave at night, march through the day, and be ready to strike in the final quarter of the night. He was out there now in the moonless night, camped in the forest beyond the ring of the Emperor’s clearing.
She left the sweltering tent, just to fix the bright stars in her head. She had failed in her mission; this was the final night of the life she had known. She prayed for the first time in years, for the strength of survival.
The night was crammed with noises, the snuffling of horses, the lowing of cattle, the distant trumpeting of elephants, coughs, songs, drums and laughter from the haram tents. Every creature in the world was taking its pleasure tonight.
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
JOHN KEATS
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
PART FOUR
1
IT HAS TAKEN ME a year and a half to assemble these notes, to make my travels, take my pictures, attend the auctions. Yes, I bought The Apocalypse, or The Unravish’d Bride, that terrible tableau of Jadav Singh’s suicidal attack on the fort of Aurangzeb, at a small auction of “colonial memorabilia” in Bangkok. With its steep forty-thousand-dollar estimated price, it practically shouted Bugs’s name. Venn bought it for me at half the price, an act of South Indian patriotism, he said, and Bugs never guessed a thing.
I’ve always seen it as a painting about a woman misplaced in time. The man who’d titled it for the museum appreciated its carnage.
Historians take note: the Devgad battle was Aurangzeb’s last great victory. The flea on the Coromandel Coast, the English concession, proved to be carrying a kind of plague. He died of a thousand small wounds, an emptied treasury from fighting Sikhs on the northwest, Marathas on the east, the freebooters and sharp traders of the various European chartered companies on the southern coasts, and his own infirmities. He died at eighty-nine, seven years after finding and losing the Pearl-of-His-Crown, having alienated all competent heirs. He carried the soul of the Mughal Empire with him to his grave; what lingered was the vacuum that invited the British in.
One year in the life of Venn Iyer and his colleague Jay Basu and X-2989—given their hours, their brilliance, their funding, the speed of computers—is of course vastly more impressive than a single book. Three months ago, as a paid subject, I put on the designer headgear and the electronic gloves and walked in virtual reality for ten seconds on a Boston street, sat in a classroom at UCLA, and spent ten seconds with a Century 21 agent in Kansas City. I don’t mean I watched them—I was with them; they responded to me. Those crowds on the Boston street parted to let me pass. I reached out and touched a faucet, touched the sleeve of a student beside me, and felt them both. When I walked up the stairs, I got winded. Venn says I talked and the various monitoring devices showed I was physically reacting to virtual space, not to the lab.
And frankly, I was disappointed; X-2989 is one of the discoveries more exciting in principle than in application. Of course I couldn’t say it, and I had long ago understood the baseline importance of pure tedium. The theory worked. The technology is as cumbersome as those room-sized mainframe card-sorting