Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [108]
“Would you like to find the Emperor’s Tear?” he asked.
It’s necessary that I undergo the search; the program is interactive, and when Venn tried it, all he got was a postcard view of modern Madras. The program will give you what you most care about; your mind is searching through the program though you don’t realize it—it is interacting with my thousand-answer questionnaire—until it finds a place it wants to jump in.
While he did his adjusting, I took down Hannah’s—Pearl’s—picture from the wall. The blond woman in a sari, the garish Mughal jewels, the diamond fused into the cupped hands of a proud potentate, the destruction, the fiery sky, the wounded, dying Jadav Singh. Venn slipped the helmet, the goggles, the special gloves on me.
“HANNAH!” I scream against the cannons and flying bullets. I can barely breathe from the sulfur clouds, my eyes burn, and I reach out to hold her, my hand closes on her shoulder and she turns, my hand is brown, with a tinkling gold bangle. She is a beautiful woman, more Pre-Raphaelite than I had imagined, with crinkly golden hair. I try to pull her my way, but she shakes her head, “No, no, Hester—don’t you see?” and now I do, though clouds of smoke are rolling in and the light is still faint, and a fine, misty rain is falling. What I see is the old man standing with his back to the battle, facing the inner courtyard where the small figure of the bent warrior is slumped, his face bloody, and the old man is holding the diamond aloft, turning its facets to capture the light of a hundred fires.
He turns—I know that face from a hundred portraits of Aurangzeb, or ‘Alamgir, the World-Holder’—a look of demented satisfaction on his face. Victory is his, vengeance and retribution and an open road to unlimited plunder and mass conversion, and suddenly his mouth opens wide, he tries to scream but the battle sounds are too loud, his attendants are all focused on the wave of Devgad warriors shooting at the fort from kneeling positions in the plowed-up field.
Now we are running along the parapet; I squeeze past the rows of sharpshooters, bumping them, they curse me as I pass, and suddenly I feel her warm hand and hear her command, “Hester, take it,” and a heavy warm glasslike object is in my hand, and we are flying down the deep stone stairs set so far apart that descent is a kind of leaping into a darkened void, each landing jars my knees and my ankles, but I am fast and strong, I have never run like this, breathless now, pulling Hannah behind me, and we are out into the field in the middle of a firefight, fair game for either side.
I scream with agony from the hot white flaming explosion in my shoulder that has spun me around and dropped me to the cool, wet soil. Hannah is on her knees, crying, Hester, Hester, Bhagmati, pray, pray, we must get back.… I try to hold the diamond out, but it is slippery with my blood.
“Mukta!” I scream, the pain blacking me out, and now a second bullet fired down on me from the parapet rakes my leg, puncturing the fleshy portion of my calf, and I think almost with satisfaction, Well, that settles it, no more running for me.
“Go, I command you,” but I can’t raise my head, and my voice is like a metal file rasping through my shoulder, astonishing pain, my words are pain, my breathing is pain, but I am like a dreamer aware of her dream even as she can’t escape it. I feel in the folds of my sari for the knife I know I have, and it is there for me.
Hannah, my Pearl, is no longer visible. Light is spreading but it is not the light of dawn; it is the light of extinguishment.… I plunge the knife deep in my belly, watch with satisfaction, and now with the mastery of my pain, the blood bubble from my beautiful brown flesh. More, I think, and plunge the knife deeper, plunge it as Hannah had into the back of Morad Farah, and make a burrow inside me. I feel the organs, feel the flesh, the bowels of history, and with my dying breath I plunge the