Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [109]
VENN SAYS he was about to pull me out of it, the screaming, running, writhing, my tears, my adrenaline and heart rate and endorphins all indicated a near-death experience; even the plunge in my blood pressure and pulse was consistent with mortal trauma. He understood me—apparently I was shouting partially in his language, which, of course, I don’t know.
My shoulder still throbbed, and it continues to ache at night, and sometimes I feel in my gut that I really am incubating an enormous diamond.
“I know where the diamond is,” I said, for suddenly the name Hester Hedges in the graveyard of Fort St. Sebastian makes perfectly good sense. She was given a Christian burial, maybe out of respect to the wishes of Henry Hedges, in which case only Hannah would have known, or could have arranged it. Or Hannah had named her a Christian, to be buried and not cremated, in order to preserve her body as a carrying case. The litter bearers would have gathered the dead Hindus off the field the next day and burned them in a mass funeral pyre. Jadav Singh was borne back to Devgad for the proper public grieving and ceremony, and the new Mughal administrator moved into the palace, cleansed it of what he called idolatry, and ruled it in the name of the Great Badshah for about thirty years, when it fell into British hands.
If Hannah had carried the gem back to the coast, and then to America, it would have turned up by now. It’s not here; it’s in India. I think the world’s most perfect diamond lies in the remains of Bhagmati, “Hester Hedges,” just under the feet of Mr. Abraham, under the hooves of goats and cows.
AS THE FOCUS NARROWS, the facts grow surer. We have the shipping and housing records, we have the letters and journals and the Memoirs, and of course we have The Scarlet Letter. Who can blame Nathaniel Hawthorne for shying away from the real story of the brave Salem mother and her illegitimate daughter? But they lived in Salem until 1720, when Rebecca Easton died: Rebecca and her five half-Nipmuc children; her daughter Hannah Easton, now called Pearl, and the proof of her “Indian” lover, the quick, black-haired and black-eyed girl called Pearl Singh. Hannah/Pearl stayed on in Salem until her death in 1750 at the age of eighty. Pearl Singh, born in 1701 somewhere in the South Atlantic on the long voyage home, saw in her old age the birth of this country, an event she had spent a lifetime advocating, and suffering for.
Hannah/Pearl returned to Salem with the infant and immediately began the search for her mother. She found her in a workhouse for the mad and indigent in Providence Plantations, speaking some tribal gibberish and insisting on wearing her outmoded woolens with the shameful I boldly sewn in red to her sleeve. It meant “Indian lover,” though there was no sign, apart from the progeny, of the Indian’s existence. She claimed he’d been killed raiding chicken coops to feed his children. And her daughter had a badge as well, her black-eyed, black-haired, lively daughter, named Pearl Singh. The town gossips named them White Pearl and Black Pearl.
Salem children were warned about the small house jammed with brass and copper items, called by many the House of Enchantment, meaning the place of ultimate debauchery. They were warned of ingesting the attitudes of such a house, along with the strong food and drink, where all the inhabitants, particularly the younger generation, carried the double taint of voluptuaries’ blood, where seditious sentiments were openly aired. “We are Americans to freedom born!” White Pearl and Black Pearl were heard to mutter, the latter even in school.
Respectable people expressing such attitudes would have gone immediately to jail. But the women had for so long indulged a liberty of eccentric dissent that their certification of certain extreme positions was considered advantageous to the maintenance of social order.
White Pearl eked out a living as a nurse, veterinarian, even, on rare occasion, doctor. Responsible citizens avoided her services, but she did enjoy a clientele