Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [11]
Has any child been so burdened? She has witnessed the Fall, not Adam’s Fall, Rebecca’s Fall. Her mother’s Fall, infinitely more sinful than the Fall of a man. She is the witness not merely of the occasion of sin, but of the birth of sin itself.
And I who have studied Hannah’s life nearly as closely as I have studied my own would say that Hannah Easton, whatever the name she carried in Massachusetts, in England, in India or even into history to this very day, loved her mother more profoundly than any daughter has ever loved a mother.
I feel for Hannah as the Nipmuc woman carries her off and drops her noiselessly on a pioneer family’s doorstep, deflecting forever the natural course and location of her girlhood. And I envy Rebecca as she, impulsively, carelessly, leaps behind her lover, who is already on his horse, and vanishes into the wilderness. She has escaped her prison, against prevailing odds that would have branded her. Her lover might have come to the window that night to kill them both. Instead, he became the first man to read the scene between them as something sacred; in the fish-oil glow, to hear the music.
4
LIKE REBECCA, I have a lover. One who would seem alien to my family. A lover scornful of our habits of self-effacement and reasonableness, of our naive or desperate clinging to an imagined continuity. Venn was born in India and came over as a baby. His family are all successful; there was never question of anything different. He grew up in a world so secure I can’t imagine it, where for us security is another kind of trap, something to be discarded as dramatically as Rebecca stepped put of dog-blooded widow’s weeds into a life of sin and servitude.
Long ago, there was Andrew, self-described untouchable from a Boston Brahmin family who’d leased a summer home next to ours on Martha’s Vineyard. He took me behind the sea-grape arbor, or perhaps I led him there from curiosity and boredom (he was my first), and later that day dolphins threw themselves on the beach and a crowd gathered to watch their threshing and not ours. I remember thinking, stretched nude on a dune above a squad of lifeguards and helicopter cameramen, I hope dolphins won’t always be sacrificed to a fifteen-year-old’s virginity.
Then came Blake, whose refrain to professors in my freshman year was always: “Can someone tell me why I should be learning stuff that’s already in a book?” It was a revelation to me that mutants had been born in my decade and raised in my country with such a pure belief in the perfectibility of knowledge retrieval. Instead of memorizing the stuff, we should be inputting it. We paid huge sums to world-famous experts who sat in their offices and read all day—and in a lifetime they probably covered 5 percent of the written record in their field. The goal of every freshman should be to replicate the data base of the most learned professors in the world. Then they could start using it in their sophomore year.
Chase, a brief flirtation from a summer archaeology dig in Harvard Yard, with a knack for finding fragments: pottery, spectacle cases, clay pipes, bent spoons, Spanish coins. The secret, he said, was an ability not to separate the valuable artifacts from the centuries of landfill—anyone could do that, he said—but to merge them, to see continuities between sand and gravel and copper coins or fired-clay powder. He’s the first of my friends to win a genius grant.
Devon, who got me through the first lonely months in London by taking me everywhere by bus and tube and walking, pointing out buildings, revealing