• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 982 0

and descriptions of all the ships and cargo that sailed into and out of the Bay of Bengal. A loyal man, Mir Ali, without him, Haider Beg would have bankrupted himself a hundred times over. A fifty-yard-long ancient wall of wafer-thin bricks that look, at a distance, like a sheaf of ill-stacked ledger papers once defined the boundary of White Town. Along this wall Hannah Legge would stroll, looking down to the sea and toward forbidden India. And here, still close to the wall, but now crushed for a roadbed, are heaps of white stones from houses that made up the White Town of Fort St. Sebastian. I take up a piece of crushed stone and drop it in my tote bag; it could have been from a wall of Gabriel and Hannah Legge’s house. A church and a cemetery overcrowded with sinking headstones still stand, and near the cemetery, a stubby rain-blackened victory tower. Where Mr. Abraham sees collapse, or perhaps even the groundwork for a development scheme, I see the spiderweb of permanence.

A satellite town has grown around, and on, the remains of old Fort St. Sebastian. Settlements here have a parasitic, not homicidal, relationship with nature. Inside the crumbled perimeter of the customhouse, shopkeepers have set up tin-roofed stalls. The whitewashed annex of the municipal school building has usurped a corner of the graveyard. Schoolchildren in sweaty uniforms eat tiffin in the serrated shade of the broken wall. Monkeys leap down from shade trees to snatch food out of their hands. At the foot of the victory tower, a vendor hawks peanuts in newspaper cones.

Whose victory? What led to battle?

But Mr. Abraham forecloses on questions. “These people used to build them all the time only.”

These people?

Meaning Muslims and Hindus. Meaning heathens. Mr. Abraham, Christian child of a different intrusion, draws me with a new alacrity toward the cemetery crammed with sunken tombstones. The few stone nubbins still standing are worn clean of inscriptions: each marker carries a typed notice behind a plastic shield. The leaning and fallen stones remind me of conventioneers with name tags clustered by the cash bar. No fence encloses the three-hundred-year-old cemetery. Bony cows graze on untended greenery; pariah dogs doze on sun-warmed headstones.

ISAAC SUCKLING

Death discover’d him

Ere he discover’d Life.

MARY BROWNE

Belov’d wyffe of Col. Josiah Browne

But for whom Vain would be my Toyle

Under this Skye.

On some stones only the name survives. Clarence Clitherow. Hester Hedges. Henry Hedges. Richard Littleton. Samuel Higginbottham. John Ruxton. James Ord. Count Attila Csycsyry. Michel Joachim Bourguien. François La Touche. Klaus Engelhardt. Antonio de Melho. Francisco da Silva. Ludovico Antonio Apiani. João Muliner. Isabela de Taides. Niccolo Manucci. Hans Van den Brinck. Catchick Sookian. Slaughter Harris.

One headstone bears no name, only a three-masted pirate vessel and the legend: “Gone off on the account.”

Three hundred years ago, Europe converged in a cove on the Bay of Bengal. Today, one person in seven—from Sumatra up to Bangladesh, then back down the Indian coast to Sri Lanka—lives in countries bordering the Bay of Bengal.

IT IS a curiosity that Europeans, who’d built the most brilliantly situated cities in the world, should have founded their Indian outposts like Calcutta, Madras and Bombay in the most inhospitable, inconvenient and uninhabitable reaches of swamp and disease on the subcontinent. It is almost as though the Portuguese, French and British, in the same spirit that motivates sweltering vacationers to strip off their clothes and plunge into a surf or mountain lake even before unpacking their bags—or, to extend the metaphor, the heedless sensual expectancy that causes fit young men to dive into an empty pool—decided to dump their cargo at the first available landfall no matter what the draw of its harbor, its hygiene, heat and drainage.

Arriving ships would lose as much cargo in that half-mile water portage across the roadstead as they had in the previous six months and fifteen thousand miles at sea. A graveyard