Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [38]
(The chaos became exponential—a kind of late-stage capitalism such as America saw in the 1890s, or the 1920s, or, I hesitate to suggest, the late 1980s—until finally all parties had to sue for a kind of peace, new ground rules so as not to exhaust the golden goose. In 1698, William Pitt—known as Diamond Pitt, the grandfather of the great parliamentarian—by force of his personality and his experience as both an interloper in India and a member of Parliament in London, was able to reunify all factions in Fort St. George. The rival East India trading corporations were not merged until the Instrument of Unification was passed in 1701.)
So in the Legges’ day, the Coromandel was like Manhattan in the mid-eighties, like Bugs Kilken’s Bel Air. Every interloper set himself up as an independent factor and became the equivalent of a real estate agent, stockbroker, art dealer, corporate lawyer and investment banker. The value of every commodity was suddenly reassessed with an eye to its resale potential, a meter was put on everyone’s time, and all the factors and interlopers were down in the pit shouting up, “Buy! Buy! Buy!”
The chain of multinational factories stretched up and down the Coromandel like condos on the Florida coast. And the wealth they generated! Even with the Europeans’ enfeebled head for business, as the nawabs charged (so enamored were the liquor-swilling firangi with legalisms and bookkeeping, being apparently incapable of keeping accounts in their heads or of acting decisively in obvious self-interest), they could hardly go wrong. Everyone grew rich—the shareholders back in London, the sharp-trading, black-marketing factors, the various local nawabs and, finally, the Great Mughal himself, old Emperor Aurangzeb in his Deccan war tents.
I think of those years as being like the last frenzied decade in the Hong Kong money pits; I think of the factors as the buccaneers of their day, the arbitrageurs, leveragers, junk-bonders. The New World was for losers, laborers and farmers who would never prosper and might lose their scalps in the bargain. England was dead, finished, washed up, effete and retentive. Ah, but India! The India trade. An immediate profit of twenty to one, England to India, and a hundred to one, a thousand to one, on the way back. And all the women, all the luxury and adventure, all the hunting, killing, debauchery a man could dream about.
Money: hand-over-fist money, sweat-of-brow money, burnout money, finger-to-the-bone money, under-the-table money, black money, dirty money, filthy lucre, money-changing-in-the-temple, thirty-pieces-of-silver money, blasphemous, usurious, treacherous money; profits, taxes, bribes, licenses, fees, levies, octrois, tariffs; middlemen, policemen, watchmen; painters, carpenters, dyers, writers, weavers; doctors, teachers, preachers, judges, accountants, barristers; wives, widows, cooks, servants, slaves, prostitutes, concubines; lewd men, austere men, gamblers, hoarders; Catholics, Roundheads, conformists, Baptists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, Armenians; black men, brown men, yellow men, white; reformers, saviors, visionaries, criminals: all in pursuit of money, money, money.
WHAT MIGHT they have seen, that misty January morning three hundred years ago? With no cyclones, although the season was less than a month past, the high surf would have been crashing against the sandbars far out to sea. When Hannah first sighted Fort St. Sebastian from the Fortune’s poop, what she saw was an exposed roadstead, a long sand reef, a surf-whipped beach, and dunes no bigger than the humps on camels. She thought herself, after two years in Stepney, a city woman and, thanks to Salem, a townswoman as well.
What must Hannah, a child totally of the North Atlantic, have thought? She had been eight months aboard a medium-sized cargo ship, around the Cape, dodging pirates, weathering storms, eating