Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [39]
The four hundred tons would have to be off-loaded in flat-bottomed masoola boats by local laborers. This was Hannah’s first vision of what she was to call the “perfected human form,” angelic faces and straight, small-scaled, dignified bodies “as God had draughted Adam, but dipp’d in ebon-ink in place of gilt or blush.” She knew she’d been transported to the other side of the world, but the transportation was more than mere “conveyancing,” as it was for Gabriel and the others. Many years later she called the trip, and her long residence in India, her “translation.”
Of all the qualities I admire in Hannah Easton that make her entirely our contemporary in mood and sensibility, none is more touching to me than the sheer pleasure she took in the world’s variety.
The word did not yet exist (“traveler” was in common usage), but if it had, she might have used it: she was, in some original sense of the word (as a linguist is to language), a tourist. She was alert to novelty, but her voyage was mental, interior. Getting there was important, but savoring the comparison with London or Salem, and watching her life being transformed, that was the pleasure. She did not hold India up to inspection by the lamp of England, or of Christianity, nor did she aspire to return to England upon the completion of Gabriel’s tour.
If she judged the world from a single, unassailable place, it might have been from a forest in Brookfield, before the expulsion from that New World Eden. Hannah was still alert to the power of the jungle. She did not fear the unknown or the unexplored. Her character was shaped on romps with Rebecca in the woods around Brookfield. And she needed time to sort out her errands—oh, so many errands!—in this vast new jungle.
3
ONCE UPON a time—in 1639, to be precise—today’s chapati-flat metropolis, Madras, was a hazardous stretch of beach with a straggly settlement of fishermen’s huts. If an East India Company agent named Francis Day had not been in love with an Indo-Portuguese woman living in San Thomé, the Portuguese fort town three miles south, the Company might have situated its factory on a more sheltered dimple farther up the coastline.
Fort St. George, Fort St. Sebastian, Fort St. Joseph, Fort St. Luke: they are monuments to stern-souled, gouty-toed and chilblained Englishmen’s sudden submission to the flame-tipped arrows of a dark-skinned Eros. Love dictates the pattern of streets and walls; its aftermath invites demographic upheaval. White Town, where the factors had their dwellings and the Company had erected its headquarters and church, was a town laid out on the confusing Latin plan, or, worse, followed imperatives known only to a Catholic or Hindu heart.
Like the story of Fort St. George’s origin, that of Fort St. Sebastian is apocryphal. In 1684, Clarence Clitherow, a dignified gentleman from Liverpool, while working as a factor in Fort St. George, was discovered to have defrauded a powerful local merchant on a private sale of diamonds. This practice—having been abused by earlier factors and governors, like my relative Streynsham Master, had brought the Company loss of profit as well as embarrassment—was prohibited by the Directors in London. The dignified gentleman, thinking it best to flee corporate reprimand and corporal retribution as swiftly and secretively as possible, disguised himself in clothes borrowed from a Chulia Muslim boatman and sailed two miles southward to the boatman’s home. There he stayed while he appealed for reconsideration of his case by the Council.
The Council, prizing knaves above fools and Englishmen over Muslims and Hindus, concluded that the blame was entirely with the plaintiff. The Fort St. George