Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [4]
The curator returns to an empty darkened room where he can watch me, while lifting the covers off two large, wooden crates. The tea-chest wood is nearly antique in itself, except for the crude, Magic Markered notation: “Salem Bibi’s Stuffs.” The Salem Bibi—meaning “the white wife from Salem”—Precious-as-Pearl! I have come to this obscure, user-hostile museum to track her down.
The opened crates overflow with clothing, none of it from the Bibi’s time. It’s like a Goodwill pickup. Satterfield paws through the upper layers, lets them spill around the crates, unsorted, still in tangles. Only the moths will know this history.
More layers; the crates are like archaeology pits. I want to stop and examine, but the decades are peeling by too quickly. Not all that survives has value or meaning; believing that it does screens out real value, real meaning. Now we’re getting down to better “stuffs,” fragments of cotton carpets and silk hangings, brocade sashes and exotic leggings.
I think we’re about to hit pay dirt. An old rug. Satterfield looks up. “Closing time,” he says. Museum hours: Closed weekends, Monday and Friday and Wednesday afternoon. Open Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning.
“I’ve come a long way to see this,” I say. “Won’t you let me stay?”
My eyes are more often called steely or forthright than pleading, but to Satterfield they convey, this day at least, the proper respect and sincerity. I get down on my knees, and help lift.
“Wherever did you get this?”
“A donation,” he says. “People in these parts, they have a lot of heirlooms. A lot of seafaring families, grandfathers’ chests and things.”
“You mean someone had all this in his attic?”
“Friends of the museum.”
“Looks Indian,” I say. “Indian-Indian, not wah-wah Indian.” I hate to play stupid for anyone, but I don’t want him to suspect me. Traces of the Salem Bibi pop up from time to time in inaccessible and improbable little museums just like this one. They get auctioned and sold to anonymous buyers. I believe I know her identity, and the anonymous donor.
Mr. Satterfield settles on one knee and lifts out the frayed wool rug with a hunting motif—old, very old—and carefully unfolds it. Inside, there is a stack of small paintings; he lifts one, then two, and finally five crudely framed miniatures from the folds of the carpet. Then he smooths the carpet out.
“Pretty good shape for the age it’s in.”
I get down on my knees, smoothing the carpet in the manner of a guest who, with indifference but a show of interest, might pat a host’s expansive hunting dog. “Well, aren’t those very interesting paintings,” I say. “Don’t you think?” My voice has caught a high note; I want to cough or clear my throat, but it would seem almost disrespectful.
“We don’t keep pictures here. This is a museum of maritime trade.”
There is surely one moment in every life when hope surprises us like grace, and when love, or at least its promise, landscapes the jungle into Eden. The paintings, five in all, are small, the largest the size of a man’s face, the smallest no larger than a fist. They make me, who grew up in an atomized decade, feel connected to still-to-be-detected galaxies.
The corners are browned by seawater or monsoon stains. White ants have eaten through the courtiers’ sycophantic faces and lovers’ tangled legs, through muezzin-sounding minarets and lotus blooms clutched by eager visitors from pale-skinned continents oceans away. But the Mughal painters still startle with the brightness of their colors and the forcefulness of their feelings. Their world is confident, its paints are jewels, it too displays all it knows.
Here, the Salem Bibi, a yellow-haired woman in diaphanous skirt and veil, posed on a stone parapet instructing