Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [40]
What we’re seeing is progressive derangement. God-fearing, land-starved, profit-seeking Welsh and English and Scottish and Irish second sons, jilted by primogeniture, sexually repressed, passion denying, furtively engaging the favors of native women, girls and boys, all unfolding in the midst of septic heat, rain, disease, squalor and savage beasts, while being waited on, cooked for, fanned, massaged by servants a thousand times more loyal, submissive and poorly paid than any in the world, in the middle of the biggest real estate boom, jewel auction and drug emporium of the past five hundred years. No wonder they went a little crazy.
Eleven years later, when Hannah and Gabriel arrived, Fort St. Sebastian had drawn, as a magnet might, satellite villages of weavers, dyers, washermen, artisans necessary for the Company station to carry on its export of textiles to England and its import of woolens, tin, bullion and brimstone. The new Nawab, liege of Aurangzeb, was the son of old Hasan Beg, known as Haider Beg.
THAT HANNAH was not as malleable as an English factor’s wife had to be and that the curbing of her spirit would require diligence and planning must have been clear to Cephus Prynne from the moment she, ignoring his steadying hand, stepped out of the boat that had ferried her—together with her husband, two junior clerks (known in colonial parlance as writers), sea chests, cases of liquor, and livestock—from the Fortune across the roadstead to the sandy strip that passed for a beach. An East Indiaman of the Fortune’s tonnage was obliged to anchor in the open roadstead. For the Company, the hauling of cargo to and from anchored ships was a burdensome expense. But for Cephus Prynne, the Chief Factor, the scary trip in a fast, open kuttamaram, a simple local canoe with logs tied at a distance to each side, over choppy waves and around sandbars, was nature’s test to see which spongy-souled novice would die or go crazy within weeks.
Cephus Prynne must have seemed to Hannah a man of disquieting miscegenation. Of their first meeting she recorded:
This morneing wee went on shoare, Mr. Prynne, Chief Factor, receiving us with civillity but without Kindnesse. “Praised be God, you did not over shoot the Port,” Mr. Prynne opined, “but this is the most incommodious place you will ever see.” He spared a hand to assist me off the country boate, which hand I shunned. Also present were Mr. Higginbottham, second factor, and Mr. Ruxton, Chyrurgeon. Reverend Colbourn, Chaplaine, sent his excuse, severall Soldyers being sick of feaver.
Venn leans into my shoulder to read Hannah’s entry for himself. I smell cloves on his breath. He chews whole cloves and cardamoms the way we chew gum. “This is the most incommodious place you will ever see.…” He snickers. He assumes the haughty gait of a British East India Company chief factor and offers me a scornful hand. Like Hannah, instinctively, I back away.
The Chief Factor was probably no more than thirty when he entered Hannah’s life on that January morning of 1695, but we know from Hannah’s responses that his body was so emaciated and his features so stern that he had the look of a man possessed with the vanity of self-privation. His clothes were from London, Hannah observed, but carelessly preserved