Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [41]
She moved to where Tamil boatmen and peons were piling up unloaded cargo. The beach was strewn with chests, bales, bleating and neighing animals. Bullion was being inspected by sharp-eyed customs officials in the service of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Casks of wine were being seized as bribes or gifts of homage. The Company’s factors and cash keepers were driving belligerent bargains with local merchants. She heard Gabriel raise his voice against traders, dyers, weavers, as though he had been with the Company at St. Sebastian as long as had Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham. She strolled away, toward clots of fishermen’s children, who watched the spectacle of disembarkation from a cautious distance.
I need to believe that if Higginbottham had not hurried after her with courteous admonitions, Hannah would have kept on strolling, that on her very first morning on the Coromandel she would have made good her escape into the “forest,” as had her mother years before in Massachusetts. The second factor coaxed and pleaded with her. “Dear lady, do not stray,” he panted. “Dear lady, I commend you to the protection of your countrymen, whom in turn I commend to the protection of the Almighty.” Behind the wheezing Higginbottham slid and stumbled his rickety-legged umbrella bearer. The children relished the spectacle; they laughed and clapped each time the Englishman mopped his sun-ruddied face or the umbrella bearer dropped the heavy shade. Hannah might have ignored Higginbottham. She might even have contributed, however circumspectly, to the children’s entertainment, had the Chief Factor himself not intervened.
Prynne’s intervention involved no clownish movements. His address was laconic and indirect. His gloomy voice reached Hannah all the way from the wharf. “It is not consistent with our interest,” the voice rebuked, “to let the people of the land see our countrywomen yield to self-indulgence.”
Hannah expected Prynne to come after her as Higginbottham had. She waited for a harsh confrontation of wills. She had intended rebellion, not an accidental breach of Company etiquette. But the Chief Factor expended no further rage on her. The would-be rebel was dismissed. Prynne resumed issuing instructions to boatmen, laborers, scribes and apprentices. His gibes he reserved for the Mughal Emperor’s and the Roopconda Governor’s officious bureaucrats.
Hannah turned her back on the fishermen’s children, startled at her own compliance.
Not far from the wharf, a hound she had grown fond of on the long, sickly trip out to the Coromandel lay stretched at the foot of a dune. The hound, named Tobias, had amused her with its antics of snapping up fish that flew onto the decks of the Fortune. Now its eyes were dulled in near death, its flanks twitchy in hyperventilation. Hunched over the hound was its master, Thomas Tringham, a red-haired boy with a sun-blistered face and a high-bridged nose who cursed the unholy heat of the New Year’s week in an unalloyed Yorkshire accent. The Yorkshire youth, sent by the Company as a writer, was to be its youngest employee at Fort St. Sebastian.
“ ’Tis January!” Hannah kept hearing Thomas Tringham mumble at the hound. She could make out only isolated phrases from his grief’s inchoate fullness. “ ’Tis January! God ne’er intended it so!”
She tried to comfort young Tringham, but he shook off the sweaty-gloved hand she’d laid on his arm. She didn’t misconstrue the rejection. He was wrapped in the surly loneliness of his private sorrow. A stranger’s sympathy was intrusive. All the same, she couldn’t abandon Tringham. She looked