Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [43]
Hannah counted twenty-five men in service and a swirling mass of hangers-on, all vying for fanning, swatting and spittle-swabbing duties. Each of the local dignitaries seemed to derive from a different universe of blood, language and sensibility. Each seemed to her, in separate ways, a voluptuary, with bloodshot eyes, a surplus of jewelry, under a cloud of complicated fragrance. It was as though eight months at sea had deposited her on a different plane of existence, a moon, an undersea world in which the last familiar creature, a dog, had just died.
Men with officious faces and ledger books in the service of Emperor Aurangzeb’s representative Nawab Haider Beg, Governor of Roopconda, the large suba, or state, in which the English, French, Dutch and Portuguese had gained their small trading concessions, stood watch over the unloaders. Hannah had never seen such display of color: rich silks, brocades, cottons, in colors and combinations of colors that only a garden in high blossom could rival. Despite an inner voice that tried to summon up ancient fears of Turks and Ottomans and infidels, she couldn’t quite credit those Christian terrors. In their scarlet uniforms and tightly wound turbans the locals seemed like comedians on stage. They seemed physically weak, no match for the sturdy Europeans, even those, like Gabriel, still groggy from their transit. She had not seen so many people crowded together, ever. The dock in Salem seemed empty, bleached, muffled, in comparison.
“Hannah. Tell this fool—” Gabriel shouted.
She eased the dog’s head back to the hot sands. She verified his count of their trunks. It was the green one missing, she remembered, with the brass locks and hinges.
Cephus Prynne spoke sharply to Higginbottham. “It is the duty of all persons in the Honourable Company’s employment to acquaint Moors and Gentoos with the Honourable Company’s will and power. That is all I desire of you. Less than that I expect not.”
Higginbottham reluctantly approached the porters. He put himself through a clumsy emulation of Cephus Prynne’s deportment. He threatened whippings and bastinadoes if the thief and the missing chest were not instantaneously restored to Factor Legge. Higginbottham’s promise of vicious chastisement, however, intimidated no porter or boatman. The crowd had sized him up. This Englishman was weak. Men tittered; children closed in for better views of the entertainment.
Hannah’s journal entry of what happened next is reticent. “Gabriel acquitted himself fitt to be in the Companyes imployment.” She must have been appalled when Gabriel swatted aside peons and porters, jerked Higginbottham out of his way, then seized Kashi Chetty’s umbrella bearer by the hair. Gabriel’s hand smashed into the umbrella bearer’s face.
“… fitt to be in the Companyes imployment …,” Venn reads aloud.
I detect Hannah’s irony, but I, too, had hoped to find censure. I cannot defend Hannah to Venn.
All the same I invent secretive excuses. Maybe Hannah was still unready, unformed. Still afraid to discover herself disloyal. Gabriel was being judged, she must have decided. Gabriel was afraid of losing the respect of the Chief Factor. He did not ever wish to become the laughingstock that Higginbottham clearly was. It wasn’t the cursed land that released in him that crude, brute petulance. Prynne and Tringham were wrong about the Coromandel. The land, any land, is no more than catalyst. In England, Gabriel had often shocked her with his violence or enticed her with his unpredictabilities. The Gabriel she knew was at his most angry when he manifested an outer calm, as on his return from the dead. As in his patient questioning about men, every man, who had visited her while he was reportedly dead, killed by the Portuguese. But there was a new deliberateness to this assault on the merchant Chetty’s umbrella bearer.
Gabriel raised his hand to strike again. The caved-in face was a randomly chosen target. The victim had been on the periphery of the titterers. His “crime” was that he had