Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [44]
Hannah shrieked, though she didn’t know she had until she heard the shriek herself. This is an incident chronicled in the Memoirs. The hand reraised. The face twisted tight in anticipation of pain. The woman’s tormented shriek. She is witnessing an unnatural vanishing of justice, an unspeakable new face of violence. She remembers concentrating on the sweat and soil of the ruffled sleeve so she would not have to see nor hear the crash of flesh on flesh. And then suddenly, the tableau explodes into noise and movement. Pedda Timanna, the rich trader with the small head, leans down from his sedan chair, gives the man a quick shove with his umbrella and knocks him out of the hand’s range.
“The error is yours,” he informs Gabriel, smiling serenely from on high. “The object is not missing. Merely misplaced.”
He points his umbrella at the Legges’ trunk, which four of his attendants place before Cephus Prynne. To the Chief Factor, he adds, “Please inspect nothing is missing.”
Cephus Prynne’s blue eyes blanch bleaker. “Mr. Higginbottham, limit your future endeavors to acquainting the unmarried servants of the Company with their living arrangements and with rules of rank and precedence, of sitting at public table, and such sundry matters.”
Pedda Timanna’s head bows in bitter triumph.
Samuel Higginbottham’s shoulders stoop with self-hate.
Only Gabriel misses the merchant’s irony and its humiliating consequences. He squats on the gritty wharf and greedily pries open the lid of the gouged, rusty-hinged chest.
HANNAH DID NOT take to Cephus Prynne, but she conceded that he was an efficient procurer of house and servants for his subordinates. The grieving young Yorkshireman and the other two new writers were hustled away to their bachelor billets by Samuel Higginbottham. The Legges were attended to by Cephus Prynne himself. In a procession of palanquins, horses, ox carts and porters who balanced trunks and bundles on their flatly turbaned heads, the Chief Factor escorted the Legges over sandy roadways to the house they were to occupy in White Town, the Europeans-only walled enclave. St. Sebastian, he explained, being a “subordinate factory,” did not yet have a Company residence for its married employees. He had plans to buy land from the Armenian merchant, but in the meanwhile the married factors were obliged to live in their separate homes, as did English freemen and European privateers.
The lodging that he had chosen for the Legges, Prynne said, had last belonged to a factor named Henry Hedges, who had died while negotiating an abatement of 8 percent on longcloth in a weavers’ village controlled by the trader Pedda Timanna. Hannah sensed there was a story to the last occupant’s death. Some hint of fiscal impropriety or at least of behavior inappropriate in an Englishman of rank.
The late Henry Hedges’ house was two stories, but in appearance and feel like no home that Hannah had ever imagined. It was a white, miniature palace, modestly plain to the street, but embracing a courtyard with servants’ quarters in the rear, a wall, a profusion of flowers and fruit trees, all humming with bloated insects—At last, she thought, the royal bugs worthy of a golden swatter—the branches alive with lizards and gaudy songbirds. Everywhere she looked, reptiles hissed at birds, birds swooped on lizards, and insects formed a gray dome, like a veil, around the head of every worker.
“You will find your malis most accomplished, madam,” said Cephus Prynne. “I suggest you release them immediately.” There were more gardeners and gardeners’ children and other unspecified staff underfoot than would make up a small American village.
“But I will need their help—” Hannah was an accomplished small-plot gardener from her spell in England. This garden, she realized the moment she saw it, would be her sanity.
“Dear lady, it is a question of their loyalty. They were recruited by your predecessor. They are like