Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [49]
Early signs of the self-pity and contradictions that would result in the twisted logic of the white man’s burden were already evident. The factors knew their lives in India were extraordinary and, by most standards of the day, debauched. The Company code they lived under placed inhuman limits on even routine freedom. At the same time, their personal code was Excess in All Things. And so they recast themselves as capital’s little pilgrims, forgotten victims of England’s indifference to their sacrifice. Self-pity, unaccountability and hypocrisy were recast as virtues and renamed forgiveness, solidarity and tolerance.
The household ran itself—Hannah didn’t think of it as being run by the servant woman and the peons—leaving her time during the day to visit or be visited by the fort doctor’s wife, Martha Ruxton, and the second factor’s wife, Sarah Higginbottham. She kept a journal of events, a protection against a jealous husband’s ferocity. Through her embroidery, and much later through her stealthily penned Memoirs, she revealed to herself her deepest secrets. She was without Gabriel’s company for weeks at a time while he toured smaller factories, scouted dyers’ villages and indigo plantations for the best dye roots, and mittahs, or village markets, for the most skillful artisans. She didn’t trust Martha or Sarah as confidantes. What she wanted from them was their gossip, their history in the place.
Over two years she elicited from Sarah the story of Martha’s courtship and marriage. In 1681, the last year of my ancestor Streynsham Master’s governorship, John Ruxton had arrived in Fort St. George, a thirty-year-old bachelor. Cholera, dysentery, typhus and lash ulcers had preoccupied him through Nathaniel Gyffords’s harsh governorship. Then, midway through Elihu Yale’s term, in June of 1690, as the monsoon broke and the very bowels of the Bay of Bengal were churned as though an elephant had tramped through a paddy field, the Golden Bliss, carrying Martha Ord, a comely girl of fourteen, and her mother and five younger sisters had docked. The thirty-nine-year-old bachelor doctor had discovered his need for golden bliss.
The mother and sisters had gone on to Masulipatnam, where Martha’s father, Grimston Ord, was third in charge of the factory. Martha Ord succumbed to the doctor’s fevered courting, insofar as an experienced and out-of-practice expatriate could mount it. In actuality, it had more to do with a strict accounting of his holdings and the assurance that upon his demise—which could happen sooner rather than later, given the precarious age and profession—Martha (and her parents and unmarried sisters) would come into one of Fort St. George’s tidier fortunes.
Immediately after the wedding on a September Sunday in 1690, the doctor, thinking ahead to the marital pitfalls that awaited young brides and old grooms in a fort filled with lonely, lustful soldiers, sailors, factors and clerks, moved to the more remote Company outpost at Fort St. Sebastian. The old physician—for he thought of himself, unfailingly, as elderly, as did his patients and even his postpubescent bride—had stories to tell of sturdy-souled Englishmen in desperate need of healing.
I have studied Dr. Ruxton’s death certificates. He was a great medical metaphysician; the deaths from Despond, Despair, Ingratitude and Melancholia outnumber those from the pox, consumption, syphilis, dysentery or ague.
Martha Ruxton had never lost the chubby contours of childhood. Now in 1697 an old married lady of twenty-one, she had been seven years in White Town and had developed neither the gaunt angularities of the fever-prone nor the cushiony complacency of the Company wife. Nor, apparently, had the tropical sun met her face or arms head-on: she was still pink and blond, easily flushed; daily she applied pastes of milk curd and lemon juice to her pretty face.
Sarah Higginbottham’s story came from Sarah herself. She confided to Hannah that she had arrived on a Company allowance to find a mate. Hannah remembered the Lancashire women on the Fortune and wondered about