Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [5]
“I need to pack these up,” says Mr. Satterfield.
Here Precious-as-Pearl zigzags on elephantback, by masoola boat, in palanquins—the vast and vibrant empire held in place by an austere Muslim as Europeans and Hindus eat away the edges.
In the first of the series, she stands ankle-deep in a cove, a gold-haired, pale-bodied child-woman against a backdrop of New England evoked with wild, sensual color. The cove is overhung with cold-weather, color-changing maples and oaks, whose leaves shimmer in a monsoon’s juicy green luxuriance. At the water’s edge, a circle of Indians in bright feathered headdresses roast fish on an open fire. More braves stand in shallow water, spears aloft, as grotesque red salmon climb the underside of giant breakers. Their wolf-dogs howl, neck hairs rising, as children toss stones in play from the shingled beach. Around her submerged high-arched instep, jellyfish, dark as desire, swirl and smudge the cove’s glassy waves. Crouched behind her, in the tiny triangle of gravelly shore visible between her muscled legs, black-robed women with haggard faces tug loose edible tufts of samphire and sea grasses. I was right—they were fascinated by us. The artist cannot contain the wonders, fish and bird life bursts over the border.
“Really. It’s getting very late.” He begins to turn the miniatures over and folds the ancient carpet over them.
“Where will you be selling them?” I ask, but he shrugs.
“That’s up to the owner, isn’t it?”
In a maritime trade museum in Massachusetts, I am witnessing the Old World’s first vision of the New, of its natives, of its ferocious, improbable shapes, of its monstrous women, that only the Salem Bibi could have described or posed for. Her hips are thrust forward, muscles readied to wade into deeper, indigo water. But her arms are clasped high above her head, her chest is taut with audacious yearnings. Her neck, sinewy as a crane’s, strains skyward. And across that sky, which is marigold yellow with a summer afternoon’s light, her restlessness shapes itself into a rose-legged, scarlet-crested crane and takes flight.
The bird woos with hoarse-throated screeches, then passes out of sight. The painting could be covered by the palm of my hand.
I lift the final one. I want to memorize every stroke.
In the largest of the series—its catalog name is The Apocalypse, but I call it The Unravish’d Bride—beautiful Salem Bibi stands on the cannon-breached rampart of a Hindu fort. Under a sky on fire, villages smolder on purple hillocks. Banners of green crescent moons flutter from a thousand tents beyond the forest, where tethered horses graze among the bloated carcasses of fallen mounts. Leopards and tigers prowl the outer ring of high grass; the scene is rich in crow-and-buzzard, hyena-and-jackal, in every way the opposite of fertile Marblehead. In a forest of blackened tree stumps just inside the fort’s broken walls, hyenas lope off with severed human limbs; jackals chew through caparisoned carcasses of horses; a buzzard hops on a child’s headless corpse.
Salem Bibi’s lover, once a sprightly guerrilla warrior, now slumps against a charred tree trunk. He grasps a nephrite jade dagger hilt carved in the shape of a ram’s head and, with his last blood-clotted breath, pledges revenge. His tiny, tensed knuckles glint and wink, like fireflies, against the darkness of his singed flesh. The poisoned tip of an arrow protrudes through the quilted thinness of his battle vest. An eye, gouged loose by an enemy dagger, pendulums against his famine-hollowed cheek, a glistening pink brushstroke of a sinew still connecting it to the socket through which the smoky orange sky shows itself. The lover’s one stationary eye fixes its opaque, worshipful gaze on the likeness of the Salem Bibi painted on the lover’s right thumbnail.
Near Salem Bibi’s dying lover, under a multirooted banyan tree