Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [50]
Martha and Sarah savored their roles as guide and guardian to Hannah. They never let Hannah forget that they were truly Englishwomen, while Hannah was tainted because of her long residence in primitive New England.
“I suppose Mr. Legge has found himself a bibi,” Sarah began, always with a smile.
Hannah knew the word, but did not let on. Bibis—their uses, their place, their importance and the need for tolerance thereof—constituted the opening lecture of old Company wives to Company novices.
Martha’s and Sarah’s smiles exasperated Hannah. Their smiles suggested that there was no choice for white men, not when the heat of India fired the brain. The very thought of an Englishwoman attempting to satisfy a rampant Englishman brought out the freckles in Martha. Every English husband strayed into infidelity. Gabriel, too, would find himself a bibi. The term, as employed by Sarah and Martha, meant a healthy young black girl, a native woman in Black Town, or some servant of the English or a slave of one of the Muslim nawabs, or a girl of low morals still living in some mud hut with a widowed mother who could be counted on to look the other way. To Hannah’s friends a bibi was an annoyance, but not a threat.
“Whatever you do, you will of course never confront your husband’s bibi. You will never acknowledge her,” said Martha.
“She does not exist,” said Sarah.
“But she must exist, surely,” Hannah protested. It seemed to Hannah that bibis, suspected and real, were at the center of most female conversations in White Town. Any servant with a new sari, any cheekiness detected, anything missing, meant a good serving girl had passed over to bibihood. Bibis were simultaneously beneath notice, no more than cute little pets like monkeys or birds (although considerably less trouble), and devious temptresses, priestesses of some ancient, irresistible and overpowering sensuality. Wise husbands did not seek bibis on their own serving staff, but could easily be distracted by some wench hanging the wash on a neighboring balcony. Each White Town wife, therefore, had a vested interest in keeping her neighbors’ servants as old and shrewish as tolerable. Maintaining an appropriately large staff of women servants of insufficient comeliness was a domestic virtue that Company wives appreciated.
“Your maids should be ugly as jackdaws,” advised Martha. “Their voices should rasp like rooks, their skin should hang in black wrinkles …”
“And be poxy,” Sarah added.
“Are the women of the Coromandel Coast otherwise so alluring to Englishmen?” Hannah asked. “If there be choice, surely—”
Hannah was not that innocent of the male entitlements, but she had never learned the code of female accommodation. To accommodate meant to demonstrate an intention to please, even on occasion to yield, but with a view to establishing control. “Why would our husbands? Are the women in this land more beautiful?”
Perhaps she was still thinking of the men she’d witnessed that January morning she had landed on Fort St. Sebastian’s beaches. The men were small and finely made, wrapped in the same half sarong as the women. She reckoned that young women fashioned along the same lines as the men (young women were not easily encountered; fully 90 percent of Indians one saw on the street were male, or shuffling old widows) could well be irresistible to white men.
In fact, whenever Gabriel was away inspecting factories or villages, Hannah spent her days in a dream of sensuality. She walked the streets and even the back lanes of Black Town, just as she had walked in Salem. She heard music from the upper floors of the sheds that passed