Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [6]
In the clean, green distance beyond the conflagration’s range, on a wide road that twists away from ruined forts and smoking villages, a gloomy, insomniac conqueror on a sober-eyed elephant leads his procession of triumph-aroused horsemen, foot soldiers, archers, gunners, lance bearers, spies, scouts, mullahs, clowns, poets, painters, bookkeepers, booty haulers, eunuchs, courtesans, singers, dancers, jugglers, wrestlers, cooks, palanquin bearers, tent pitchers, storytellers, to the next gory and glorious field of slaughter. Their eyes form a perfect, glitter-pointed triangle: Salem Bibi’s, her Hindu lover’s, the Mughal conqueror’s.
On the low-parapeted roof of the fort, Salem Bibi chants stubborn and curative myths to survive by. Her braceleted hands hold aloft a huge, heavy orb of unalloyed gold and a clear, multifaceted diamond through which a refracted lion and a lamb frolic in a grove of gold grass as supple as silk. At her henna-decorated, high-arched feet, a bird cage lies on its side, its microscopic door recently ripped off its hinges. The newly exposed hinge glows against the cage’s duller metal, a speck of gold-leaf paint.
“Thank you, Mr. Satterfield.”
It is a feast of the eyes, and I must steady myself, take a breath, palms outstretched on the museum’s floor. You can study it for a lifetime and find something new each time you look. It’s like an Indian dessert, things fried that shouldn’t be, hot that should be cold, sweet that should be tart. And an art that knows no limit, no perspective and vanishing point, no limit to extravagance, or to detail, that temperamentally cannot exclude, a miniature art forever expanding.
Go, Salem Bibi whispers, her kohl-limned sapphire eyes cleaving a low-hanging sky. Fly as long and as hard as you can, my co-dreamer! Scout a fresh site on another hill. Found with me a city where lions lie with lambs, where pity quickens knowledge, where desire dissipates despair!
THERE ARE no accidents. My Yale thesis on the Puritans did lead to graduate school, but it also took me here. My life with Venn Iyer, father of fractals and designer of inner space, is no accident.
I drove out to this museum to track down for a client what he claims is the most perfect diamond in the world. The diamond has a name: the Emperor’s Tear. For eleven years, I have been tracking the Salem Bibi, a woman from Salem who ended up in the Emperor’s court. I know her as well as any scholar has known her subject; I know her like a doctor and a lawyer, like a mother and a daughter. With every new thing I’ve learned, I’ve come imperceptibly closer to the Emperor’s Tear. In that final Götterdämmerung painting, she is holding it: I have seen the Emperor’s Tear atop its golden orb. Three hundred years ago, it existed in her hands; I know where she came from and where she went. I couldn’t care less about the Emperor’s Tear, by now. I care only about the Salem Bibi.
I should have let the keyboard do the tracking, but, like shamans and psychics, I’ve learned to go with hunches as well as data bases. The easiest way for a white-collar felon to make a stone vanish for a while is to loan it to a small, grateful museum under a plausible alias. And if the museum, finding itself too cluttered already, and out of its curatorial depths, were to sell it in some obscure auction in Europe or Canada, and the owner just happened to show up and buy it, he’d have title, free and clear, wouldn’t he?
What I hadn’t figured on was the secret life of a Puritan woman whom an emperor honored as Precious-as-Pearl, the Healer of the World.
3
SHE WAS Hannah Easton, only surviving