Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [60]
At the edge of the fort, in the still-dark west, jackals howl and hyenas chuckle like cardplayers in a room next door. Buzzards circle. The noise is coming from overhead, and the sky is turning pink over the ocean; dawn will come quickly.
The rope ladder to the roof has been moved into climbing position. She doesn’t know whether to climb or to watch, but soon the indecision is taken away, for the ladder is adjusted ever so slightly by invisible hands and slowly a regal form descends in a white shimmering material and gold ceinture, her ankles and wrists jangling softly with gold. Hannah ducks behind her door. It is that two-dimensional time of the dawn, or of history, the light not yet able to endow shape with form or meaning. The woman’s long black hair looks at a distance, in the pale light and against the white silk, like a giant fissure cut across her back. The white-wrapped arms seem to move separately, severed from each other by the hair, and she dashes down the far end of the terrace, entering a room behind a splintered door that had always been locked. It must be, she knows, Bhagmati, but a servant transformed. Hannah watches, and watches, but no one emerges from the storage room, and now the sky is morning bright though the sun has not yet risen above the ocean’s far curve. By this time, Chief Factor Prynne is usually pacing his terrace, offering his profile to the sun, but not this morning.
She will try to sleep an hour or two and rise in time for services. No reason for both of them to be fined. Maybe she’ll screw up her courage to beg the Chief Factor’s forgiveness for her husband’s indisposition.
But she finds she cannot sleep. She has lost control of her house, as though its complicated history, its artwork, the convolutions of its predecessor’s fancies and obsessions, were all coming out this morning to claim their inheritance. The simple servant girl returned in her familiar sleeping-and-waking clothes, rolled up her mat and began the light whisking of the terrace with her stick-bundle broom, leaving no trace of the queenly vision that had descended.
“Bhagmati,” Hannah called.
The girl presented herself at the opened door. The morning light behind her was blinding white, and she merely a slim black cutout against it.
“I saw you. You were on the roof terrace. You were dressed in white silks and gold. You went behind that door.”
The girl said nothing.
“Bhagmati, what are you?”
No, she did not believe in ghosts and witches. Those were the primitive beliefs of the world she had come from. But she did believe in evil, and in possession, in falsity and magic. She could not hold with poor Hubert that the world was explicable by formula and experiment. That was the faith of an Englishman who had never seen America, and never seen India. And having seen India, and America, Hannah knew she could never be content in England. The girl continued sweeping the terrace, opening the bird cage and feeding the parrot, singing softly to herself.
She knows that men have died for her. She knows that the world that seems so calm and peaceful this Sabbath morning is full of furious meaning, but refuses to reveal itself.
AT THE INQUIRY later, all attested to the fact that Cephus Prynne had left alone. None were seen to have followed him. The walk up the hill from Sonapatnam wall to White Town was considered an evening’s constitutional stroll, indulged in safely by one and all, except of course the women. It was not unknown that jackals prowled the trash pits and hyenas inspected the burial grounds; both those areas were, by mutual agreement, far outside the perimeters of civil protection.
Of course, on the field where the body of Cephus Prynne was found, three days later, in the most deplorable condition of tropical decomposition, bandits and brigands of every persuasion had often wielded uncontested power. Very little flesh remained, but for the tight skin of the forehead, upon which the letter H in a Roman script had been slashed. And on parts of the body the pariah