Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [61]
8
IT HAD RAINED steadily for three days from a high, bright sky the day that Two-Headed Ravanna and his three sons were impaled for the murder of Chief Factor Cephus Prynne. Ravanna, a well-known local cutthroat who had never before attacked a white man, earned his name for the goiter that extruded from his neck and lay on his shoulder like a second head (which in jest he often emblazoned with eyes and a mouth). He went to his agonized death slowly lowered upon the sharpened shul, surviving to hear loud cheering as the gory spike burst from his bowels and out the very eye socket of his phantom head, and lasting with sufficient strength to curse the Mughal Governor, Haider Beg; the Company Governor, John Goldsborough; and the motley assortment of traders and factors who had sworn to his presence outside the gates near Attila Csycsyry’s distillery the night of Cephus Prynne’s disappearance.
All firangi men and women participated in the credible lie that Chief Factor Prynne had been slain by highway bandits. These are times of famine and skirmish! Bolt your portals against Zentoos and Moors! The jungle is no place to turn the other cheek!
Fearing a correlation between plunging morale and plunging profits, the Fort St. George Council met in extraordinary session and unanimously promoted Samuel Higginbottham to chief factor.
There were some rumors that weeks before his death, Prynne had accused Higginbottham of deceit or theft and had asked for insulting clarifications on several entries of prices of goods and costs of sorting, weighing and packing them for shipping home. To counteract these malicious rumors, Sarah spread rumors of her own: Pedda Timanna’s hired assassins were behind the incident. John Ruxton told the young writers that he had seen enough curious deaths on the Coromandel Coast to know for sure that fools expired of cholera, lunacy and flux, and knaves were killed by daggers, garrotes and poisons. Martha Ruxton convinced herself that the mutilated corpse recovered near the distillery was not Cephus Prynne’s at all.
Nawab Haider Beg was not disconcerted by Prynne’s precipitous removal. Firangi factors were expendable. The institution of bribes-for-influence would endure. The weaker the English Company, the stronger the competition from privateers. The more cutthroat the rivalry, the richer the coffers of the Mughals. He arranged the magistrates’ ruling: the Englishman got drunk as Englishman were wont to do and was set upon by idol-worshiping robbers who owed their political allegiance to the Hindu Raja, Jadav Singh, who lived in the sandstone hill-fort beyond the jungle.
The evening after the body was recovered and buried ceremoniously with gun salutes, Gabriel took Hannah for a ride along the surf-scalloped shore. Beyond the sand reef a two-masted Dutch hooker flying the Marquis’s flag of scarlet crossed cannons on an onyx field was unloading its cargo into kuttamarams. On the beach fishermen were spreading torn nets across the dunes; children were teasing sand crabs out of their holes; gulls, crows and pariah dogs were picking through entrails of discarded fish.
Twilight is so fragile in the tropics! Nightfall so sudden and unequivocal! I can see Hannah, taut spined on horseback, and Gabriel eager, impatient, riding ahead to meet the piratical Marquis. In every lungful of velvety night vapors, Hannah tastes the warmth and wetness of the Coromandel Coast’s peculiar fecund mortality.
We know that Hannah and Gabriel Legge were on the beach on a June night in 1697. We know that Hannah suddenly let go of her reins, that she twisted impulsively, violently, in her saddle, and kissed Gabriel. We know this because recent scholarship about the Company’s trade is finally retrieving the communal and individual memorial