Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [62]
A fisherman’s child, crouched behind a sand dune, witnessed Hannah Legge’s kiss. Reared in an overcrowded shack where sexuality was furtive, a fierce, efficient grab and shudder and nothing more, he watched, mesmerized, the beautiful white woman seize her man right there on the beach, his beach, and vent on him without coyness and without shame her wild firangi passions and selfish wants, and as he watched the woman greedily, shamelessly, he saw a vision of himself on another shore by another ocean, an adventurer without family, without caste, without country, cantering into worlds without rules.
An asset hunter knows when to continue digging long after economists and historians have stopped.
That fisherman’s boy found his way to William Ill’s court in London. There he chanced upon John Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe and was incensed by its Eurocentric falsity. That fisherman’s boy composed his own heroic play, The World-Taker, in rhyming couplets as a corrective. In the extant fragment, the anonymous fisherman-poet claimed that when he first came upon Dryden’s confession that “true passion is too fierce to be in fetters bound,” he was wracked by the vision that had befallen him years before on a sandy strip in neglected Fort St. Sebastian.
FOR HANNAH, too, that night served as a diving board into the Unknown. For there on the night-kohled rim of a seductive ocean, as the beach children hooted and giggled and threw fistfuls of sand, Gabriel announced to her he was joining the Marquis as a pirate.
The Marquis, in his honorable youth, had been a gunnery mate for the British in battles with the Spanish. Then he set himself up, à la pige, free-lance, for anyone who paid. There was no dishonor in being a mercenary or of working for the natives. A fractious subcontinent had made all of them rich, traders and militarists alike. Hindu against Muslim, Muslim against Sikh: it was a paradise on earth.
The dishonor that had banished the Marquis from Compagnie Royale service, and from respectable fraternity in all but Fort St. Sebastian, had been over a woman. As a rising young officer in the French outpost, then known in his Alsatian guise as Klaus Engelhardt, he had presented himself one morning half an hour late for dress parade. It was known he had been with his bibi. The young lieutenant had been offered a gentleman’s choice, which he failed: ride the spindle-backed, blood-encrusted wooden horse for an hour with legs weighted down with iron for maximum penetration and possible permanent damage, or watch his bibi ride it before his eyes, and those of his mates, until her certain death.
A factor finds his true self by becoming a freebooter. There’s no stopping voyages of self-discovery. Ditto for voyages of self-destruction.
Hannah, a foster child twice over, could inherit full knowledge of the world’s wickedness, but she couldn’t bequeath it to Gabriel. Gabriel was impulsive, charming, jealous, violent and generous. He had a democratic spirit; he worked well with blacks—better, in fact, than with whites. He truly did not understand the bargain of the world: the principle that Hubert had tried to teach. The equal-and-opposite reaction. So she let Gabriel sail on the Esperance, the Marquis’s sloop. She did not ask him whose vessel he planned to plunder nor for what treasure he longed to risk his soul. He was not a pirate of simple rapacity as was the Marquis’s second mate, Cutlass da Silva. And he was not like Captains John Avery and William Kidd, who relished harassing haj-bound pilgrims in order to enrage the Grand Mughal. Gabriel wouldn’t, he couldn’t, do what Pirate Avery had done in