Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [65]
In Zanzibar, he gambled for and won a Frenchman’s ship, Le Rêve Doré, and discovered, in its airless, lightless hold, footed chests of jewels and gold urns and a writhing, moaning cargo of freaks and monsters—three-eyed maidens; identical jugglers joined in the head, the chest, the back; two-headed, four-armed girls who spoke separately, even in different languages; a three-headed youth with seven arms who made love to three separate women simultaneously; six-legged goats; old women with necklets of youthful, breast-shaped goiters—waiting to be shipped to the Sun King’s court in Versailles. “Twynnes and monsters,” he wrote, whom he dispatched mercifully by sword, “lest their deformitie rowse unseemlie lust.”
The expedition that Gabriel liked to recount to his friend Attila “the Turk-hater” Csycsyry involved Peter the Great’s “grand ambassador,” Golovin, and a ship’s carpenter, Pyotr Mikhaylov. Gabriel had met the two Russians when he had been shipwrecked off the coast of Java, and he had been picked off-sea by a Dutch East Indiaman carrying the two Russians on board. The carpenter, a jolly, gigantic man with a reformer’s fiery, violent ideas, had ranted against the boyars, the landed aristocracy of his country, against the clergy of all nations, and especially against the Turks. He had dreamed of exterminating the Turks. It seemed strange indeed that a carpenter and an ambassador should be traveling together, and that the ambassador conveyed a worshipful attitude toward a simple tradesman.
Pyotr Mikhaylov, agreeing with Gabriel, had been for the freeing of the slaves, and for the stringing up of the slavers’ captains. “Free them all!” he shouted, sloshing the potent clear liquid into beer-sized mugs, “bring on the carpenters, the builders, the sailors, the poets.” True to his word, he had freed and Russified an Abyssinian the Dutch had bought for resale.
The story always came to a climax with his assertion that the young carpenter, drunk on what he called “little water,” had said, “Someday you will tell your children you drank vodka with Peter, Czar of all the Russias.”
GABRIEL’S SEVENTH expedition is written up in many histories, French, Dutch and English. In keeping with the bilingual nature of his partnership with the Marquis, the caper goes by two names: Sauvez le Singe! or Save the Monkey! Pedda Timanna had let drop to Gabriel, while bartering diamonds and wild cinnamon for bullion, that the Dutch East India Company had just seized a fort on the Coromandel port islet of Vishnuswaram, and that the Hindu Nayak who ruled this islet, fearing ouster or at least humiliating subjugation by the Dutch, was hiring mercenaries and promising them a percentage of his gold-filled coffers. The Nayak, it was rumored in punch houses like Attila Csycsyry’s and in the high-ceilinged chambers of Fort St. Sebastian, was an easy-to-fleece “heathen foole,” who saw as his only mission in life the saving of a temple that his ancestors had built to a “heathen devyl with animal bodye” they called Lord Hanuman.
The Company consultation-book entries on Sauvez le Singe! go into some detail about both the Nayak’s military vulnerability and the Dutch motivation. The Nayak, a profoundly, or shortsightedly, religious man, had spent little on fortification and much on temple beautification. His one decrepit fort, situated at the mouth of the one easily navigable channel that separated his islet from the bigger, stronger island of Ceylon, had fallen easily to the Dutch Company’s soldiers, who had courted Ceylon with generous trade treaties in exchange for a temporary base to launch their Vishnuswaram operation. The prize the Dutch were after was the revenue of lavish donations collected each year from the more than two hundred thousand pilgrims and miracle seekers who