Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [66]
The Nayak, though resigned to the immutabilities of fate, was desperate to save the sacred temple from spoliation by infidels. Samuel Higginbottham had it on good authority from a Portuguese interpreter, Antonio de Melho, working in San Thomé, that the Compagnie Royale de France’s factory in Pondicherry, too, was casting a rapacious eye on the temple coffers in Vishnuswaram. Saving the islet for England was an act of high patriotism.
BUT WHAT mesmerized Hannah more than the profit-hungry firangis’ motives was the sturdiness of a religious faith that allowed hundreds of thousands of devotees to worship a godhead that chose to reveal itself as a scarlet-faced, yellow-furred, long-tailed monkey.
On the long nights of Gabriel’s absence, and the long days of her newfound isolation from the society of Company wives, it was Bhagmati who became Hannah’s only link to the outside world. And that outside world, increasingly, was a world of stories and recitations, for Bhagmati was as unwelcome on the streets of Fort St. Sebastian, and especially White Town, as the wife of Gabriel Legge had become.
It started with a simple request. She could not sleep, the moon burned brightly through the coir-matted window, and she knew that Bhagmati, too, was lying awake on her mat outside the door.
“Talk to me, please,” she said.
They now spoke a common language, she and her servant, which the Company women had warned about. Bad enough, they said, when you can’t understand what they’re saying in that yanna-yanna-yanna language they speak, but it’s worse when you do. They should of course understand simple English, but on no account should you permit them to address you in their chatter. Should that happen, it means you’ve lingered too long in the halfway house from home, all the accommodations you’ve made are suddenly manifest, your blood has thinned, your brain and your palate have made some sort of infernal adjustment. You can eat their food, endure their weather, tolerate their heathen ways. You find yourself getting ideas across to them, somehow, and comprehending their responses.
“Who is this Hanuman I’ve heard about?” she asked. A simple question with military and economic implications.
“Lord Hanuman?” the servant asked. She squatted in the moonlight in her white sleeping sari. In the semidark, her voice was deeper, not that of a twenty-year-old, or however old she was, but of a storytelling mother putting a child to sleep. With Bhagmati as guide, Hannah felt she had tumbled headlong into a brilliantly hued subterranean world peopled with shape-changing monsters and immortals that exaggerated or parodied hers. But thanks to Gabriel’s voyages, she knew it was real.
Bhagmati could neither read nor write, but she was so agile memoried and charismatic tongued that she could recite to Hannah hour-long fragments of the epic poem she and her people lived by. In the epic, the god Vishnu comes down to earth for the seventh time to save mortals from demons, assuming on this seventh descent the bodily form of Prince Rama, the rightful heir to the throne of aged King Dasaratha, and worthy husband of a beauteous orphan named Sita.
“Bhagmati—did all this happen, exactly as you’re telling it? Or is it just a play, a poem?”
“Exactly as I say, memsa’ab. The place he came to earth is known. The forest is marked.”
“All right.”
Like a child, she wanted reassurance. The Bible, too, was very specific. It was said you could trace the cities in the Holy Land in a few months if the Ottomans permitted. Every place-name in the Bible. There were pious men in Salem who had done it.
Bhagmati began her telling: In the course of Prince Rama’s tribulations on earth, he is unjustly banished to a forest for a term of fourteen years. While in the forest with Sita and a loyal younger brother, Lakshman, he comes home from his food-gathering errands one day to find that the demon-king Ravanna, the ten-headed, twenty-armed cruel and lustful ruler of Lanka—Ceylon—has abducted the beautiful Sita.
Ten heads of course were possible. Two-headed