Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [69]
This time Sita refuses. If during her first exile, the forest had disclosed to her only its dangerous blandishments, then during her second exile the forest has disclosed to her its wise secrets about eternity and redemption. This time she stands up to Rama and the unfair institutions of Ayodhya. She flings herself to the ground. And miraculously the Mother Earth that had given her birth now swallows her whole, leaving no trace of Sita the mortal.
I MAKE ONLY one demand of Venn and his mother, and of Jay and his grandmother. Where is Sita’s version of her captivity in Lanka? I want to hear Sita tell me of her resistance to or accommodation with the multiheaded, multilimbed carnivorous captor. Did Sita survive because of blind or easy faith in divine Providence? Or did she genuinely believe that deprived of Rama’s protection, she’d transformed herself into a swan whom a crow wouldn’t dare touch? I may not have Sita’s words, but I have the Salem Bibi’s; I know from her own captivity narrative what Sita would have written.
10
HANNAH WAS on the roof of her house scanning the waves for the Esperance’s press of jaunty white sails when Samuel Higginbottham, whom, since Cephus Prynne’s demise, she had gone to great lengths not to run into on her provisioning trips, dismounted in a pale haze of dust at the edge of her garden. She moved back from the roof’s parapet; she intended not to be at home to any factor or Company agent in Gabriel’s absence.
She called Bhagmati to help prepare a lie: Mistress Legge was feeling poorly and could not come down. Gabriel had instructed her to isolate herself from Martha and Sarah, from anyone with Company associations who might grill her about the Marquis’s missions. But Bhagmati, she could see, was out in the courtyard, arguing strenuously with a dark young woman in cream-colored clothes.
From the arm gestures, which practically shouted “Be off with you, fly, fly!” Hannah assumed the woman was either an acquaintance of her servant’s who had gained admission to White Town under false pretenses, or a vague relative of Bhagmati’s, someone she didn’t want around. This woman, at a distance, at least, looked saucy and self-confident; she stood with a hip crooked, one hand resting on it, leaving the other free for gestures. And her gestures seemed to take in Hannah up on the balcony, who had thought herself unseen. But Samuel Higginbottham had also caught sight of her pacing the roof before he had dismounted, and now ordered her down with a presumptuous slap of his fist on his open hand.
She leaned over the parapet and took her time scrutinizing the dusty Englishman. Promotion to the position of Chief Factor had given his florid round face a new square-jawed sobriety. She remembered him as he had appeared to her that first day on the beach: a slow clumsy man, overtly fearful of Cephus Prynne’s caustic tongue, and fitfully arrogant with Pedda Timanna, Kashi Chetty and Catchick Sookian. Was promotion to Chief Factor in a Coromandel outpost what he had dreamed of and prayed for all along? Was this the dusty fate he had plotted to embrace? She felt grateful for Gabriel’s wildness.
From the roof she taunted him. “And what business might the Chief Factor have with a married woman?” Let him think her rude. She was no longer a factor’s wife. Why should she rush down, offer him water and food, make him welcome? She remained within the protective magic circle she had drawn for herself. If she stepped outside that invisible circumference, if she raced down, she would lose her advantage. Sarah and her husband were adversaries now. Fate had changed alignments.
“This business concerns your husband,” the Chief Factor retorted.
“Then you ought to return when my husband is present.”
His jaw lost some of its chiseled sternness. She noticed how contrived his stiff-spined deportment was and pitied his desire to appear authoritative for people he considered his subordinates. His features—the thinness and straightness of the nose, the arch of the brows—were in such prim and