Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [74]
Eventually, because everything in history (as Venn keeps telling me) is as tightly woven as a Kashmiri shawl, Higginbottham’s riot changed the course of history.
The riot had its origin in one fateful glance that the Chief Factor cast out his bay-facing office window on an amber-gold, honey-sweet late September afternoon. A Coromandel-built two-master with a decked poop was being rowed ashore by a dozen firangi sailors in scarlet tricornered hats and silver-braided blue coats. Seated on a throne under a gaudy roundel, being fanned with peacock feathers by servants, was Gabriel Legge, the pirate resplendent in Norwich grays and gold braid. On the beach an escort of forty lance bearers and four firangi musicians and an equipage curtained with red silk and valanced with brocade and lace waited to transport Pirate Legge to the fort, factory and his New Salem palace.
Higginbottham at once dispatched young Tringham and the factory’s dubash, or interpreter, to Nawab Haider Beg’s gold-domed palace. The dubash was a man capable of simultaneous guiltless loyalties to the English Company’s friends and foes. Knowing that, Tringham had been sent along to rally the focus of the interpreter’s promiscuous affections. Dubash Ali, who also went by the names Oliver and Ortencio, was a handsome black-haired, green-eyed, peach-skinned consumptive of thirty. Many stories circulated about his provenance; he was a Baluchi whom a Dutch slaver had bought and abused; he was an Arab seaman for Pirate Avery and had jumped ship on the Malabar Coast; he was a Spanish don’s son whom Moors had captured and hauled eastward. The one constancy in Ali’s life was concupiscence.
In the letter to the Nawab, after he had stated his name, nationality, profession, and made the required Mughal epistolary self-deprecation of describing himself as His Highness the Nawab’s least worthy servant, Higginbottham demanded that the Nawab cast out of the great state of Roopconda all interlopers, namely Gabriel Legge and his diabolic cohort of brigands and pirates who owed allegiance to none other than Lucifer, and who, if not restrained, would soon seize Emperor Aurangzeb with gory force and lay Hindustan waste.
Perhaps in Leadenhall Street—but certainly not in Fort St. Sebastian—there existed a Company officer capable of appreciating the rich ironies, even the grim humor, of Higginbottham’s dilemma. He might even have called it theatrical, operatic, this clash of competing, profit-driven opportunists. Haider Beg was no less an underling than Higginbottham, serving as he did at the sufferance of Emperor Aurangzeb, although he exercised untrammeled authority over a broader area. The Nawab knew that a significant, and potentially vast, portion of his wealth derived from playing off the European powers against one another, and in further encouraging the breakup of European concessions into smaller and smaller, and ever more efficient and ruthless, competitors. Assuming, of course, that in their single-minded pursuit of profit they did not forget their nominal obedience to Mughal authority. He was more than willing, on occasion, to inflict that sharp blade of remembrance when the European authorities allowed their underlings to drift.
A summary of Nawab Haider Beg’s response is entered in the Fort St. Sebastian diaries. The Nawab’s letter, too, begins with the usual courtesies and invocations. In the name of Allah, who is most kind and most merciful, Haider Beg assures Higginbottham, Englishman, valued friend, fortune’s favorite, esteemed Chief Factor, that his concern for the Emperor’s well-being has been received. However, out of his affection for this Englishman and his great respect for His Royal Highness William, monarch of sovereign England, he has stopped the epistle’s farther passage; his fear is that the Englishman’s generous concerns could be cunningly misrepresented by English-hating or less tolerant courtiers as the English Company’s arrogant refusal to pay the Emperor and the Nawab