Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [77]
So impressed were they with his eloquence that the death sentence was commuted and extended to dubash Ali instead. He was stoned to death.
The Nawab’s mercy came at a price for Thomas Tringham. The magistrate, on the Nawab’s personal orders, chose to teach the firangis a lesson for having incited a revolt against taxes. In the past, when the English, the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese trading companies had sinned against the Nawab, he had been content to whip or shoe beat or impale the companies’ Indian servants. This time, the Nawab eschewed all such mercy. Thomas Tringham was tied to a post in New Salem’s gutted marketplace; his nose was sliced off with a sword, and the bleeding, fainting noseless factor was hoisted backward on a washerman’s donkey and paraded through thirty villages.
Gabriel Legge was not fated to be killed or maimed that day. Lust and luck had always governed his life. Though Zeb-un-nissa’s hovel was badly charred by Higginbottham’s obsessive loathing, and her thatch roof entirely burned, the lovers copulating in a cement bath tank filled with star-chilled water and floating lotuses were spared all but a shower of sparks. Villagers still tell of an eight-foot naked firangi giant who was seen in the alley, glistening, tumescent, blister backed, hurling brick walls and burning buffalo out of his way.
MONTHS LATER Hannah would realize that while she’d wept and raged over the confluence of Gabriel’s lust and Higginbottham’s obsessions, Destiny was ensnaring her life into Roopconda’s larger history.
A true Englishman owed his wife discretion. So discreet were long-term residents that their half-English children grew up within sight of their fathers’ wives without ever being acknowledged. Bibis were at times emboldened, like Zeb-un-nissa, to pay visits to White Towns and to White Houses, under the guise of milkmaid or washerwoman, just in the hope of capturing the firangi wife in a kind of paralyzed tableau.
Hannah was a stranger to all these conventions. The explosion and the indisputable disclosures in its wake shattered her marriage as definitively as a bat bite had ended Higginbottham’s.
All around her now, she saw chaos. New Salem, shared with an arrogant wench who had fathered Gabriel’s son, in a society that had effectively turned on her for her husband’s piracies, was a prison that no amount of riches could soften. She had lived with, and accepted, the possibility that Gabriel might never return from any of his voyages, and that uncertainty had bound her closer to him. But the certain knowledge of his unfaithfulness, his preference of a bibi to her, was a matter that her pride would not permit forgiveness.
We might call the explosion, the attendant shame and the arrogant visit of the bibi a very loud wake-up call, a sign to Hannah that tolerance and patience and even a pragmatic tradeoff between luxury and uncertainty were no longer sufficient, no longer bearable.
She made up her mind that she would be gone from the Coromandel on the next appropriate sailing, for London. She asked Bhagmati, her only true companion, to make the voyage, but the servant would not cross the dark waters, would not desert the small shrine she kept for Henry Hedges. Bhagmati still walked the parapets, now in the empty palace home in New Salem, dressed in her silks and sometimes dressed in his.
Until the passage could be arranged, Hannah moved back to Fort St. Sebastian, to stay with Martha Ruxton, while her trunks could be packed. It would be, she felt, a clean break. Service in India was a well-known widow-maker, and