Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [78]
It would be a bleak, gray, dismal life, she feared, after some of the excitements and colors and violence of the Coromandel Coast. But a life without treachery, without killings. Her life would reside in other people’s stories; she would have stories to tell someone’s children.
Tringham was brought to Dr. Ruxton’s house after his penitential tour of the outlying villages. The excision was clean—thanks, perhaps, to the high-bridged, prominent nose of the young Yorkshireman that had given the butcher an adequate target. But what a ghastly sight it was, how casually cruel to inflict an unavoidable, undisguisable mark that serves no purpose and threatens no life, in the center of a face.
Hannah remembered the scalpings, the brandings, the blown-away faces of Salem, and the surgeries she had practiced to good advantage. She remembered the injured boy in Stepney, whose wounds were incomparably more serious. Ruxton had only heard of the various dismemberments wrought by native laws—they seemed bent on excising every limb or digit for one offense or another, including the ears and eyes, which made crude sense—but a nose, an English nose, was a gratuitous insult to England, to manhood and to a surgeon’s skills.
“I can help,” said Hannah. It was to be her final act in India. Tringham, too, rebuffed by the Mughals and now humiliated before his countrymen, had decided to book passage with Hannah on the same packet ship to England. But he intended to disembark in the Cape.
Calling on her knowledge of suturing, and of the skin’s ability to bond to itself, Hannah convinced the doctor, and the patient, that a nose of sorts could be fashioned from a flap of skin cut like a wedge from the forehead, twisted in a fashion to suggest gristle, then joined again to the cheeks.
He would look syphilitic, perhaps, the doctor opined, but otherwise improved. Hannah had a surgeon’s touch, but it was all he could do to dissuade her from sacrificing a joint of the wretch’s little finger and grafting it to the stump of bone already exposed. All in all, the Cape might be a solution. Despite the red hair, he might find a home among noseless people.
12
WITH TWO WEEKS to go, and the December cyclone season upon them, Bhagmati made her to way to the Ruxtons’ house and begged her mistress to reconsider. The master was drinking heavily, he had grown careless and abusive, and now he was at sea in a dangerous season, in a bad temper.
She had had a dream. The dream was about Gabriel. Within hours he would be back home again. She had seen him in a masoola boat heavy with chests. There hadn’t been room in the boat for sailors. Not even for the Marquis. But she had also dreamed of corpses. Bodies bobbed like gulls on the waves. The bodies, impaled by Mughals’ spears, shriveled like fallen fruit in the forest.
“Please come home. One last time,” she begged.
Hannah took the dream to be Bhagmati’s euphemism for gossip overheard in the marketplace. Fishermen must have spied the Esperance on the open roadstead. Boatmen were unloading booty even now, and ferrying in small portions of it to the customhouse. The rest of the loot, the Marquis and his sailors would load with weights and dump in the shallows until retrieval was safe. Haider Beg maintained a reasonably efficient but still bribable force to round up beaching pirates. The Marquis was wily about local ways. He knew whom to bribe and whom to intimidate. It was all part of the Great Game. And she was sick of the Great Game.
There were trunks to pack, friendships to end with promises of letters, and so she went back to New Salem, hoping to avoid her husband. Gabriel had been sullen but fair-minded. She would have resettlement money, and he agreed to forward cash to her at regular intervals for the next few years, or as long as his business prospered. She would miss the warmth of his returns,