Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [79]
From the roof, the sky seemed unusually bright, unusually high. The domed sky bounced giddy rays of light off fishermen’s sails. She would not allow herself to think of typhoons. She would not get over the fear she herself had felt when those short years ago the Fortune had anchored in deep waters offshore, and she had had to lower herself into a kuttamaram crammed with Lancashire maidens, most of whom had now married and scattered like buckshot across the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, the spaniels, a harpsichord and a cherrywood cabinet. She would not let Martha Ruxton’s stories of “country boates spleet into peeces” repeat themselves, over and over.
She discerned a pinnace far out to sea. Not the Esperance. The Esperance could not show itself during the day.
Toward dawn, in an eerie dream, Gabriel cried to her for help. She ran to the balcony, pulling the rusted latch off the door in her anxiety. Again she heard the moan of someone in pain and need. But it was only the rough wind scraping seas and forests. The wind blew from the northwest; it blew with such fury that it tore thatched roofs off fishermen’s huts; it lifted oxen and horses from their tetherings and hurled them in the surf-striated black waves of the churned-up bay.
THEN SHE SAW the light boat by the sandbar. It was the kind of boat that Martha Ruxton, always scornful of local skills, had derided as “a country boate fit for Moores, Zentoos, hogs and swine and coolies.” But this boat’s sail riveted Hannah’s attention. This sail was not of patched and moldy canvas that local fishermen and ferriers dried on dunes between trips. Scarlet silk glowed against the sapphire sky. This was a boat fit for the most audacious New World fortune builder or the most disdainful Old World pirate king. She prayed that the Nawab’s troops hadn’t seen what she’d seen.
She watched and waited impatiently for the craft to grow larger, splash closer to the shore. But it remained tiny, its movements erratic and jerky. Sailors were trying to pole the craft away from the bar into deeper waters. But sand sucked their poles and swallowed the prow. Gale winds snapped the mast and loosened the blood-red flag of silk.
It happened so suddenly that Hannah wasn’t sure if she had seen it or imagined it. The wind caught the boat atop a sandy crested wave, lifted it, spilling all deckhands into the water, then turned it over and dashed it on the heads of the sailors and beasts before they’d even oriented themselves in the water. She saw the bobbing and sinking of spheres (human heads?) and of rectangles (chests of silk and brocade?). Men struggled out from under the upturned craft and were swept away by ferocious currents.
In the quickly lightening dawn, she watched the boat crumple like straw with each crashing breaker. And then she saw a force of destruction gather upon the beach that she had never seen and always feared: a crowd, a small army, an armed guard of the Nawab’s men making their way across the wind-torn roadway to the half-beached hulk. The bodies of firangi sailors, most of them drowned but some still struggling, were chopped and speared as the soldiers passed. It was a scene of mass murder on top of a furious cyclone.
Bhagmati tried to pull her away. Bhagmati took charge; Hannah was shaking from the cold and wind, the sight of men she now recognized being hauled upon the beach and stabbed some more. She let herself be draped in lengths of coarse cotton such as Bhagmati wore. Tough-palmed hands daubed muddy brownness on her white forehead and cheeks. White Town, Bhagmati urged, was a place to flee. The mobs were stoning the enclave walls. The rumor had started in the qsba and spread, fueled by the Nawab’s men. His soldiers were already patrolling beaches and trails for firangis who had sacked another Mecca-bound pilgrim ship. Muslim boatmen, pilots, traders, were spilling infidel blood to avenge sacrilege. The Nawab had received word of the