Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [80]
The Marquis had left instructions with association wives for just such precipitous escapes. They were to get in touch with Count Attila Csycsyry at his punch house, and he’d billet them in safe huts until enough of the Nawab’s men could be bought to look the other way. But Bhagmati could not place her faith in dishonesty, nor in a drinker’s promises. She had her own getaway plans. She hustled Hannah down the hill, over the bridge and into a shaky settlement of washermen in Black Town. So Hannah did not witness the Marquis’s drowning nor Cutlass da Silva’s mutilation.
BUT THERE WAS a witness to the beach happenings. The fisherman’s child who had watched the lovers in happier times, years later, in a cold, lonely attic in London, retrieved the memory in rhyme. The manuscript fragment of The World-Taker that has survived opens with a shocking soliloquy summarizing that night’s events. The manuscript’s current owner in Calcutta, a Marwari businessman of taste, will not permit any portion of it to be copied. The prohibition derives from his nationalism. He has no wish to expose the fragment to Western scholars who will note in it only a sad mimicry of lesser Dryden and Pope. An asset hunter thrills to the chase. The few lines I remember verbatim I remember for the clues they contain:
O, how I dread to tread again
Sonapatnam’s shores of blood and pain!
Cursed was that day when I
Spied the slain Marquis ascend the sky.
One cruel death ought reveal lessons wise,
But the celestials dispensed one more prize.
Cutlass da SiIva’s tongue to a board was nailed;
Justice is e’er meted, dear and bejewelled.
So the Marquis died that night. Cutlass da Silva had his tongue cut out. That gruesome soliloquy does not mention Gabriel.
THE DETAILS are given to me by Mr. Abraham as we walk around the ruins of the customhouse. That night of massacre became a guidebook’s lore.
Mr. Abraham says, “These chaps suddenly found themselves between devil and deep blue, if you get my drift only. One sec they are discoursing so merrily, dividing up their loot, and the next sec they and their belongings are all tumbling topsy-turvy in the drink. November, December, are very bad months here, you see. Very treacherous. So what is happening is this. The boat is sticking in sandbar. You know the Lord Tennyson poem, ‘Crossing the Bar’? Tennyson is thinking of this Madras-side sandbar only. The pirate chaps are huffing and puffing but nothing is happening. Then suddenly wind is dislodging the bloody boat! The boat is now like an upside-down bowl. The de Mussy fellow and that Portuguese chap, they are good swimmers, isn’t it? They are somehow managing to struggle from under the boat, they’re managing to wade neck-deep on sandbar. All is well for them, you are thinking. In the meantime the English fellow is sitting tight inside the upturned boat. He is thinking, My God, am I in a cave or a whale’s belly or what? The good Lord is listening to him and the good Lord is creating an air pouch in the water for the Englishman, this Legge. And the boat is hiding him from the eyes of the angry Muslim mob. But the other two chaps are not so lucky. The good Lord is always finding jolly good means to punish sinners and devils. An arrow is piercing de Mussy’s skull. So de Mussy is dead on spot, which means he is luckier than the Cutlass fellow. Cutlass is not bothering to see if he can give succor to his wounded friend. Oh, no. He’s a selfish fellow. He is just running and running. And wham! He is running into the mob. The rest is not a pretty story.”
Cutlass da Silva, Mr. Abraham confirms, had his tongue cut out, but the tongue was not nailed to a board as described in the soliloquy. The tongue was actually nailed to da Silva’s chest and da Silva himself then nailed to a plank and dumped into the Bay of Bengal, where he was accused, falsely, of having dumped three hundred haj-bound pilgrims.
“So you see, there could