Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [83]
2
IT’S RAINING. For weeks without break it’s been raining. I couldn’t have imagined such rains in Cambridge or Boston. Venn says, looking through all my notes on Hannah, Gabriel and the Coromandel Coast, that a perfected X-2989 program, sucking all data into itself like an informational black hole, might be able to generate three milliseconds of virtual reality running time.
Life is extremely wasteful of data, in other words, says Dr. Venn Iyer.
Mr. Abraham is reluctant to be outdoors in this muddy season. He takes off his squeaky-new leather sandals, rolls up the flared legs of his made-to-measure trousers and leads me down a flooded alley. Only mad dogs and American scholars, Mr. Abraham sighs. A cycle rickshaw whizzes by and spatters mud on his starched and ironed shiny garments. I offer to pay the dry-cleaning bill and realize at once from the jerky way he pulls ahead that I have offended him.
We are in this alley because three hundred years ago, when this busy, built-up mile was just sandy seafront, a washerman’s hut stood near here. Hannah lay in that hut, enfeebled not quite by fever but perhaps by a premonition that her time on the Coromandel was not yet over. The present moment, however perilous, could not equal in terror the premise of her return. (Like Venn, I believe less and less in accident, more and more in design. She did not make the boat’s sailing because it was not yet time for her to return.)
It was a cyclone that finally awoke her. A cyclone with the fury of divine judgment lashed the tiny port village. Around nine o’clock in the morning, the high winter sky precipitously blackened. For two hours or more, winds from the north sucked birds out of trees, blew thatch off the huts, then attacked the remaining walls, washing everything into the sea. Houses toppled off shaky foundations. Paddy fields turned into salty lagoons. Then winds from the east more malicious than the winds from the north lacerated the coast. Ships tore free of their anchors and beached themselves in jungles leagues inland. Water rose as high as a cliff and swallowed dunes. Within moments, the water cliffs flooded the customhouse. The river surged over the bridge and swirled into the crowded alleys lined with stalls. By noon the sea spread itself over five villages and three market towns in the hinterland. That afternoon the winds blew first from the south, and then from the south-southwest, and carried debris-loaded seawater back into the Bay of Bengal.
The harsh, gritty wind lacerated her face. When she covered her cheeks with her hands, she felt warm blood on her palms.
“This is no country for Christians!” she cried. This was not the place she wished to be entombed. But where could she run to? She saw the folly of a governess’s job in Cambridge. There would surely be no welcome there for a pirate’s widow, and no place in old Salem for an Indian lover’s daughter.
An angry mob was already within earshot. Bhagmati hurried the grief-dazed Hannah, no longer disguised as anything but a half-dead firangi, around uprooted trees and waist-deep mud pools. They had to make their getaway before the pathways were flooded. They found a donkey, braying senselessly for its lost master. Bhagmati prodded the beast, with Hannah’s body upon it, toward the bridge.
That night the bridge broke. An Englishwoman on a donkey and her servant were on the bridge when winds wrenched it off its base (Coromandel consultation-book entry, but never confirmed), lifted it and dashed it back into frothy river water. That bridge has been rebuilt and broken and rebuilt many times since. The bridge has been officially named and renamed over and over again. One of its longer-enduring names was the Robert Clive Bridge. But among local people, since the night that Hannah and Bhagmati sailed downriver on broken-off waterlogged planks, it has been called the Bridge of Drownings.
I visualize the sundered bits of barks and timber, bodies of victims and animals swirling downstream. The stone bridge