Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [84]
“Bhagmati!” she screams. “You, the Lucky One! Make me lucky!”
Hands hurl a jute sack over her head. She hears herself scream, feels herself hauled into a country boat like a fisherman’s catch and dumped on top of other bagged and wriggling humans.
3
HANNAH CAME TO on a low divan in an airy tower room in a hill-fort. The divan was the only piece of familiar furniture in the room. There was a large wooden chest with iron clasps pushed against one wall and a silken carpet patterned with hunting scenes on the stone floor. Heavy bolsters and outsize cushions were piled on an embroidered floor rug, and brass urns, pitchers and spittoons ranged in neat rows under a high window slit.
After the grand excesses of Henry Hedges’ English furniture, the dark austerity of the tower room—she would not allow herself to call it a prison—startled her. She would have to accustom her limbs to fold and her spine to flex into new positions so she could recline, lounge and squat like the locals. In hallways and courtyards out of her view, soldiers and servants were issuing instructions in a language that she hadn’t heard before. She squatted on the thin rug, cheek pressed into the stone wall, knees drawn up to her chin in despair. For the first time in her life she longed for the rule-bound sternness and security of the Fitch household.
Bhagmati’s soft singing seeped into the darkening room. Hannah pushed the portal with her shoulder; the portal gave way, revealing Bhagmati in the circular landing of the turret. She had her back to Hannah, her eye to a musket chink in the pocked stone wall.
“Whose prisoners are we?” Hannah asked.
Bhagmati swiveled around, startled by the panic in Hannah’s voice. “We are not prisoners,” she explained, calming Hannah. “We are in Panpur Palace. We are the guests of Raja Jadav Singh. The Lion of Devgad. Panpur is his vassal.”
Hannah had heard Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham speak covetously of the quality of indigo grown on Panpur plantations. She’d associated Panpur exclusively with squalid villages that somehow harvested a valued commodity that Gabriel, the English Company and the Compagnie Royale fought over. That Panpur had a fort, a courtyard with fountains, landscaped gardens with canals and a monarch capable of inspiring apparent devotion made her realize how myopic had been her life in Fort St. Sebastian.
“A raja?” She was used to saying “nawab.”
“The Grand Mughal calls Raja Singh the Rat of the Coromandel.”
“What do you call him?”
Bhagmati laughed. “My lord.”
The servant woman appeared young and beautiful, regal in her posture! She had changed into fresh, fragrant garments. The bared lustrous skin of her arms smelled of floral oils and woody essences. Her hair, still wet from a bath or from the rain-churned river, cascaded in raven waves. Even her voice had a new confidence.
In the formal diplomatic dealings on the Coromandel Coast, English people were most often in contact with Muslims, who ruled in the name of the Emperor Aurangzeb through their nawabs and their laws and customs agents. Muslims seemed a more knowable people than Hindus; Muslims’ aversions and their attractions struck familiar chords with devout Christians. They had a heaven, a hell, a book, a leader, a single god; they knew sin and tried to repent. Their dietetic codes were harsh, but logical.
The idea of Hinduism was vaguely frightening and even more vaguely alluring to Hannah. English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism. Muslims might be cruel, but true obscenity attached itself to Hindus, whose superstitions and wanton disregard of their own kind—burning young widows, denying humanity