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By Root 957 0

to those they called untouchable—excited contempt. Muslims had restrictions, which were noble and manly; Hindus had taboos, which were superstitious and cowardly. Hindus were unreasonable, and unreachable, so tradition-bound that their minds were considered undeveloped, except for a wily ruthlessness among the trading castes. What little good she knew of the religion came from Bhagmati’s stories; what little she saw in practice alarmed her. It seemed to feature the worship of various horrific and comic images. They worshiped the male sex organ; they worshiped an elephant-headed, fat-boy god. They had more gods than people, and, God knew, they had enough people.

Venn bristles at Hannah’s misconception of Hinduism. He believes in a cosmic energy that quickens and governs the universe. He explains to me impatiently the Hindu concepts of Brahman and Atman. “Not gods,” Venn protests, “but vivid metaphors. The ‘gods’ are visualizations of the Brahman’s aspects and attributes.” I simplify the concepts for myself into Cosmic Soul and Individual Soul.

The antagonisms between the three religions naturally reinforced each other’s prejudices of the other two, but Christians and Muslims tended to concentrate their opprobriums against the common Other. If anything, Hannah had a Christian’s skepticism about other faiths, bolstered by a Muslimized intolerance for idolatry.

And now she was in a totally Hindu world. Bhagmati seemed no longer a servant. Perhaps she, Hannah, was about to become one.

In other words, at the age of thirty, Hannah was a pure product of her time and place, her marriage and her training, exposed to a range of experience that would be extreme even in today’s world, but none of it, consciously, had sunk in or affected her outer behavior. I want to think, however, that the forces of the universe (for want of a more precise concept) were working within her. I don’t have any other way of explaining what she was about to do, or become.

4

THE PANPUR FORT was protected by a steeply built-up embattlement, a brick wall and a moat. The Bay of Bengal was in view and offered protection on its eastern flank. A wide river separated the nominal jurisdictions of Muslim Roopconda and Hindu Devgad, to which the Panpur fort and outlying villages paid their levies. English factors passed easily over these religious and political borders, enjoying trading rights in both jurisdictions, but among locals the borders were strongly defended.

Hannah could look out of the high window and see crocodiles bare their immense jaws in the green water of the moat. At a distant line of trees, and across the swollen river, Nawab Haider Beg’s soldiers in their showy Roopconda uniforms were cutting down trees and setting up their tents. Cannons were trained in the fort’s direction. Gunners, most of them firangi, directed the cannons’ placement. Horses and elephants were being exercised by stable hands. Eunuchs carried caldrons of water into the women’s tents. Sword sharpeners enjoyed a lively business. Slaves were setting up clay ovens, and cooks lighting fires to feed an eventual army.

“The Nawab’s men?” Hannah asked, astonished.

“The Nawab’s men are also the Emperor’s men,” Bhagmati explained. “He knows the Lion rescued the English widow.”

She felt a shudder of wonder, that the life of Emperor Aurangzeb, the Seizer of the World, was crossing the life of a Brookfield orphan. She understood; somehow she was the cause of the Nawab’s encirclement. Bhagmati explained the strategy: the Nawab would wait. He wasn’t sure if Jadav Singh was inside, and a full-scale assault on a modest fort was unmanly unless the prize was worthy. To wage war simply over the rumored presence of a white woman was ungallant. This was a war of intelligence, of spies, of courtesans and servants and eunuchs bribed, of notes passed across lines under saddles, inside bodices. Hannah looked down at her clothes. The coarse khadi and veils were stiff with dried mud. Her feet were black, bruised, naked. A smell of slime and rot came off her wet, weed-tangled hair. She felt