Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [86]
“They say the Badshah came south to fight the Raja himself,” Bhagmati said. She laughed a brief bitter laugh. “But even in wartime you want to bathe and change.”
She put on a clean sari, the same as Bhagmati’s. That afternoon, as the one-time servant taught her erstwhile mistress the art of pleating and folding a sari, the two women shared confidences. Bhagmati had had a vital life, distinct from waiting on firangi households. Why had Hannah not sensed that before? Perhaps Rebecca’s embracing of the wilderness had started like this: a moment’s sharp awareness, My God, they’re alive! She remembered her mother, suddenly, wearing the beaded belt her lover had given her, showing it to Hannah for admiration. They’re humans; they have a richer life than I do.
“You wear the sari well,” said Bhagmati. They had giggled, going through the elaborate process, getting it even. If Martha Ruxton could see her now! And Samuel Higginbottham!
Bhagmati had been born with the name of Bindu Bashini. Hannah spun the alliterative name like a ball on the tip of her tongue. Her own mother, she realized suddenly, must have taken a Nipmuc name. A new name for a new incarnation. Rebecca Easton was dead. Hannah Easton Fitch Legge was dying.
Bindu Bashini had been born into a merchant family in faraway Hughli. Hooooghleee. Bhagmati’s father had procured taffetas, floretta yarns, raw silks and the finest muslins for the English Chief Factor to ship out from Hughli. Hannah pictured another English factory run by another chief factor on the banks of another wide river sludgy with silt meandering into the Bay of Bengal. She pictured Bindu Bashini’s father and brothers as the spitting image of Pedda Timanna, touring the wharf on palanquins.
As a child Bindu had lived in a large mud hut crowded with parents, grandparents, widowed great-aunts, uncles and aunts-in-law, girl cousins, boy cousins and servants. She learned to sew, sing, cook, paint auspicious alpana designs on holy days, swim in the hyacinth-choked pond behind the hut, and chant a weekly prayer to Lord Shiva so he might direct a kindly, preferably motherless, husband her way.
“Why motherless?” asked Hannah.
“Fewer beatings.”
Then, at age ten, the unspeakable had happened. On her way upriver by barge to Nadia with three widowed aunts and a bachelor cousin for the funeral of a great-grandfather, she and her family had been set upon by river pirates. The cousin and two bargemen had been killed, the women robbed, and Bindu Bashini herself violated and thrown into the river. She’d been meant to drown. A dishonored Hindu girl couldn’t go back home. To have been abused was to have brought shame to the family for its failure to protect her.
She had swum against the current. She had scrambled up the muddy, sloping riverbank. She had survived. Mahouts washing an elephant had saved her. The elephant had lifted her from the water. Individual effort thwarted divine fate. She had neither wanted to, nor known how to, drown. So her relatives—all of them decent, affectionate men and women in untested times—had done the disowning in accordance with neighborly pressure and Hindu custom. Only cowards chose shameful life over honorable death.
“And so that’s the reason you worship the elephant god?” Hannah asked, remembering the crude drawings of elephant heads on human bodies she’d seen in Bhagmati’s sleeping room.
She smiled, but shook her head. “I don’t worship elephants,” she said.
Bindu, twice a victim, had run from her family, from her village, from all the familiar taboos and traditions. She’d kept running. She’d found herself a series of servant jobs, starting with buffalo and elephant washing. She’d staved off starvation in a hundred shameful ways. When she was twelve, she found work scrubbing the cooking pots in the house of an English factor in Hughli. Let her proud merchant family share in her shame! The factor’s name had been Henry Hedges. It was fate. He treated her like a slave, and then he treated her like a queen. He’d craved her with the urgency of an addiction.