Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [87]
When a man craves you like that, you feel very powerful, said Bhagmati. Dressed in similar clothes, sharing the same space and the same fate, the distance had vanished between them.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Hannah.
Would Henry Hedges have moved her to London? Certainly not at the beginning of their long, strange relationship. But toward the end, he was talking about it; he would train her in the English arts, in cooking his strange foods. “Joints,” she suddenly giggled, “Hedges-sahib loved joints on Sunday.” She might have gone. She trusted absolutely Hedges’ ability to keep foreignness at bay, just as she trusted Raja Jadav Singh to keep her safe. But when Hannah had offered to take her to England, she had refused to go. It wasn’t religious. She could not conceive of England without Hedges. She preferred to keep his shrine alive, to walk the parapets in his clothes, in her queenly silks, than to abandon him to the Coromandel Coast.
5
HANNAH GOT a glimpse of Raja Jadav Singh and his subedar that evening. She was standing at the only window slit of her tower room when the two men, similar in attire and appearance, with the same mustaches, colorful turbans wrapped in the same manner, pinned in the middle with rubies and pearls, rode up the steep ribbon-narrow trail and over the drawbridge on frisky, short-legged tattu horses. They led a small band of wounded cavalry. For besieged men, they seemed absurdly lighthearted. The Lion glanced up in the direction of her tower, and though he couldn’t possibly have spied her—she took care to stand far back from the window slit—he let a smile hover on his lips.
Such a gentle-looking face, she thought; the eyes so large and luminous, the smile unforced.
Soon the party of warriors and attendants moved out of her limited focus. The shrieks of aghast wives, the tuneful laments of widows, the jangle of agitated anklets floated up from the courtyard.
Hannah felt she had entered a world whose simplest rules about the saintly and the villainous were unknown to her. She had no way to measure new experiences and nothing in her old life with which to compare them. She needed to hold on to objects, to be able to name and memorize the new.
Even above the shrieking, the obvious suffering, she heard music from the inner palace. That Indian music she sometimes heard on her solitary walks in Black Town. King David, she thought, remembering her Scriptures, was he not the Lion of Judah? Shepherd and king, cruel and kindly, a soldier, a musician. A voluptuary. The general he killed to claim the widow. The bitter old man who lost his rebellious son. Founder of the line of Christ.
But what were the designs of this Lion? Singh, she knew, meant “lion,” but she’d never taken Indian names literally. The lowliest servants in White Town had been named Rama and Vishnu, and every third person was a Mohammed. Had the Raja plucked her to safety from an angry mob on a raging river out of a royal instinct for chivalry? Or was he just another schemer—like Chief Factors Prynne and Higginbottham, like the unscrupulous Marquis and the self-serving Pedda Timanna, like Gabriel himself, who had tried in their selfish ways to “rescue” her? Was he merely using her, a firangi haj-insulter’s widow, to taunt his potent enemy, Aurangzeb, the Grand Badshah?
Or could she say, like Bhagmati, that it had not been her fate to die that day? The Raja, like Bindu Bashini’s elephant, was simply there, part of a design.
The next morning Raja Jadav Singh visited. Hannah was amazed at how rested he looked in spite of his recent skirmish with the well-armed soldiers of the Nawab. He addressed her in English. To her expressions of gratitude and then her simple question “Why?” he answered, “I was not looking to save you, or anyone. I am not in the habit of pulling bodies out of the water.”
His face had the warm tint of almond shells.