Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [89]
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, the Raja sent her odd, occasional gifts. A small songbird in a silver cage. An oval black stone the size of her hand. A copy of Kautilya’s treatise, in Sanskrit. A basket of custard apples.
She was becoming like Bhagmati, making a fetish of his gifts, feeling his presence in the tokens he sent.
Before this longing, she had conceived of emptiness as absence, detectable only by the circumference within which it was contained. Now the void became a pleasureful pain, subsuming all the old Salem virtues such as duty and compassion. She wanted the Raja and nothing else; she would sacrifice anything for his touch and the love they made.
What she felt for the Raja was of a different order from what she had felt for Gabriel, or not dared feel for Hubert. Gabriel and Hubert, for all their distinctive eccentricities, were men cast in one familiar mold, men who thrilled and disappointed within a predictable range. The Raja was an agent of Providence. He had saved her life, then saved her from the chilly, unfulfilled life of a governess.
In hours alone that passed alternately like centuries, and then like instants, she began to believe that the only woman she’d ever known who could understand these feelings was her mother. She, too, lifted her gray tunic to the Raja when he entered, even with Bhagmati in the room. Her life had shrunk to something so intense, so small, yet so vast, that it wiped out the possibility of consequence as thoroughly as it erased all previous histories.
She turned the tower room in Panpur fort into a museum of indirect tokens. She embroidered samplers with rhymes Hubert had once recited and with sentiments of which Susannah Fitch would surely have been ashamed.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
or
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
When she bathed, she tattooed a pink alphabet of guilt all over her body with the fibrous roots Bhagmati had taught her to use as cleansing agents. She embroidered elaborate knuckle covers for Jadav Singh to use under his shields: scenes of Nipmuc warriors scalping amber-maned Puritans; a field of Massachusetts wildflowers (imagine the consternation of the first Sotheby’s catalog, trying to explain the origin of such transcontinental adumbration!). She hung shield covers, her pennants of love, in crowded rows from the ceiling. She fastened a sampler embroidered with snowdrops and crocuses on the window slit so she would not have to look out on the milling confidence, and strange cowardice, of the Nawab’s men. By day, she taught the songbird fanciful tunes from the Puritan service, as Rebecca had done with the Nipmuc women. But during the nights she suffered nightmares of war: the Nawab burned the Raja’s bright eyes with red-hot irons; the Nawab’s elephants trampled the Raja to death.
And then one evening Jadav Singh reappeared as though he had not been away harassing the Nawab’s scouts nor stealing the Nawab’s swift turki horses, and wooed her with sweetmeats and confidences.
To Hannah his life story was as alien as a gypsy’s. His birth had been prophesied to his mother after forty years of barrenness. Barrenness was a tragedy for all parents, but a queen’s barrenness was a catastrophe for all her subjects. Thrones vacated by the deaths of issueless kings were promptly usurped by Aurangzeb.
After thirty-eight years of barrenness (they had, of course, married as children), his father had taken on a second wife, the very young, very beautiful daughter of a minor Deccani raja. The elderly King became desperately aroused by the child-queen’s flat boyish body and lisping monotone of a voice. More than his throne, more than an heir, he craved his child-bride beyond all possibility of fulfillment. He banished his first wife to a small palace built of rose-tinged sandstone, delegated royal tasks to a war-weary general and an abstemious Brahman priest, and locked himself and his child-love inside a