Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [92]
She had not been raised in a world of savagery, not on the scale of India. The vast inequalities, as well as the injustice and superstitions of India, seemed to her unnatural and unbearable. And yet it was here in India that she felt her own passionate nature for the first time, the first hint that a world beyond duty and patience and wifely service was possible, then desirable, then irresistible. In her former life, the possibility of intense pleasure was as remote from her as the likelihood of abject suffering. In old Salem, from her mother’s shameful example and under the Fitches’ tutelage, she’d thought capitulation to pleasure, outside of convention, was a sin. In New Salem with Gabriel she’d equated being happy with not being unhappy. She had felt no love, not as she now understood it, for Gabriel. For the first time, she pitied him for never having known her, and she even wished him happiness with his bibi. In Panpur fort’s scorpion-rife rooms and lizard-infested terraces, she’d come to understand the aggressive satiety of total fulfillment.
And she knew, for the first time, the contradictions of a passionate nature. She wanted to run down to the interior courtyard, where the wounded and the dying and breast-beating parents, wives and husbands were congregated, and throw herself into nursing them all, not eating or sleeping until their flesh and bones were mended, ashamed of her happiness, wishing herself as mutilated as they. The next moment, she could not imagine their survival, their future, nor her possible connection to any of them, and not seeing herself or her lover belonging with them, she would have scourged them from the face of the earth.
The stench of living flesh carried across the courtyard, up the turrets to the balcony. The raped wives and daughters of limbless peasants broke into the zenana, beat Bhagmati and set fire to her Hedges shrine. They wanted to die, but there were no daggers to fall upon. Protective eunuchs, wakened from their sentry duty outside the zenana apartments, blocked the doors and pushed them away.
The world was rotting; there was no honor, no protection. These people were innocents, the troops were innocents, but corruption was everywhere. Peace brought profit to everyone, but peace was a curse word on the Coromandel Coast. She had traveled the world, a witness to unimagined visions, merely to repeat her mother’s folly, and to live her mother’s life over.
IT TOOK the apparition of Bhagmati, her face and neck scratched, nose and lips split open, to wake the drowsing Raja. “The villagers have no food,” she cried, under the lovers’ balcony. “The soldiers will mutiny.”
The loyal subedar, his near double, had been killed outside the gates, his body thrown to the crocodiles. The Raja sent his most persuasive minister to Higginbottham, requesting English gunners and long-range guns in exchange for rebates on indigo prices, but the Englishman, loyal tool of the Nawab, refused to meet him.
From her pink stone palace in Devgad, two days to the interior, the Queen Mother goaded her son with real or imagined perils: the Emperor had razed Devgad’s holiest of temples! The Emperor had erected a mother-of-pearl mosque on the desecrated altar of God Vishnu! Lion, the Queen Mother pleaded through the humble mouths of messengers, cease your slumbering! Return to assert your power. The messengers were trapped by spies and led in chains to the tent of punishment to have their feet and hands cut off.
A cornered rat, Jadav Singh withdrew to a windowless cell in the corner of the fort, into a foodless and waterless period of meditation.
7
BEFORE DAWN Jadav Singh had made up his mind to beg for a truce, then slip out of besieged Panpur before the truce was signed. Devgad, fifty miles to the interior, was more defendable and more fully provisioned. From Devgad he would launch the battle of his life against World-Taker Aurangzeb. The decision made him happy, a singing, smiling,