Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [95]
She smelled the blood, vomit and feces of men yielding to panic, or to death, and heard the enemies’ eerie whoops of hate. Bhagmati tugged at her sari and held out the Raja’s ceremonial dagger. “Use it,” she said, “he would want you to.” So remote was Hannah from the meaning of the words that she at first looked around her for a likely enemy to kill, but then Bhagmati took a smaller knife of her own and made a single sharp thrust to her own stomach, stopping just before slashing herself open.
“This time, death is better,” she said.
But Hannah had Tringham’s faith. Nothing could happen to her, not from alien enemies.
“No, you mustn’t,” said Hannah, and she suddenly seized her servant’s arm and threw her down into the tall grass at the edge of the trail, where the bodies of fallen Hindus and Muslims were strewn like rocks at the bottom of a cliff. Hannah lay with her; they did not move.
The battle, what there was of it, consisted of one charge, one volley of response, hand-to-hand combat, heavy losses and the survival of the Muslim General. The winning soldiers scattered immediately, freed for the day to take their pleasures in neighboring villages, to loot them, kill the infidels, rape the women, burn the evidence.
In battle as in chess, positioning and superior numbers lead to the checkmating, the killing, of the King. King is fallen! she heard, early in the battle, and after that, the rest was hate and instinct battling on until the immediate lust, or the concept of honor, was placated.
Amid the bodies, Hannah lay across Bhagmati, their saris giving away their religion and putting them both at risk. She lay helpless, afraid to move for what seemed like hours, not flinching when bullets passed all around her and thudded into the ground, or tore into another body. Random or deliberate, she didn’t know.
There is a sound associated with battle scenes in that time and place, one of the few sounds in human history that have no analog. It is the sound of the elephant walk, the prerogative of the winning General to survey the scene atop his battle elephant, protected under a silken canopy in his high, upholstered howdah, which rests upon the elephant’s broad, flat back and is cinched around its girth. It is the sound a trained elephant makes as it untangles bodies from protective piles, rolling them over with its pink-tipped, bristly trunk; then, once the enemy corpses or the still-living bodies are laid out straight, the sound it makes as it plants a broad front foot directly on the face of each stretched-out body, grinding the head into a featureless mash with a calm, almost gentle, ruthlessness.
It is the sound of skulls caving in, of air expelled, of the human body treated like coconuts or sugarcane, a sound no different, really, from any great force exerted against any soft resistance. And that is the surprise, for the very few who have ever heard it: the human body is nothing very special, or very different from any small obstruction. In the eye of Brahma, Bhagmati used to say, the world is less than a grain of sand, all human lives less than anything clinging to it. Hannah remembered the Brookfield stories, the sounds of scalps ripping, like pulling up roots. It pleased her that in these last minutes of her life, as the elephant made its implacable approach, these were the thoughts the Lord God had planted in her brain.
She clung tightly to Bhagmati, but there was no resisting the second insistent shove of the elephant’s stiffened trunk, which toppled her from the mound of her servant’s body. Suddenly, all fears vanished. She would agree to die, but not in the way of some simple ant, some