Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [99]
With serene fingers the Queen Mother folded a bloodied shred of her son’s battle vest. The blood of her son did not sadden her. She said, “A mother’s duty is to place the needs of her son above her fears. A wife’s duty is to walk through fire to please her husband. A king’s duty is to sacrifice himself for his subjects.”
When Bhagmati finished translating, she added: “You see why I prayed for a motherless husband?”
“I am neither wife nor queen,” Hannah retorted. A bibi had the right, the duty, to live for love. Gabriel’s black bibi had seized happiness for Gabriel and for herself; a bibi had the power to laugh in the face of a firangi wife.
She slept beside him on the terrace floor, changing the bandages, applying the cooling ointments, administering the barks and herbs. Five days later, the Raja awoke, spoke briefly, and fell back asleep. Ten days after the operation he awoke for good and discovered his right arm hung limp and could not be moved. Had he been stronger, he would have found his dagger and killed himself with a single blow of his weak left arm.
His grief set the palace to weeping. The helplessness of the King turned the whole palace barren. The old Queen called for the expulsion of the witch who had done the only thing worse than murdering him. She had dishonored him, made him unable to function, the way old Hasan Beg had taken a broom, and then a shoe, to her husband when he had refused to leave his palace. The old Shia King had been properly beheaded. Her husband had been laughed at and forced, ignominiously, to take his own life.
So now Hannah knew. The war of the broom. The war of the shoe.
She had him where she wanted him, on a bed, unable to move, ready at last to listen. She confessed her love for him, her wish to marry him in the eyes of whatever gods he proposed. The condition of his arm in no way disqualified him. It might even make him listen.
“What good am I to my people—a king who cannot raise his arm in battle? When a tiger grows old, the younger ones must drive him out,” he said. “I must die.”
“Leave this,” she said. “Come home with me.”
“Leave?” It was an obscene idea, to alter one’s fate, to abandon one’s duty. The Gita said the Spirit is not an old garment, changed at will. Only when life is over does the duty, the garment, change. All he said was, “Land of Higginbottham.”
“England is not my home. My home is America.”
“America, England. Fort St. George, Pondicherry.” He sighed. “Same.”
“My father was your age when he left England and came to America. He was a clerk, and he became a farmer. My stepfather was a farmer in the woods, and he became a carpenter in the city. My husband was a factor, and he became a pirate. I was once a respectable married English lady and look at me now—a bibi in a sari. We can all change.”
And she thought, My mother, my mother. I must see my mother.
“What change do you propose for a one-armed king?”
“He is going to become a one-armed father.”
He stared out at the high blue sky, with just its normal allotment of circling buzzards. “My mother had a premonition. She said you cast a spell—”
“I am with child for the usual reasons.”
The Raja slowly sat up at the side of the bed. Then he stood, plucked the sleeve of his right arm, lifted the dead weight inside and let it flop. She reached for him, but he sidestepped her.
“A very long time ago it now seems, when I was still a young man, you asked me how you would know when you were no longer welcome. I said when you were no longer fed the sweetest grass—”
“I remember,” she said.
He gathered himself up into the semblance of a raja, striking a pose with his left arm out. “The women’s rooms are attached to my mother’s palace. You … and your child will always have a place. As I promised. You will not need a personal servant, but she is a loyal worker, and there is a place for her as well.”
She did not see him again until the night of the fearful final panel in the Salem Bibi series.
I HAD NO elephant for the climb to Devgad fort; I