In 1871 Père-Lachaise did not yet have a wait-list, and citizens of all kinds—pace, Napoléon—were embraced in its loamy arms. The 147 Communards who were, on the final day of la semaine sanglante, shot against the wall there, were buried there, not far from where they had been executed. (You can visit them now, and many do.) But let us now be exact: of the 147 slain fédérés, 146 of them made their final home in Père-Lachaise. One of their number did not. And that would be number 6.
Sometime in the very early hours of Monday, 29th May, three dark-hued men in sailors’ attire—had this been London, they would have been referred to as lascars—took advantage of the fact that most Parisians were elsewise occupied and slipped into the eastern cemetery. They departed with a body in a muslin sack, leaving behind an empty casket. They assumed that no one would care and in that they were correct.
The men—we will, for the sake of convenience, continue to call them lascars, though it may be noted that none among them have made previous appearance in our tale—had been given a set of instructions, uttered in vivo, now executed posthumously. He had told them he was not to be buried in Père-Lachaise, no. There was another journey yet to make. To his wife, with whom he wished to be reunited.
Accordingly they took the body of number 6 to a slaughterhouse in La Villette. There it was carried to the furnace. They stood round it, heads lowered, as the body was reduced to ash, and as the smoke rose toward the skies.
It is of course unclear what transpires after death as none of us here have been to that land. But let us assume that the smoke bearing the spirit of our prince, our captain, our number 6, ascended. And that in some sky or sea unknowably high above the earth, the prince’s smoke and spirit found its companion: his bride, who had long ago herself been rendered as smoke and ash. Some fourteen years before, and in faraway land.
FIFTY-FIVE
THE SKY SPREADS out before her like the blue sunlit cloudless sky of Zuber wallpaper. (Hand-blocked, panoramic, the motif called L’Hindoustan.) The flames ripple the air, a disturbance in the field of vision. The flames are impossibly hot; they cannot be endured. But on the other side of this moment, an eternity: her children, her husband, and all the time in the world. Even as the flames grow higher, the fires hotter, the pain now in excess of what can be borne.
The images in her mind are not those of the present. What she sees when she closes her eyes are nighttime flames: long wooden sticks, wrapped tightly at the top with rags, dipped in oil, set afire. Hundreds of them, lighting up the village. The night before she and her prince are to be joined in marriage. She sees it now, spread out before her in panorama, as if she were watching her own life from distant vantage.
Full moonlight. There were to be a thousand in attendance but there are sevenfold that number now on the vast lawn behind Orchha Palace. Some brought with them sweets of boiled milk; others—when the food provided by the palace was gone—purchased fried noodles served in small cups made of leaves.
Closer, on the vast lawn on either side of the Orchha Palace gates, are the special guests of the Political Agent. Here each plate is heaped up beyond demand. Fruit from Bombay, cakes from Delhi, beans from Allahabad, tinned foods from elsewhere. There are small fish with silver scales, caught on the high seas, preserved in oil, tinned in Iberia, now somehow here, in Bundelkhand, prized open for their benefit.
The Agent has mounted a small raised platform, no more than a foot high, and he is speaking to the assembled guests: “Every man is pleased when his rights are regarded.” Just beyond the palace a larger crowd, awaiting debris, remains, jetsam. Jostling, now shoving, their sweeper trays thrust out before them, singing, speaking— Then silent. All pausing now, for the arrival of the Procession.
At the head of the Procession are State officials, men all, older all, in long silk robes and bright-colored turbans. There are many of them. Even in rows of three it takes the longest while for them to pass.
As they advance through the village the flare and flicker of the torches is augmented by Chinese rockets; and the noise of men and horse and crowd supplemented, too, by trumpet voluntary.
Now from the western road come the elephants, their hides gone silver in the moon’s blue light. They swing their great trunks side to side. There are five of them. They are draped with tapestries of silver and of gold, and on their backs haudas of silver and ivory, haudas within which men, dressed in satin, hold parasols and feathery fans. On the great feet of the elephants are silver anklets, bells that tinkle lightly with each heavy step.
The last hauda is vacant. The elephant has no rider save his mahout, cross-legged on the gray beast’s head, guiding it with sharp metal rod. The elephant is a gift to the prince and no one may ride it but the prince himself. Madhya watches from the crosshatched window. The prince is elsewhere. But soon: here.
She steps forward, allowing her face to be glimpsed behind the lattice. It is her night. The State and the men and women of Bundelkhand have come to pay her their respects. Yesterday she was a daughter and tomorrow she will be a bride. On this night alone she casts her own shadow.
The camels and their riders now arrive from the eastern road. They are the final converging column and they take their time, knowing nothing can transpire until they are in place.
The horses, the elephants, the camels, all still now. There is no sound but there is light from a carpet of flaming torches. The low, earthy scent of animals, the high acrid scent of combusting oil, carried up by air and heat to the window behind which Madhya is contained—, silent, solitary, amidst a city of thousands convened to behold her.
The first avatar is the sound, the distant sound of breath, many breaths in synchrony, 3,000 breaths, 6,000 lungs from the throng at the far end of the central road. Intake and hold. Now there, now there, now there, now here.
In the inhaled silence Madhya can hear the hooves on packed dirt. The other beasts—the horses, the elephants, the camels—had arrived in cohorts. This one is alone.
A stallion, a black Arabian stallion trapped with silver. It has a rider. The rider is a Tikka Raja, is a prince, is Prince Dakkar of Bundelkhand.
His garment is cut in the traditional way: long, double-breasted, with a bib set into the front. It is trimmed in gold. His crown is six pounds of pure gold. The royal device, intaglio’d into the soft gold, is a circle atop a circle, the smaller perched atop the larger. The ratio of the two circles is 3:11, that of the diameter of the Moon to the diameter of the Earth. Three divided by eleven is 27.3, which is the length, in days, of the lunar cycle. These are things Prince Dakkar knows. These are things Prince Dakkar keeps in his head. The crown circles his head, a planet orbiting its sun.
Now the great doors swing open, all inhale, and in that still moment between heartbeats the prince rides through. Camels, elephants, other fine horses all remain here. The prince is there. Outside the palace, they stand on tiptoe to see. They cannot see. Can see only: the large wooden doors, suspended on their newly greased hinges, pulled shut from the inside.
Madhya in her latticed room looks down at sharp angle into the moonlit courtyard. She sees her prince, no longer on horseback but standing on the courtyard’s packed earth. Sees his crown. Knows that were she to see his eyes they would be filled with love. Knows it without the necessity of proof.
The priest extends his arms in front of him, palms up, a cradle. Into that cradle the Prince Dakkar places a small wooden box. Up here: Madhya watches. Down there: the title to her life is being transferred.
She has been told by her older sisters that this is normal. That the less she knows, the more she will understand. It is a paradox, Surya told her, combing out her younger sister’s long hair with a brush of thick boar’s bristle. Like the paradox of sex? Madhya asks. But there are only silences. Silences, or high, silly giggles, as if of pleasure, or of embarrassment vividly recalled.
On this week of weeks Madhya’s parents are full of pride, her sisters full of pride and envy. She is about to wed a prince. Her life i
s about to change forever. What does this mean? Will she still be, a week from now, herself? If—as the elephants, the camels, the horses, all seem to indicate—if she will be, a week from now, a different person in a different place— Who will she be?
This is the culmination of all her father had worked for, and his father before him, and his father before him, as was, as was. This is the moment when the beauty and grace of Madhya’s great-grandmother, that legendary beauty and grace, appeared once more, this time with the moon and stars even more propitiously aligned. Every third generation, her mother told her, there is one who justly can aspire. It was Madhya’s mother’s mother’s mother whose marriage to a successful gold merchant lifted the family from its terrible home. Now it is Madhya. And Madhya’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter. It is hard to imagine. What could be better than to marry a prince? Than to become princess? To stand, with grace and charm, beside him, to bear his children?
There is no better fate. This is what she has been told. This is what she knows. This is what she almost knows.
* * *
—
MADHYA HEARS THE opening of Orchha’s inner door. The steps, soft leather on stone. Her father is climbing the stairs. Soon he will knock on the door. He has something to show her. Down in the courtyard: her prince remounts the stallion. Outside the elephants move slowly back, the camels clear a path for the departing prince that he may ride off into the night, to the sound of firecrackers and applause, and, as he gains the wider road, the son et lumière of cannon and sky rockets, trumpets and shouts, echoing far into the silvered night.
Tomorrow night the prince will once more gain the courtyard. Tomorrow night the prince will dismount, and the stallion will remain without rider. She will hear his footsteps on the stairs, his and his alone. The crowd, sated by the day’s ceremonies, will have begun its dispersal. That night will be for husband and bride.
Now it is day and now it is hot and the moon is nowhere to be seen in the rippled sky. Only blue sky white smoke and heat.
She remembers the night before her wedding and she remembers her imagining of the night after the wedding, but she cannot, now, recall the day itself. It is too much day, and she needs memories of the night; the sun and flames are far too intense, and she can recall only the lattice, the courtyard, the moon, the full and silvered moon.
The memory no match now for sunlight, heat, flames.
The preparation administered by her amah, a tincture of opiates, has made her slow, lazy. Her head lolls back against the woven restraint. She looks out at odd angle across the field. The town, a good kilometer away, is vague, wispish, distorted by the heat in the air, by the tincture. Nearer, in the foreground, the flames are slow, liquid. There is no middle ground.
Against the terrible heat, against the inevitability of the flames, Madhya’s vision again turns inward. A shard of an image, then another, then several. The memories coming more quickly now. They cling and tumble, a kaleidoscope turned by rapid hand. Horses, elephants, robes of flame and saffron. A train quitting the dusty station, gathering force, the engine straining against the weight and inertia, clouds of dense white steam, dense black smoke. And on the train, growing smaller and more distant with each tick of the station clock: a prince, the prince, her prince.
She recalls now her first communication with the man who would become her husband. It was a page torn neatly from a Hoe & Co.’s Premier Diary, printed in Stringers Street in Madras, a compendium of useful facts: calendars fixed, calendars moveable, postal information, registration fees. This particular page, entitled “Postal and Telegraphic Information,” contained a Numerical Table: so that correspondents conveying common phrases, common greetings, might send number rather than phrase. (At 2.80 rupees per telegraphed word, economy of language was of the essence.) Heartiest Diwali Greetings could be conveyed by sending the numeral “1.” Ib Mubarik would be “2.” Heartiest Bijoya Greetings would be “3,” Heartiest Congratulations on your Success in the Examination would be “10.” There were 27 in all. The one against which she placed a near-imperceptible dot of red ink was numeral 16— May Heaven’s Choicest Blessings be Showered on the Young Couple. She had that neatly torn page conveyed to him by trusted intermediaries. She knew he would understand; and then he did.
The diary page rises, flutters, floats away on memory’s wind. Here now is the ivory ball, the white ball in the dark box, the gift tendered to the prince by her father as dowry. It was carved by hands smaller and more precise than Madhya could imagine, an impossibly delicate intaglio. Within the ball was another ball, and within that another. She had assumed that it had been crafted from elephant tusk, but once, speaking of something else, her father had said that this was water ivory, not land ivory. She imagined the whale. The large whale, now spouting on the surface of the waters, now beneath them, larger than any elephant, larger than all the wedding elephants together, they would nest within the whale like the smallest seed of ivory at the center of a carved-out ball. Like the sun, within the wide and final orbit of the outermost planet, the blue planet Neptune.
That ivory ball, that gift, presented to the prince, tied the fate of Madhya to the fate of Prince Dakkar. It was done that night, the night of moon- and torch-light, in a small secluded courtyard while thousands outside held their breath. And because of that night, this day. The children she had borne Prince Dakkar, a boy and a girl—Hanuman! and Rani!—put to sleep gently one new-moon night and by sun’s rise both dead, throats slit wide, tales of British skirmishers clad in black rappelling up the palace wall, committing unspeakable crimes, departing as silently as they’d arrived. (Someone in the palace must have given them a map. Someone in the palace must have been rewarded handsomely. May their souls be forever condemned throughout all time.)
Then, even as she was still in darkest grief—that of mother for dead child, the darkest grief that can be known or imagined—came to Bundelkhand three horsemen from Oudh. They were taken in, their horses fed. They were given tea. And when all were gathered and seated, they gave out their news, the news that Dakkar, Prince Dakkar, Madhya’s husband Prince Dakkar, had been killed in battle. Was hit by a curved-trajectory shell, a Mallet’s Mortar, designed in Woolwich to aid in the siege of Sebastopol. The Crimean War ended before the Mallet’s Mortar could be deployed but now one of them had found its way to India; and one of the shells hurled by the Mallet’s Mortar has found its way to the band of Prince Dakkar. Death to all within range was instantaneous and there were no remains.
Madhya cannot hear their words. Cannot hear anything. See anything. The veil of grief is full, black, and blots out the sun. A day passes. A night, another day. She touches neither food nor water. There is only one certitude now, repeating without cease, until all else has been dispelled.
To live is to die. To die is to live.
The veil of black grief slowly parts, admitting this one ray of sunlight. Illuming the path. The path to Dakkar, to Rani, to Hanuman. It is, to Madhya, the only path. Sati. She summons to her chamber only those who cannot defy her will. Tells them in plain words what must be done.
The next morning the widow of the late Prince Dakkar is sedated, is bound, is carried to this field. Her body will be sublimated. Her soul will be freed. He is in another place and so a pyre has been crafted that his wife may join him there.
The pain has increased beyond the recoil of nerve endings. No longer pain but transport.
The first time they were parted the young prince was borne away by steam-engine train. He left land for water, town for globe. Now she is traveling to him, by steam, by fire, by smoke. She loves him, this she knows. The Hindoo holy men who prepared the sati had poured substantial quantities of clove and cardamom onto the faggots, aromatic offerings, that her final sensations not be the acrid scorch of her own burnt flesh.
She recalls the cloves from when she was a wife, the rose water from when she was a mother, the cardamom from when she was a princess. But she is no longer mother, princess, wife; and soon
there will no longer be a Bundelkhand, for when a prince dies and leaves no heirs the Honourable Company will annex it. ‘Tis what they did in Satara, in Jaitpore and Sambalpore, in Nagpore and Jhansi, in Tanjore and Arcot, then in Oudh. ‘Tis the Doctrine. And now even Bundelkhand will belong to the Company.
What Madhya recalls now: the high salty pain of children taken from her, the horse-and-saddle musk of the men from Oudh—the Sikh, the bellied merchant—who came to tell her of Dakkar’s death. The char and smoke of the burning wood, burning flesh. Compared to all that has come before this seems simple, cleansing, just. The flames are her palanquin, transporting her down a long path, away from the house of suffering which even now recedes in the distance.
Her last thought is not a thought at all, but an image: of a blue and pacific planet, the planet Neptune, discovered just eleven years previous, marking the farthest known reach of bodies trapped by the sun.
FIFTY-SIX
WHEN THAT FURNACE in La Villette was shut down and the ashes of our sailor were cool enough to touch they were placed in a leather satchel and taken by the lascars from Villette down the rue du Faubourg du Temple, to the rue du Temple, to the rue Ste.-Avoye, to the rue Barre du Bec, down to the quai Pelletier. They proceeded on foot. It was, in effect, a funeral procession, but no one looking at them would know that. They walked slowly as if out for a promenade, not wanting to arouse the attentions of an occupying army.
Then they walked across the pont Notre Dame, past the flower merchants of the quai Desaix where they paused to purchase some white roses. From there they made their way west on the quai de l’Horloge, home to the clockmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet, into whose care Isambard Kingdom Brunel had been entrusted while matriculating at the Lycée Henri-IV. The same Breguet who some twenty-seven years later had been visited by a young Indian prince, and who for that prince had fashioned an exquisite four-footed clock.
The Great Eastern Page 34