The Mountain of Light (29 page)

“He died, you know, my brother's only son. Horace had specifically asked me to look after him, and I thought, since I am the publisher of the fine
Bombay Herald,
a letter of introduction from me to the Governor-General would get Lucius a post in the Council at least. What I had in mind for him was that military secretary title. How fine he would have been in his uniform then, eh, Mary?”

Mrs. Wingate nodded without enthusiasm. Lucius had been a spotty-faced boy of seventeen, who had somehow wrangled his way as an infantryman into the Forty-third regiment of the East India Company, and he had been happy enough there until her husband had decided that a boy with his charm and intelligence needed to be in Calcutta, not languishing under a burning Indian sun on march to some outpost. Or rather, his brother Horace had written to Harry Wingate to tell him he ought to think so and, to help him think so, had brought up a long-held debt. So Wingate had written to Lord Dalhousie, and the Governor-General had
thrown that letter into the garbage, and sent its deliverer, Lucius, to the jailhouse of the nearest regiment until he could be sent back to his own—as he was AWOL from it. The Persian carpets, the ivory-inlaid tea table, the fine china tea set that Harry Wingate had also sent along—he, Wingate, was sure had gone to fatten the personal treasury of the Governor-General.

Lucius had died within a week, having caught cholera—and literally not having been able to run from it—in the jail.

This Captain Ramsay who was to travel to England at Lord Dalhousie's behest was the military secretary—the very post Mr. Wingate had coveted for his nephew had gone to Dalhousie's nephew.

The next morning, before the
Bombay Herald
went to press, Mr. Wingate cheated Mr. Dossabhoy by carving out the bottom right-hand side of his advertisement, and took his revenge upon Lord Dalhousie by printing notice of his presence in Bombay—when, why, et cetera. He had finally decided to release this information because he couldn't see how it could be of any use to him at all since he couldn't get onto the HMS
Medea
—that ship was under a tight and rigorous guard.

Three hours after the paper came out there was an accident in the steam room of the HMS
Medea;
a fire began, and half the machinery was burned before the fire could be brought under control. That put the
Medea
out of commission. There were then no ships leaving the Bombay docks—civil or military—other than the SS
Indus,
a P & O steamer, winding its leisurely way up the Red Sea to Suez, where passengers would then go across the desert, and by the Nile to Alexandria, from there across the Mediterranean on another steamer, the SS
Oriental,
almost perfectly synchronized with the Bombay–Suez route, so that there would be no delay in arriving in England.

The article in the
Herald
appeared on one day; on the next another paper carried the news of the fire on the
Medea
.
Most of Bombay read both the papers. It wasn't
that
difficult to connect the two articles and form the same impression Mr. Wingate had.

As the days passed, W. C. Symes, principal agent at the Bombay offices of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company, sold a few more last-minute passages to England on the SS
Indus
.

•  •  •

Bombay Harbor lay on the eastern side of the group of seven islands that made up the city. Some sixty years ago, the islands had been coalesced into one with a series of causeways, creating a single landmass and making travel between the islands much easier. Bombay, and its various islands, had a deep history of various owners, one after another, until the Portuguese (whose presence in India predated even the Mughal emperors, let alone the British) acquired it. They built their Roman Catholic churches in earnest, brought their language into the city, and their culture and costumes. And all during Mughal rule in India, the Portuguese and the British butted against each other, jostling for supremacy at the Mughal court, deeply suspicious of the
other
foreigners in this alien land.

And then, in 1661, Charles II married the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza, and she brought the city of Bombay with her to England as part of her dowry. It was that simple. The British in India at that time, under Emperor Aurangzeb's Mughal rule, had had no need to fight for Bombay. The Emperor hadn't cared—his main Arabian Sea port, from which his ships traded and took Indian pilgrims on the Haj to Mecca and Medina, was at Surat, north of Bombay, and afforded enough deep-water moorage for all of his, and his nobles' needs.

Charles II agreed to rent out the city of Bombay—which
he had no intention of visiting and could barely dab at on a map—to the East India Company for the awesome sum of ten pounds sterling a year. The Company offices were established in Bombay soon after the Court of Directors signed the lease for the city.

The port at Bombay Harbor was called Apollo Bandar—its name as much of a hybrid as were the people of Bombay. The British anglicized the Portuguese
pollem,
for the palla fish sold at the docks, and adopted the
Bandar,
which meant port, from Persian.

Here, on the eastern side of Bombay Island, spreading north up its face, were the P & O landing docks, the Bombay Yacht Club, the cotton baling stations, the Customs House, the quarantine area, Fort George and its Treasury, which held, at the moment, the Kohinoor diamond. Only a few people knew where exactly the Kohinoor was in Bombay, and Mr. Wingate was one. But thanks to him, almost everyone in Bombay who read the
Herald
knew that it was somewhere in the city.

At the P & O dock in Apollo Bandar, the SS
Indus
lay quiet at her moorings two nights before she was due to sail to Suez. She was one of the Company's biggest paddle steamers, weighing about seventeen hundred tons, with engines at twelve hundred horsepower, and a maximum speed of eight knots. She had one large smokestack rising from the center of her deck, imprinted with the P & O motto—
Quis separabit
—who shall separate us.

The
Indus
had been built in the dry docks at Glasgow by a local shipbuilding company, to the P & O's specifications. From the very beginning, she had been intended for use in India and so given her name—that of a mighty river in the Punjab and, some four thousand years ago, of an even mightier civilization in the valley of that river. Her first voyage had been her longest, and it had taken her from her frigid birthplace south into the warm waters off the coasts of Africa,
around the Cape of Good Hope, until she had traveled up the Arabian Sea to the dock at Bombay.

The
Indus
was a trim two hundred and eight feet in length, forty feet wide, twenty-three feet deep. At full capacity, she could carry twenty-one first-class passengers and fifty-three second-class passengers. Her captain and crew made up another thirty-six people onboard.

As night fell over Bombay—almost at the same time every day of the year—no twilight dawdled in the sky and darkness plunged down to claim all of India. Lamps and lanterns flared all around the dock and on the deck of the
Indus
. It had been blisteringly hot during the day, with a white heat that had driven everyone inside, but with the coming of the night, activity began. Three large gangplanks, on wheels, were guided to the ship.

The night watchman, an old man with a sea-roughened face, sat on his haunches against the shadowed wall of the Customs House and lit a
beedi
. His lantern was attached to the end of a long wooden stick, which now lay on the ground, the lantern's wick turned so low as to be just a spot of wavering blue and gold. Every twenty-five days or so came the nights when the
Indus
was laden with provisions for her trip to the Suez, and at those times, he left off walking his rounds around the dock, or dozing quietly by the main gate, and sat here, watching over the men and the ship.

He could not see very well anymore. Old age, he thought, stroking his free hand over the contours of his bald head with a half ring of hair around the bottom. The workers were a mere blur, the lights much brighter, dimming briefly as the men moved between him and them, carrying large sacks of food and supplies. He hadn't told the dockmaster about his eyesight, especially at night, and how the shadows melded one into another. But he had worked on these docks fifty-five years, ever since he was a boy of fifteen, and knew every pier, every landing, every building old and new—for he had explored
them during the day and during the night—every smell, every sound, and every shape that didn't belong. The map of the docks was engraved in his heart. Here he had lived, and here he would die. There was no retirement for this man.

“Chachaji,” a voice said softly next to him.

He canted his head toward the sound and grunted. “So you are here, finally?”

The younger man bent to find and touch his uncle's feet, and then raised his hand to daub at his eyes.
“Pranam,”
he said.

“Sit,” the uncle said. He still hadn't turned his head to look at his nephew. Instead, he listened as his brother's son settled comfortably on the floor, his shoulders thumping against the wall, his breath even and youthful. The older man sniffed in the air. His nephew smelled clean, and so healthy—fed on the purest butter from the Lahore cows which grazed on the banks of the Ravi River; milk from their udders, fresh and warm and frothy; the wheat that had ripened in his brother's fields, threshed in wholesome winds, ground into flour by his sister-in-law in the courtyard of the house. This boy was their last child, born late into the marriage; his confinement had caused his sister-in-law, who was then an ancient thirty-five years old, a great deal of embarrassment.

“Are you married?” he asked.

“
Ji,
Chachaji,” the younger man replied. “Thirty years now—four sons and two daughters. The girls are married into the village, good houses. And my sons farm the land. They did not . . . want to go into my profession.”

The night watchman nodded, his heart heavy. “I never understood why your father wanted to be a servant—”

“That was only at the beginning; when he learned of gems and jewels, he became one of the most respected men in Lahore.”

“True. And I left the Punjab when I was fifteen, ran away from home because I had a fight with your grandfather
and”—he spread a hand outward—“came here to Bombay. Every day the city gets more crowded; every person is unusual, comes from elsewhere, has a varied history, looks different, speaks in a foreign tongue.” He sighed and with shaking fingers took out a
beedi
he had rolled in a cloth and tied around his waist. He did not offer one to his nephew, who though a man, a husband, a father of many years, was still much too young to smoke in front of him, and he would not allow such disrespect.

“I've only been here for two days, Chachaji.” The younger man shifted about, his gaze fixed on the ship across the expanse of concrete where figures scurried onto the gangplanks, backs bent under the weight of gunnysacks, grumbles audible, the flap of their bare feet loud until they crested the deck, where they paused, outlined against the blue-black of the sky and the glitter of the stars, and then disappeared down the holds. “It's a”—he hesitated, searching for the word in his unlettered vocabulary—“city of . . . unbelievers.”

“There's no soul here,” his uncle agreed. “A lot of places for worship, but no place a heart can call a home.” He drew in a lungful of smoke, exhaled, and listened as his nephew's breathing quickened in the thin gray fog that surrounded them. The boy wanted a
beedi,
but he wouldn't ask for one, or take one out of his own pocket.

“You have been happy here, Chachaji?”

“After a fashion,” the old man said in comfortable rumble. “I could not go back to the Punjab after fighting with your grandfather; I had too much pride in my chest. And so, I haven't seen your father . . . or my other brothers for so many years now. A letter every now and then has been the most I've had, like the one that informed me of your coming here. Written by your father's own hand. We have never learned to read and write in our family—how proud your grandfather must have been. How is he? How is my brother?”

“Old,” the younger man said with a smile that was lost
in the darkness, but not in the inflection of his voice. “And dying. My father's heart has been broken, shattered—there's no mending it.”

The night watchman allowed the
beedi
to burn down between his thumb and index finger. And so death must come to all of them, he thought. Displaced, dislocated, dislodged here in Bombay, he still remembered the sweet, clean aroma of a summer morning in the fertile plains around the Ravi River, the song of the
koyal,
the calluses cutting through the young skin of his hands as he reaped the wheat. Of the fight with his father, he remembered nothing at all; only that he had had a point to make and had made it by exiling himself from his birth land and his family. His brothers had stayed on, grown up, married, had children . . . their children had married and had their own children, and in the last few years the Punjab had burned down from an Empire into a holding of the British. Much as Bombay had always been. They all had the white Sahib for a master now.

And so, each engrossed in his own thoughts, the old man and his nephew watched the steady stream of goods into the
Indus
's hold. To anyone else, these provisions would have seemed gross, a flagrant amassing of food and drink for a few weeks spent at sea, enough to feed many armies, frittered away on just a few. But the night watchman had guarded the docks for many years, and had seen many steamers boarded with mounds of groceries; his nephew had worked in the court of the Maharajah Ranjit Singh, who had owned the Kohinoor diamond as just one of his luxurious possessions among lands, rivers, streams, gullies, mountains, and palaces.