Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 67 (всего у книги 78 страниц)

INDIA

1

NO sooner had our vessel cast off from the Akyab dock than Tofaa Devata said to me, very primly, “Marco-wallah,” and began to lay down rules for our good behavior while we traveled together.

Since I was no longer being a Lord Justice, I had given her leave to address me less formally, and she told me that the -wallah was a Hindu suffixion which denoted both respect and friendliness. I had not given her leave, as well, to preach at me. But I listened politely and even managed not to laugh.

“Marco-wallah, you must realize that it would be a grave sin for us to lie together, and exceedingly wicked in the sight of both men and gods. No, do not look so stricken. Let me explain, and you will be less heartbroken by your unrequited yearning. You see, your judicial decision resolved that dispute back yonder in Akyab, but without deciding on the merits of the opposing arguments, so those arguments must still be taken into account in our relationship. On the one hand, if my dear late husband was still my husband at his death, then I am still sati, unless and until I remarry, so you would be committing the very worst of sins when you lay with me. If, for example, over yonder in India, we were caught in the act of surata, you would be sentenced to do surata with a fire-filled, incandescent brass statue of a woman, until you scorched and shriveled horribly to death. And then, after death, you would have to abide in the underworld called Kala, and suffer its fires and torments, for as many years as there are pores on my body. On the other hand, if I am now technically the slave of that Akyab creature who won me at dice, then your lying with me, his slave woman, would make you also legally his slave. In any event, I am of the Brahman jati—the highest of the four jati divisions of Hindu humankind—and you are of no jati at all, and therefore inferior. So, when we lay together, we would be defying and defiling the sacred jati order, and in punishment we would be thrown to those dogs trained to eat such heretics. Even if you were gallantly willing to risk that frightful death by raping me, I am still held to be an equal defiler and subject to the same grisly punishment. If it is ever known in India that you put your linga into my yoni, whether I actively engulf it or only passively spread myself for it, we are both in terrible disgrace and peril. Of course I am not a kanya, a green and unripe and flavorless virgin. Since I am a widow of some experience, not to say talent and ability and a capacious, warm, well-lubricated zankha, there would be no physical evidence of our sin. And I daresay these barbarian sailors would take no notice of what we civilized persons might do in private. So it would probably never be known in my homeland that you and I had reveled in ecstatic surata out here on the gentle ocean waters under the caressing moon. But we must desist as soon as we touch my native land, for all Hindus are most adept at scenting the least whiff of scandal, and crying shame and jeering nastily, and demanding bribes to keep silent about it, and then gossiping and tattling anyway.”

She had exhausted either her breath or the myriad aspects of the subject, so I said mildly, “Thank you for the useful instruction, Tofaa, and set your mind at ease. I will observe all the proprieties.”

“Oh.”

“Let me suggest just one thing.”

“Ah!”

“Do not call the crewmen sailors. Call them seamen or mariners.”

“Ugh.”

The Sardar Shaibani had gone to some trouble to find for us a good ship, not a flimsy Hindu-built coasting dinghi, but a substantial lateen-rigged Arab qurqur merchant vessel that could sail straight across the vast Bay of Bangala instead of having to skirt around its circumference. The crew was composed entirely of some very black, wiry, extraordinarily tiny men of a race called Malayu, but the captain was a genuine Arab, sea-wise and capable. He was taking his ship to Hormuz, away west in Persia, but had agreed (for a price) to take me and Tofaa as far as the Cholamandal. That was an open-sea, no-sight-of-land crossing of some three thousand li, about half as far as my longest voyage to date: the one from Venice to Acre. The captain warned us, before departure, that the bay could be a boat-eater. It was crossable only between the months of September and March—we were doing it in October—because only in that season were the winds right and the weather not murderously hot. However, during that season, when the bay had got itself nicely provided with a copious meal of many vessels bustling east and west across its surface, it would frequently stir up a tai-feng storm and capsize and sink and swallow them all.

But we encountered no storm and the weather stayed fine, except at night, when a dense fog often obscured the moon and stars, and wrapped us in wet gray wool. That did not slow the qurqur, since the captain could steer by his bussola needle, but it must have been miserably uncomfortable for the half-naked black crewmen who slept on the deck, because the fog collected in the rigging and dripped down a constant clammy dew. We two passengers, however, had a cabin apiece, and were snug enough, and we were given food enough, though it was not viand dining, and we were not attacked or robbed or molested by the crew. The Muslim captain naturally despised Hindus even more than Christians, and stayed aloof from our company, and he kept the seamen forever busy, so Tofaa and I were left to our own diversions. That we had none—beyond idly watching the flying fish skimming over the waves and the porkfish frolicking among the waves—did not discourage Tofaa from prattling about what diversions we must notsuccumb to.

“My strict but wise religion, Marco-wallah, holds that there is more than one sinfulness involved in lying together. So it is not just the sweet surata that you must put out of your mind, poor frustrated man. In addition to surata—the actual physical consummation—there are eight other aspects. The very least of them is as real and culpable as the most passionate and heated and sweaty and enjoyable embrace of surata. First there is smarana, which is thinkingof doing surata. Then there is kirtana, which is speaking of doing it. Speaking to a confidant, I mean, as you might discuss with the captain your barely controllable desire for me. Then there is keli, which is flirting and dallying with the man or woman of one’s affection. Then there is prekshana, which means peeping secretly at his or her kaksha—the unmentionable parts—as for example you frequently do when I am bathing over the bucket back yonder on the afterdeck. Then there is guyabhashana, which is conversing on the subject, as you and I are so riskily doing at this moment. Then there is samkalpa, which is intendingto do surata. Then there is adyavasaya, which is resolving to do it. Then there is kriyanishpati, which is … well … doing it. Which we must not.”

“Thank you for telling me these things, Tofaa. I shall manfully endeavor to restrain myself even from the wicked smarana.”

“Oh.”

She was right about my having frequently glimpsed her unmentionable kaksha, if that was what it was called, but I could hardly have avoided it. The wash bucket for us passengers was, as she had said, on the high afterdeck of the ship. All she had to do, for a measure of privacy while she sponged her nether parts, was to squat facing astern. But she seemed always to face the bow, and even the timorous Malayu crewmen would discover chores needing doing amidships, so they could peep upward when she opened the drapery of her sari garment and spread her thick thighs and mopped water up from the bucket to her wide-open and unclothed crotch. It bore a bush as black and thick as that on the black men’s heads, so maybe it inspired lustful smarana in them, but not in me. Anyway, though repellent itself, that thicket at least concealed whatever was within it. All I knew of that was what Tofaa insisted on telling me.

“Just in case, Marco-wallah, you should fall enamored of some pretty nach dancing girl when we get to Chola, and should wish to make conversation with her as flirtatiously and naughtily as you do with me, I will tell you the words to say. Pay attention, then. Your organ is called the linga and hers is called the yoni. When that nach girl excites you to ravening desire, that is called vyadhi, and your linga then becomes sthanu, ‘the standing stump.’ If the girl reciprocates your passion, then her yoni opens its lips for you to enter her zankha. The word zankhameans only ‘shell,’ but I hope your nach girl’s is something better than a shell. My own zankha, for example, is more like a gullet, ever hungry, near to famishment, and salivating with anticipation. No, no, Marco-wallah, do not beseech me to let you feel with your trembling finger its eagerness to clasp and suck. No, no. We are civilized persons. It is good that we can stand close together like this, watching the sea and amiably conversing, with no compulsion to roll and thrash in surata on the deck, or in your cabin or mine. Yes, it is good that we can keep tight rein on our animal natures, even while discoursing so frankly and provocatively as we do, about your ardent linga and my yearning yoni.”

“I like that,” I said thoughtfully.

“ You do? !”

“The words. Linga soundssturdy and upright. Yoni soundssoft and moist. I must confess that we of the West do not give those things such nicely expressive names. I am something of a collector of languages, you see. Not in a scholarly way, only for my own use and edification. I like your teaching me all these new and exotic words.”

“Oh. Only words.”

However, I could not endure too many of hers at a time. So I went and sought out the reclusive Arab captain and asked him what he knew of the pearl fishers of the Cholamandal—whether we would be encountering them along the coast.

“Yes,” he said, and snorted. “According to the Hindus’ contemptible superstition, the oysters—the reptiles, as they call them—rise to the surface of the sea in April, when the rains begin to fall, and each reptile opens its shell and catches a raindrop. Then it settles to the sea bottom again, and there slowly hardens the raindrop into a pearl. That takes until October, so it is now that the divers are going down. You will arrive right when they are collecting the reptiles and the solidified raindrops.”

“A curious superstition,” I said. “Every educated person knows that pearls accrete around grains of sand. In fact, in Manzi, the Han may soon cease diving for the sea pearls, for they have recently learned to grow them in river mussels, by introducing into each mollusc a grain of sand.”

“Try telling that to the Hindus,” grunted the captain. “They have the mindsof molluscs.”

It was impossible, aboard a ship, to evade Tofaa for very long. The next time she found me idling at the rail, she leaned her considerable bulk to wedge me there while she continued my education in things Hindu.

“You should also learn, Marco-wallah, how to look with knowing eyes at the nach dancing girls, and compare their beauty, so that you fall enamored only of the most beautiful. You might best do that by comparing them in your mind with what you have seen of me, for I fulfill all the standards of beauty for a Hindu woman. As it is set down: the three and the five, five, five. Which is to say, in order of specification, that three things of a woman should be deep. Her voice, her understanding and her navel. Now, of course I am not so talkative as most—giddy girls who have not yet attained to dignity and reserve—but on the occasions when I do speak, I am sure you have taken note that my voice is not shrill, and that my utterances are full of deep feminine understanding. As for my navel …” She pushed down the waistband of her sari, and lifted up the billow of dark-brown flesh there. “Regard! You could hide your heart in that profound navel, could you not?” She plucked out some matted old fluff that had already hidden there, and went on:

“Then there are five things that should be fine and delicate: a woman’s skin, her hair, her fingers, toes and joints. Surely you can find no fault with any of those attributes of mine. Then there are the five things that should be healthily bright pink: the woman’s palms and soles and tongue and nails and the corners of her eyes.” She went through quite an athletic performance: sticking out her tongue, flexing her talons, exhibiting her palms, tugging at the sooty pouches around her eyes to show me the red corner dots, and picking up each of her grimy feet to show me their leathery but rather cleaner undersides.

“Last, there are the five things that should be high-arched: the woman’s eyes, nose, ears, neck and breasts. You have seen and admired all of those except my bosom. Regard.” She unwound the top part of her sari, and bared her pillowlike dark-brown breasts, and somewhere down the deck a Malayu uttered a sort of anguished whinny. “High-arched they are indeed, and set close together, like nestling hoopoe birds, no gap between. The ideal Hindu breasts. Slide a sheet of paper in that tight cleft and it will stay there. As for putting your linga there, well, do not even consider it, but imagine the sensation of that close, soft, warm envelopment of it. And behold the nipples, like thumbs, and their halos, like saucers, and all black as night against the golden fawn skin. When examining your nach girl, Marco-wallah, be sure to look closely at her teats, and give them a wet lick with your tongue, for many women try to deceive by darkening theirs with al-kohl. Not I. These exquisite paps are natural, given me by Vishnu the Preserver. It was not casually that my noble parents named me Gift of the Gods. I budded at the age of eight, and was a woman at ten, and a married woman at twelve. Ah, just see the nipples, how they expand and writhe and stand, even though touched only by your devouring gaze. Think how they must behave when actually touched and fondled. But no, no, Marco-wallah, do not dream of touching them.”

“Very well.”

Rather sulkily, she covered herself again, and the numerous Malayu who had congregated behind nearby deckhouses and things dispersed again about their business.

“I will not,” Tofaa said stiffly, “enumerate the Hindu qualifications for beauty in the male, Marco-wallah, since you fall lamentably short of them. You are not even handsome. A handsome man’s eyebrows meet above the bridge of his nose, and his nose is long and pendulous. My dear late husband’s nose was as long as his royal pedigree. But as I say, I will not list your shortcomings. It would not be ladylike of me.”

“By all means, Tofaa, be ladylike.”

She may have been a beauty by Hindu standards—in truth, she was, as I later was often told by admiring Hindu men, openly envying me my companion—but I could think of no other people that would have judged her even passable, except possibly the Mien or the Bho. Despite Tofaa’s daily and highly visible and well-attended ablutions, she somehow never got quite clean. There was always that measle on her forehead, of course, and always a gray scurf about her ankles and a darker gray curd between her toes. But while I cannot say that the rest of her, from the measle down to the curd, was ever actually, in the Mien and Bho manner, encrusted, it wasalways just perceptibly dingy.

Back in Pagan, Hui-sheng had gone always barefoot in the Ava fashion, and Arùn had done so all her life, and even after a day of padding about the dusty city streets, their feet had always been, even before bath time, kissably clean and sweet. I honestly could not understand how Tofaa always managed to have such dirty feet, especially out here on the sea, where there was nothing to smirch them but fresh breezes and sparkling spindrift. It might have had something to do with the India-nut oil with which she coated all her exposed skin after each day’s washing. Her late dear husband had left her with very little in the way of personal possessions: not much but a leather flask of the nut oil and a leather bag that contained a quantity of wood chips. As her employer, I had voluntarily bought her a new wardrobe of the sari fabrics and other necessities. But she had regarded the leather containers as necessities, too, and brought them along. I had known that the oil of India-nut was to keep herself glistening in that unattractively greasy way. But I had no notion of what the wood chips were for—until one day, when she did not emerge from her cabin at mealtime, I tapped on her door and she bade me come in.

Tofaa was squatting in her immodest bathing position, and facing me, but her thicket was hidden by a small ceramic pot she was pressing to her crotch. Before I could make my excuses and step back out of the cabin, she calmly lifted the pot away from herself. It was the sort of pot used for brewing cha, and the spout of it came sliding, slick with secretions, out from among the hair. That would have been surprising enough, but even more so was the fact that the spout was emitting blue smoke. Tofaa had evidently put into the pot some of those wood chips, and set them smoldering, and stuck the smoking spout up inside herself. I had seen women play with themselves before, and with a variety of playthings, but never with smoke,and I told her so.

“Decent women do not play with themselves,” she said reprovingly. “That is what men are for. No, Marco-wallah, daintiness of the insideof one’s person is more to be desired than any merely exterior appearanceof being clean. The application of nim-wood smoke is an age-old and cleanly practice of us fastidious Hindu women, and I do this for your sake, though little you appreciate it.”

I frankly saw little there to appreciate: a plump, greasy, dark-brown female squatting on the cabin floor, with her legs shamelessly apart, and the entrapped blue smoke oozing lazily up through her dense bush. I could have remarked that someexterior daintiness might have improved her chances of attracting someone nearer to her interior, but I chivalrously refrained.

“Nim-wood smoke is a preventive of unexpected pregnancy,” she went on. “It also makes the kaksha parts fragrant and tasty, should anyone happen to nuzzle or browse there. That is why I do this. Just in case you should sometime be overwhelmed by your brute passions, Marco-wallah, and seize me against my will, despite my pleas for mercy, and fling yourself upon me without giving me time to make ready, and force your rigid sthanu through my chaste but soft defenses, I take this precaution of administering the nim-wood smoke every day.”

“Tofaa, I wish you would stop.”

“You wantme to?” Her eyes widened, and so must her yoni have done, for a voluminous puff of the blue smoke came suddenly up from there. “You wantme to bear your children?”

“Gèsu. I want you to cease this everlasting preoccupation with matters below the waist. I engaged you to be my interpreter, and I am already shuddering for fear of what words you are likely to speak, ostensibly mine. But right now, Tofaa, our rice and goat meat are getting wet with salt spray. Come and put something in your other end.”

I really believed, at that time, that in choosing a Hindu woman for my translator in India, I had unfortunately chosen a particularly unlovely and witless and pathetic specimen. How she had come to be the consort of a king was beyond my comprehension, but I sympathized more than ever with that wretched man, and thought I better understood now why he had thrown away a kingdom and his life. But I have here recounted a few of Tofaa’s charmless attributes—only a few of them—and have repeated some of her fatuous garrulity—only some of it—by way of making her both visible and audible in all her awfulness. I do that because, on arriving in India, I discovered to my horror that Tofaa was notan anomaly. She was an unexceptional and purely typical adult Hindu female. From a crowd of Hindu women, whatever the assortment of classes, or jati, I could hardly have picked out Tofaa. Worse yet, I found the women to be immeasurably superior to the Hindu men.

In my journeying I had got acquainted with numerous other races and nations before visiting those of India. I had concluded that the Mien droppings of the Bho of To-Bhot had to be the lowest breed of mankind, and I had been mistaken. If the Mien represented humanity’s ground level, then the Hindus were its worm burrows. In some of those countries I had earlier inhabited or visited, I could not help seeing that some of the people despised and detested other people—for their different language or their lesser refinement or their lower class in society or their peculiar ways of life or their choice of religion. But in India I could not help seeing that everybodydespised and detested everybody else, and for all those reasons.

Let me be as fair as I can. Let me say that I was in some small error from the start, in thinking of all Indians as Hindus. Tofaa informed me that “Hindu” was only a variant of the name “Indian,” and properly referred only to those Indians who practiced the Hindu religion of Sanatana Dharma, or Eternal Duty. Those preferred to be dignified by the name of “Brahmanists,” after the chief god (Brahma the Creator) of the three chief gods (the other two being Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer) of their numberless multitude of gods. Other Hindus had picked out some lesser god from that mob—Varuna, Krishna, Hanuman, whoever—and gave more devotion to that one, and thereby rated themselves superior to the greater ruck of Hindus. Many others of the population had adopted the Muslim religion seeping in from the north and west. A very few Indians still practiced Buddhism. That religion, after originating in India and spreading afar, had almost died out in its homeland, possibly because it enjoined cleanliness. Still other Indians followed other religions or sects or cults: Jain, Sikh, Yoga, Zarduchi. In all their teeming diversity and jumble and overlap of faiths, however, the Indian people maintained one holy attribute in common: the adherents of every religion despised and detested the adherents of every other.

The Indians did not much like, either, to be lumped all together as “Indians.” They were a seething and still unmixed caldron of different races, or so they claimed. There were the Cholas, the Aryans, Sindi, Bhils, Bangali, Gonds … I do not know how many. The lighter brown Indians called themselves white,and claimed they were descended from fair-haired, pale-eyed ancestors who came from somewhere far to the north. If that was ever true, then there had since been so much intermingling that, over the centuries, the darker browns and blacks of the southern races had predominated—as mud does when poured into milk —and all the Indians were now but shades and tints of muddy brown. None was of any color worth boasting about, and the insignificant differences of hue served only as one more basis for their abhorring each other. The lighter brown ones could sneer at the darker brown, and they at the indisputably black.

Also, depending on their race, tribe, family lineage, place of original origin and place of current habitation, the Indians spoke one hundred seventy-ninedifferent languages, hardly any two of them mutually comprehensible, and every one was deemed by its speakers the One True and Holy Tongue (though few of them ever bothered to learn to read and write it, if indeed it had a script or character or alphabet to be written in, which not many did), and the speakers of every True Tongue scorned and reviled those who spoke any False Tongue, which meant any of the one hundred and seventy-eight others.

Whatever their race, religion, tribe, or tongue, allthe Indians spinelessly submitted to a social order imposed by the Brahmanists. That was the order of jati, which divided the people into four rigid classes and an overflow of discards. Jati having been first devised by some long-ago Brahman priests, their own descendants naturally constituted the highest class, called Brahman. Next were the descendants of long-ago warriors– verylong ago, I surmised; I saw no man of the present day who could conceivably be imagined as a warrior—next, the descendants of long-ago merchants, and last the descendants of long-ago humble artisans. Those would have been the bottommost order, but there were also the discards, the paraiyar, or “untouchables,” who could claim no jati at all. A man or woman born into any of the jati could not associate with anyone born into a higher, and of course would not with anyone of a lower. Marriages and alliances and business transactions were done only between matching jati, so the classes were eternally perpetuated, and a person could no more ascend to a higher one than he could ascend to the clouds. Meanwhile, the paraiyar dared not even let their defiling shadow fall on anyone of jati.

No person in India—except, I suppose, a Hindu of the Brahman class—was pleased with the jati he found himself born into. Every lower-jati person I met was anxious to tell me how his forebears had, in the long-ago, occupied a much nobler class, and had been undeservedly debased through the influence or trickery or sorcery of some enemy. Nevertheless, all preened in the fact that they were of higher order than somebodyelse, even if only the vile paraiyar. And any of the paraiyar could always point derisively to some still more miserable paraiyar to whom hewas superior. What was most contemptible about the jati order was not that it existed, and had existed for ages, but that all the people caught in its toils—not just Hindus, but every single soul in India—willingly let it go on existing. Any other people, with the least scintilla of courage and sense and self-respect would long ago have abolished it, or died trying. The Hindus never had even tried, and I saw no sign that they ever would.

It is not impossible that even a people as degenerate as the Bho and Mien may have improved in the years since I was last among them, and made something halfway decent of themselves and their country. But, from what travelers’ report I have had of India in these later years, nothing has changed there. To this day, if a Hindu ever feels bad about his being one of the dregs of humankind, he has only to look about for some other Hindu he feels better than, and he can feel good. And that satisfies him.

Since it would have been unwieldy for me to try to identify every person I met in India according to all his entitlements of race, religion, jati and language—one man might be simultaneously a Chola, a Jain, a Brahman and a Tamil-speaker—and since the whole population, in any event, was under the sway of the Hindu jati order, I continued to think indiscriminately of them all as Hindus, and to call them all Hindus, and I still do. If the fastidious Lady Tofaa considered that an improper or derogatory appellation I did not and do not care. I could think of numerous epithets more fitting and a lot worse.

2

THE Cholamandal was the most dreary and uninviting shore I ever sailed to. All along it, the sea and land merely and indistinctly blended, in coastal flats that were nothing but reedy, weedy, miasmal marshes created by a multitude of creeks and rivulets flowing sluggishly out from India’s distant interior. The merging of land and water was so gradual that vessels had to anchor three or four li out in the bay, where there was keel room. We made landfall off a village called Kuddalore, where we found a motley fleet of fishing and pearl-fishing boats already riding at anchor, with little dinghis ferrying their crewmen and cargoes back and forth from the anchorage to the almost invisible village far inland across the mud flats. Our captain adroitly maneuvered our qurqur among the fleet, while Tofaa leaned over the rail and peered at the Hindus aboard the other vessels and occasionally shouted queries at them.

“None of these,” she finally reported to me, “is the pearl-fisher boat that was at Akyab.”

“Well,” said the captain, also to me, “this Cholamandal pearl coast is a good three hundred farsakhs from north to south. Or, if you prefer, more than two thousand li. I hope you are not going to suggest that I cruise up and down its whole length.”

“No,” said Tofaa. “I think, Marco-wallah, we ought to go inland to the nearest Chola capital, which is Kumbakonam. Since all pearls are royal property, and go ultimately to the Raja, he can probably easiest direct us to the fisher we seek.”

“Very well,” I said, and to the captain, “If you will hail a dinghi to take us ashore, we will leave you here, and we thank you for the safe crossing. Salaam aleikum.”

While a scrawny little black dinghi-man rowed us across the brackish bay water, then poled us through the fetid marshes toward the distant Kuddalore, I asked Tofaa, “What is a Raja? A king, a Wang, what?”

“A king,” she said. “Two or three hundred years ago reigned the best and fiercest and wisest king the Chola kingdom ever had, and his name was King Rajaraja the Great. So ever since, in tribute to him and in hope of emulating him, the rulers of Chola—and most other Indian nations, as well—have taken his name as their title of majesty.”

Well, that was no uncommon sort of appropriation even in our Western world. Caesar had originally been a Roman family name, but became a title of office, and in the form of Kaiser remains so for the rulers of the more recent Holy Roman Empire, and in the form of Czar is used by the petty rulers of the many trivial Slavic nations. But I was to discover that the Hindu monarchs were not satisfied just to appropriate the former Raja’s name—that was not pretentious enough, all by itself—they had to elaborate and embroider upon it, to affect even more royalty and majesty.

Tofaa went on, “This Chola kingdom was formerly immense and great and unified. But the last high Raja died some years back, and it has since fragmented into numerous mandals—the Chola, the Chera, the Pandya—and their lesser Rajas are all contending for possession of the whole of the land.”