The East Indian: A Novel

PROLOGUE

A witch was hanged from the yardarm of the ship on the fourth week of my voyage to America. Some days before, we had stopped at the isles called the Azores to load wood and fresh water and were well on our way to the New World. They hanged the witch just before dusk. I was among those who gathered to watch as she was led up by two sailors, one on either side of her, her legs in chains although she could not have gone far even if she had tried to flee. Her name was Ann Brady. It was May, and the winds that filled our sails and blew the God’s Gift towards Virginia were still chilly, but the waters were quite tranquil.

Captain Coxe had conducted Mistress Brady’s trial and had been judge and all the jury. He had set up court on the deck with an eager crowd of sailors and Virginia voyagers pressing around him. Being among the youngest, Little Sammy Mason, Dick Hughes, and I were at the back of the crowd, straining to see and hear. The three of us were of the same age, or thereabouts—between ten and fifteen, with Sammy being the youngest, Dick being a bit older than I was. Sammy was a slight fellow, smaller even than me, and I was said to be small for my age. His eyes were the lightest I had seen, bluish gray, like the sky on a certain kind of day, his hair was a thatch of gold, and his face that of a girl. Sammy suffered from ulcers in his mouth through the journey. I recommended some of the medicinal powder I had filched from a London apothecary, but Sammy looked doubtful, and would sit with his mouth hanging open—just to air out the insides, he said, and Dick and I would keel over with laughter at how foolish he looked. We were boys and, in spite of our unfortunate lot, we could laugh at just about anything. Dick, for his part, was tall and gangly with brown hair and green eyes, his face sorely afflicted with spots—he was good at doing things the sailors asked him to do, things with ropes and such, and one of them said he should consider working on a ship. And then there was myself—the brown-skinned boy, the East Indian who went by the name of Tony.

Where you hail from, lad? the sailors asked me curiously.

Where your moor friend from? they asked Sammy and Dick.

Tony is an Indian from East India, sir, they explained.

The sailors always looked surprised at that. East India is a long way off, even further than America, one of them remarked.

It was dawn on that occasion. The ship, which never fully slept, was stirring to renewed life. The distant horizon silently bled red and pink.

It is somewhere that-a-way, I think, I said, pointing eastwards. Somewhere there.

Dick and Sammy squinted at the sky, trying to catch a glimpse of the land from where I had started.

An East Indian… the boatswain remarked, looking at me speculatively. You are the first East Indian sailing to America, lad. Do not know of any who have gone before you.

Not knowing whether to be proud at that or dismayed, I smiled uncertainly.

What is Virginia like, sir? Dick asked. He was not interested in talking about me.

Wood and water, the man replied. Water and wood.

And I imagined green forest and winding river, balanced on the outer edge of the world.

A man who had known Mistress Brady in England stepped up at the trial and told of how her presence had stopped the milk from creaming in the churn, how chickens had died after she visited a farmstead—first one or two and then by the dozens. The crowd sighed and murmured as if they had been there and seen it all with their own eyes—that unyielding cream, that souring milk, those dying fowl, that village.

I gathered that they were not trying her for ill deeds in England, but rather for the spells she had worked on the God’s Gift: one of the women on the ship had developed sores on her dugs—a slight chortle at that from us boys, quickly silenced by Captain Coxe. The sores had burst and yielded white pus that stank like rotten fish. The woman was now so sick that she was worn to the bone and could hardly walk. It was doubtless the doing of Mistress Brady, who had got into a quarrel with her, a petty dispute that had ended with Mistress Brady spitting and cursing.

The ailing woman was brought forward. She looked very ill indeed, with her weary, hollow face and gaunt frame. The sores had started on her breasts like small, ugly fruit, she claimed, a mere week after the quarrel. The captain had already had her examined by his wife, who had testified to the eruptions on her.

And who else has had an encounter with the witch? he asked. He had already judged her to be a witch, knew she was one.

There were also confused accounts of how a child had caused Mistress Brady offense, how he had perished after a bout of fever and vomiting, how his skin had turned a bright yellow, a sure sign of a witch’s malignance, how he had refused all food. There were several ill children on the ship. It was unclear to me which one they were describing.

What have ye to say to this, mistress? Captain Coxe asked, turning to her solemnly. She did not say a word, she did not raise her eyes. We waited.

Nothing?

It appeared that the captain had had enough. His hot grog awaited him in his cabin. It would be best to hang her and be done with it.

The God’s Gift was a small ship with just some hundred-odd souls in her, crew and migrants. There was a fair chance of meeting the other passengers at least once in the course of the crossing. Sometimes even the two gentlemen on the ship, Master Warburton and Master Marlow, stopped us boys for a chat as we scampered across the deck doing chores for the sailors. They were elegant young men with pointed beards, falling lace collars, and slashed sleeves, although they were not as wealthy as they looked, so some of the sailors told us, being merely second sons. They were out to make their fortune in the New World. They too were curious about me.

From where do you hail, you little tawny ape? Master Marlow asked.

He is a gypsy, I warrant, just like that woman—the witch, Master Warburton ventured. The kind they used to call Egyptians. One of those who roam the countryside telling fortunes and swindling the folk, and such.

No, sire, I said hastily. I am no gypsy. And I explained, once again, that I was an Indian from East India.

Master Warburton then wistfully said he should have gone to East India instead of to Virginia, which was all swamp and sickness, from what he had heard. In India, he would have sailed to Soorat, met the mighty Moghol, and earned fat rubies just for paying his respects. I had no idea what he was talking about but feigned I did.

The witch and I had exchanged a few words one afternoon while on deck. The passengers were allowed to take the open air once every day or two in small groups, but no one wanted to be in Mistress Brady’s company, so she walked alone. I had been by myself too, looking over at the water, listening to the creak of the ropes, the groan of the wood, and the sound of the wind slapping against the sails. Mistress Brady had come to stand by my side. She had spoken first and asked me my name. I had told her that it was Tony.

Her gaze was unwavering. What was it before that? she had asked. What did your mother call you, lad?

But I would not tell her. I had lost that name somewhere on my earlier journey, the one that took me across two oceans to England. When she saw that a sullen silence was the only response she was going to get, she had not pressed me further. She had placed her hand beside where mine rested on the rail and I saw that it was nearly as dark as mine, the skin of it rough from labor. I had looked up at her countenance and seen that her eyes were a deep brown—also almost the color of my own. There were some streaks of gray on her dark head, but there was yet a look of youth about her. At that moment, a sailor had come up and roughly told her to shove off downstairs. She had thrust a piece of salted pork into my hand and ruffled my curls as if I were still a very small child, and then she was gone.

So, a witch was hanged four weeks into our voyage to Virginia. After it was over, they hauled the body down and flung it into the water. Captain Coxe trundled back to his cabin, and they shooed us down to the hold, which stank of stale food, sweat, and vomit, but which was at least rid of the witch’s envy and spite. We went on our way, breasting the gray-white waves, the ship moaning like a living beast, the winds pushing us briskly westwards.

It has been many years now since that crossing. But in my mind, she still stands there, forever looking out at the waters, forever asking me my name, forever failing to reach her journey’s end. And I, forever poised at the start of my own voyage.

It was the year of our Lord 1635, and I, Tony, the East Indian, was the first of my kind, so they say, to reach America.

I

BLACK WATERS

ONE

The earliest memories I have of my birthplace feature salt—acres of it in translucent flats that glistened in the sun and gleamed in the moonlight, silver mountains of it harvested and brought to the warehouses, and smaller mounds piled in bullock-drawn carts. The only whiter thing I was to see in my life was snow. Even the air was saturated with salt, and the townspeople sweated saltier than any other people in the world.

The journey that led me to the God’s Gift commenced in that salty place, the small port of Armagon in East India, where I was born to my mother, a Tamil woman who had migrated from further south and who was reputed among the townspeople for her beauty. My father could have been one of the many men who worked in the salt pans in the sizzling heat, or he could have been a local merchant, or he could have been a landlord, or a Brahmin priest. In fact, he could have been anyone at all, although my mother insisted that he was a well-known medicine man and astrologer from another town who had lost his heart to my mother till his wife firmly reclaimed it. I got accustomed to the many men who came to see my mother in the evenings after the lamps were lit and after she adorned her hair with jasmine and patted scented waters on her skin. Every man in the town wanted to claim that he had been with her. She was lovely even in the harsh white light of day, and in the softness of twilight she was transformed into a goddess. We lived with an older woman who I called my grandmother, though she might or not have been related to us. A man I knew as my uncle lounged on the veranda, a wooden club always by his side.

In truth, you could say that my story was set into motion well before my birth, when the English East India Company traders came, dreaming of ventures bigger than anything the world had yet seen. Armagon is on what the white men called the Coromandel, the long, low, scrubby coastline punctuated by the deltas of many broad rivers and the rich alluvial soils they leave behind. For as long as I could remember, there had been light-complexioned foreigners living in the factory they had constructed on the seashore.

Who are they, Amma? I asked.

Just Company men, she said, distracted.

Why are they pale like that?

For the same reason you are dark—the gods decided.

Unlike some other people, my mother kept track of the passage of days and years, perhaps because she knew that her days in her profession were numbered. That was why she could tell me that it was about five years after I was born that the Englishmen had first come and asked our local chieftain for land to erect a factory. They could transform our sleepy, salty town into a thriving trading post, they had promised—men and money would flow in from all corners of the world. Taking off their hats, in a gesture our chieftain had come to recognize as respectful, they had reminded him how prosperous Pulicat, just a two-day journey south of us, was under the Dutch traders who had arrived there decades ago. They would make sure our town would benefit from the trade, there would be wealth as never before…

However, the chieftain had heard enough stories about how the Dutch had filled their ships with local young men and taken them across the ocean to the Spice Islands. Their families had waited for their return till they gave up waiting. The rumor was that they had become slaves at plantations of clove and cinnamon. When the raja had questioned the English about that, they said no, the Dutch were the Dutch, but they were the English, Englishmen of the English East India Company—they would do nothing like that. And they had given their word on that and many more things.

Eventually, the Englishmen were granted land enough to erect their factory and changed the name of our town to Armagon in honor of the local landlord who had advocated with the raja on their behalf. He was called Aru-mugam—the six-faced one, named for the god Murugan—but the white men got it slightly wrong, and it became Armagon. Armagon, the city by the sea, the city of salt, the city with the Company fort.

The factory was a lonely place and we, the people of the town, had very little to do with it. Its stone walls were two stories high and its wooden gates were soon eaten away by the salt-laden winds that blew in from the sea. None of the Company men stayed very long, and as I grew into boyhood, I noticed new faces reddened by the sun replacing the previous ones every now and again. Trade was dull and the riches we had been promised by the Englishmen never came to transform Armagon. The winds that arrived late in the year made it the devil of a harbor, they complained, impossible to dock in. And they cursed their bad fortune in Armagon, in the Coromandel, in East India.

As I think about it all these years later from the other side of the round earth, with New World sky above my head and New World dust under my feet, Armagon is a place visited in a dream, one remembered in fragments: the scented jasmine clambering up the walls of our small house; the salt beds glimmering in the light of the moon; the surf rolling onto the sandy shores; the weeds that grew around the walls of the East India Company factory bursting into bloom after the rains; the river flowing at the bottom of the hill on which the factory was built; and, at night, the white stars wheeling silently over all of it—the factory, the salt, the sea—surely still there, making giant arcs against the inky sky.

Perhaps, in a few years and if my mother had lived longer, I would have learned to blush at being the son of a courtesan. But at that time all seemed well. My mother earned enough to keep us in comfort, she was of lower caste perhaps, but not of the lowest; she was deemed very touchable even by the highest caste men, her presence did not pollute. With her by my side and my paternity obscure, I was one of those few children who floated in the unnamed space between castes.

I was adored by my only parent, who insisted that with my large, watchful eyes and thick, wavy locks of hair, I was the loveliest child in Armagon. Of course, she would say that, but others said it too, showering me with compliments, comparing my looks with this deity’s and that one’s. Their admiration first pleased me and then made me embarrassed, because were boys not supposed to be strong rather than lovely?

One distinct memory lingers: a snake, gray-gold in hue, slithered into the house on a warm afternoon and was scooped up on the end of a stick and carried out by my uncle with a stern warning from my grandmother not to kill it. Snakes were wise sages in their previous lives, she said.

"And what were the wise sages in their previous lives?" I asked.

She did not know. All she knew was birth followed death, one life followed another, and every birth was not only a continuation of the previous, but also an awakening, a renewal.

You must have been a prince in your previous life, my darling, Amma crooned, taking me in her arms.

And what were you, Amma?

I do not know, but I would like to be a bird in the next one—a forest-dwelling one, colorful, swift-winged.

My grandmother snorted from her corner. Nonsense—a bird, indeed.

But the old lady was not always so cynical. I could practically see her heart soar when she told me the ancient legends of the gods—the dozens of them who populated our town, and the country beyond, slipping unannounced in and out of mortal lives, some colossal, some diminutive, some with the countenances of men and women, some animal-featured, most of them multilimbed, all beautiful and terrible and grand—the red-skinned, warlike Murugan, whom she particularly revered, the lion-faced Narasimha, the noble Rama, the mischievous Krishna, the fiery Siva, and the even fiercer Yellamma, goddess of smallpox and sacrifice. My grandmother filled my head with their stories—their epic adventures, their acts of honor and deceit, their amorous exploits, their divinity, their humanity. I devoured her tales with greedy ear, as did Amma and even my uncle. They were the most enduring of the old lady’s gifts to me, and in later years, in America, even when I had largely discarded them, I was to be visited every now and then by those deities of my early days.

One evening, shortly after the lamp was lit, my uncle brought home a white man. As soon as the stranger stepped in, my amma put on the expression that I had learnt was reserved for her patrons, demure, yet bold and flirtatious, her eyes making promises she would not put into words. Sir Francis Day was a slender young man, probably in his twenties. His eyes were blue as the seas he had sailed across, his mouth was small and thin-lipped, his jaw sharp and long. He wore the tight breeches all Company men wore, a coat, a ruffled blouse, and a feathered hat that I coveted right away. His fair, fine hair was slightly limp in the heat and tied back with a ribbon. My uncle brought him to the chamber where my mother sat, as he did all visitors; my grandmother came in from the back room to scrutinize him, as was her habit with all men. I announced my name to him, provoking a tight smile. He probably had not expected to meet a child in this house. My mother was all large, lovely eyes, scented shoulders, and lustrous locks. She knew all about the fleeting nature of men’s desire and how she must snare it while it lasted, and reel it to land.

And then I was ushered away into the backyard, as I always was when my mother had her patrons visiting, and the rest of the evening was no different than one of the many evenings of my childhood—a touch of lamplight, my grandmother’s tuneless crooning, and, beyond our walls, the sound of the sea. Master Day might have come several times before, and certainly came many times after, but it is that day that remains in my memories—the white man hesitating momentarily at our threshold, my mother, welcoming and curious.

Master Day, who we learnt was factor of the Company’s fort in Masulipatnam, a little further north on the coast, seemed to admire my amma. There was nothing new in that; after all she was famed for her beauty. And she did have regular customers who gifted her with jewelry and other fine things. The only difference was that Master Day was her only English patron. Others might have looked down on her for consorting with a white stranger—I do not know. White men were considered unclean meat eaters by the higher-caste people in Armagon, and they would not have anything to do with them. But perhaps my mother was not subject to the same expectations. I could not tell then and certainly cannot now, after all these years. A gambler and adventurer with a flashy smile and sudden shouts of laughter, Master Day was also a most sensible, hard-nosed trader who pored over his books filled with figures in black ink. When he was in Armagon, he would spend his days at the lonely factory supervising the loading and unloading of goods to and from the Company’s ships. In the evenings he would usually come back to us, unless business kept him away.

White man here, my uncle would announce, although he knew our visitor’s name, and although Master Day was less white than exceeding red in the heat, which bothered him terribly. I do not know what my mother felt about her Englishman, but she always welcomed him graciously and smiled as he took her hand in his to kiss, a gesture my grandmother thought was not becoming because it was performed in public.

I now wonder what they spoke about to each other and in what language they communicated. Those details evade me. But I do know that it was from Master Day that I learned English. I had a shrewd wit and a good ear, he said, and very soon I could patter away in his tongue to the wonder of the townspeople. He even wrote down the English alphabet for me and gave me printed books which I would study in the lamplight to my grandmother’s exasperation. She said I would go blind if I read in the dark, that learning the white man’s tongue served no earthly purpose. Soon my mother, who, I suppose, was beginning to tire of her trade, stopped accepting other visitors; we furnished our house with finer things; and my uncle spent his days smoking hemp or napping on the front porch, his wooden club lying half-forgotten by his side.

Master Day’s main business was in Masulipatnam and he would be absent for weeks. By the time I was approaching my eleventh birthday, my mother allowed me to sail in his vessel to his factory up north or on his other voyages up and down the Coromandel. She thought it would allay my growing restlessness at home, a trait she did not know how to deal with. Often Master Day’s superior, one Master Andrew Cogan, another Company factor, came with us. I served Master Day and Master Cogan their drinks, fetched them their meals, and cleaned their shoes. We docked at small shallow ports, some of them filled with bustling crowds and marketplaces, others deserted except for the sea lapping against the shore and a few stray jackals that scampered into the scrub at our approach. Master Day and Master Cogan desired to found a new factory, the biggest on the Coromandel, unrivaled in the whole of the East Indies, to and from which ships would sail, carrying commodities between England and the Indies, bringing the Company riches beyond its grandest dreams. To this end, the two Englishmen tirelessly explored the coast. I enjoyed these brief voyages, learning to speak their tongue like they did and learning also to eat their foods, including certain forbidden ones my mother never found out about.

Around that time, my grandmother died of a brief, fierce illness. Master Day had by then determined that Armagon had sadly proved a complete failure, so he convinced my mother, who was grieving the loss of her older companion, that she had little to keep her in the town and promised to settle her in a fine dwelling further south in a place he planned to visit more frequently in the course of his trade.

So, my mother, my uncle, and I packed our possessions and bade farewell to Armagon and that forlorn fort looking over the foamy white Bay of Bengal, the second factory set up by the English East India Company on the southern Coromandel, the place that the Company men now said was best forgotten, better lost than found. We uneventfully sailed some fifteen sea leagues south and came to the house Master Day had found for us near the Portuguese port settlement of São Tomé. It was concealed by dense shrubbery and fruit trees near a town called Mylapore—the Place of Peacocks. Through the day and sometimes at night the air was punctured by the big birds’ harsh, penetrating cries.

Once upon a time, there was an apostle of Christ who struggled between doubt and belief.

It was Master Day who recounted his tale to me. Thomas, Doubting Thomas, had insisted on seeing the resurrected Christ’s wounds and on handling the soft dampness of torn skin and flesh before he accepted that the Master had indeed returned from the dead.

Except I shall see on his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe, he had declared stubbornly. But after Thomas had examined Christ’s body for himself, as a physician does a patient, clinically rather than reverentially, feeling the spongy wounds, some yet leaking blood, others starting to crust over with growth, after he had finished, he had marveled. My Lord and my God… he had declared in a simple affirmation of faith. My God and my Lord.

Master Day told me this when I questioned him about the gods worshipped by the Portuguese in their temple—the one not far from our new home. They had called their settlement São Tomé after the doubting saint, and it was the base from which they explored the Coromandel looking for the riches that trade would bring.

My mother was content, I believe, in the year or thereabouts we spent near São Tomé, the year that turned out to be her very last. Master Day sailed north to Armagon and further up the coast, to solicit the paramount ruler of the kingdom, a sultan, for trading permissions. We waited for him to return to us, watching the tides rise and fall, the crabs scuttle on the sandy shores, the fishermen set out on their long, narrow catamarans, singing plaintive airs.

I wished to go with Master Day, but he never took me on these longer journeys. However, I was allowed to accompany him to the Portuguese temple, which he instructed me to call a church—an imposing white structure standing tall in the burning sun. Like Master Day, Saint Thomas, I learnt, was destined to be a wanderer. He had been reluctant at first, this time caught between belief and doubt in his own ability to confront the unknown. But he could not ignore the insistent voice that whispered to him night after night: Fear not, Thomas… Go away to India and proclaim the Word, for my grace shall be with you.

Hence, Doubting Thomas had come to East India to tell people about his One God. He had eventually perished on a hillock some leagues from São Tomé, pierced in his side with lances by heathens (which was another word for people like me). I heard that the soil of the hillock was still red with the apostle’s spilt blood. His body was moved to the seashore and interred. Centuries later, the Portuguese traders had built the church over his tomb, which was revered by them, as well as by some of the Muslims who lived in Mylapore.

Master Day was not a man given to enmity, but he disliked the Portuguese. He told my mother and me that they were godless idol worshippers, which bewildered me, because I thought that they worshipped the same gods as the English. But no, Master Day firmly insisted, the Portuguese were papists, thugs, and boors to boot. I suspect the main reason behind Master Day’s aversion was the success of the Portuguese merchants, who had grown rich on the trade in fine chintzes, pepper, and indigo,