The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  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 th
e 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.

  Three thousand pounds of flour, bread, hops, and malt. Oxtails, sides of beef, pork, mutton, calves’ heads, and enormous blocks of ice clad in jute heaved over the steep gangplank to keep the meat fresh. Two hundred head of livestock—hens, geese, ducks, sheep, pigs—which were kept in a pen belowdecks, brought up to the bow in the middle of the night, slaughtered there, bled over the edge of the ship’s bulwark. The decks were then washed down and disinfected before the first shard of dawn streaked over the horizon, so although the passengers of the Indus would sit down to freshly made sausages at breakfast in the stateroom, they wouldn’t realize that the meat had lived and breathed, and eventually died, just a few feet away on the very deck they would promenade on after the meal.

  There were bottles of champagne, claret, Madeira, port and sherry, brandy, rum, whiskey, and pale ale, soda water and lemonade for the ladies. Bags of tea, coffee, sugar, curry powder, made their way up the gangplank. And then came the jams, jellies, marmalade, macaroni, olive oil, catsup, vinegar, salted tripe, vermicelli, eggs, butter, and bacon.

  The kitchens—there were two of them on the Indus, one for the passengers and one for the crew—were below the foredeck, and each had its set of cooks and provisions. P & O policy strictly forbade the crew cooks from dipping into the passengers’ rations.

  When the last of the goods had been stowed aboard—and this was the second night of the loading—the old man finally turned the wick of his lantern on high, waited for flame to flare, picked up his stick, and held the lantern, swinging, over the face of his nephew, whom he had never before seen. His breath caught in his chest—this was his brother’s face, the one he would have had if the watchman had stayed on in the Punjab to see his younger brother grow up into manhood. How much he had missed because of his stupid fight with this boy’s grandfather.

  “I must go back now, Chachaji,” his nephew said. “My master will wake soon; he cannot quite manage without me.”

  The watchman set the lantern down and reached out to touch his nephew’s shoulder. How firm and strong he felt, how successful he had already been in his life—children he had brought up and given the family lands to, daughters he had married to good people and good families, a wife . . . “Where is your wife?” he asked.

  “She died, Chachaji,” the other replied. “Four years ago.” He turned to look at the Indus, lying a little lower in the waters of the bay, the waves lapping against her bow in a rhythmic motion, setting her rocking slightly. “So I decided to take this job. My father thought I should.”

  “You have been a good son,” the old man said ruminatively. His brother had always had an ease of control over many things—people, his family—but then his brother had had a great responsibility in the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, and he had held that job for years, trusted and comfortable in the imperial presence. Bringing up his children to listen to him well into their adulthoods would also have been easy for him.

  “Then you leave on this boat?” the watchman asked, nudging his chin outward.

  “With my master, yes.”

  “You cannot come back, beta,” the uncle said. “Can you? After you have crossed the black waters, after you’ve lost caste doing so. Who will you be? What can you be?”

  The younger man bowed his head. When he spoke, though, there was no bitterness in his voice. “I have been asked to go along with my master to England, there to serve him as I have here. He will not return, I think; he has other plans. And so I cannot also; I could not afford to pay my way back. But”—his mouth hardened and his eyes glittered—“it will not be so bad after all. I have work to do, Chachaji. Much work.”

  He rose, bent down again to touch his uncle’s feet, and moved that hand to his forehead and eyes, then walked away into the gloom of the dockyard. The night watchman listened to his footsteps fading away and knew that he would not see his nephew again. They could, either of them, die before that meeting would happen.

  • • •

  While the city of Bombay slept, lamplighters roamed about, flames held aloft, their quick eyes seeking out a smoking or doused streetlamp. The street sweepers and cleaners came by, pulling their carts, and the whish-whoosh of their brushes, and sluice of water from their buckets, set the roads gleaming by dawn. Police constables walked their beats, striking the ground with their thick lathis. Here and there, a night watchman called out the hour in a song-filled voice.

  A brisk breeze settled in from the sea, whisking around the buildings and towers, bringing cool relief to the poor, the homeless, shrouded in cotton sheets on the pavements under the star-thronged sky.

  At Watson’s Hotel in the Esplanade, a five-minute walk from the docks at Apollo Bandar, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Mackeson lay on his bed in the very center of the room. It was on the fourth floor, the topmost, and at one corner, so the room had windows, or rather a series of half-glass doors, perforating two walls. A wrought-iron balcony wrapped around the outside of each floor of the hotel, common to all the rooms, wide enough only for a man to step outside for a smoke.

  Mackeson had his hands crossed on his chest, in the pose of a dead saint put to rest, but his thoughts were anything but calm. For sleep would not come, coveted though it was. He shifted his head. Although the curtains had been drawn over each door, light from the streetlamps still seeped in around the sides. And for a long time now, he had been able to distinguish the chair, the desk, the paintings on the walls, even the
whorls and swirls of the carpet’s design, and the gleam of the mosaic floor. Overhead, a broad, sheetlike punkah moved from side to side, and a rope attached to it ran along the ceiling to the entrance door, and through a hole in the wall above the transom window. A boy sat outside, tugging at the rope and making the punkah move. He usually had it tied to his toe, and merely had to waggle his foot to keep the fan in motion once started.

  He had fallen asleep though, Mackeson thought; the punkah had stopped many times, and started again when the boy awoke and remembered his duty.

  The room was stifling hot. Mr. Granger, the manager, upon showing Colonel Mackeson the room, had suggested keeping the verandah doors open during the night. It was quite safe, he had said, and they had security guards patrolling the street outside. But the noises of a city fading into the night’s rest had grated upon Mackeson’s ears—he had spent all of his time in India in small, outlying villages and distant regimental camps. The constant sound of carriages, the harsh laughter of the coolies, the inconsequential chatter of so many people, forever and on and on, had churned inside him, given him no peace at all since he had come to Bombay this morning.

  Even the hushed luxury of Watson’s was painful. In the smoking room, there was the crackle of the newspapers, the smog of cigarettes, the unnerving sensation that the cut of his trousers was at least four years out of date and that the crease was not sharp enough no matter how hard Multan Raj had tried his hand at an iron. In the dining room, he had been bewildered by the array of forks and knives and spoons—which was for what? He had forgotten, so long in the army, so unused to a grand dinner party; the utensils for the fish, the fowl, the side of beef all seemed the same to him. He was conscious of having lifted the wrong one when the waiter—a native boy—had coughed by his side and gently removed all others to the side of his plate so that he could identify the correct fork.

  And the women were so . . . splendid. Some were clad in real blue gowns—the up-country women Mackeson knew had long given up that color because it yellowed and aged quickly under the Indian sun—their hands were smooth and clean, unwrinkled; their hair was set by expert hands, presumably by their native ayahs, who were more skillful than the ones who served the Englishwoman anywhere else in India.