The Luminist (3 page)

He gathered the totems that shaped love for his father. The pieces of glass, split free from discarded lihuli bottles at the sides of the drinking men's huts. He brought the glass to his father, and before his father could protest that there was no time for childish diversions in this coming world, Eligius moved the glass until the delicate candlelight shivering in his father's eyes grew across the pages. Then the Britishers' words bowed beneath a sun of his making.

His father smiled. The first in who knew how long. “Ah, I can see them so much better now. Shall I tell you what they mean?”

After that, Eligius didn't leave him alone at night anymore. Outside their glassed light, the night moved for Matara, but differently for them.

While he stayed up late by his appa's side like a man, the colonials' words came to him. Over the last of winter he learned the secret heart hiding in the language of English law. That they'd come hundreds of years before as merchants and warriors who showered the Mughal Jahangir with riches and rarities until India's arms opened wide. “In whatsoever place they choose to live,” the Mughal decreed, “in whatsoever port they arrive, let none molest their peace and prosperity.” One trading post became legions, became the East India Company, a nation within their nation possessing the power to tax, to make war and peace, to send India's wealth across the sea.

Spring 1836 came. His father told him that in Aipassi, the colonials' October, the East India Company Governor and its Court of Directors would meet to renew the Company's Charter, and with it bend India into the ornate, locked gates of empire.

Their neighbors' lives still turned simply from season to season. The taxes, the villages lost to the currents of the Britishers' expansion; these newer maladies were no different than the old diseases and droughts that came on the tides of passing time. They didn't seem to notice that this new world was an unreadable sky stretching over their country.

His father called Matara's men together at the nirayanam, in the colonials' April. He told them he'd go to the East India Company Court six months hence. He would argue for the Charter to be amended in accord with colonial law, for the lagaan to be lifted, and for a greater Indian voice in their own affairs. The Director he'd served had allowed him to study books of English law. For what reason, if not to invite Indian ideas?

The village men laughed at him. Matara's leader, its grama sevaka, called him naïve and even dangerous. Eligius didn't believe his father was dangerous, but he thought his mother did from the way she held her pregnant belly when his father read statutes aloud, as if she were swept up in a surging crowd.

Chakran came to Swaran on a summer evening and asked him to explain it once more. “ Tell me again. What are you trying to do?”

His father spoke to the grama sevaka all that night. Nothing more than words, but words weighed more than the sea when a man has lived too long in quiet grief that his life must, and won't, change. That was what his father said later to his wife, his Sudarma, while Eligius listened to them from the next room, his cheek pressed against the cool wall. “These words, Swaran,” his mother worried.

This is how Matara begins to hope, his father said to her, like a lover.

When he stole a glance, Eligius caught them kissing. He realized he'd begun to hope as well.

Then the rains came, then the fall again, and then the first day of Aipassi, 1836, when Swaran said that he'd read enough. It was time to speak.

ON THE MORNING of Court, Eligius sat in front of his hut, watching the dawn light wash Matara's landscape with gold. It was well past the usual hour of the men's departure from the banyans for the Overstone fields and the John Company quarry, yet still they paced restlessly in the rain-promising air. “Eligius!” one of the neighbor women called. “For your appa Swaran, and all of us! Tell Sudarma to give thanks for a good man!” She clasped her hands together.

He returned her anjali mudra. One more prayer. Another frail light joined to the multitude.

Sudarma came out into the street. She made a fire like the other women. Navigating herself onto her haunches, she melted ghee, then poured a cascade of reddish grains into a heavy pot. They hissed against the slickened iron before bursting.

He held up a shard of glass and sent the sun where he pleased. For a moment he lost himself.

Sudarma's hands flew to her belly. Her face cinched up. She clutched herself as if the plateau rising from her might break open. “Restless today. Like you. Another few days, I think.”

“Will he stay?”

She smiled her quiet smile; when she was happy, her smile chimed in him. “I'm not so sure it's a boy. Go to your father. Tell him the men are still here, and the women all pray for his success at Court.”

“Yes, amma.” He went inside, where Swaran madly displaced ragged tomes of British law.

“Appa, the men haven't left. I think they're waiting to go with you.”

“Is grama sevaka among them?”

Eligius peered outside. “Yes appa, I see him.” Chandrak was easy enough to spot. Tall, lean, dark as charred teak, he shared a jar of lihuli with the men congregating around him, who waited to see what he would do. A leader in Matara, revered among its lower-born, he had elemental, wanting eyes.

“Keep your mother company,” Swaran said. “We're almost ready to leave.”

“Are the men coming with?”

“I'll ask it of Chandrak. We will see.” He chose from a sheaf of papers. “Put these with the charter.”

Eligius took his father's notes outside, reading them silently and allowing the stone-on-stone noise of them to fill his mouth. They were nothing like Tamil, which moved like a quiet tide to shore.

“Just like him, I see.”

Chandrak eyed Swaran's notes without comprehension. Kneeling near Sudarma, he poked at her cooking fire with a stick. “How old are you now, Eligius? Fourteen?”

“He'll be fifteen soon,” Sudarma said. She put her dull knife to the slope of an onion.

“I was a year at the foundry in Sufragam at his age, pulling black oxide from the ground.”

Eligius heard his father sighing at books the way laboring men like Chandrak sighed in the colonials' endless fields.

“I had to break rocks against my body.” Chandrak ignored Sudarma's smirk. The muscles on his forearms twined. “Look at my hands. A man like your father, who does nothing but pour other men's coffee, doesn't have hands like these. Such hands break men but make leaders.”

He's more of a man than you, Eligius thought as his father emerged. Anger passed through him like rings of warm light.

Chandrak raised a fist. The murmurings of the men fell away. “Swaran, why do you think the Britishers will listen to you in their language or anyone else's? We've talked and talked and still I don't see. Becoming like them does nothing but hold you apart from your own.”

“If I know nothing beyond pouring their coffee, grama sevaka, why should they make time for such a man? But they have made time for me today.” He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. He was no older than Chandrak, yet to Eligius he'd aged
terribly in the last months. “We cannot settle for shouting at their gate. We must walk through their doors. I ask your blessing.”

“If their soldiers come through Matara, what would become of us if we followed you? The answer isn't in those books, Swaran. We can put nothing between us and them but men and the promise of what men can do.”

The others grunted assent. Some of them bore limbs torn from the banyan grove ringing Matara.

“Do not come if you intend to cause trouble,” Swaran told them. “I'll go alone. My son and I. I would do this even in defiance of you. We will die if we remain this way.”

“Come.” Chandrak extended his hand. “Why are we fighting?”

Swaran took it. “I'll go with you if Sudarma wishes me to,” Chandrak said with a wink.

Eligius saw his father pull his hand back, with some effort. Chandrak's grip was field-strong.

He stood, taking his father's notes and the East India Company's charter. “I'm ready, appa.”

Sudarma spilled pieces of onion into the simmering ragi. She guided her knife back through the bulb, her hands precise, her fingers slivering near the promise of blood. “Go because you're men of Matara who know each other all your lives. And if not for that, then stay in the fields and do nothing.”

Swaran kissed his wife's forehead. She gazed up at him and put both hands on her stomach, but he'd already turned to face Chandrak and his fellow villagers. “ To have you with me would be a blessing. Among these Directors, there may be an honorable man. He is new. I don't know him to say that he will listen to me, and make the others listen. But there is time enough if I fail for you to tell me how wrong and weak I am. Then we can see how well your way works.”

Chandrak conferred with his fellows. “ We'll go with you.”

Eligius carried his father's most precious notes. They fluttered in the breeze he stirred as he ran across the road towards
the jungle. Aribbon of runoff water passed beneath his feet and he stepped in it, bursting the reflection of the sun.

Matara's women called after their men. Admonitions to be safe, to come home when it was done, to tell them how it was.

“They think your father's ideas will save us,” Chandrak said when he caught up with Eligius. Swaran walked ahead, alone with his thoughts. “And if he fails, what they already suffer will be blamed on him, as if it was always his fault. This is the way of the world. You shouldn't grow up weak and believing in nonsense. Do you understand?”

Eligius stared at the banyan limb in Chandrak's hands.

“Now we have everything we need,” Chandrak said.

Dimbola

CATHERINE WALKED ACROSS THE GROUNDS TOWARD the small cottage where the crate and the letter from Sir John waited. It was October 1836. The natives called it Aipassi.

When she'd first disembarked the
Royal Captain
in January of that year, touching the hewn stone of Ceylon's Port Colombo dock caused her to despair her reunion with Charles. How could she explain Hardy to a man who understood only the simple calculus of legal theory, calendar days, nautical distances?

She'd spent the prior four months studying Bible verse and struggling to puzzle out her emotions in the impossible leaning of the sea. On the day of her arrival in Ceylon's harbor, Julia had come to her cabin weeping that there was a body floating freely atop the waves. In another moment she'd heard its impact against the ship's hull, like the hesitant knocking of a child at a parent's closed door. That was Ceylon.

Matters needed time, she'd thought.

Charles had come in a solid, if ordinary, carriage piloted by the maid he'd written of in his letter, and so she'd looked this Mary up and down, searching for signs of the new life. A sturdy, quiet twenty-three year old, Mary carried herself that day and all days after with the bearing of a bricklayer and the air of lessened expectations common to servants aligned with midlevel households.

Charles looked older. Sick even still. His ivory beard was thicker now. It blanketed the prominent jawline she had watched
soften with age. His burly frame had thinned considerably. She wondered what Mary was feeding him, or whether he was closing himself off in a room amongst the chaos of his books and papers. But his eyes were so full of hope for her devotion that she'd kissed his hand and ignored the milling natives just outside their carriage, with their language of melody and unmapped terrain, their skin like burnt chicory. Charles needed her filial kiss. Men must feel necessary.

She'd found nothing in Mary's demeanor, nothing in Charles' quiet embrace upon hearing of Hardy, nothing in the wordless mien that settled upon them during the journey from Port Colombo to Kalutara and her new home, nothing in the quiet non-intersecting circles they followed in the months after, from which assurance could be drawn that this was the life she was meant for. This was home.

From all appearances, Charles' life in the house he called Dimbola scarcely extended beyond the single room he'd established as his study, and in which he'd arranged his considerable library. The rest of the house felt empty and in need when she'd arrived. Sparse furnishings, a disorder to the English amalgam of rooms and functions, a lack of cultural flourishes – art, namely – by which their guests might come to know Charles' achievements. It had not surprised her that during his long sojourn in Ceylon without her, Charles had not attended to details best left to a wife. Still, Dimbola suffered a malaise that she quickly set about dispelling. Mary kept order. She kept the children fed and occupied, allowing Catherine to reclaim her role as wife and architect of a socially presentable colonial life.

Soon after her arrival, she'd discovered the cottage while searching for an old cachepot. The structure was nothing, and treated as such. Mary stored her mops and buckets there, alongside the remaining crates, odd chairs and tables, the items her new mistress and master had brought to Ceylon.

In it Catherine found saris, wraps, the detritus of Indian women hanging in the gray space of an alcove. They were covered
in a patina of dust, their hues no more than suggestions of what they once were.

Left by servants, she decided. Women long since vanished.

By early spring, their arrival had lost the luster of the new. Charles returned to his books and laws, Mary to her grumbling and cleansing of her betters, Julia to her writerly musings and complaints about the life abroad her parents were surely withholding from her.

Catherine returned to the cottage each day.