Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee

Author:Bharati Mukherjee
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction.Historical
ISBN: 9780307792280
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

AT ATTILA CSYCSYRY’S Suchikhana, the stuffy, smoky, infernally hot den of male privilege in Fort St. Sebastian, the men were drunk and complaining. Pedda Timanna had been spotted in White Town, bold as you please, riding in his palanquin despite traditional prohibitions against black trespass and ostentation, and stopping briefly at a white man’s house.

The ban against the baboons should never have been lifted, said the men as one: Chief Factor Prynne said so from the front table where he was served his single glass of claret; so did his chief detractor from the rear table, the Alsatian gunner of promiscuous employment who called himself the Marquis de Mussy but had been born a baker’s son from Aachen named Klaus Engelhardt; so did, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, Dr. Ruxton, Higginbottham, and some young factors, some foreign visitors from the Portuguese or French forts, some English travelers or interlopers and other free-lance traders. It had taken Gabriel Legge several weeks to finally join the drinking contingent at Count Csycsyry’s Suchikhana; he’d gone there as a guest of the cynical and disaffected Marquis de Mussy.

It had started as a typical night at Count Attila’s, with the usual crowd seated in their rigid hierarchies, reflecting their usual animosities. The Marquis was a pirate, as were many others. A liquor concession in an abstemious country under the grip of the orthodox Grand Mughal Aurangzeb himself is an oasis open to lions and gazelles alike, and not to be lightly barred on grounds of moral repugnance.

In Black Town, the Muslim overlords tolerated so-called punch houses for the Christians and gentiles, meaning Hindus and various forms of unacceptable half castes, so long as no araq, the staple English arrack, a potent rice or molasses liquor, was sold to the faithful. Attila Csycsyry, an oft wounded, now philosophical Transylvanian Protestant who’d followed the Turk-hating mercenary trail that led, finally, to the Coromandel Coast, did not, exactly, run an arrack house. To his thinking, arrack houses were notorious bhang dens, where alcoholics spiced their drinks with hemp and opium, where knife fights broke out and ended in murders.

He was, to himself, a publican. But on Company land, public houses were not permitted. And so, an ever-resourceful immigrant in a concession of traders, he had appropriated a name known to all, Suchikhana, meaning “water room.” Attila was a water bearer, an honorable profession in the land of a desert-born faith. He was a purveyor of civilized European wines, brandies, beer, whiskeys and, for habitués who tasted, then tolerated, then demanded, the barbaric local brews: rums, palm tari, which the English called toddy, and the deadly arracks, which he brewed in his own distillery on the cleared land just west of the fort. He drew the line at bhang.

The Suchikhana was part social club and part meeting hall for those who rejected the Company’s paternalistic and poorly rewarded attentions. Freemen, pirates, interlopers, adulterers, dropped by early in the afternoon when they were not sacking Surati merchants’ ships or bribing

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