Return to Bhanupur by Giles Tillotson

Author:Giles Tillotson [Tillotson, Giles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184756289
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Standing at the stern, leaning over the wooden railing, he liked to watch the wake. Such churning of the ocean had brought the world into being. He had never before understood the image. But then he had never seen an ocean before, much less this strange turmoil of blue crystal and white foam, forever unravelling at his feet, unfolding itself like a map exposed to the searching light of a clear sky. Kingdoms of froth melted at sight, and by the time they travelled to the middle distance, could no longer be distinguished.

The limitless sky awed him. He had never seen it unimpeded, always obscured by buildings. The sky that hung over the courts of his palace was composed of patches, stretched from wall to wall like shamianas. Even in the fields of the country—and he rarely visited them now—the farms and villages were his primary objects, and the sky was not seen but considered, as a source of scanty rain. In mid-ocean no human concern divided it. Only the solitary seabirds hung themselves upon it, and he marvelled that they could determine their direction of flight in a world without bearings, a void between two planes.

It had not been so flat throughout the journey. They endured a rough passage across the Arabian Sea, when water and sky merged in a single vortex, his companions grew sick and suffered more from alarm at the strange sensation than from the pain of the illness, and he wondered aloud whether their ancestors were right to have resisted the crossing of the seas. But after Suez and Port Said they found the waters of the Mediterranean calmer, and it felt like passing into a personal eternity.

Of course he knew it to be landlocked—the courteous Captain Melbourne having shown him their route on a map—and at times they were close enough for him to glimpse the coastal cities, first of north Africa, then of Malta and Sicily. It was strange to think of lives lived out in unvisited places, of experience invested with importance but unknown to others. He liked to imagine citizens, looking out to sea in a moment of leisure, observing the passing of his ship and idly asking ‘Who? Where? And Why?’

In truth, he had begun to ask these questions of himself, without the benefit of a distant perspective. The enforced leisure of the voyage, and the anonymity thrust upon him by the empty sky, seemed to divest him of all identity. A king without his kingdom. How much was his role as Maharaja composed of what others did and said around him, and the spaces that he filled? Was it only that he wore this robe, in this hall, on such and such a day? Can one still be Maharaja of Bhanupur somewhere off the coast of Malta? Well, no matter. But can one still be Amar Singh? He doubted even that. Beneath the bright and lofty canvas, he knew himself to be only a soul in creation, and perishable as foam.

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