The Trotter-nama by I. Allan Sealy

Author:I. Allan Sealy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: British -- India -- Fiction., Painters -- Fiction., India -- Fiction.
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1988-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Trotter-Nama

dismal spectacle awaited Mik. The mahouts had decamped with the strongest elephants, while the creatures they left behind had either burst their bonds and run off into the jungle or else perished in chains. Now that he saw them, Mik remembered the shrill trumpeting that had penetrated his toddy fog as he lay in the arms of the Alexander women. He detonated a charge that brought down a portion of the Elephant Wing and buried the creatures. In the dry dock beyond, one camel remained, an emaciated creature which stood erect, smiling histrionically. Mik let it loose and it wandered off into the desert, across the salt flats and past the aerolite. He watched it go, not knowing that years later he would harness it to a short-lived experiment, the cane-press. A few feathers showed signs of a struggle in the fowl run, but the chickens were all gone, and there was no trace of dung. Only the cows and buffaloes in the Rib remained sleek, plump-teated, and content, with silken dewlaps and a seersucker sheen, being fed and watered regularly by the greying Alexander sisters.

Mik returned blear-eyed to his pallet and took comfort in the arms of his Indo-Greek gopis, making sons and daughters for twelve nights in a row. By day he prepared a small rose garden at the foot of the North Tower where his child-love had once dug her grave with a teaspoon. There he lingered at dusk, patting the earth around the seedlings and watering the new moss with the avidity of the confirmed wanderer. Then he saddled his horse once more, rode around to the Balloon Room to salute his untouchable lady, and clattered off down the Gunpowder Drive to his campaigns, leaving the keys to Sans Souci on a nail in the Spur.

It was Farida who found them. Nobody had written to her of Fonseca’s death—her little friend Rose couldn’t write—but when he failed to arrive for Luisa’s wedding she knew. Two months after Jacob Kahn-Trotter sailed for England on the Cranganore, Luisa died and was buried next to Luis. Left with Ferdinand and her daughter’s twins, Farida wrote to Jacob in London on black-edged paper and brought the young ones back to Nakhlau. From a long way up the Trotter Road she saw that there was no West Tower and her misgivings were confirmed, but she had no tears left. Without a glance at the heap of grey stones that had been a tower she took the children directly to her old apartments where the indigo was peeling off the walls. She looked in the old mirror and saw that she had lost none of her good looks: all the features that once marked her as a beauty were sharpened by grief and heightened by the onset of middle age. Besides, some of her sorrow lifted when she heard that Jarman Begam and Yakub Khan were also dead. She blackened her hair with collyrium and walked with her back held straight.

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