boys, two two-headed freak dogs, horses, goats, hogs, sheep, geese, chickens, ducks, plum puddings, vats of pea soup, mutton pies, pork pies, chops, cutlets, potatoes, lemons, rum, beer, dysentery, scurvy, into a one-second-long video model.
Attaining Nirvana, for Venn, is attaining perfect design.
Together and separately we remember what happened to Hannah Easton Fitch Legge aka the Bibi from Salem so that we may predict what will happen to us within our lifetime.
Before you build another city on the hill, first fill in the potholes at your feet.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …
JOHN KEATS
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
P ART T WO
1
THE GUIDE , an Indian Christian named Mr. Abraham—I don’t know if it’s a first name or not—takes me on a tour of the Fort St. Sebastian ruins. Fort St. George, Fort St. Sebastian and all their related remnants of English and Portuguese colonialism are now located in the northern outskirts of the modern city of Madras. This is the place, south of the sluggish Penner River on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal, where on a fetid January morning in 1695, from its anchorage on a sand reef half a mile off the shore of Fort St. George, the Fortune began its dangerous and laborious unloading of cargo and disembarked Gabriel and Hannah Legge.
The ruins hold no fascination for Mr. Abraham. He is a very thin, up-to-date young man, assiduously elegant in a leisure suit of pale-blue teri-cot, and recently the recipient of a master’s degree in commerce from the University of Madras. He listens to test-match cricket from New Zealand on a transistor radio. Free-lancing as a guide for English-speaking tourists is a stopgap. His deportment has in it a protective haughtiness; his dainty, solicitous way of holding a huge, threadbare black umbrella over my melanoma-prone pinkness reveals a man who has greater expectations from life than recycling the faded glories of his subcontinent. He doesn’t know it, but his casual graciousness has, in fact, profound historical antecedents. He lets me linger where I want, answers my questions with a shrugged yes and “so they say.” Rubble is rubble to him. He lives for development, a South Indian Silicon Valley. He belongs to the future.
I have with me a book of engravings of the original Sonapatnam, and from the fragments of a wall, the rubbled foundation of the customhouse, I can orient myself in time as well as space. I can imagine the customs master, Mir Ali, one of Haider Beg’s appointees, spyglass in hand, noting the names and descriptions of all the ships and cargo that sailed into and out of the Bay of Bengal. A loyal man, Mir Ali, without him, Haider Beg would have bankrupted himself a hundred times over. A fifty-yard-long ancient wall of wafer-thin bricks that look, at a distance, like a sheaf of ill-stacked ledger papers once defined the boundary of White Town. Along this wall Hannah Legge would stroll, looking down to the sea and toward forbidden India. And here, still close to the wall, but now crushed for a roadbed, are heaps of white stones from houses that made up the White Town of Fort St. Sebastian. I take up a piece of crushed stone and drop it in my tote bag; it could have been from a wall of Gabriel and Hannah Legge’s house. A church and a cemetery overcrowded with sinking headstones still stand, and near the cemetery, a stubby rain-blackened victory tower. Where Mr. Abraham sees collapse, or perhaps even the groundwork for a development scheme, I see the spiderweb of permanence.
A satellite town has grown around, and on, the remains of old Fort St. Sebastian. Settlements here have a parasitic, not homicidal, relationship with nature. Inside the crumbled perimeter of the customhouse, shopkeepers have set up tin-roofed stalls. The whitewashed annex of the municipal school building has usurped a corner of the graveyard. Schoolchildren in sweaty uniforms eat tiffin
Attaining Nirvana, for Venn, is attaining perfect design.
Together and separately we remember what happened to Hannah Easton Fitch Legge aka the Bibi from Salem so that we may predict what will happen to us within our lifetime.
Before you build another city on the hill, first fill in the potholes at your feet.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …
JOHN KEATS
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
P ART T WO
1
THE GUIDE , an Indian Christian named Mr. Abraham—I don’t know if it’s a first name or not—takes me on a tour of the Fort St. Sebastian ruins. Fort St. George, Fort St. Sebastian and all their related remnants of English and Portuguese colonialism are now located in the northern outskirts of the modern city of Madras. This is the place, south of the sluggish Penner River on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal, where on a fetid January morning in 1695, from its anchorage on a sand reef half a mile off the shore of Fort St. George, the Fortune began its dangerous and laborious unloading of cargo and disembarked Gabriel and Hannah Legge.
The ruins hold no fascination for Mr. Abraham. He is a very thin, up-to-date young man, assiduously elegant in a leisure suit of pale-blue teri-cot, and recently the recipient of a master’s degree in commerce from the University of Madras. He listens to test-match cricket from New Zealand on a transistor radio. Free-lancing as a guide for English-speaking tourists is a stopgap. His deportment has in it a protective haughtiness; his dainty, solicitous way of holding a huge, threadbare black umbrella over my melanoma-prone pinkness reveals a man who has greater expectations from life than recycling the faded glories of his subcontinent. He doesn’t know it, but his casual graciousness has, in fact, profound historical antecedents. He lets me linger where I want, answers my questions with a shrugged yes and “so they say.” Rubble is rubble to him. He lives for development, a South Indian Silicon Valley. He belongs to the future.
I have with me a book of engravings of the original Sonapatnam, and from the fragments of a wall, the rubbled foundation of the customhouse, I can orient myself in time as well as space. I can imagine the customs master, Mir Ali, one of Haider Beg’s appointees, spyglass in hand, noting the names and descriptions of all the ships and cargo that sailed into and out of the Bay of Bengal. A loyal man, Mir Ali, without him, Haider Beg would have bankrupted himself a hundred times over. A fifty-yard-long ancient wall of wafer-thin bricks that look, at a distance, like a sheaf of ill-stacked ledger papers once defined the boundary of White Town. Along this wall Hannah Legge would stroll, looking down to the sea and toward forbidden India. And here, still close to the wall, but now crushed for a roadbed, are heaps of white stones from houses that made up the White Town of Fort St. Sebastian. I take up a piece of crushed stone and drop it in my tote bag; it could have been from a wall of Gabriel and Hannah Legge’s house. A church and a cemetery overcrowded with sinking headstones still stand, and near the cemetery, a stubby rain-blackened victory tower. Where Mr. Abraham sees collapse, or perhaps even the groundwork for a development scheme, I see the spiderweb of permanence.
A satellite town has grown around, and on, the remains of old Fort St. Sebastian. Settlements here have a parasitic, not homicidal, relationship with nature. Inside the crumbled perimeter of the customhouse, shopkeepers have set up tin-roofed stalls. The whitewashed annex of the municipal school building has usurped a corner of the graveyard. Schoolchildren in sweaty uniforms eat tiffin
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