Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (12 page)

Art by Kaysha Siemens

1746
Madras, India

The British give different words for everything. Thanthai’s kallu kada is called a “Liquor Shop,” and the padaneera drunk by the cup is called “palm wine,” which Thanthai says makes it taste better on their foreign tongues. But there are some soldiers that come in and bang their hands on the counter and ask for “a shot of kallu, fellow, quickly” and Thanthai serves them the sourest kallu from under the counter. It gets sourer with each day, until it transubstantiates into unsellable vinegar. The workers would have thrown the tumbler back in Thanthai’s face, but the British soldiers knock back peg after peg, their faces twisting and throats working, congratulating each other with slaps on the back. Thanthai says that they’re after the authentic local experience, and it only gratifies them when the local experience turns out to be absolutely disgusting.

Thanthai isn’t actually Cani’s real thanthai. Everybody knows, though he pretends to be deaf whenever anyone says anything, and mute whenever she tries to ask him about it. Mama, on the other hand, becomes at first very Catholic, then very Konkani, and starts threatening to try to teach her Konkani even though nobody in Madras speaks it. “Then you can learn Portuguese,” Mama suggests with airy certainty. “O que voce acha, senhora?”

Mama’s face changes when she speaks Portuguese, an unfamiliar light reshaping the planes of her cheekbones and jaw. Her voice is rich and somehow yearning over the syllables, as if she’d like to hungrily swallow them back down again.

“I don’t want to learn Portuguese.” Cani turns away quickly.

Mama sighs and holds up her hands, “Que pena,” she says lightly. “What a shame.” And that should be the end of it, except Mama’s dark eyes watch her intently as she leaves the room, and for days after. Cani doesn’t ask her about her real thanthai again.

The cannon fire from the French ships besieging Madras lets up during the night, and the residents of Black Town throng around the narrow wall that encloses White Town and Fort St. George. Old mamis wearing braids of jasmine flattened and crushed by the activity of the day, children clutching onto saris or chasing each other through the lamplit alleys, men of all classes talking and shouting. An aunty from down the street is screaming over a small body wrapped in bloodied white muslin.

The iron gates to White Town are firmly barricaded. Thanthai does a brisk trade in kallu, even to some of the hard-faced mamis who usually do nothing but complain about their drunk husbands and sons.

The French fleet is shrouded in thick black smoke that rolls over the fort from the river. Most of the shot was aimed at White Town’s fortifications, but the French guns aren’t particularly accurate, especially when fired from aboard ship. Black Town has no walls or barricades, and so bears the brunt of the assault.

Cani’s eyes slide towards the bloodied bundle in her neighbour-aunty’s arms. Mama catches the direction of her gaze and pulls her close, against the soft silk of her sari and the familiar scratchiness of the zari border, printing stylized mangoes and peacock-eye patterns into her cheek. “My darling Canimozhi,” she whispers absently, lifting her head and glaring in the direction of the besieging fleet. “Maybe we should all learn French instead.”

Cani dreams of the river turned to clear glittering glass, with the French ships frozen in the solid water. The froth around the hull shines sharply, slicing the hands and feet of sailors who try to drop from the rigging. The glass is cool under her belly as she watches the fish trapped under the surface like flies preserved in amber. She laughs and peers down even deeper where iridescent-scaled fish pool around the heads of peacocks, and elephants are stopped in the act of kicking up silt from the river bottom as they make their watery journey inland. Tigers perch on riverbed rocks, unfurling chiffon fins as delicate as dragonfly wings behind them in the water.

She takes a breath and wills the water to liquefy below the surface, leaving a thin layer to support her body and trap the ships. The wind picks up, carrying with it salt from the sea, whipping her loose hair into swirling loops as below her the glass cracks and runs, melting into currents speckled with bright wriggling fish. One of the tigers unfreezes mid-leap, body continuing to twist and stretch as it sinks its claws into an elephant calf’s back and rips.

Blood ribbons into the water, dark and clotted, and the calf screams like her neighbour-aunty as the tiger uses a beat of its powerful fins to claw it again.

She watches, hands clenching into fists, but does not will the blood away.

She wakes to the sound of the temple bell, ringing for morning puja. Thanthai kisses them both before slipping away to temple; the gates to White Town are still sealed shut because of the siege, so Cani decides to stay and keep Mama company. Mama, of course, prays at St. Andrew’s rather than St. Mary’s, which is where the British factors and their bell-sleeved, stiff-bodiced memsahibs worship. Mama says that there is a big difference between an Anglican and a Catholic, as big as the difference between a Jain and a Brahmin, but Cani doesn’t think they can be all that different – the Christians all pray in White Town, after all.

Mama looks around at their single-room home attached to the back of the kallu kada and sighs heavily, at a loss for how to fill her day without trading figures from Pondicherry and Goa and Bengal arranged in long columns. Cani feels briefly guilty that she ever wished for the gates to White Town to be mysteriously locked, for Mama to have to stay at home instead of going to clerk for the British governor. Thanthai pretends not to hear, but Cani has listened to the customers talk about people who
choose
who work for the British, calling them bootlickers and traitors and – even whores. They say that about her mama and make veiled references to Cani’s green eyes and foreign features, half-damning and half-sympathetic. If Mama didn’t work at the fort, they’d stop. Cani is sure of it.

The bombardment begins at 7 a.m. sharp. A few men and women, freshly bathed and dressed for prayer, duck into the shop for cover. The men give each other self-satisfied smiles when they realise their good fortune in landing up at the
kallu kada, while the women look around avidly. The shop is magnificent. Rows and rows of gleaming bottles on shelves, painstakingly washed out in the river, polished by hand and then refilled; above the bar hangs a large painting of King George II with his legs on show and wearing more gold than a Brahmin lady at a wedding, as Thanthai likes to say. Thanthai’s quite the painter; Mama brought him the oils and thick paper as a present last summer and he laboured away by moonlight behind the shop for weeks before allowing them to see his masterpiece.

Mama had rolled her eyes. “How nice. Even
we
are painting their pink faces now,” she grumbled. But the painting had gone up, enjoying pride of place.

“You know the British. One look at the King and all they want to do is drink, isn’t it, Cani my daughter?” Thanthai had said, winking. Mama kept glaring and so he heaved a sigh, gave her a kiss, and whispered, “All I want is a peaceful life, Nataline, just a peaceful life.”

Cani grabs for Mama’s long blue nightdress as another cannon strikes nearby, rattling all the bottles on the walls and perhaps even the teeth in her head. “Thanthai hasn’t come back yet.”

“Shh, anjinho, don’t worry. Now, look at all these people in the shop. Don’t you think your papa would like it if we sold them some drinks?” Mama’s face is smooth and unworried, her voice teasing. Cani unclenches her hands and nods.

As they go to take orders, one of the men starts telling the tale of the besieged Queen Meenakshi of Madurai; it’s a perennial Madrasi favourite, and Cani lingers to hear it again. “The wise Queen Meenakshi took the throne of Madurai when her husband died with no heir, but one of her husband’s relations started plotting rebellion. Both appealed to their liege-lord, the Nawab of the Carnatic. The foolish nawab sent his advisor Chanda Sahib to settle the dispute.” The man pauses for effect, and Mama dutifully contributes a disapproving noise from across the room. “Yes, my friends,” he agrees sorrowfully. “Chanda swore on the Qur’an to keep Meenakshi on her throne, and together they ousted the usurper. But after the rebels were scattered, Chanda Sahib betrayed the queen!”

Cani gasps in shock, carried along by the story, and one of the neighbour-ladies cries “Shame, shame!” Mama hands the storyteller a generous shot to wet his throat, and he gulps it down before continuing with renewed vigour. “The faithless Chanda imprisoned the queen in her own palace. The blasphemer had sworn his loyalty – not on the Qur’an, but on a brick wrapped in glittering paper!” Cani leans closer as the storyteller lowers his voice. “But Meenakshi would not treat with the invader. She threw herself from a tower rather than submit, and so we remember her today: a Nayak queen, honourable to the end!”

Everyone quietens unexpectedly. But Cani is thinking of Queen Meenakshi at the top of the tower, leaning out of a stone-clad window and looking down at the ground far below her. “What happened to Chanda Sahib?” she asks.

The storyteller turns toward her with a patronising smile and then Cani is knocked to the floor in a wave of sound and light so thick that it feels like a physical force.

Glass shatters on the shelves. Sharply alcoholic shards pelt her back and scatter across the floor like chittering insects. The packed mud floor heaves and bucks, copper bowls ring and clatter; somewhere in the distance it sounds like many people are screaming. Cani feels a tug under her shoulders as she’s pulled upright and her eyes slowly focus through the slick smoke: it is Mama’s face, close to hers. Her mouth is working but instead of words Cani hears a loud, heavy hum like water rushing downriver. Mama looks frightened. There is blood on her chin, and her right hand is wrapped up in a length of cleaning cloth.

The sounds coalesce into her name:
Cani,
Mama says, shaking her and making the humming worse. “Anjinho, meu coração.” Her words bleed into each other, water pouring out from a glass onto her face. The shop, the magnificent shop is littered with aunties lying on the ground and some men staggering around and big long pieces of glass like glittering swords, and George II has a cannonball embedded through his glorious head.

“The King,” Cani coughs out. Mama starts to cry. “The King has no head.”

Thanthai appears just in time to watch the British soldiers desert their posts to loot the kallu kada, drawn by the unmistakable stench of alcohol flowing out into the streets. He hugs Cani and Mama too hard and pulls them back when one of the officers arrives to shout at his men. The French ships are still firing their cannon, but the soldiers ignore the siege and their red-faced officer to drink alcohol straight from the bottle. “At least the shop didn’t catch fire,” Thanthai says fervently. “Thank Ishvara, both of you are alive.”

And then the doctor peels back the last wrapping around Mama’s hand and Cani throws up all over Thanthai’s feet. Her Mama’s right hand is a mass of blood and flesh, shredded by the glass.

“You are lucky,” the doctor tells her. “You won’t lose any fingers.”

“I’m a clerk,” Mama tells him angrily, with a rasp in her voice. “Don’t you understand, you fool? This is my
writing
hand.”

Cani dreams her frozen-river dream again, only this time all the fish are shaped like liquor bottles, and the screaming calf has mama’s dark, thick-lashed eyes and bleeds indigo ink instead of blood. The French sailors impale themselves endlessly on the sharp ice of the river as she pulls the tiger away and wills the blood back into the calf.

She is concentrating so hard that she does not notice the interloper to her dream until he clears his throat and asks “Ninna hesaru enu, magale?” in what is clearly meant to be a kindly tone.

Cani starts at the unfamiliar language, and scrambles up to her knees before turning. A man in embroidered silks and a turban edged with extravagant strings of pearls is standing on the glass-river a few feet away from her, looking at her river-scene with a curious expression. Cani did not dream him; she has never seen such rich apparel in her waking life.

He offers her a smile. “Malayalam ariyamo? Paire endah, kutty?” These words sound a little more familiar, but still unintelligible. Cani crosses her arms and wills her hair into a severe oiled plait. He sighs. “Tumhara naam kya hai, beti?”

Cani glares at him, but is caught entirely off guard when he starts forward and seizes her chin. He tilts up her face and chuckles in understanding. “Oh, you are foreign!” he announces in English, and Cani pushes him away.

“I’m
Tamil
!” she shouts, and stamps her foot. The glass cracks with a sound like cannonshot and breaks into jagged spikes as her body rises up until she’s hovering a foot in the air; the man collapses into the sharded water as her skin darkens a shade, then another until her hands are a glorious coal-black relieved only by her shining pink nails.

The interloper pulls himself onto an ice-floe, and squeezes out his salwar half-heartedly. “Yes, yes madam, you are Tamil only,” he agrees with a choking laugh. “You are finished with anger, no? We can talk a little bit?” He looks down at his waterlogged clothes with palpable sadness, and raises his eyes heavenward.