The Luminist (36 page)

In the scullery he found some blackened potatoes and a bit of bread, some lard and a few stray morsels of lamb. The water his mother had collected from the rains now reeked of ash. He poured the buckets out of the scullery window and set them in the doorway to be taken to the well.

It was almost a year since he'd first come. If this winter was like the last, the rains would find them soon.

He brought the food, some linens and blankets and some clothes to the front room. The fire had eaten his modest quarters down to the frame. A pile of soot marked his sleeping corner. There was nothing left of his possessions. Everything was dust. The feather shadow was gone.

He walked down the corridor. The paintings had been stolen. The walls were pockmarked with cavities from the men's crude bludgeoning at the gas light fixtures. Scorched shadows adorned the ceiling where the flames had journeyed through the arteries of the house.

He opened Charles' door.

The window wall no longer stood. Glass littered the floor in a glimmering trail out onto the grass. The room had been stripped of everything he'd come to know. Curtains, books with spines that crackled like split coconuts when opened, the fronds and step stool and every other trapping of her photograph, all gone.

Charles' burnt remains had been left to rot atop the debris. He was so bereft. Age and illness had already begun to shrink him, then three nights lashed by the valley 's bitter rains. Now,
finished by fire. Only a hand, upturned like a gnarled root, marked the blackened thing for the once-lion it was.

He closed the door softly, and wondered where his mother fell.

Gita helped him carry everything to Holland House. He ushered her inside with a promise of some bread and lamb. Sitting her atop a folded sheet, he told her to be still while he swept broken glass from the ceiling window into a corner. While she ate, he set up the camera on its legs. Next to it, he lay Sir John's telescope. The telescope's curved eye reflected the room.

He saw the image reflected in its glass, of a gracefully carved wooden frame jutting out from its hiding place under a drop cloth.

He brought the painting out from its alcove, set it against the wall and let the cloth fall away.
I asked, do you see love when you look at it?

In time, he thought, I will know every detail of this. Her lips, apart as if captured in the creation of a word. Her hair, her skin, her eyes like submerged pearls. George had painted light into her eyes, remaking the soft glow cast by the lit diya which she held near her heart.

He stayed a long time with her, staring at his diya in her hands until the light drained from the world. But not from her, nor from the memsa'ab's house. The light stood still, here.

4.

Dimbola is dark now.Its feverish life and bustle are stilled as are the lights which shined there. Servants, scientists, disciples, painters, astronomers and divines, all those who came to her in hopes of burning themselves into memory are gone. Silence is the only tenant left. But I have seen their faces across this land and others, and I say they live.

SIR GEORGE WYNFIELD
Portraitist to the Royal Family, on his memories of Ceylon, 1902

Departing

ELIGIUS PICKED DEAD PETALS FROM THE TAMARIND growing near the broken wall. He'd planted it in an effort to pretty up what remained of their hut, but it had gone to pulp in only a few days, a victim of the unrelenting rains. He rolled the petals into his palm, using his thumb as a mortar until a fine rust smear remained.

Gita's laughter at this distraction filled the bones of Matara. Four years and as many monsoon seasons had passed over his old village since the soldiers felled it. Little remained to mark the place. Yet this burial ground was where she chose for her reading each day.

It was the colonials' June, in their year of 1842. His sister no longer remembered her own mother 's face.

It had taken him many days of scavenging before he'd found Sudarma at the rear of the house. She had fallen in the memsa'ab's sacred room; he found her lying on the floor, covered in the smoke and ash she'd breathed until no air was left in her.

He could see the neglect tattering away at Gita's memory of her mother and he let it happen. Let her fill the void with a woman of her own fashioning. A perfect union of doll parts. Sustainer, beauty, angel, ghost.

Gita no longer cried in outrage that her brother's hands tucked her in for the night. Yet something in her yearned for her old home and he had long since given up fighting with her about
her desire to sit outside the hut she'd been born in and hear of Gretel slipping beneath the waves.

Gita began kicking through the mud. Her four -year old's attention span had reached its limit. “ Very good today,” he said. “ Your pronunciation is much better.”

She shrugged. Progress in the colonials' language mattered little to her.

“ Let's start back.” He picked up the book. “ I 'll make you rice with curd.”

“ Stay.”

She took such joy in chasing her shadow among the banyans. When she was ready, she smiled and then ran without waiting for him, down the rain-carved road towards the jungle. It was the long way back. But it was the only route she tolerated. She loved the sea.

He gave in, as he always did. He'd come to perceive unexpected things in her childish tantrums. He needed to give her everything she wanted. Safety and certainty above all, because in her outcries he heard his own death, and the void after him, and how she would fill it with memories of him.

Let them be worth keeping, he thought. I can give her so little else.

The wind was with them. The journey was not so daunting to her little legs. They found the road and followed it back to Dimbola, where they saw a carriage waiting at the gate. Its doors bore the ornate crest of the Galle Face.

Gita's face darkened. When the vicar 's messenger stepped out, she dropped her eyes as she always did around others. Even ones she saw often enough to know, soldiers and colonials and this boy. She refused to make eye contact at his awkward pleasantries.

Her poor eyes, Eligius thought. Always expecting to see the worst.

“ We need to speak,” the vicar's oldest altar boy said.

Eligius told his sister to mind the church's horse. He led
the boy to the main house. The boy – he never did see fit to give Eligius his name, and Eligius never asked – seemed more comfortable there. The colonials liked their formalities.

“There is a family.”

There always is, Eligius thought.

The boy covered familiar terrain. Address, societal position. None of it mattered much. Eligius knew his role, and what it was worth. “ My fee.”

“They will pay you when you arrive. You may meet the ser - vant's gaze only. The master of the house will not have it.”

Again, he thought, familiar terrain. “A favor, of the vicar. May Gita stay at the church until I am finished?”

Starchy indignation crept into the boy 's eyes. “ It's harder for her when she's alone.” He paused, letting the lie settle against his tongue. “She finds peace at the church.”

“ Very well. But you should go before the light fades.”

“ I make my own.”

“ It is not so much to light a candle,” the boy said haughtily. “ We light hundreds each evening in the church and we are not prideful. It's unseemly for anyone, let alone such as you.”

“Then you should have no trouble finding someone else to attend to this family's needs.”

There were but a few others in Ceylon who had taken up the art. He'd heard of them. Colonials who came to shore in the months following the violence to stake claims on the abandoned estates. They brought a new crop of tea that they hoped might circumvent the blight that had taken such a toll on the coffee plantations, and another garrison of soldiers who kept troublemakers at bay. They brought as well new cameras that were smaller than his, with lenses like prisms, and new ways of coating the glass plates. But they were prisoners of their new world and its capricious light. None knew its ways like he did. None were willing to bathe in poisons like he was. Hobbyists, that was all they were. Effete portrayers of fox hunts and
christenings. No one save he went to the families needing their darkest moments arrested. Only him.

Sometimes he wondered if those families were behind the odd peace he'd come to know in Ceylon. Perhaps they kept Matara's roaming boys from the one who made death a portrait sitter.

He chose not to belabor the point. There was no need. On the church's behalf, the boy had performed this minuet many times. Never did these people feel closer to their God than when they unleashed their contempt.

“I am grateful to you and to the vicar for thinking of me,” Eligius said, “and for taking Gita. Of course I will go shortly.”

The boy left Eligius for his carriage. Gita was dutifully petting the horse. Eligius gave her the book. Its page was bent to Gretel's tale. “ Practice your words one more time before you go to bed,” he told her.

“ I don't want to go.”

He hushed her. “They are always nice to you. They cook good food and keep you in a warm room. There is nothing to object to. I will look in on you tonight, when I am done.” The church carriage propelled forward with a sharp jerk. Her face appeared in the window, quietly disconsolate. She had grown to be obedient. Too much so. He could put her in anyone's hands and upon his word, she would do whatever was asked of her. Hers was a life too easily ruled.

She thrust her hand out of the carriage window and waved.

She had four years of memories, and he'd done what he could to make something tolerable of them.
Will you have room for one more, Gita? Just one, just a goodbye. And from it, I hope you will make something like forgiveness.

He waved back.

 

THE INDIAN GIRL who answered his knocking was young, with luminous eyes and smooth skin. Eligius touched his camera. “I have been sent for.”

She stepped aside for him. He brought the camera in and leaned it against the wall. Slipping his rucksack off, he checked to make sure the glass plates survived the journey. Giggles drew his attention to a doorway across the tiled foyer. Three small boys covered their mouths and jostled each other. Maybe Gita's age or younger.

The servant girl rushed up the curved stairs to the master of the house waiting at the top. He whispered to her and walked away, letting a small velvet satchel fall from his fingers to the floor just outside an open door. The girl came to the banister and waved. Eligius brought his tools upstairs. “Close the door,” he told her. She obeyed.

He set down his camera and spread its legs before considering the room. The curtains were open in the mistaken belief that every available drop of light was required. He asked the girl to close them, careful to keep his voice low and his gaze averted from the master standing in the corner, mumbling words into the silence. She did as he asked. The room sank into a murky haze.

Eligius lit the first candle. He dipped a taper into the bobbing light and brought it to the others.

“Are there enough?” the girl asked him.

It was always good to hear something like his own language in these places. “ Yes. You did very well.”

The room was oddly shaped. Like an oval, but with one end smaller than the portion with the bed. That end would require more light. He brought candles to surround the bed and gazed upon his subject for the first time.
I remember you, memsa'ab Pike.

Her family had surrounded her with pieces of themselves. A tiger figurine fashioned from the husks of coconuts rested in the crook of her arm. Satin cloth embroidered with her family crest made a cloak around her head. A garland of hyacinth crowned her dry hair. A crucifix hung on the wall above her. The Bible – there was always this book, he thought, closer at hand than it likely ever was in life – lay open across her midsection.

She was to be remembered for her children, he saw, and for flowers, and piety. Her once-spoken dream of a song that could bring tears was nowhere in the room. Nor was his memsa'ab's photograph. Perhaps her husband could not look at the sculpture of his wife's secret life. Maybe he'd never known of it. Here then was the spouse and mother they would rather remember. The other would simply be buried.

He surrounded Mrs. Pike with candles until her loose flesh radiated something like sleep. Positioning the camera, he treated the plate, readied the paper, and slipped under the cloak. There you are.

While the image developed in his light box, he accepted a mug of spiced black tea from the maid. In a small, sweet voice, she told him her name. Navneet. Punjabi. She was fourteen. Her family came south before she was born. The master 's boys called her Nan. Her village, Tutakoreen, was one of the first to fall. She remembered the sounds of hammers against her walls, but little else. Two nights before her memsa'ab died, she heard the woman's moaning and the doctor saying that her stomach had burst. Later, the sa'ab left his wife's side, came to her room and raped her. She knew it would happen again.

Eligius glanced at the master. He was reading from his own Bible. Occasionally he looked up at his dead wife as if she were a slumbering child drifting away on a story.

He wanted to tell Navneet to leave, but life wasn't like that. Only the fighting had gone away. Everything else had remained, with new faces manning the old ramparts. “ Take kunch or suarnalata,” he told the girl. “It will end any baby that begins from him.”

She smiled.

He put the imprint into a simple frame fashioned from detritus Dimbola wood. Setting it next to the body, he took his rupees and left. The plate, with Mrs. Pike's image seared into it, bounced at his side as he walked to the carriage. Later, he could use the glass to make photographic copies of her to sell at the
bazaar. The colonials never went there and didn't know how highly pictures of dead Britishers were valued. He'd taken many of the dead and sold them twice, to the grieving and to the pleased. Soldiers who'd died of their wounds, or old sa'abs whose cholera came with the droughts, those were the easiest to sell. He'd even sold Charles' photo to the colonials. It touched them, the new directors especially. How they went on about the inspiration this old patriarch had kindled, compelling an Indian boy to such a Christian display of bedside mourning, like an angel at the Nativity.