Free The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee Page B

mission, the way many Indian students in America go back to India for a week and get married to satisfy their parents, then return with a stranger who can cook, bear children, and, eventually, be loved. In other words, why not? She got married because it was her time to get married. Just like you, he says to me, what if you hadn’t read Auctions & Acquisitions one morning? What if the name Pearl hadn’t leaped off the page? You got started on this the same way Hannah did when she walked out along the beach one day and saw the boat and the men hauling the body ashore.
    So one morning she was content with her passionate needlework, smugly contemptuous of Hester and her suitor; the next morning she walked to the river because it was her time to be in the path of death, to witness grief, to hear Gabriel’s Strange defense of luxury, and expose herself to the possibility of life.
    We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.

10
    GABRIEL LEGGE’S father turned out to be an indebted drunk from Morpeth, not a shipowner from Danagadee. Ancestral lands in Northumberland, those that had not been seized by creditors or lost in successive lawsuits, had been given out to Gabriel’s far-older brother, the sober but dull-witted Morgan Legge. Gabriel looked upon his place in the birth order—second son, fourth child—as providential. No land to root him, and not a groat’s worth of family fortune to tempt him into staying and currying favor.
    “Can you imagine me herding sheep? Married to a ewe like my wretched brother?” It was true; Morgan and his wife, named Felicity, whom Hannah called Fleece, and brood of children did come south once to pay their respects and to inspect the homemaking skills of the New World bumpkin their brother had hooked. Hannah had the impression of having been visited by a flock of geese rather than blood relatives.
    Homemaking skills, in the world of Morgan Legge, had decided linkages with submission and stupidity. It was mandated that the wife should not outshine the husband in anything but parental wealth. In the case of Fleece, a serving girl on a neighboring farm, this condemned her to permanent eclipse.
    Hannah, orphaned by secrecy and a bee sting, had set great store by family, having forbidden herself to think too deeply of her mother. It did not seem possible that actual blood relatives could not unlock a secret, did not possess in abundance, a side of oneself otherwise hidden or left undeveloped. Morgan, squat, short, fair and balding, with two eyes and seven children, wiped that expectation from Hannah’s mind. She was grateful for the absence of family, the absence of definition and expectation.
    She had married a man as singular in his society, as inexplicable to Morpeth, as she was in Salem. His life was a mystery to her, fabulously rich when he chose to embellish it, but otherwise a blank. He could describe the interior of a Mongol tent, the smell of camels, the pink flesh inside the trunk of a raja’s elephant, but he could not, or would not, answer the simplest question about the ships he sailed or the captains he served. He pointed out to her that his life was provisional. In the parts of the South Atlantic and Indian oceans that he plied, the odds were better than even that any voyage he undertook would be his last. She would be well looked after; that’s all he could guarantee.
    WHEN Hannah Easton Fitch Legge left Salem for England in 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been in existence for sixty-two years. Time enough for a full range of political responses to have evolved. New World Man was either an ungrateful wretch wallowing in moral regression, or the upright angel of God’s green promise, reaping the rewards of sober rectitude. Reading those responses today—the charges and countercharges—is a shock: we have not changed in three hundred