The Luminist (5 page)

The guards pressed themselves against the gate, bracing it. More fusillades launched from the crowd. Mangoes and kavas burst against the bars, raining pulp across the tended grass of the Court garden.

Eligius turned his back on their anger. Brushing bits of fruit from his shirt, he felt as if his trembling heart were visible to the world.

The court building itself looked much like a plantation, with its columns, its walls the color of ripe coconut meat, its polished glass. The Rees flag billowed on sea winds. The sculpted grounds made a mockery of the anger he'd come through. Even the breeze gentled once past the gates.

A parade of strutting peacocks scampered aside as they approached the carved ebony doors of the Court's entryway. Before knocking, Swaran drew palmfuls of water from a stone basin. Lotus blossoms floated aimlessly, cut from their roots.

A Sikh doorman regarded Swaran's petition without expression. His chubby face had cracked from the sun. Rivulets of perspiration crept down the folds of his neck, slipping beneath the banded collar of his uniform. “It is more today than yesterday,” he said, opening the door wide. “Every day they get louder. When this door closes, you won't hear them at all.”

The room beyond was marvelous to behold. All of Matara
could have fit inside its ellipse. Its walls were covered with clean white paper embossed with raised images of acacia. Windows opened wide onto an expanse of tall sugar cane fields and the stone edifice of the Galle Face church. The windows were bordered with enough cloth to stock a bazaar. Gathered in loose folds with links of golden cord, the cloth breathed with each gust of sea air.

On any other day Eligius might have run from wall to wall like a child delighting in his flight. He might race along the room's perimeter and imagine running across the sea to strange places.

Across the expanse from them, a Hindu servant struggled to remain upright as the boy riding atop his shoulders bobbed up and down, his small red head snapping with the jerkiness of his mount's gait. “Horse!” the young boy screamed. “Lift me up! Up!”

The servant obeyed. He hefted the boy high in his arms and paraded him past windows. When the boy tired of this, he demanded his horse once again. In an instant the servant was hopscotching in a mad circle.

“No.” A woman's voice.

Ewen halted his exultant flight. He began to cry at his mother's tone.

Something else disturbed Catherine's view of the proscenium, the marble, the frescoes and the light suffusing the Court's expanse in descending sparks of dust. An instant before the Indian boy, the contraption's keyhole was making dervishes of the strolling men. Cups and saucers lost their mundane structure and became the obelisks of London, the surrounding dust like that city's silverwashed fog. Faces came undone from the men and women who possessed them. Faces were geometry.

The contraption, with its mirrors and polished glass, brought resolution to the world like nothing else in life. It isolated the possible. She saw moments in the eyes, in the filament creases around mouths. There, a happy marriage. There, a
thwarted plan. Aspects that were daily lost to careless memory might still be found somewhere on each one passing through her vision.

Then the Indian boy came within her view and remained. He stood stiffly next to an older Indian man. His father, perhaps. There was another man with them but he felt peripheral; he was sinewy and hard, as if he'd been broken from the ground and put to a whetstone. The boy, who appeared to be Julia's age, had skin the color of milky tea. He wore trousers and a tunic. The clothes gentled his lean physique, made him less a part of this strange country.

When he looked at the man who held reams of papers and an open book, she wondered if the boy was the sort who watched his father tirelessly, to become the one she found in her camera's view.

The boy turned to face her camera. He tilted his head, regarding it and perhaps the suggestion of the woman hidden within it. When he moved, he opened a patch of pale watercolored sky in the window behind him. His shadow cast across the polished floor.

She was about to bark an order for him to move away but she could not. In that unlikely face, in the void of sound or motion, the space between her and her dead child came to her.

The Indian boy's shape against the Court wall was a moment that she could not name. It stepped forward from life and meant to remain, but she could not understand why that should be so, when Hardy had come as a moment already passed.

“No,” she finally said.

Eligius saw her emerge from under a dark cloak. Despite the earthen sari adorning her, this woman was colonial. There was no mistaking the empire in her.

Regarding him from across the foyer, she returned beneath the cloak of a spidery apparatus that filled Eligius with a queer dread. The thing stood on black legs, smooth and lucent in the twitching gaslights and filtering sun. Five feet high, most of its
body was hidden away beneath the black hood that reminded him of the draped macaw cages he marveled at as a child.

A British girl of Eligius' age stood alongside the hidden woman. Her hair was golden, her face made turbulent in the mottling light. She fingered a glass pendant around her neck. When the afternoon sun struck the dangling shape, bubbles of color spilled across the blue-veined marble floor.

A Cingalese servant girl hurried past, bearing trays of sweet meats and pastries no larger than hatchlings. The British girl's pendant light adorned her, then fell away.

“Whose water do you draw?” the servant whispered when she reached Swaran.

“We're here to address the Court,” Swaran said.

“You may wait in the chambers, but be sure and remain at the top of the stairs, where it's dark.”

Eligius glanced back. The woman was out from under her cloak and standing at a window with the girl, facing the Galle Face and the sea beyond. The boy played in the shadow of wall frescoes depicting forgotten colonials.

The servant led them to a set of whitewashed doors. Inside, they took seats in the uppermost row. At the bottom was a dais, a lectern and several tables. Colonials congregated in groups like clusters of nettles, festooned in their finest linens and silks. The men tugged at brilliantly hued sashes fixed around their throats while they raged at each other in something approaching verse. Their voices rose and fell while white boys carved into parchment with the sharpened quills of native birds. Their handiwork was rendered with such speed, it seemed that the boys were charged with the task of arresting the men's words no sooner than they were aloft.

Eligius couldn't understand much of it, but the comings and goings fascinated him. Like the bazaars at Kaveri and the port, pockets of commerce unfolded in corners. Hindi women held up flowers and cinnamon satchels. While they waited to be
noticed, their eyes wandered to the men bringing the council members steaming tea and plates of clove loaf.

He pitied them, to be seen by their women this way.

One at a time, Britishers emerged from the dankness to approach the dais. They presented their wants. Rights to their neighbor's well, levies on tobacco imported from further than twenty five miles to Ceylon's markets, news of growing unrest in Madurai and whether the directors might impose a limit on servants brought in from that part of the country. “They bring able backs, but contempt for their betters,” an aggrieved man said.

The directors sat at a long table under another Company flag. Though they listened, decisions seemed to come from one man, Governor Andrew Wynfield. He cut a robust figure, with broad shoulders and a piercing glare that he trained to imposing effect upon those who stepped forward. The other men seemed older, heavier, trapped by their station. This man was stronger than they were.

One director sat away from the others. His head was bathed in waning light from the ring of windows above him. He held a thick woolen overcoat tightly under his chin, like a blanket. His free hand stroked a beard of brambles and moonlight. A beggarly old lion. The Governor leaned to whisper to him after each solicitation.

Swaran got up and slowly descended towards the dais. Those conducting the business of the rich paid him no attention as he passed.

Eligius felt a guilty wave of embarrassment for his father. They'd walked a long way. The brown stain of Ceylon's mud roads covered him. His clothes were festooned with leaves and windborne dust that clung to the soft cloth like gray rain clouds.

Swaran approached a lectern. His bearing was regal despite the barely disguised mirth his appearance provoked among the colonials.

“You must be Swaran Shourie.” The governor read from a document. He held up a hand, silencing the room. “You have
asked for the floor and it is yours, though only for a moment. We are about to adjourn.”

“I am here by right of the people,” Swaran said. “The southern provinces and all their villages, Wynfield sa'ab.”

“By right?” Governor Wynfield smiled. “Was there an election I should be aware of?”

“There are issues you should be aware of, sa'ab. Matters more pressing than where your servants come from.”

“Your tone, sir.”

“On behalf of Ceylon, I ask for leniency on the lagaan. The tax. I have studied the charter by which the Court and the Company gained sovereignty, and I believe the tax exceeds its bounds. I have the citations to your laws.”

Wynfield's smile had not left him, yet something within it hardened like pottery in an artisan's kiln. “We have been over the same laws. It is a closed matter.”

“There must be an open forum, sa'abs. The Charter is to be renewed for another twenty years. It cannot be, not as it stands.”

One of the directors leaned forward. “Speak of it in the proper way, Swaran. It is a matter of respect, or else say nothing.”

Eligius saw his father's hands tremble.

“Your Zamindari system forces us to grow only what you need,” Swaran pressed on, “with seed we are forced to buy from you. Your lagaan takes us into debt, so we cannot afford to sow the fields. Having nothing to grow, we have nothing to sell and no way to pay this tax. Our markets are full of Indians bartering scraps of themselves to each other while we lose our lands.”

“I have little sympathy.” Wynfield held out his teacup and waited. In an instant, a Tamil servant stood at his side, refilling it. “Ceylon's poverty was a matter of record long before we accepted stewardship, at no small expense of the Crown's time and capital. Your people are free to work and raise the money to address their arrears. The fields afford them such work.”

“Why should they work the fields?” Swaran's voice was
shrill. The Indians in the chamber cast their eyes down. “What do they gain?”

“Outrageous,” one of the directors blurted.

“The simple task of amending the Charter has begun,” Wynfield said. “ When it is ready, you will hear of its terms, and I will look to you to convey those terms clearly to the people who appointed you.”

Swaran stood helplessly. “The people will not accept this.”

“The laws,” Wynfield said angrily, “suggest that they must. Do they not?” He turned to the bundled old lion. “As the scrivener of their drafting, please speak to our rights under the Charter.”

Eligius pulled back as the lion's gaze found him.

“I've read everything – ” Swaran began.

“They are ample,” the lion said quietly. “They are clear and unambiguous, Swaran.”

“This is not your country!”

Eligius spun in his seat. Chandrak was bounding down the steps towards the dais. “We are not all weak men!” Chandrak shouted. “If we fall, so shall you!”

“Who is this man?” Wynfield stood as soldiers left their posts at either end of the dais. They headed towards Chandrak, bayonets leveled.

Swaran's head bowed. Eligius tried to see his father's face through the crush of bodies suddenly swarming the Court floor.

The soldiers caught Chandrak by the arms and hair. Pummeling him with the butts of their rifles, they dragged him through a side door. “So shall you!” Chandrak's cries echoed through the chamber.

Wynfield came to the edge of the dais as the directors cleared the hall. “You bring talk of rebellion in here? Rest assured, you are no longer welcome, Swaran. If you are seen again, you will be arrested.”

“I did not speak of rebellion – ”

“Further discussion is pointless. You will leave here. Now.”

Eligius watched his father gather his papers. He wanted to
speak, but his words had fallen into a deep hole. Did his father feel this way, at this moment? As if he was drowning within himself?

“Is the boy your son, Swaran?”

The old lion stood from his seat with difficulty. “Tell me your name, boy,” he said when Swaran tucked away the last of his notes in silence.

“Eligius.” He watched his father trudge back up the hall steps, towards the servant entrance.

“Merely to pass through the mob outside took courage for you both,” the lion said. “You have a Christian surname. Are you Christian?”

“Hill country Tamil. My family came from the north long ago. I was named for the missionary Ault's predecessor. He helped my mother when I was born, or I would not have lived. My mother had a fever.”

“It's a harsh world for the young.”

“I was weak when I was born. I am strong now. My mother said to me, ‘Stay. You did not come all this way only to go back now.' And so I did.”

“A splendid story.”

“Why didn't you listen to my father? He worked hard to speak with you.”

“Walk with me.”

The great foyer outside fell into shadow as a cloud crossed its windows. For a moment, Eligius felt a glow upon him as he left the Court hall. Then he felt its recession from his skin, leaving only the old lion's cold hand. “I hope we meet again, Eligius. I would like to think there will be other things to remember me by.”