The Confusion

"Aye," Jack said, after he had allowed a proper silence to go by, "sometimes I think her curves are too perfect to've been shaped by man."

"They were not shaped, but only discovered, by man," said Enoch Root, and risked a single step towards her. Then he fell into silence again.

Jack busied himself inspecting various works higher up the beach. For the most part these were makers of planks and pegs. But in one place a shed of woven canes had been erected, and thatched with palm-fronds. Inside it, a woodcarver of higher caste was at work with his chisels and mallets; wood-chips covered the sandy floor and spilled out onto the beach. Jack went in there, bringing Surendranath as his interpreter.

"For Christ's sake! Look at her! Will you just look at her!? Look at her!" Then a pause while Jack drew breath and Surendranath translated this into Marathi, a couple of octaves lower, and the sculptor muttered something back.

"Yes, I see quite plainly that you were so good as to remove the elephant-trunk, and that the lady has a proper nose now, and for that you have my undying gratitude," Jack hollered sarcastically, "and as long as I am helping you with your self-esteem, sirrah, allow me to thank you for scraping off the blue paint. But! For! Christ's! Sake! Do you know, sirrah, how to count? You do!? Oh, excellent! Then will you be so good, sirrah, as to count the number of arms possessed by this Lady? I will patiently stand here while you take a full inventory—it may take a little while…oh, very good! That is the same reckoning that I have arrived at! Now, sirrah, if you will be so kind, how many arms do you observe on my body? Very good! Once again, we agree. How about Surendranath—how many arms has he? Ahh, the same figure has come up once again. And you, sirrah, when you carve your idols, you hold the hammer in one, and the chisel in another, hand—how many makes that? Remarkable! Yet again we have arrived at the same figure! Then will you please explain to me how come it is that This! Lady! is formed as you have formed her? Why the numerical discrepancy? Do I need to import a Doctor of al-jebr to explain this?"

Jack stormed out of the shed, followed closely by Surendranath, who was saying, "You told the poor fellow she was supposed to represent a goddess—what on earth were you expecting?"

"I was being poetickal."

Jimmy and Da

"My first thought was that she couldn't have been wrought by a Dutchman, on account of her marked dead-rise,

LATE 1696 AND EARLY 1697

THEY WERE TRAVELING NOW AS Hindoostani gentlemen: Enoch and Jack each had a light two-wheeled carriage drawn by a pair of trotting bullocks. Each carriage could have accommodated two passengers, provided they were very close friends, but by the time Jack and Enoch had packed themselves in with their diverse weapons, bundles, wine bottles, et cetera, there was only room for one. And that was fine with Jimmy and Da

By day the pace, combined with the sun, would have slain them all in a few hours. So they woke up around sunset, lay about camp for a few hours as the heat of the day seeped away into the earth and sky, then got underway a couple of hours before midnight and hurried down roads and paths until dawn. Jack had made the trip several times, and had learned how to break it up into stages, each of which ended in a mango-or coconut-grove near the walls of a town. They would smooth out some ground and make camp as the sun rose, and a few ru

This was traveling of a wholly serious and businesslike nature, and demanded certain adjustments of Jimmy and Da

Once they had escaped from Jack's blighted jagir the landscape was pleasant enough, but uniform and monotonous: ditched and irrigated fields alternating with groves of food-bearing trees, and occasional stretches of jungle covering hills, vales, and other areas that were not suited to agriculture. Sometimes they had to pass through such parts; the jungle seemed to rush out of the night to envelop them, and they moved forward with extreme care, expecting stranglers to abseil from overhead limbs, or large man-eating felines to explode from the brush. They had to ford several rivers, which in this part of the world meant wading through crocodiles. At one of these fords, Da

The next day—or rather, the next evening—they woke up to find themselves in a black country of black men. It had been a long night's march and their bodies wanted to sleep but their minds did not. When they lay their heads down they could hear the earth thumping beneath them, like a gentle heartbeat, for this black earth was far richer in saltpeter than any in Jack's jagir, and the ground outside the walls of this town was pocked with holes where people labored with their thudding timbers all day long.

If the earth was full of thumps the air was just as full of strange cries, for every peasant working in the fields hollered "Popo!" every minute or so. Jack ended up sitting in the shade of a tree with Jimmy and Da

"Those field workers are Cherumans—a caste so low that they can pollute a Nayar from a distance of sixty-four feet," Jack explained, "whereupon the Nayar is obligated to kill them, and then purify himself with endless and pompous rites. So to save themselves from being killed, and the Nayars from being inconvenienced, they cry out Popo! all the time, to warn all comers that they are present."

"You're full o'shite as ever, Dad," said Jimmy with equal measures of contempt and affection.

A different cry sounded from around the road-bend: "Kukuya! Kukuya!" As soon as they heard it, the Cherumans picked up their hoes and moved away from the road, depopulating a sixty-four-foot-wide strip to either side of it. Presently a small party of travelers came into view: a black-ski

"If that be a Nayar, then let's go to where the Nayars live," Da