Loot: A novel - Softcover

James, Tania

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593469658 ISBN 13: 9780593469651

Publisher: Vintage, 2024

Synopsis

A spellbinding historical novel set in the eighteenth century: a hero’s quest, a love story, the story of a young artist coming of age, and an exuberant heist adventure that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years.

“Addictively absorbing.” —The New York Times Book Review


This wildly inventive, irresistible feat of storytelling from a writer at the height of her powers is "an expertly-plotted, deeply affecting novel about war, displacement, emigration, and an elusive mechanical tiger" (Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait).

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu’s sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate—and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create—will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.

Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate.  When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu’s palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.

About this title

About the Author

TANIA JAMES is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Guernica, One Story, A Public Space, and The Kenyon Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter I

On the day he is taken from his family, Abbas is carving a peacock into a cabinet door. He drives his gouge tip through the rosewood, adjusting the pressure with his pointer finger. Grooves deepen, a beak appears. He moves on to sculpt feathers, stacked like scales. He excels at this task and has never been so bored in his life.

Seated nearby on coir mats are his father and two older brothers, Junaid and Farooq. With a post braced against the inside of his knee, Junaid knocks out nuggets of unwanted wood with the tak-tak! of his mallet and chisel. Farooq sketches a pair of peacocks for a headboard. Their father sands a finished post, stopping every so often to shoot Abbas a warning look.

“No more of your toys,” his father has told him in private. “Beds and cabinets, that’s it. The toys only bring trouble.”

Pausing to arch his back, Abbas is distracted by a pigeon fluttering down from a roof across the lane. Curious, isn’t it, the way birds bob their heads while they walk but never while they fly? (Abbas finds it curious, though some might say curiosity is exactly his problem.) He wonders if it’s something to do with a connective mechanism between the leg and the neck. And, he wonders, if one were to construct a mechanical pigeon, how might the head be engineered to jerk with every step?

Then he recalls something a friend once told him.

Ask too many questions and next thing you know, you’re the one being questioned.

Abbas is trading out one gouge for another when a man appears at the threshold, holding a bayonet that surpasses him in height. By the tiger-striped sleeves, Abbas knows him to be one of Tipu Sultan’s royal guards.

“Are you Abbas, son of Yusuf Muhammad?” the guard says.

“Who’s asking?” says Abbas, not as coolly as he’d like.

The guard takes a breath. “Tipu Sultan Fath Ali Khan, the Tiger of Mysore, the Padshah of Patan, Breaker of Colonel Baillie, and God-Given Overseer of the State—” Across the lane, a lathe shrieks to a stop. People lift their heads from their work. “—has summoned Abbas, son of Yusuf Muhammad, to the Summer Palace.”

“Outside the city walls?” asks Abbas, who has never in his life been outside the city walls.

“Is there another Summer Palace?” says the guard. “Get up!”

Abbas stands, his legs tingling with pins and needles. He wonders if he will faint.

“Wait,” says Yusuf Muhammad, following Abbas and the guard into the lane. “He’s only seventeen. Let me answer for his crimes.”

“What crimes?” says Junaid. “What is all this about?”

“Did I say crimes? I meant misdeeds.” Yusuf Muhammad drops his voice low. “Is this about the eunuch?”

“Eunuch?” says the guard, affronted.

“I can speak for myself,” Abbas says quickly. He follows the guard’s instruction to walk three paces ahead but does not grant his family a backward glance, knowing it is too late to explain himself or ask their forgiveness.

It is said that in Srirangapatna, the spies outnumber the people. There are the spymasters and couriers of Tipu Sultan, ferrying messages to and from the capital city, and then there are the spies of Tipu’s enemies—the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nairs of Malabar, the Marathas, the English, the Mangalorean Catholics. (Do not even get Tipu started on those Catholics; mention the Catholics in his presence and he will have a gold-plated fit.) Tipu has spies in the courts of his friends and enemies, too, constantly sending him intelligence, which, problematically, only excites the thirst for more intelligence.

But these are problematic times.

Tipu’s kingdom barely survived the most recent war with the English, and talk of still another is always on the horizon. The people never know who is coming from where to take what from whom. All they can do is submit to power each time it changes hands, each time the powerful decide to redecorate. This one wants a new calendar. That one wants his face struck on a coin. With every alteration, large and small, the ground unfirms itself beneath their feet, making it nearly impossible for anyone to leave a lasting mark.

At the moment, Abbas has no interest in leaving a mark. All he wants is to stay out of trouble, though it is, perhaps, a little late for that.

Abbas has never been to the Summer Palace before, but he has made eight toys for Zubaida Begum, one of the high-ranking consorts of Tipu’s zenana. The carved animals moved by hand crank: elephants, tigers, and horses. Soon after Abbas made one for Zubaida Begum, she ordered seven more, one after another.

To collect the toys, she sent a man by the name of Khwaja Irfan. From a distance, Abbas would watch Khwaja Irfan coming down the lane, easy to spot in his brassy cloaks of green or marigold, silks that spoke of royal places. He had a pointy chin and keen eyes, no facial hair to disguise the fineness of his features. “What’s the matter?” he asked Abbas the first time they met. “Never met a eunuch before?”

Abbas shook his head.

“Then I’m your first. How fun for me.” Khwaja Irfan closed the umbrella he’d been using to shield himself from the sun.

Abbas was taken with the umbrella’s handle, how it curved up into the graven head of a tiger.

Khwaja Irfan noticed him staring. “Nice, isn’t it. Pure elephant ivory.”

Abbas eyed the cut of the teeth and said: “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Ivory wood, maybe. Whoever told you otherwise was lying.”

Khwaja Irfan appraised him with a sly smile. “Okay, Know-It-All.”

Somehow Khwaja Irfan would manage to tuck that phrase into each of his visits, a teasing that made him feel like family. Or at least like the sort of family Abbas would’ve requested had he any choice in the matter. His brothers were chipped from the same block of stone as their mother—blunt, judgmental, suspicious of smiley types. Of eunuchs his mother said that they were gossips and could never be trusted.

The family regarded Abbas’s toys with a similar mix of disdain and skepticism. Only his father took a sheepish interest, asking for the occasional demonstration, which often ended with him saying, “How do you come up with these things?” This, to Abbas, was the highest of praise.

It made Abbas doubly proud to deliver the begum’s payment to his father. The rupiya always came in a silk drawstring pouch, embroidered in gold with Tipu’s tiger insignia. Before handing the pouch to his father, Abbas took a private moment to hold it to his nose and inhale.

Rosewater. Betel. Mysterious womanly smells.

“The real thing smells better,” came a remark from Farooq, tailed by laughter.

Abbas shuffles ahead of the guard, down a row of artisans ordered by the nobility of their crafts: the potters, the weavers and embroiderers, the goldsmiths and blacksmiths, the muralists and miniaturists. (“At least we’re not next to the leatherworkers,” their father used to say about being at the far end. “We’re quite a ways from them.”) There is Ustad Mahfuz and deaf Bilal, Madhava the Younger and Madhava the Disciple, Tariq and Khandan and old Ustad Saadat with his weird glass eye, tossing a bit of bread to a stringy dog.

Some of them stare. Others know better.

Though the forges are behind him now, Abbas can still hear a hammer clinking against iron, can still picture that white-orange rod wilting as if by magic, the air above it shimmering. Abbas has always liked watching the blacksmiths. It occurs to him now that he may never watch them again.

A pair of peepal trees wave him along, their leaves softly gossiping in his wake.

Soon he comes to the Water Gate, the tunnel that allows commoners to enter and leave the city. The same gate through which Yusuf Muhammad led them twelve years ago, along with a number of other woodworkers from Shimoga, all of them recruited by Tipu’s father to carve the walls and columns of the Summer Palace. Yusuf Muhammad took a look around at the capital city—at the whimsical footbridges and gold-leafed fountains, at the mighty temple gopuras and the soaring minarets, not a poor person in sight, even the stray dogs lounging about with an air of satisfaction—and thought: Why leave? What reason would one have to abandon the protective walls of Srirangapatna?

Now, as Abbas passes beneath the dangling bodies of bats, he feels as though Srirangapatna is abandoning him.

“What do you call a know-it-all who knows nothing?” Khwaja Irfan asked Abbas, the last time they met.

Abbas considered the question. “European.”

Khwaja Irfan laughed. “Not bad, kid.”

“I’m not a kid.” Abbas set his latest creation on the table. “Would a kid make this?”

It was a painted wooden horse, carrying a wooden Tipu Sultan on its back. Abbas gently turned the crank, bringing the horse to a gallop, its head easing forward and back, the legs scissoring open and closed, the tail extending like a windblown pennant.

“Shabash,” said Khwaja Irfan softly, all joking set aside.

Abbas offered him a turn. Khwaja Irfan guided the handle, shy at first, then transfixed. “Maybe you do know it all,” he said, bringing the horse to a stop.

While packing the toy into a straw-filled crate, Abbas asked, as nonchalantly as he could, if Zubaida Begum had said anything about the last toy.

“She liked it,” said Khwaja Irfan.

Abbas paused, knowing he shouldn’t ask the next question. “What does she look like?”

Khwaja Irfan raised an eyebrow. “Careful.”

“I’m just asking.”

“Ask too many questions, my friend, and next thing you know, you’re the one being questioned.”

Abbas finished packing in silence and nailed the crate shut. “Here you go,” he said, pushing the crate toward Khwaja Irfan, who was staring into the street, preoccupied.

When he spoke, his voice was low, almost a murmur.

Were an artist to choose me for his model—

How could he draw the form of a sigh?

“What is that?” Abbas asked.

“It’s a poem she wrote.” Khwaja Irfan paused in contemplation. “She is a poet, an artist. Like you.”

Abbas waited for more, his chest beginning to thrum with a sweet sort of turbulence.

But then Khwaja Irfan turned away and stepped into the street, the package in his arms. Over his shoulder he called, “Khuda hafiz, Know-It-All.”

Abbas muttered the poem to himself, committing it to memory.

Only later (too late) did he notice the tiger-head umbrella, roaring mutely against the wall.

...

At the guard’s prompting, Abbas climbs a set of steps and passes through a sandstone arch that delivers them into Daria Daulat Bagh. It is an ocean of a garden, populated with fruiting and flowering plants from all over the world. Pigeons flutter and coo from a domed pigeon keep, flying in and out, messages tied to their ankles.

Down the smooth stone path he proceeds, past shrubs tamed to spheres, trees whittled to points, grass clipped tight as carpet. Beyond this lies the Summer Palace, its dark maw cut by columns. He has never seen it before, only heard it described by his father. But his father neglected to mention the enormous cages that flank the entrance, each holding a replica of a tiger. So lifelike, Abbas thinks as he nears, observing the perfect stroke of each stripe, the citrine of each eye.

One of the tigers flicks its tail, causing Abbas to leap back.

“That’s Bahadur Khan,” the guard says. “He gets edgy around feeding time.”

As they pass, the tiger raises its head with an intent expression, as though undressing Abbas to the bone.

Inside the Summer Palace, painted battles span the walls, dizzy with red-coated soldiers being skewered by Tipu’s cavalry. Still other walls are painted in delicate climbing vines, florals of carmine and blue.

No time to marvel. The guard directs him through forests of fragrance—sandalwood, teak—and around a corner, where they come upon a hidden staircase.

“Up,” says the guard. Abbas is surprised, having assumed that the only direction he would be going is down. At the top of the landing, he finds himself in a grand pavilion propped by columns, every cornice frothing with scrolls and carvings. And there at the far end sits Tipu Sultan, leaning casually on a bolster pillow. Beneath him is a vast carpet. Above him is a finely dressed servant, stirring the air with a fan of white peacock feathers. The servant is wearing slippers.

Abbas presses his bony feet together, wishing he could’ve washed them.

“You with the yellow dhoti,” says Tipu, confusing Abbas, for he had assumed his dhoti to be white. “Come forward.”

As he approaches, Abbas notices a European, clad in a pyjama and turban, sitting off to the right of Tipu Sultan. The European has a long pink face that brings a mandrill to mind. His eyes are squinty and golden brown, so clear they seem capable of seeing into Abbas’s thoughts, specifically the one about the mandrill. Abbas drops his gaze to the carpet, where a border of red tulips bloom, their stems leading to the circle where Tipu sits.

“Salaam,” says Tipu Sultan.

Abbas bows, keeping his focus on the spurs of Tipu’s leather shoes.

Tipu Sultan’s face is round and mild. He has the glower of a hawk, the chin of a mouse. He lets pass a long silence.

“You are the toymaker,” says Tipu, finally.

“Yes, Padshah.” Abbas clasps his hands. “I am Abbas, son of Yusuf Muhammad.”

“I knew an Abbas, son of Yusuf Muhammad.”

Everyone knows of that Abbas, son of Yusuf Muhammad, the general and traitor recently executed by strangulation.

“No relation,” says Abbas.

“But you know another traitor, I do believe. Your toys were very popular with the begum he worked for. Now we know why. She and the eunuch were in the pocket of that termite, Nana Phadnavis. What I’ll never understand is why anyone would trust a Maratha. Isn’t it so, Musa?”

“Indeed it is their nature,” says the European—with an Arabic name?—in surprisingly smooth Kannada. “Even a Maratha will not trust a Maratha.”

Tipu raises a finger. Another servant appears, carrying the wooden horse toy, the one with a painted Tipu Sultan on its back.

Abbas feels sick.

“Did you make this?” asks Tipu Sultan.

“Yes, Padshah.”

Tipu rotates the hand crank, studying the gallop. Abbas catches the eye of the European Musa, who is staring not at the trotting horse but at Abbas.

“This is not how a horse runs,” Tipu says flatly. “You have the back legs and hind legs running in tandem, like a dog’s. When a horse gallops, each hoof meets the ground at a different moment. I am an expert on horses because of my father, praise be his memory. He could have written a treatise on horses to rival that of Xenophon.”

“Forgive me, Padshah.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593469658
• ISBN 13: 9780593469651
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304