The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee Read Free Book Online Page A

meekness—with a pagan iridescence.
    I HAVE SEEN this handiwork and been bemused by its extravagance and ambiguity. It survives in the private collection of a Hollywood mogul, son of a Dachau survivor, the producer-director of five slug-and-chase movies, the kind that brings out popcorn munchers by the million to mall Cineplexes. In 1983 he flew me out to Bel Air for a proposition. He’d heard I knew Puritan art, that I was an asset hunter, and that I’d heard of the Emperor’s Tear. He wanted me to work for him as his private art adviser. He has taste, and his taste is for colonial American.
    Hannah’s personal message has now become commodified; it is collectible art. Its current owner hangs it in a halogen-lit hallway in his Bel Air garrison. The high-tech hanging and lighting diminishes, I imagine, the original shock of the Salem Bibi’s subtext. In Bel Air, the uttermost shore is a phone call away. All the same, in that overfurnished, overdecorated, oversurveillanced warehouse of museum-quality purchases, the Salem Bibi’s covenant seems as ambiguous and as appropriate as ever. Bugs Kilken of Bel Air knows that his father—and, therefore, he—was spared. He believes in what Hannah would call grace; what he calls the luck of the draw.
    For Bugs, who makes millions with schlock and for whom moviemaking is a kind of technological indulgence increasingly distant from art, true expression is found only in naive visions. He feels he should be simplifying his life. He’s a vegetarian and doesn’t drink; he admires the Shakers. He feels the world went wrong around 1700, and his art collection sets out to restore a little sanity.
    Bugs’s father survived Dachau because he could repair light bulbs. Simple as that; he’d been a poor boy in Poland who knew how to reconnect the filaments of blown light bulbs without breaking the glass or detaching the bottoms. The guards kept him alive. In their low cunning, they billed the authorities for new bulbs and kept the change. Kilken, Senior, came to L.A. after the war and started a lighting store. He remarried, and Bugs, and Bugs’s studio, are the results. Bugs wants to make a movie about his father, about the petty and the grotesque maneuverings that killed millions and spared dozens, but he can’t—he’s locked into the industry. He can’t downsize; he can’t desert his fans and distributors. That day, he’d drunk Calistoga water and stared at Hannah’s embroidery.
    “It’s a pretty little piece, isn’t it?”
    I said nothing.
    “British. But from India. Bought it in an old estate sale in London,” he told me. I couldn’t tell if he was testing me or bragging. I knew that he’d bought it in Tokyo for six thousand dollars. I’ve since learned that’s how he operates: buys cheap, donates it to a museum, repurchases to establish a public value.
    “They embroidered like this in the American colonies,” I ventured. “Never so beautifully, of course.” Still testing me, he’d agreed. It could be American.
    “Salem, perhaps,” he’d said. “Could that be the Taj Mahal?”
    “There’s no record that anyone in America knew about the Taj Mahal,” I’d said.
    “I think it is the Taj. Whoever embroidered that was a very sophisticated person. There’s so much we don’t know about colonial America. A port city like Salem, or Boston—they were nerve centers of their time. Anything known in London would be known in Boston six weeks later.”
    But now I know: Hannah took that embroidery with her to England and then to India when she married. It is her sampler, and it probably stayed in Asia, perhaps in some maharaja’s private collection, until Bugs Kilken redeemed it. That day, I’d pushed a little harder. “There was a piece like this that came up in a Sotheby’s sale in Tokyo this year.”
    He smiled, a kind of guarded conspiracy. “Really? Not a crude copy, I hope.”
    And now, ten years later, Hannah has brought us together again. He’s learned