Summary
The crimson dust of 1857 swallows Lieutenant Walter Hurst as he falls to sepoy fire, his saber still half-raised in imperial salute; months later his widow’s womb expels a pale, mewling David whose very breath seems to apologize for existing. Colonial whispers brand the boy “coward” before he can spell the word, his tubercular shimmer a living indictment of the father who died too dramatically. Sent to England’s chalky boarding schools, David absorbs fog, Shakespeare, and the guilty vertigo of empire, returning to Calcutta a diffident adult in a solar-topee, only to find his mother’s eyes colder than the marble slab where daddy’s sword is displayed. One monsoon-sodden night, spectral Sikhs beckon; he follows their lantern-lit file through banyan shadows to a jungle temple where torchlight licks at the bronze thighs of Śiva the Destroyer and the virgin Sarasvati—her anklets trembling like imprisoned sparrows—is being wed to stone. David snatches the girl from the idol’s impending embrace, marries her in a muddled Anglican ceremony, and drags her to London’s fog where drawing-room matrons dissect her bindi like entomologists pinning a rare moth. When parliamentary ambition calls, Sarasvati wilts under corsets and racism; an oily compatriot whispers home, and she flees back toward the Ganges just as mutinous drums crescendo. David pursues, arrives amid burning bungalows, dodges assassins, yet it is Sarasvati who intercepts the dagger meant for him—her blood a final sindoor smear across the map of empire.
Synopsis
Lieutenant Walter Hurst, called out with his regiment to quell an uprising against British rule, is killed. His wife has just given birth to a son, David, whose sickly and sensitive nature as he grows up earns him a reputation of cowardice. Upon his return to India after being educated in England, David learns of his mother's antipathy for him; overwrought, he has a vision of his father leading a group of Sikhs and follows him into the jungle to a Brahmin temple, where he witnesses the secret betrothal of Sarasvati to the idol of Siva the Destroyer. He rescues the girl from the temple, and much to his mother's humiliation he marries her and takes her to England, leaving behind his childhood love Diana. Sarasvati, unable to adjust to English society and customs when her husband is elected to Parliament, is persuaded by one of her countrymen to return to India; David follows and arrives on the eve of a fresh rebellion. Seeking his wife, he evades an attempt on his life, for Sarasvati receives the fatal blow and saves him.
