Loot: A novel - Softcover

James, Tania

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593469658 ISBN 13: 9780593469651

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • 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.

A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Kirkus Reviews

“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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593469658
• ISBN 13: 9780593469651
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Anja's; service@anja-karge.de; ; Von-Gumppenberg-Str. 94; Pöttmes; 86554; Deutschland