Chapter 8

  

The middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 1902

  

For close to two years, Anand wandered through Arabia and Europe, stopping in coastal cities where there was work building or fixing ships. Traveling westward, he wrote Vishwan a letter every week.

But there were some things he couldn’t tell his little brother.

The English he had learned in school from the British served him well. He had taken to the subject, which had helped him much more than rudimentary Hindi in Kochi. Anand knew he was lucky that languages came easily to him. In Constantinople, he used his Arabic. In Calais, he became better at French. In Frankfurt, German.

He left Morocco for the north after a team of pirates wrecked a frigate he was repairing and the company employing him went bankrupt.

He left Frankfurt after an incident with the wife of a duke. She had not told Anand who she was; he never would have betrayed the hospitality of the man for whom he was working.

English came most easily to him but England was far from his favorite country. The men he worked with in Portsmouth did not know the meaning of being civilized. Unlike their ship-building brethren in India, these men on the docks of England had no education, often speaking English with less facility than Anand himself. Most of them thought nothing of going days without washing, and subsisted on potatoes and ale. Yet in spite of all this, they considered themselves superior to Anand.

Anand had heard of America. The further west he traveled, and the more coastal cities he visited, the more he heard about the wonders of this young country of America.

Though he missed his home of Travancore, he knew it was safest for him to stay away for a short time longer. Besides, there was still much more of the world to see. Ever since that day years ago when he had died of typhoid and been given another chance at life, he knew he was meant to see the world. Maybe even change it. There would be time for him to return to Travancore. When he did, it would be interesting to see how the land and people had changed.

When Anand stayed in a city for a long enough time to receive mail, his brother was able to write to him to tell him what was happening at home. Vishwan read the Tamil newspaper Swadesamitran and the English newspaper Madras Standard, and wrote to Anand of the growing movement toward independence. Such movements to break away from British rule and elect their own leaders had existed for years, but this time was different. The British were wary and the local kings were afraid.

Anand thought of the Heart of India, the giant elephant statue crafted in a Kochi workshop years before by a Muslim friend. It was brought to the water’s edge of the coastal town of Thoothukudi, in southeastern India, where it was safe from interference from maharajas who opposed its message. There in the symbolic city of Thoothukudi, which had replaced Korkai as the Pearl Emporium from ancient times, the Heart of India was free to be seen by all. Men from many religions and castes had contributed their labor in creating the statue. Anand’s Paravar caste had given the Paravar pearl held in the elephant’s trunk. Yes, there would be time to return home and to see the statue again.

Anand booked passage on a large passenger ship which would take many days to sail from England to New York. The passengers from over a dozen countries told stories of boundless opportunities about which they could not possibly know, yet their faces were filled with such hope that it was impossible not to believe them.

Anand could tell America would be different.