The Luminist Read Online Free

air. “Eligius!” one of the neighbor women called. “For your appa Swaran, and all of us! Tell Sudarma to give thanks for a good man!” She clasped her hands together.
    He returned her anjali mudra. One more prayer. Another frail light joined to the multitude.
    Sudarma came out into the street. She made a fire like the other women. Navigating herself onto her haunches, she melted ghee, then poured a cascade of reddish grains into a heavy pot. They hissed against the slickened iron before bursting.
    He held up a shard of glass and sent the sun where he pleased. For a moment he lost himself.
    Sudarma’s hands flew to her belly. Her face cinched up. She clutched herself as if the plateau rising from her might break open. “Restless today. Like you. Another few days, I think.”
    â€œWill he stay?”
    She smiled her quiet smile; when she was happy, her smile chimed in him. “I’m not so sure it’s a boy. Go to your father. Tell him the men are still here, and the women all pray for his success at Court.”
    â€œYes, amma.” He went inside, where Swaran madly displaced ragged tomes of British law.
    â€œAppa, the men haven’t left. I think they’re waiting to go with you.”
    â€œIs grama sevaka among them?”
    Eligius peered outside. “Yes appa, I see him.” Chandrak was easy enough to spot. Tall, lean, dark as charred teak, he shared a jar of lihuli with the men congregating around him, who waited to see what he would do. A leader in Matara, revered among its lower-born, he had elemental, wanting eyes.

    â€œKeep your mother company,” Swaran said. “We’re almost ready to leave.”
    â€œAre the men coming with?”
    â€œI’ll ask it of Chandrak. We will see.” He chose from a sheaf of papers. “Put these with the charter.”
    Eligius took his father’s notes outside, reading them silently and allowing the stone-on-stone noise of them to fill his mouth. They were nothing like Tamil, which moved like a quiet tide to shore.
    â€œJust like him, I see.”
    Chandrak eyed Swaran’s notes without comprehension. Kneeling near Sudarma, he poked at her cooking fire with a stick. “How old are you now, Eligius? Fourteen?”
    â€œHe’ll be fifteen soon,” Sudarma said. She put her dull knife to the slope of an onion.
    â€œI was a year at the foundry in Sufragam at his age, pulling black oxide from the ground.”
    Eligius heard his father sighing at books the way laboring men like Chandrak sighed in the colonials’ endless fields.
    â€œI had to break rocks against my body.” Chandrak ignored Sudarma’s smirk. The muscles on his forearms twined. “Look at my hands. A man like your father, who does nothing but pour other men’s coffee, doesn’t have hands like these. Such hands break men but make leaders.”
    He’s more of a man than you, Eligius thought as his father emerged. Anger passed through him like rings of warm light.
    Chandrak raised a fist. The murmurings of the men fell away. “Swaran, why do you think the Britishers will listen to you in their language or anyone else’s? We’ve talked and talked and still I don’t see. Becoming like them does nothing but hold you apart from your own.”
    â€œIf I know nothing beyond pouring their coffee, grama sevaka, why should they make time for such a man? But they have made time for me today.” He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. He was no older than Chandrak, yet to Eligius he’d aged
terribly in the last months. “We cannot settle for shouting at their gate. We must walk through their doors. I ask your blessing.”
    â€œIf their soldiers come through Matara, what would become of us if we followed you? The answer isn’t in those books, Swaran. We can put nothing between us and them but men and the promise of what men can do.”
    The others grunted assent. Some