He knocked and was called in. On the chair was, as always, Father Emílio Seijas, the incongruous holder of the position of Dean of Indian Philosophy, busy at the one task he seemed to exist for: sorting papers between the file cabinet and the shredder. In his most private thoughts, Professor Hiriyanna liked to amuse himself with the theory that Father Seijas never left that chair and was cursed to keep sorting papers for eternity as penance for the sins of a former life.
“Good afternoon, Father. What is happening?” he asked in Portuguese. The Dean of Indian Philosophy didn’t speak Kannada.
“Ah, you. Good. I was about to send a letter requesting your presence.”
Hiriyanna cocked his head. “You wanted me?”
Father Seijas copied the gesture and Hiriyanna couldn’t tell whether it was mockery or honest incomprehension. “My last memorandum said it would happen if you didn’t change your habits. When the College Inquisition Board next meets, I hope I can at least tell them you’ve stopped teaching the most unorthodox of your opinions. Seeing you here, I reckoned you’d decided to spare me the trouble of summoning you.”
That remark bounced a few times inside the professor’s head until he recalled the Dean’s memorandum he’d tossed to the trash the previous week. His usual response would have been to make up some meek-sounding promise, but the exasperation he’d accumulated from the worried looks and attempted single syllables he’d heard all day bolstered his animus. “Let them come for me,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
In a stronger tone, Hiriyanna said, “Let them find another scholar who can quote both the Stoics and the Naiyyayikas and point out their areas of convergence. Let them find someone else who can teach the Trinity in perfect harmony with the Trimurti. Let them find someone else who can make Thomas Aquinas dispute with the Charvaka sages. Let them try.” He knew he was being injudicious, but that was one of those days when he had little patience for obtuseness.
Father Seijas examined another sheet of paper and placed it in a drawer. “Today of all days. I guess not all news can be good.”
“What is the news? What happened today?”
“A success,” said the Dominican, seeming to answer the question for the hundredth time that day. “We only received the message this morning, but it happened five weeks ago.”
“What did?” Hiriyanna felt a slight pang of alarm at his own impatience with his boss, but Seijas merely waved a typewritten folio before him.
“My Order obtained a copy of the Royal Bulletin in Manila. The straits were so full of Dutch ships that they had to send it via airship; otherwise we would’ve learned of it last Tuesday.” The Dean saw the question that persisted in the professor’s eyes and proceeded to skim paragraphs from the folio. “To quench your curiosity: the Twenty-Third Division of the Iberian Flying Army captured Copenhagen. The Canutic Emperor surrendered. We won.”
The professor stood for what felt to him like a full minute. “What… what happens now?”
Father Seijas laughed. “What, you ask? Our Lady of Velankanni heard my prayers. The war is over! Iberians have proved stronger than Scandinavians, airships stronger than submarines, Saint Peter stronger than Luther. Everything is now the way it should be. You could say history has been corrected.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Allowing no dent in his excitement, Seijas said, “The next part is obvious. Now we’ll go after the steam carriages, and once we’ve brought all the apostates to their knees, the Holy Lands of the True Cross will be whole again. There will be one Church, as it was in the beginning.”
It was only because his defiance had been spent in the recent outburst that Hiriyanna refrained from demolishing, as easy as it would have been, the Dean’s belief in the inevitable dominance of His Catholic Majesty over the world, but in his head there was a clear summation of what he could have said. He could picture himself going into his home office and unrolling his copy of the Map of the World’s Colonies, one of his proudest secret possessions, issued by the Royal Observatory of Svalbard and smuggled into Iberian India by his friend Hariram, who traded in printed goods. If he weren’t afraid of confiscation by the Customs Inquisition Bureau, he would have liked to make his boss stand before the map and point at the hundred little names and lines highlighting, for example, the presence of no less than eight religions in the continent of Vinland. His point with that exercise, had he been so temerarious as to try it, would have been that Iberians had been in India for over three centuries and their evangelizing mission had failed disastrously. He placed no bets on a single Canutic duchy in Europe turning Catholic.
He voiced none of his thoughts on the matter. But one doubt still bothered him.
“Will the Danes leave India?” Their colonial bases were in the east, somewhat far from Mahisūru, but their submarines scouted with impunity the entire southern coast.
Father Seijas showed him the last page of the bulletin. “That’s for the Pope to decide. Or rather, was. It says here that a meeting was arranged in Rome between the ambassadors of both empires. Since this Royal Bulletin is a month old, the scheduled date corresponds, for us, to last Friday.”
“Do you know what was resolved?”
“Not yet. But the fishermen at Mangaluru have been saying they’re not seeing any more submarines there. My guess is they’ve done a land swap: the Danes surrender India in exchange for, say, Encoberta, which we can reconquer anytime.”
So much for magnanimity, thought the professor. Encoberta, meaning hidden, was an unimaginably huge island, just off New Guinea, recently discovered by Dutch ships pushed southward by the tower-high waves generated by the Krakatau eruption, but seized by the Iberians soon after. It was named after one of the titles of the fabled king Sebastião, who was believed to be waiting at a secret location to one day save Portugal from doom, although, if the outcome of the world war was any indication, he wasn’t going to be needed for another while. The island had received its name because it was the last portion of Earth to be explored, which meant it had been waiting there for centuries until some ship finally happened upon it. However, Hiriyanna had heard reports that the place appeared to have inhabitants of its own, which made him doubt the aptness of the name.
Father Seijas noticed the magnitude of the worry in the professor’s face and gave him a fatherly smile. “You look more troubled than you should be. If you’re looking for permission to breathe easily, you have it. Rejoice. This is a good thing.”
The professor had more to say to that, but once again refrained. Living under Iberian rule made people develop odd coping skills. His was to pretend everything was normal until he was nearly able to believe it. The war had been a persistent but remote notion to him: he’d never seen it, never met anyone who’d been in it. He had no idea how his life was supposed to be any different without it. All he knew to do in the face of any change was to go about his day and do his tiny part in shaping it into normalcy. As a teacher, as a subject of His Catholic Majesty, as a family man, as a perpetual student of every form of wisdom there was to hear, he did not presume to have a hand in the flux of the future.
He looked for something to occupy the minutes until he felt calm again. He graded wrong answers. He read some Mozi in a Latin translation he’d bought from his friend Hariram. He went home.
Rukkamma entered the house in her school uniform and jumped to hug her father. He took her to the kitchen and served her lunch. As they sat to eat the lentil soup and millet dumplings he’d made, she went over the list of prepositions they’d been practicing since the previous week. They’d already been over auxiliary verbs and the formal second person, and he intended to introduce irregular conjugations soon after.