Chapter One ONE The earliest memories I have of my birthplace feature salt--acres of it in translucent flats that glistened in the sun and gleamed in the moonlight, silver mountains of it harvested and brought to the warehouses, and smaller mounds piled in bullock-drawn carts. The only whiter thing I was to see in my life was snow. Even the air was saturated with salt, and the townspeople sweated saltier than any other people in the world. The journey that led me to the God''s Gift commenced in that salty place, the small port of Armagon in East India, where I was born to my mother, a Tamil woman who had migrated from further south and who was reputed among the townspeople for her beauty. My father could have been one of the many men who worked in the salt pans in the sizzling heat, or he could have been a local merchant, or he could have been a landlord, or a Brahmin priest. In fact, he could have been anyone at all, although my mother insisted that he was a well-known medicine man and astrologer from another town who had lost his heart to my mother till his wife firmly reclaimed it. I got accustomed to the many men who came to see my mother in the evenings after the lamps were lit and after she adorned her hair with jasmine and patted scented waters on her skin. Every man in the town wanted to claim that he had been with her.

She was lovely even in the harsh white light of day, and in the softness of twilight she was transformed into a goddess. We lived with an older woman who I called my grandmother, though she might or not have been related to us. A man I knew as my uncle lounged on the veranda, a wooden club always by his side. In truth, you could say that my story was set into motion well before my birth, when the English East India Company traders came, dreaming of ventures bigger than anything the world had yet seen. Armagon is on what the white men called the Coromandel, the long, low, scrubby coastline punctuated by the deltas of many broad rivers and the rich alluvial soils they leave behind. For as long as I could remember, there had been light-complexioned foreigners living in the factory they had constructed on the seashore. "Who are they, Amma?" I asked. "Just Company men," she said, distracted.

"Why are they pale like that?" "For the same reason you are dark--the gods decided." Unlike some other people, my mother kept track of the passage of days and years, perhaps because she knew that her days in her profession were numbered. That was why she could tell me that it was about five years after I was born that the Englishmen had first come and asked our local chieftain for land to erect a factory. They could transform our sleepy, salty town into a thriving trading post, they had promised--men and money would flow in from all corners of the world. Taking off their hats, in a gesture our chieftain had come to recognize as respectful, they had reminded him how prosperous Pulicat, just a two-day journey south of us, was under the Dutch traders who had arrived there decades ago. They would make sure our town would benefit from the trade, there would be wealth as never before. However, the chieftain had heard enough stories about how the Dutch had filled their ships with local young men and taken them across the ocean to the Spice Islands. Their families had waited for their return till they gave up waiting.

The rumor was that they had become slaves at plantations of clove and cinnamon. When the raja had questioned the English about that, they said no, the Dutch were the Dutch, but they were the English, Englishmen of the English East India Company--they would do nothing like that. And they had given their word on that and many more things. Eventually, the Englishmen were granted land enough to erect their factory and changed the name of our town to Armagon in honor of the local landlord who had advocated with the raja on their behalf. He was called Aru-mugam --the "six-faced one," named for the god Murugan--but the white men got it slightly wrong, and it became Armagon . Armagon, the city by the sea, the city of salt, the city with the Company fort. The factory was a lonely place and we, the people of the town, had very little to do with it. Its stone walls were two stories high and its wooden gates were soon eaten away by the salt-laden winds that blew in from the sea.

None of the Company men stayed very long, and as I grew into boyhood, I noticed new faces reddened by the sun replacing the previous ones every now and again. Trade was dull and the riches we had been promised by the Englishmen never came to transform Armagon. The winds that arrived late in the year made it the devil of a harbor, they complained, impossible to dock in. And they cursed their bad fortune in Armagon, in the Coromandel, in East India. As I think about it all these years later from the other side of the round earth, with New World sky above my head and New World dust under my feet, Armagon is a place visited in a dream, one remembered in fragments: the scented jasmine clambering up the walls of our small house; the salt beds glimmering in the light of the moon; the surf rolling onto the sandy shores; the weeds that grew around the walls of the East India Company factory bursting into bloom after the rains; the river flowing at the bottom of the hill on which the factory was built; and, at night, the white stars wheeling silently over all of it--the factory, the salt, the sea--surely still there, making giant arcs against the inky sky. Perhaps, in a few years and if my mother had lived longer, I would have learned to blush at being the son of a courtesan. But at that time all seemed well. My mother earned enough to keep us in comfort, she was of lower caste perhaps, but not of the lowest; she was deemed very touchable even by the highest caste men, her presence did not pollute.

With her by my side and my paternity obscure, I was one of those few children who floated in the unnamed space between castes. I was adored by my only parent, who insisted that with my large, watchful eyes and thick, wavy locks of hair, I was the loveliest child in Armagon. Of course, she would say that, but others said it too, showering me with compliments, comparing my looks with this deity''s and that one''s. Their admiration first pleased me and then made me embarrassed, because were boys not supposed to be strong rather than lovely? One distinct memory lingers: a snake, gray-gold in hue, slithered into the house on a warm afternoon and was scooped up on the end of a stick and carried out by my uncle with a stern warning from my grandmother not to kill it. Snakes were wise sages in their previous lives, she said. "And what were the wise sages in their previous lives?" I asked. She did not know. All she knew was birth followed death, one life followed another, and every birth was not only a continuation of the previous, but also an awakening, a renewal.

"You must have been a prince in your previous life, my darling," Amma crooned, taking me in her arms. "And what were you, Amma?" "I do not know, but I would like to be a bird in the next one--a forest-dwelling one, colorful, swift-winged." My grandmother snorted from her corner. Nonsense--a bird, indeed. But the old lady was not always so cynical. I could practically see her heart soar when she told me the ancient legends of the gods--the dozens of them who populated our town, and the country beyond, slipping unannounced in and out of mortal lives, some colossal, some diminutive, some with the countenances of men and women, some animal-featured, most of them multilimbed, all beautiful and terrible and grand--the red-skinned, warlike Murugan, whom she particularly revered, the lion-faced Narasimha, the noble Rama, the mischievous Krishna, the fiery Siva, and the even fiercer Yellamma, goddess of smallpox and sacrifice. My grandmother filled my head with their stories--their epic adventures, their acts of honor and deceit, their amorous exploits, their divinity, their humanity. I devoured her tales with greedy ear, as did Amma and even my uncle.

They were the most enduring of the old lady''s gifts to me, and in later years, in America, even when I had largely discarded them, I was to be visited every now and then by those deities of my early days. One evening, shortly after the lamp was lit, my uncle brought home a white man. As soon as the stranger stepped in, my amma put on the expression that I had learnt was reserved for her patrons, demure, yet bold and flirtatious, her eyes making promises she would not put into words. Sir Francis Day was a slender young man, probably in his twenties. His eyes were blue as the seas he had sailed across, his mouth was small and thin-lipped, his jaw sharp and long. He wore the tight breeches all Company men wore, a coat, a ruffled blouse, and a feathered hat that I coveted right away. His fair, fine hair was slightly limp in the heat and tied back with a ribbon. My uncle brought him to the chamber where my mother sat, as he did all visitors; my grandmother came in from the back room to scrutinize him, as was her habit with all men.

I announced my name to him, provoking a tight smile. He probably had not expected to meet a child in this house. My mother was all large, lovely eyes, scented shoulders, and lustrous locks. She knew all about the fleeting nature of men''s desire and how she must snare it while it lasted, and reel it to land. And then I was ushered away into the backyard, as I always was when my mother had her patrons visiting, and the rest of the evening was no different tha.