The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘Then whose? What am I going to do with all this food? What’s going to become of that fish I bought yesterday?’ Ma Cho collapsed on her stool.

  Behind them, in the now-deserted marketplace, dogs were fighting over scraps of discarded meat, circling in packs around the refuse heaps.

  two

  At the palace, a little less than a mile from Ma Cho’s stall, the King’s chief consort, Queen Supayalat, was seen mounting a steep flight of stairs to listen more closely to the guns.

  The palace lay at the exact centre of Mandalay, deep within the walled city, a sprawling complex of pavilions, gardens and corridors, all grouped around the nine-roofed hti of Burma’s kings. The complex was walled off from the surrounding streets by a stockade of tall, teak posts. At each of the four corners of the stockade was a guard-post, manned by sentries from the King’s personal bodyguard. It was to one of these that Queen Supayalat had decided to climb.

  The Queen was a small, fine-boned woman with porcelain skin and tiny hands and feet. Her face was small and angular, the regularity of its features being marred only by a slight blemish in the alignment of the right eye. The Queen’s waist, famously of a wisp-like slimness, was swollen by her third pregnancy, now in its eighth month.

  The Queen was not alone: some half-dozen maidservants followed close behind, carrying her two young daughters, the First and Second Princesses, Ashin Hteik Su Myat Phaya Gyi and Ashin Hteik Su Myat Phaya Lat. The advanced condition of her pregnancy had made the Queen anxious about her children’s whereabouts. For the last several days she had been unwilling to allow her two daughters even momentarily out of her sight.

  The First Princess was three and bore a striking resemblance to her father, Thebaw, King of Burma. She was a good-natured, obedient girl, with a round face and ready smile. The Second Princess was two years younger, not quite one yet, and she was an altogether different kind of child, very much her mother’s daughter. She’d been born with the colic and would cry for hours at a stretch. Several times a day she would fly into paroxysms of rage. Her body would go rigid and she would clench her little fists; her chest would start pumping, with her mouth wide open but not a sound issuing from her throat. Even experienced nurses quailed when the little Princess was seized by one of her fits.

  To deal with the baby, the Queen insisted on having several of her most trusted attendants at hand at all times—Evelyn, Hemau, Augusta, Nan Pau. These girls were very young, mostly in their early teens, and they were almost all orphans. They’d been purchased by the Queen’s agents in small Kachin, Wa and Shan villages along the kingdom’s northern frontiers. Some of them were from Christian families, some from Buddhist— once they came to Mandalay it didn’t matter. They were reared under the tutelage of palace retainers, under the Queen’s personal supervision.

  It was the youngest of these maids who had had the most success in dealing with the Second Princess. She was a slender ten-year-old called Dolly, a timid, undemonstrative child, with enormous eyes and a dancer’s pliable body and supple limbs. Dolly had been brought to Mandalay at a very early age from the frontier town of Lashio: she had no memory of her parents or family. She was thought to be of Shan extraction, but this was a matter of conjecture, based on her slender fine-boned appearance and her smooth, silken complexion.

  On this particular morning Dolly had had very little success with the Second Princess. The guns had jolted the little girl out of her sleep and she had been crying ever since. Dolly, who was easily startled, had been badly scared herself. When the guns had started up she’d covered her ears and gone into a corner, gritting her teeth and shaking her head. But then the Queen had sent for her and after that Dolly had been so busy trying to distract the little Princess that she’d had no time to be frightened.

  Dolly wasn’t strong enough yet to take the Princess up the steep stairs that led to the top of the stockade: Evelyn, who was sixteen and strong for her age, was given the job of carrying her. Dolly followed after the others and she was the last to step into the guard-post—a wooden platform, fenced in with heavy, timber rails.

  Four uniformed soldiers were standing grouped in a corner. The Queen was firing questions at them, but none of them would answer nor even meet her eyes. They hung their heads, fingering the long barrels of their flintlocks.

  ‘How far away is the fighting?’ the Queen asked. ‘And what sort of cannon are they using?’

  The soldiers shook their heads; the truth was that they knew no more than she did. When the noise started they’d speculated excitedly about its cause. At first they’d refused to believe that the roar could be of human making. Guns of such power had never before been heard in this part of Burma, nor was it easy to conceive of an order of fire so rapid as to produce an indistinguishable merging of sound.

  The Queen saw that there was nothing to be learnt from these hapless men. She turned to rest her weight against the wooden rails of the guard-post. If only her body were less heavy, if only she were not so tired and slow.

  The strange thing was that these last ten days, ever since the English crossed the border, she’d heard nothing but good news. A week ago a garrison commander had sent a telegram to say that the foreigners had been stopped at Minhla, two hundred miles downriver. The palace had celebrated the victory, and the King had even sent the general a decoration. How was it possible that the invaders were now close enough to make their guns heard in the capital?

  Things had happened so quickly: a few months ago there’d been a dispute with a British timber company—a technical matter concerning some logs of teak. It was clear that the company was in the wrong; they were side-stepping the kingdom’s customs regulations, cutting up logs to avoid paying duties. The royal customs officers had slapped a fine on the company, demanding arrears of payment for some fifty thousand logs. The Englishmen had protested and refused to pay; they’d carried their complaints to the British Governor in Rangoon. Humiliating ultimatums had followed. One of the King’s senior ministers, the Kinwun Mingyi, had suggested discreetly that it might be best to accept the terms; that the British might allow the Royal Family to remain in the palace in Mandalay, on terms similar to those of the Indian princes— like farmyard pigs in other words, to be fed and fattened by their masters; swine, housed in sties that had been tricked out with a few little bits of finery.

  The Kings of Burma were not princes, the Queen had told the Kinwun Mingyi; they were kings, sovereigns, they’d defeated the Emperor of China, conquered Thailand, Assam, Manipur. And she herself, Supayalat, she had risked everything to secure the throne for Thebaw, her husband and step-brother. Was it even imaginable that she would consent to give it all away now? And what if the child in her belly were a boy (and this time she was sure it was): how would she explain to him that she had surrendered his patrimony because of a quarrel over some logs of wood? The Queen had prevailed and the Burmese court had refused to yield to the British ultimatum.

  Now, gripping the guard-post rail the Queen listened carefully to the distant gunfire. She’d hoped at first that the barrage was an exercise of some kind. The most reliable general in the army, the Hlethin Atwinwun, was stationed at the fort of Myingan, thirty miles away, with a force of eight thousand soldiers.

  Just yesterday the King had asked, in passing, how things were going on the war front. She could tell that he thought of the war as a faraway matter, a distant campaign, like the expeditions that had been sent into the Shan highlands in years past, to deal with bandits and dacoits.

  Everything was going as it should, she’d told him; there was nothing to worry about. And so far as she knew, this was no less than the truth. She’d met with the seniormost officials every day, the Kinwun Mingyi, the Taingda Mingyi, even the wungyis and wundauks and myowuns. None of them had so much as hinted that anything was amiss. But there was no mistaking the sound of those guns. What was she going to tell the King now?

  The courtyard beneath the stockade filled suddenly with voices.

  Dolly stole a
glance down the staircase. There were soldiers milling around below, dozens of them, wearing the colours of the palace guard. One of them spotted her and began to shout—the Queen? Is the Queen up there?

  Dolly stepped quickly back, out of his line of sight. Who were these soldiers? What did they want? She could hear their feet on the stairs now. Somewhere close by, the Princess began to cry, in short, breathless gasps. Augusta thrust the baby into her arms—here, Dolly, here, take her, she won’t stop. The baby was screaming, flailing her fists. Dolly had to turn her face away to keep from being struck.

  An officer had stepped into the guard-post; he was holding his sheathed sword in front of him, in both hands, like a sceptre. He was saying something to the Queen, motioning to her to leave the cabin, to go down the stairs into the palace.

  ‘Are we prisoners then?’ The Queen’s face was twisted with fury. ‘Who has sent you here?’

  ‘Our orders came from the Taingda Mingyi,’ the officer said. ‘For your safety, Mebya.’

  ‘Our safety?’

  The guard-post was full of soldiers and they were herding the girls towards the steps. Dolly glanced down: the flight of stairs was very steep. Her head began to spin.

  ‘I can’t,’ she cried. ‘I can’t.’ She would fall, she knew it. The Princess was too heavy for her; the stairs were too high; she would need a free hand to hold on, to keep her balance.

  ‘Move.’

  ‘I can’t.’ She could hardly hear herself over the child’s cries.

  She stood still, refusing to budge.

  ‘Quickly, quickly.’ There was a soldier behind her; he was prodding her with the cold hilt of his sword. She felt her eyes brimming over, tears flooding down her face. Couldn’t they see she would fall, that the Princess would tumble out of her grip? Why would no one help?

  ‘Quick.’

  She turned to look into the soldier’s unsmiling face. ‘I can’t. I have the Princess in my arms and she’s too heavy for me. Can’t you see?’ No one seemed to be able to hear her above the Princess’s wails.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, girl? Why’re you standing there? Move.’

  She shut her eyes and took a step. And then, just as her legs were starting to give way she heard the Queen’s voice. ‘Dolly! Stop!’

  ‘It’s not my fault.’ She began to sob, her eyes pressed tightly shut. Someone snatched the Princess from her arms. ‘It’s not my fault. I tried to tell them; they wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ The Queen’s voice was sharp but not unkind. ‘Come on down now. Be careful.’

  Weeping in relief, Dolly stumbled down the steps and across the courtyard. She felt the other girls’ hands on her back, leading her down a corridor.

  Most of the buildings in the palace complex were low, wooden structures, linked by long corridors. The palace was of relatively recent construction; just thirty years old. It was closely modelled on the royal residences of earlier Burmese capitals, at Ava and Amarapura. Parts of the royal apartments had been transported whole after the founding of Mandalay, but many of the smaller outlying buildings were unfinished and still unknown, even to the palace’s inhabitants. Dolly had never before been in the room she was led to now. It was dark, with damp, plastered walls and heavy doors.

  ‘Bring the Taingda Mingyi to me,’ the Queen was screaming at the guards. ‘I will not be kept prisoner. Bring him to me. Right now.’

  An hour or two went slowly by; the girls could tell from the direction of the shadows under the door that morning had changed into afternoon. The little Princess cried herself out and fell asleep across Dolly’s crossed legs.

  The doors were thrown open and the Taingda Mingyi came puffing in.

  ‘Where is the King?’

  ‘He is safe, Mebya.’

  He was a stout man with oily skin. In the past, he’d always been ready with advice but now the Queen could not get a single clear answer out of him.

  ‘The King is safe. You should not worry.’ The long, drooping hairs that sprouted from his moles shook gently as he smiled and showed his teeth.

  He produced a telegram. ‘The Hlethin Atwinwun has won a famous victory at Myingan.’

  ‘But those were not our guns I heard this morning.’

  ‘The foreigners have been halted. The King has dispatched a medal, and decorations for the men.’ He handed her a sheet of paper.

  She didn’t bother to look at it. She had seen many telegrams over the last ten days, all filled with news of famous victories. But the guns she’d heard that morning were not Burmese, of this she had no doubt. Those were English guns,’ she said. ‘I know they were. Don’t lie to me. How close are they? When do you think they will reach Mandalay?’

  He wouldn’t look at her. ‘Mebya’s condition is delicate. She should rest now. I will return later.’

  ‘Rest?’ The Queen pointed to her maids, sitting on the floor. ‘The girls are exhausted. Look.’ She pointed to Dolly’s red eyes and tear-streaked face. ‘Where are my other servants? Send them to me. I need them.’

  The Taingda Mingyi hesitated, and then bowed. ‘Mebya. They will be here.’

  The other maids arrived an hour later. Their faces were sombre. The Queen said nothing until the guards had shut the doors. Then everyone clustered tightly around the new arrivals. Dolly had to crane her head to catch what they were saying.

  This was what they said: the British had destroyed the fort at Myingan with immaculate precision, using their cannon, without losing a single soldier of their own. The Hlethin Atwinwun had surrendered. The army had disintegrated; the soldiers had fled into the mountains with their guns. The Kinwun Mingyi and the Taingda Mingyi had dispatched emissaries to the British. The two ministers were now competing with one another to keep the Royal Family under guard. They knew the British would be grateful to whoever handed over the royal couple; there would be rich rewards. The foreigners were expected to come to Mandalay very soon to take the King and Queen into captivity.

  The invasion proceeded so smoothly as to surprise even its planners. The imperial fleet crossed the border on 14 November, 1885. Two days later, after a few hours of shelling, British soldiers took possession of the Burmese outposts of Nyaungbinmaw and Singbaungwe. The next day, at Minhla, the fleet came under heavy fire. The Burmese garrison at Minhla was a small one, but it resisted with unexpected tenacity.

  The British forces were armed with the latest breech-loading rifles. Their artillery support consisted of twenty-seven rapid-firing machine guns, more than had ever before been assembled on the continent of Asia. The Burmese could not match this firepower. After an exchange of fire that lasted several hours, the British infantry was sent ashore.

  There were some ten thousand soldiers in the British invasion force and of these the great majority—about two-thirds—were Indian sepoys. Among the units deployed at Minhla there were three battalions of sepoys. They were from the Hazara Regiment and the 1st Madras Pioneers. The Indians were seasoned, battle-hardened troops. The Hazaras, recruited from the Afghan border, had proved their worth to the British over decades of warfare, in India and abroad. The 1st Madras Pioneers were among the most loyal of Britain’s foot soldiers. They had stood steadfastly by their masters even through the uprising of 1857, when most of northern India had risen against the British. The Burmese defenders of Minhla stood little chance against these sepoys, with their newly manufactured British equipment and their vastly superior numbers. The dogged little defence force dissolved when the redoubt was charged.

  The aftershock of the collapse at Minhla was felt a long way upriver. At Pakokku the garrison melted away; at Nyaungu, near the great, pagoda-covered plain of Pagan, Burmese gunners spiked their own cannon after firing a few shots. At Mygingan, which was under the command of the Hlethin Atwinwun, the defenders were forced to abandon their positions after a bombardment that lasted several hours. A few days later, without informing King Thebaw, the Burmese army surrendered.

  The war lasted just fourteen
days.

  three

  For two days after the bombardment of Myingan, Mandalay was strangely, almost eerily quiet. Then the rumours started. One morning a man went running through the marketplace, past Ma Cho’s stall. He was shouting at the top of his voice: foreign ships had anchored off the shore; English soldiers were marching towards the city.

  Panic struck the market. People began to run and jostle. Rajkumar managed to push his way through the crowd to the adjoining road. He could not see far: a cloud of dust hung over the road, drummed up by hundreds of racing feet. People were running in every direction, slamming against each other and pushing blindly at anything that came their way. Rajkumar was swept along in the direction of the river. As he ran, he became aware of a ripple in the ground beneath him, a kind of drumbeat in the earth, a rhythmic tremor that travelled up his spine through the soles of his feet.

  The people in front of him scattered and parted, pushing up against the sides of the road. Suddenly he was in the front rank of the crowd, looking directly at two English soldiers mounted on brown horses. The cavalrymen were waving people away with drawn swords, clearing the road. The dust had made patterns on their polished boots. Looming behind them was a solid mass of uniforms, advancing like a tidal wave.

  Rajkumar darted to the side of the road and pressed himself against a wall. The crowd’s initial nervousness melted as the first squad of soldiers marched past with their shouldered rifles. There was no rancour on the soldiers’ faces, no emotion at all. None of them so much as glanced at the crowd.

  ‘The English!’ someone said, and the words went quickly from mouth to mouth, growing louder and louder until they became a kind of murmured cheer. But as the vanguard passed and the next squad came into view, an amazed silence descended on the spectators: these soldiers were not English—they were Indians. The people around Rajkumar stirred, as though moved to curiosity by the sight of an Indian in their midst.