The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  On waking in the morning, Manju would find Dolly on her knees, dressed in a frayed old longyi, wiping the floors with tattered shreds of cloth. They would work together, going through a couple of rooms each day, breaking off when the monks came by for their daily visits.

  For Manju these mid-morning breaks were the best-loved aspect of daily life in Rangoon. She’d always known that Buddhist monks lived by collecting alms, but it came as a surprise to observe the ways in which this tenet, more or less abstract, came to be translated into the mundane mechanics of everyday life—into the workaday reality of a tired-looking group of young men and boys, walking down a dusty street in saffron robes, with their baskets balanced on their hips. There was something magical about the fact that this interruption came always at a time of day when the tasks of the household were at their most pressing; when there was scarcely room in one’s head but to think about what had to be done next. And in the midst of all that—to open the door and see the monks standing there, waiting patiently, with the sun beating down on their shaven heads: what better way could there be of unbalancing everyday reality?

  Calcutta seemed very far away now. The flow of letters from India had suffered disruptions because of the threat of submarines in the Bay of Bengal. Steamer traffic between Calcutta and Rangoon had become so irregular that letters tended to arrive in bunches.

  One such bunch brought news both of Arjun’s impending departure and of his arrival in Malaya. Dolly was very glad to hear of this development: ‘Perhaps Arjun could find out what’s become of Dinu,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time since we last heard from him.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll write . . .’

  Manju sent a letter to the address her father had provided— via army headquarters in Singapore. Many weeks went by without an answer.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Manju said to Dolly. ‘I’m sure Dinu’s fine. We’d have heard if anything was wrong.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ But a month passed and then another and Dolly seemed to become resigned to her son’s continuing silence.

  The baby was now kicking urgently against the walls of Manju’s stomach and she had no attention to spare for anything other than her own condition. With the approach of the monsoons, the days grew hotter and the effort of carrying the child grew very much greater. Sooner than they had expected, the festival of Waso was upon them. Dolly took Manju on a drive into the countryside in a taxi rented for the day. They stopped in a wooded area off the Pegu road, and collected armloads of fragrant yellow padauk flowers. They were on their way back to Rangoon when Manju had a dizzy spell and fainted on the back seat.

  After this episode the doctor confined Manju to bed. Dolly became her nurse, bringing her food, helping with her clothes, occasionally leading her around the compound. The days went by in a kind of trance; Manju would lie dreamily in bed, with a book beside her, open but unread. Hours would pass while she did nothing but listen to the sound of the pouring rain.

  They were now well into Thadin—the annual three-month period of reflection and abstinence. Often Dolly would read to Manju, mainly from the scriptures—from such translations as she could find, since Manju knew neither Pali nor Burmese. One day Dolly chose a discourse by the Buddha, addressed to his son, Rahula.

  She read: Develop a state of mind like the earth, Rahula, for on the earth all manner of things are thrown, clean and unclean, dung and urine, spittle, pus and blood, and the earth is not troubled or repelled or disgusted . . .

  Manju watched her mother-in-law as she read: Dolly’s long, black hair was slightly flecked with grey and her face was etched with a webbing of lines. Yet, there was a youthfulness in her expression that belied these signs of age: it was hard to believe that this was a woman in her mid-sixties.

  . . . develop a state of mind like water, for in the water many things are thrown, clean and unclean, and the water is not troubled or repelled or disgusted. And so too with fire, which burns all things, clean and unclean, and with air, which blows upon them all, and with space, which is nowhere established . . .

  Dolly’s lips seemed hardly to move, and yet every word was perfectly enunciated: Manju had never before known anyone who could appear to be in repose when she was actually at her most intently wakeful, her most alert.

  When Manju reached the eighth month of her pregnancy Dolly banned Neel from any further travels. He was at home when Manju’s labour started. He helped her into the Packard and drove her to the hospital. They could no longer afford the private suite that Dolly and Rajkumar had taken before, and instead Manju went into the general maternity ward. The next evening she was delivered of her child—a healthy, sharp-voiced girl, who began to suckle the moment she was put to Manju’s breast. The baby was given two names—Jaya was to be her Indian name and Tin May the Burmese.

  Exhausted by her labour Manju fell asleep. It was dawn when she woke up. The baby was in her bed again, rooting hungrily for her feed.

  Holding her daughter to her breast, Manju remembered a passage that Dolly had read to her just a few days before: it was from the Buddha’s first sermon, delivered at Sarnath, two thousand and five hundred years before: . . . birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow; contact with the unpleasant is sorrow, separation from the pleasant is sorrow, every wish unfulfilled is sorrow . . .

  The words had made a great impression on her at the time, but now, with her newborn daughter beside her, they seemed incomprehensible: the world had never seemed so bright, so replete with promise, so profligate in its rewards, so generous in its joys and fulfilments.

  For their first few weeks in Singapore the 1/1 Jats were based at the Tyersall Park camp. This was the very place that Arjun’s friend Kumar had talked about—where a soldier had shot an officer and then committed suicide. In New Delhi the story had sounded unlikely and far-fetched—an extreme situation— like a report of a mother lifting up a car to save her children. But now that they were in Singapore themselves, with India half a continent away, nothing seemed improbable any more— everything appeared to be turned on its head. It was as though they no longer knew who they were, no longer understood their place in the order of things. Whenever they ventured beyond the familiar certainties of the battalion, they seemed to lose themselves in a labyrinth of hidden meanings.

  It so happened that Kumar was in Singapore when the 1/1 Jats first arrived. One afternoon he took Arjun and Hardy to an exclusive club, for a swim. The pool was very crowded, filled with European expatriates and their families. It was a hot sticky day and the water looked cool and inviting. Following Kumar’s lead, Arjun and Hardy jumped in. Within a few minutes they found themselves alone: the pool had emptied as soon as they entered the water.

  Kumar was the only one who was not taken aback. His battalion had been in Malaya more than a year and he had travelled all round the colony.

  ‘I should have warned you about this,’ Kumar said, with a mischievous smile. ‘It’s like this everywhere in Malaya. In smaller towns, the clubs actually put up signs on their doors saying, “No Asiatics allowed”. In Singapore they let us use the pool— it’s just that everyone leaves. Right now they’ve had to relax the colour bar a little because there are so many Indian army units here. But you may as well get used to it because you’ll come across it all the time—in restaurants, clubs, beaches, trains.’ He laughed. ‘We’re meant to die for this colony—but we can’t use the pools.’ Ruefully shaking his head he lit a cigarette.

  Soon their battalion was sent north. The Malayan countryside was a revelation to the Indian officers. They had never seen such prosperity, such beautiful roads, such tidy, well-laid-out little towns. Often, when they stopped, the local Indian residents would invite them to their houses. These were usually middle-class people with modest jobs—provincial lawyers and doctors, clerks and shopkeepers. But the signs of affluence in their homes were such as to amaze Arjun and his fellow-soldiers. It seemed that in Malaya even ordinary people were able to afford cars and re
frigerators: some even had air conditioners and telephones. In India only Europeans and the richest of rich Indians could afford such things.

  Driving along rural roads, the officers discovered that in Malaya the only people who lived in abject, grinding poverty were plantation labourers—almost all of whom were Indian in origin. They were astonished at the difference between the plantations’ ordered greenery and the squalor of their coolie lines. Hardy once remarked on the starkness of the contrast and Arjun responded by pointing out that in India, they would have taken such poverty for granted; that the only reason they happened to notice it now was because of its juxtaposition with Malaya’s prosperous towns. This thought made them both cringe in shame. It was as though they were examining their own circumstances for the first time, in retrospect; as though the shock of travel had displaced an indifference that had been inculcated in them since their earliest childhood.

  Other shocks awaited. Out of uniform, Arjun and his friends found that they were often mistaken for coolies. In markets and bazaars shopkeepers treated them offhandedly, as though they were of no account. At other times—and this was worse still—they would find themselves being looked upon with something akin to pity. Once, Arjun got into an argument with a shopkeeper and found himself being called Klang—to his puzzlement. Later, enquiring about the meaning of this word, he discovered that it was a derogatory reference to the sound of the chains worn by the earliest Indian workers who were brought to Malaya.

  Soon it seemed as though there was not a man in the battalion who had not found himself embroiled in an unsettling encounter of one kind or another. One evening, Kishan Singh was oiling Arjun’s revolver, squatting on the floor, when he looked up suddenly. ‘Sah’b,’ he said to Arjun, ‘can I ask you the meaning of an English word?’

  ‘Yes. What is it?’

  ‘Mercenary—what does it mean?’

  ‘Mercenary?’ Arjun started in surprise. ‘Where did you hear this word?’

  Kishan Singh explained that during one of their recent moves, their convoy of trucks had stopped at a roadside tea-stall, near the town of Ipoh. There were some local Indians sitting in the tea-stall. They had announced themselves to be members of a political group—the Indian Independence League. Somehow an argument had started. The civilians had told them that they—the 1/1 Jats—weren’t real soldiers; they were just hired killers, mercenaries. A fight would have broken out, if the convoy hadn’t got under way again. But later, when they were back on the road, they had begun to argue again— with each other this time—about the word mercenary and what it meant.

  Arjun’s instinct was to bark an order at Kishan Singh, telling him to shut up and get on with what he was doing. But by now he knew his batman well enough to be aware that an order would not deter him from looking for an answer to his question. Thinking quickly Arjun embarked on an explanation: mercenaries were merely soldiers who were paid for their work, he said. In this sense all soldiers, in all modern armies, were mercenaries. Hundreds of years ago soldiers had fought out of religious belief, or because of allegiance to their tribes, or to defend their kings. But those days were long past: now soldiering was a job, a profession, a career. Every soldier was paid and there was none who was not a mercenary.

  This seemed to satisfy Kishan Singh, and he asked no more questions. But it was Arjun himself who now came to be troubled by the answer he had given his batman. If it was true (and it undoubtedly was) that all contemporary soldiers were mercenaries, then why did the word have the sting of an insult? Why did he feel himself smarting at its use? Was it because soldiering was not just a job after all, as he had taught himself to believe? That to kill without conviction violated some deep and unalterable human impulse?

  One night he and Hardy stayed up late, discussing this subject over a bottle of brandy. Hardy agreed that it was hard to explain why it was so shameful to be called a mercenary. But it was he who eventually put his finger on it: ‘It’s because a mercenary’s hands obey someone else’s head; those two parts of his body have no connection with each other.’ He paused to smile at Arjun: ‘Because, yaar, in other words, a mercenary is a buddhu, a fool.’

  Arjun refused to be drawn into Hardy’s jocularity. He said: ‘So are we mercenaries, do you think?’

  Hardy shrugged. ‘All soldiers are mercenaries today,’ he said. ‘In fact, why just stop with soldiers? In one way or another we’re all a little like that woman you went to in Delhi— dancing to someone else’s tune, taking money. There’s not that much difference.’ He tipped back his glass, with a laugh.

  Arjun found an opportunity to take his doubts to Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland. He told him about the incident at the tea-stall and recommended that the other ranks’ contacts with the local Indian population be more closely supervised. Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland heard him out patiently, interrupting only to nod assent: ‘Yes, you’re right, Roy, something must be done.’

  But Arjun came away from this conversation even more disturbed than before. He had a feeling that the Lieutenant-Colonel could not understand why he was so outraged at being described as a ‘mercenary’; in his voice there had been an undertone of surprise that someone as intelligent as Arjun could take offence at something that was no more than a statement of fact. It was as though the Lieutenant-Colonel knew something about him, that he, Arjun, either did not know or was not willing to recognise. Arjun was embarrassed now to think that he’d allowed himself to go off at the deep end. It was as though he were a child who’d taken umbrage at the discovery that he’d spoken prose all his life.

  These experiences were so peculiar, so provocative of awkward emotions, that Arjun and the other officers could rarely bring themselves to speak of them. They had always known their country to be poor, yet they had never imagined themselves to be part of that poverty: they were the privileged, the elite. The discovery that they were poor too came as a revelation. It was as though a grimy curtain of snobbery had prevented them from seeing what was plainly before their eyes—that although they had never been hungry, they too were impoverished by the circumstances of their country; that such impressions as they’d had of their own wellbeing were delusions, compounded out of the unimaginable extremity of their homeland’s poverty.

  The strange thing was that even more than Arjun, it was the real faujis—the second- and third-generation army-wallahs— on whom these experiences had the most powerful effect. ‘But your father and grandfather were here,’ Arjun said to Hardy. ‘It was they who helped in the colonisation of these places. They must have seen some of the things that we’ve seen. Did they never speak of all this?’

  ‘They didn’t see things as we do,’ Hardy said. ‘They were illiterate yaar. You have to remember that we’re the first generation of educated Indian soldiers.’

  ‘But still, they had eyes, they had ears, they must occasionally have talked to local people?’

  Hardy shrugged. ‘The truth is yaar, they weren’t interested; they didn’t care; the only place that was real to them was their village.’

  ‘How is that even possible . . .?’

  In the following weeks Arjun thought often of this: it was as though he and his peers had been singled out to pay the price of a monumental inwardness.

  With every day that he spent on the mountainside Dinu could feel his pictures changing. It was as though his eyes were adjusting to unaccustomed lines of sight; as though his body were adapting to new temporal rhythms. His earliest pictures of the chandis were angular and densely packed, the frames filled with sweeping vistas. He saw the site as being replete with visual drama—the jungle, the mountain, the ruins, the thrusting vertical lines of the tree trunks juxtaposed against the sweeping horizontals of the distant sea—he laboured to cram all these elements into his frames. But the more time he spent on the mountain, the less the background seemed to matter. The vastness of the landscape had the effect of both shrinking and enlarging the forest-enclosed clearing in which the chandis stood: it became small and intimate, but s
aturated with a sense of time. Soon he could no longer see either the mountains or the forest or the sea. He found himself moving closer and closer to the chandis, following the grain of the laterite and the pattern of the moss that covered its surface; trying to find a way of framing the curiously voluptuous shapes of the toadstools that grew within the joins of the stone.

  The rhythms of his work changed in ways that he could not fully control. Hours would go by before he made a single exposure; he would go back and forth dozens of times, between his camera and his subject; he began to stop his lens further and further down, experimenting with aperture settings that required exposures of several minutes at a time, even as much as half an hour. It was as though he were using his instrument to mimic the pinprick eyes of the lizards that sunned themselves on the chandis’ floors.

  Many times each day, inexplicable perturbations would sweep through the surrounding forests. Flocks of birds would rise screaming from the surrounding trees and go boomeranging through the skies, only to settle back in exactly the same spots from which they had risen. To Dinu each of these disturbances now seemed like an augury of Alison’s arrival, and in listening for their causes—sometimes the backfiring of a truck on the estate, sometimes a plane coming in to land at the nearby airstrip—his senses came to achieve an uncannily close attunement to the sounds of the forest. Every time the trees were shaken alive, he would break away from his work, straining to catch the sound of the Daytona. Often he would go running down the path to the gap where he could look down on the ford. As the disappointments mounted, he grew steadily more impatient with himself: it was plain idiocy to imagine that she’d drive out this way again, considering the last time. And in any event, why come all the way here, when she would see him in the house at dinnertime?