The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  A year went by and every day Ma Thin Thin Aye left and entered the studio by the door that led to the street. One day she said: ‘U Tun Pe, do you know what I find hardest in my writing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The moment when I have to step off the street and go into a house.’

  He frowned. ‘Why . . .? Why that?’

  She wrung her hands together in her lap, looking exactly like the serious student that she was. ‘It is very hard,’ she said. ‘And to you it may seem like a small thing. But I do believe that it is this moment that marks the difference between classical and modern writing.’

  ‘Of all things . . .! How so?’

  ‘You see, in classical writing, everything happens outside— on streets, in public squares and battlefields, in palaces and gardens—in places that everyone can imagine.’

  ‘But that is not how you write?’

  ‘No.’ She laughed. ‘And to this day, even though I do it only in my mind, nothing is more difficult for me than this— going into a house, intruding, violating. Even though it’s only in my head, I feel afraid—I feel a kind of terror—and that’s when I know I must keep going, step in, past the threshold, into the house.’

  He nodded but made no comment. He gave himself a little time to think about what she’d said. One afternoon he bought biryani from Mughal Street and invited her up.

  A few months later, they were married. The ceremony was a quiet one and they invited very few people. Afterwards, Ma Thin Thin Aye moved into Dinu’s two rooms. She marked off a corner for herself and set up a desk. She began to teach literature at the university. In the afternoons, she still helped at the studio. They were happy, content with the smallness and privacy of their world. Their childlessness did not seem a great lack. Her work began to gain notice, even beyond literary circles. She became one of the select group of Burmese writers whose presence was regularly sought at festivals in the countryside.

  One morning, Daw Thin Thin Aye was tutoring a promising young student at the university, when she heard a burst of gunfire close at hand. She went to the window and saw hundreds of young men and women running by, some covered in blood.

  Her student pulled her away from the window. They hid under a desk. After a couple of hours they were found by one of Daw Thin Thin Aye’s colleagues. There had been a coup, they learnt. General Ne Win had seized power. Dozens of students had been shot down, right inside the university.

  Neither Dinu nor Daw Thin Thin Aye had ever been directly involved in politics. After the coup, they kept to themselves and waited for the winds to change. It was not until many years had passed that they realised that this was a storm that had come to stay.

  U Thiha Saw was arrested and his newspaper was shut down. General Ne Win, the new dictator, began to juggle with the currency. Notes of certain denominations were declared to be valueless; overnight, millions of kyats became waste paper. Thousands of the country’s brightest young people fled into the countryside. Rebellions multiplied and flourished. Raymond went underground with several hundred followers. In the east, on the Thai border, the insurgents gave a name to the territories under their control: they became a Karen Free State— Kwathoolei, with its capital at the riverbank town of Manerplaw.

  With each year the generals seemed to grow more powerful while the rest of the country grew ever feebler: the military was like an incubus, sucking the life from its host. U Thiha Saw died at Insein gaol, in circumstances that were not explained. His body was brought home bearing marks of torture and the family was not permitted a public funeral. A new censorship regime developed, growing out of the foundations of the system that had been left behind by the old Imperial Government. Every book and magazine had to be presented to the Press Scrutiny Board, for the perusal of a small army of captains and majors.

  One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was ordered to report to the Scrutiny Board’s office. The building was plain and functional, like a school, and its long corridors smelt of toilets and disinfectant. She went to an office with a plywood door and sat for several hours on a bench. When at last she was shown in, she found herself facing an officer who looked to be in his late twenties. He was sitting at a desk and the manuscript of one of her stories was lying in front of him. His hands were in his lap and he seemed to be toying with something—she could not tell what it was.

  She stood at the desk, fidgeting with the hem of her blouse. He did not ask her to sit. He stared, looking her up and down. Then he jabbed a finger at the manuscript. ‘Why have you sent this here?’

  ‘I was told,’ she said quietly, ‘that that is the law.’

  ‘The law is for writers,’ he said. ‘Not for people like you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You do not know how to write Burmese. Look at all these mistakes.’

  She glanced at her manuscript and saw that it was covered with red pencil marks, like a badly filled schoolbook.

  ‘I’ve wasted a lot of time correcting this,’ he said. ‘It’s not my job to teach you people how to write.’

  He got up from his chair and she saw that he was holding a golf club in his hands. It struck her now that the room was full of golfing paraphernalia—caps, balls, clubs. He reached for her manuscript and crumpled it into a ball, with one hand. Then he put it on the ground between his feet. He took many little steps, swinging the head of his club back and forth. He swung, and the ball of paper went sailing across the room. He held the pose for a moment, admiring his swing— the bent knee, the flexed leg. He turned to her. ‘Pick it up,’ he said. ‘Take it home and study it. Don’t send anything to this office again until you’ve learnt to write proper Burmese.’

  In the bus, on the way home, she smoothed out the pages, one by one. His vocabulary, she realised, was that of a child; he was barely literate. He had run his pencil through everything he hadn’t understood—puns, allusions, archaisms.

  She stopped writing. Nothing could be published unless it had undergone the board’s scrutiny. Writing was hard enough, even with nothing to deal with except yourself. The thought of another such encounter made those hours at the desk seem unendurable. The newspapers were full of strident denunciations of imperialism. It was because of the imperialists that Burma had to be shut off from the world; the country had to be defended against neo-colonialism and foreign aggression.

  These tirades sickened Dinu. One day he said to his wife: ‘Look at the way in which these thugs use the past to justify the present. And they themselves are much worse than the colonialists; at least in the old days, you could read and write.’

  Daw Thin Thin Aye smiled and shook her head in reproof. She said: ‘To use the past to justify the present is bad enough— but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past. And you can be sure that there are plenty of people to do that too: it’s just that we don’t have to put up with them.’

  Their lives became very quiet and stunted: they were like plants whose roots had been trimmed to contain them inside tiny pots. They mixed with very few people, and were always careful about what they said, even with friends. They grew gnarled with age, inside and outside: they moved round their rooms with slow deliberation, like people who are afraid of knocking things over.

  But all was not quiet around them. There were changes under way that they did not know about. Their lives were so quiet, so shut off that they didn’t feel the first rumbles under the volcano. The eruption, when it came, took them by surprise.

  It started with another of the general’s crazed whims— another juggling of the currency. But this time people were not content to see their life’s savings turned into waste paper. There were protests, quiet and hesitant at first. One day, in the university, there was a brawl in a teashop—a small, apparently innocuous event. But suddenly classrooms emptied, students came pouring out into the streets; leaders emerged and with astonishing speed, organisations developed.

  One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was taken to a meeting. She went unwillingly, pushed on by her s
tudents. Afterwards, she helped write a pamphlet. When she picked up the pen her hand was shaking—she saw herself in the censor’s office again. But as she began to write, a strange thing happened. With every sentence she saw her crumpled pages coming alive, rising off the floor and hitting back at the golf club, knocking it out of the major’s hands.

  She began to go to meetings all over town. She tried to get Dinu to come but he resisted. Then one day there was news of a new speaker: she was to address a huge gathering, near the Shwe Dagon—her name was Aung San Suu Kyi and she was the daughter of Dinu’s old acquaintance from the university, General Aung San.

  Dinu was seventy-four at the time; with age his right leg had grown stiffer and he walked with difficulty, but this new name had an energising effect on him. He went to the meeting and after that he was not able to stay at home again. He began to take pictures; he travelled with his camera, putting together a pictorial record of the movement in its headiest and most joyful days.

  On August 8, 1988 Dinu woke up with a mild fever. Daw Thin Thin Aye made him a meal and told him to stay in bed. There was to be an important march in the city that day: she left early in the morning. Some three or four hours later, Dinu heard repeated volleys of gunfire in the distance. He was too ill to go out; he lay in bed and waited for his wife to come home. In the late afternoon there was a knock on the door. He dragged himself out of bed and threw the door open.

  There were three or four uniformed policemen standing on the stairs. Behind them were several longyi-clad plain-clothes men.

  ‘Yes?’ said Dinu. ‘What do you want?’

  They pushed past him without a word. He looked on helplessly as they went through the flat, opening cupboards and closets, rifling through their possessions. Then a plain-clothes man pointed to a framed picture of Raymond. The others gathered around, whispering.

  One of the policemen came over to Dinu, with the framed photograph in his hand. ‘Do you know this man?’ he said to Dinu.

  ‘Yes.’ Dinu nodded.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  Dinu picked his words carefully. ‘I know his name.’

  ‘Do you know that he’s the leader of an insurgency? Did you know that he’s one of the most wanted terrorists in the country?’

  ‘No.’ Dinu’s answer was non-committal.

  ‘Anyway—you will have to come with us.’

  ‘Not right now,’ said Dinu. ‘I can’t. I’m ill and I’m waiting for my wife.’

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ said the man in the uniform. ‘She’s already been taken to a place where she will be safe.’

  forty-seven

  On Jaya’s last day in Yangon, Dinu promised to take her to 38 University Avenue, to attend a public meeting at Aung San Suu Kyi’s house.

  The year 1996 marked the sixth anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest. Despite her confinement, Aung San Suu Kyi’s compound was still the centre of the city’s political life. Twice every week, on Saturdays and Sundays, she held a meeting at her house: people gathered outside and she addressed them from the gate. These meetings had become pilgrimages. A hush fell on Rangoon on weekend afternoons and thousands poured into the city from all round the country.

  Dinu came to Jaya’s hotel to pick her up. A friend of his had driven him there in a car—a 1954 Czech-built Skoda. The car was making loud coughing noises as it idled on the street. As she was stepping in, Jaya noticed that the car’s doors were all of different colours, all oddly misshapen, as though they’d been banged into shape with sledgehammers.

  ‘What a strange-looking car,’ she said.

  Dinu laughed, ‘Yes . . . this is a car that has been put together entirely from bits of other cars . . . The bonnet is from an old Japanese Ohta . . . one of the doors is from a Volga . . . It’s a miracle that it runs at all . . .’

  The backfiring of the Skoda’s engine echoed through the streets as they drove away. The centre of the city was almost eerily quiet, emptier than Jaya had ever seen it before. But as they went northwards the traffic increased: there were cars, buses, small trucks. They came to a wide, tree-shaded avenue lined with large villas.

  They parked a good distance away, and joined the many hundreds of people who were walking down the avenue.

  They came to a house with a green and yellow fence. There was a large crowd outside. Not much was visible of the interior of the compound: the house was set well back from the road, surrounded by stands of tall bamboo. The gates were of metal, with spikes along the top. There were some ten thousand people gathered round them, most sitting patiently on the grassy verge that lined the avenue on both sides. The road was kept clear by volunteers and policemen, and traffic was flowing through, right past the gates, at a slow but steady pace.

  The volunteers were wearing saffron tunics and green longyis: Jaya learnt that these were the colours of the democracy movement. Dinu was recognised by many of the volunteers. They waved him through to a vantage point that was quite close to the gates. The view was good and Jaya spent a long time looking at the people around her: there were many students and a fair sprinkling of Buddhist nuns and monks, but most of the people there seemed like ordinary folk. There were plenty of women, a large number being accompanied by children. The atmosphere was expectant but not tense; there were many food vendors making their way through the crowd, selling drinks and snacks.

  Dinu nudged Jaya’s elbow and pointed to a photographer and a couple of men in wire-rimmed sunglasses. ‘M.I.,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Military intelligence. They will film it all and take it back to their headquarters. Their bosses will watch it tomorrow.’ Jaya noticed that there were many Indians in the crowd. She commented on this to Dinu and he said, ‘Yes, you can be sure this fact hasn’t escaped the regime . . . the official papers often describe these meetings as gatherings of evil Indians.’ He laughed.

  Suddenly there was a great uproar. ‘There she is,’ Dinu said. ‘Aung San Suu Kyi.’

  A slim, fine-featured woman stepped up. Her head was just visible above the gate. Her hair was dark black, and gathered at the neck. She was wearing white flowers above her hair. She was beautiful almost beyond belief.

  Aung San Suu Kyi waved at the crowd and began to speak. She was using Burmese and Jaya could not understand what she was saying. But the delivery was completely unlike anything she’d ever heard. She laughed constantly and there was an electric brightness to her manner.

  The laughter is her charisma, Jaya thought. She could hear echoes of Aung San Suu Kyi’s laughter everywhere around her, in the crowd. Despite the swarming intelligence agents, the atmosphere was not heavy or fear-filled. There was a good-humouredness that seemed very much at odds with the deadened city beyond. Jaya understood why so many people had pinned their hopes on Aung San Suu Kyi; she knew that she herself would have been willing to do anything that was asked of her at that moment: it was impossible to behold this woman and not be half in love.

  Both she and Dinu were silent as they walked back to the old Skoda. They got back inside, and presently Dinu said: ‘It’s strange . . . I knew her father . . . I knew many others who were in politics . . . many men who are regarded as heroes now . . . But she is the only leader I’ve ever been able to believe in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’s the only one who seems to understand what the place of politics is . . . what it ought to be . . . that while misrule and tyranny must be resisted, so too must politics itself . . . that it cannot be allowed to cannibalise all of life, all of existence. To me this is the most terrible indignity of our condition—not just in Burma, but in many other places too . . . that politics has invaded everything, spared nothing . . . religion, art, family . . . it has taken over everything . . . there is no escape from it . . . and yet, what could be more trivial, in the end? She understands this . . . only she . . . and this is what makes her much greater than a politician . . .’

  ‘But if that’s true,’ Jaya said hesitantly, ‘doesn’t it make it much ha
rder for her to succeed—as a politician?’

  Dinu laughed. ‘But she has already succeeded . . . don’t you see? She has torn the masks from the generals’ faces . . . She has shown them the limits of what she is willing to do . . . and these limits have imprisoned them too . . . she haunts them unceasingly, every moment . . . She has robbed them of words, of discourse. They have no defence against her but to call her an imperialist which is laughable . . . when in fact, it is they who invoke the old imperial laws and statutes to keep themselves in power. The truth is that they’ve lost and they know this . . . this is what makes them so desperate . . . the knowledge that soon they will have nowhere to hide . . . that it is just a matter of time before they are made to answer for all that they have done.’

  forty-eight

  Dinu came to Jaya’s hotel to take her to the airport. On the way, as they were driving through the city in the Skoda, Dinu said: ‘You’ve been here seven days and we’ve never once spoken of my father.’

  ‘That is true,’ Jaya said guiltily.

  ‘Tell me about his last days,’ Dinu said. ‘Were you with him?’

  ‘Yes, I remember it very well. My great-aunt Uma had died just a few days before, you see. They were almost ninety, both of them . . .’

  They died within a few weeks of each other. Uma was the first to go: she died in her sleep and it was Rajkumar who found her. The news caused a stir: she was given a state funeral and the Governor came. The family was pushed quietly to the background.

  Rajkumar died of a heart attack, a month later. His funeral was as modest as Uma’s had been grand. A few of his friends from the Burmese temple carried his body to the crematorium. Afterwards Jaya and Bela took his ashes to the river. Jaya scattered them in the water.

  ‘I remembered how he’d always said that for him, the Ganges could never be the same as the Irrawaddy.’