The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  She looked up to see Rajkumar ushering someone into the cabin: a small, portly, owlish man, dressed in a grey suit and a felt hat. The visitor doffed his hat and smiled, so broadly that his eyes almost disappeared into the creases of his deeply lined face. This had to be Saya John, she knew, and the knowledge of this made her more apprehensive than ever. This was the meeting she had most dreaded: Rajkumar had talked of his mentor at such length that Saya John had become the equivalent of a father-in-law in her mind, to be either feared and propitiated, or else to be resisted and fought with—she had no idea how things would turn out between the two of them. Now, faced with him in person, she found herself folding her hands together, in the Indian way, unconsciously, through the force of long habit.

  He laughed and came quickly across the cabin. Addressing her in Burmese, he said, ‘Look, I have something for you.’ She noticed that his accent was thickly foreign.

  He reached into his pocket and took out a filigreed gold bracelet, wrapped in tissue paper. Taking hold of her wrist, he slipped the bracelet over her knuckles. ‘It belonged to my wife,’ he said. ‘I put it aside for you.’

  She spun the bracelet around her wrist. The polished gold facets gleamed in the dappled light that was shining in through the portholes. He put his arm around her and under the pressure of his hand, she felt her apprehensions seeping away. She glanced at him shyly and smiled. ‘It’s beautiful, Saya. I’ll treasure it.’

  Rajkumar, watching from the doorway, saw a lightening in the mists that had gathered around her over the last few days. ‘Come,’ he said quickly. ‘Let’s go. The gaari is waiting.’

  On the way to Blackburn Lane, in the carriage, Saya John reached into his pocket once again. ‘I have something for you too, Rajkumar.’ He took out a small, spherical object, also wrapped in tissue paper. He handed it carefully to Rajkumar.

  Undoing the tissue paper, Rajkumar found himself holding a spongy ball, made of whitish-grey strings that were tangled around each other, like wool. He raised the ball to his face, wrinkling his nose at the unfamiliar odour. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Rubber.’ Saya John used the English word.

  ‘Rubber?’ Rajkumar recognised the word, but had only a dim awareness of what it referred to. He handed the ball to Dolly and she sniffed it, recoiling: its smell was more human than botanical, the scent of a bodily secretion, like sweat.

  ‘Where did you get this, Saya?’ Rajkumar said, in puzzlement.

  ‘In my hometown—Malacca.’

  Saya John had been travelling too, while Rajkumar was away in India: he had gone east, to Malaya, visiting friends and looking up his relatives by marriage. He’d stopped at Malacca, to visit his wife’s grave. It was some years since he’d last been back, and he’d noticed immediately that something had changed in the interim, something new was afoot. For years, ever since he could remember, Malacca had been a town that was slowly dying, with its port silted up and its traders moving away, either northwards to Penang, or southwards to Singapore. But now, suddenly, Malacca was a changed place; there was a palpable quickening in the muddied veins of the sleepy old city. One day a friend took him to the outskirts of the town, to a place that he, John Martins, remembered from his childhood, an area that had once been home to dozens of small spice gardens, where pepper plants grew on vines. But the vines were all gone now, and in their place there were long straight rows of graceful, slender-trunked saplings.

  Saya John had looked hard at the trees and had not been able to name them. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Rubber.’

  Some nine years before, Mr Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil. But Mr Ridley was himself the first to admit that it might take as many as ten years for a rubber plantation to become productive. Malaya’s European planters had backed away on learning this. But Mr Tan Chay Yan, persevering undeterred, had succeeded in milking rubber from his trees in three short years. Now everyone, even the most timid British corporation, was following his lead, planting rubber; money had been pouring into the city. The B.F. Goodrich company had sent representatives all the way from Akron, Ohio, urging the planters of Malaya to plant this new crop. This was the material of the coming age; the next generation of machines could not be made to work without this indispensable absorber of friction. The newest motor cars had dozens of rubber parts; the markets were potentially bottomless, the profits beyond imagining.

  Saya John had made enquiries, asking a few knowledgeable people about what was involved in planting rubber. The answers were always short: land and labour were what a planter needed most; seed and saplings were easily to be had. And of the two principal necessities, land was the easier to come by: of labour there was already a shortage. The British Colonial Government was looking to India to supply coolies and workers for the plantations.

  Saya John had begun to toy with the idea of buying some land for Matthew, his son. He’d quickly discovered that land prices around Malacca had risen steeply; he was advised to travel north, in the direction of the Siam border. He’d set off, not quite convinced still. He was too old to start up a vast new project, this he knew; but there was Rajkumar to be counted on—he would know what to do about building a workforce—and of course there was always Matthew, who had been away in America many years. No one knew exactly what Matthew was doing there; the last he’d heard, the boy had travelled east, to New York. There had been a letter a while back; he’d said something about looking for a job— nothing at all about coming home. Perhaps this was exactly what was needed to bring the boy home: a huge new enterprise to which he could dedicate himself: something that would be his own; something that he could build up. He could see himself growing old, living with Matthew—the boy would have a family, children; they’d live together in a quiet place, surrounded by trees and greenery.

  These ideas were still forming in his mind, when he glimpsed the perfect place, from the deck of a ferry boat: the south-facing slope of a mountain, an extinct volcano that reared out of the plain like the head of some fantastic beast. The place was a wilderness, a jungle; but at the same time, it was within easy distance of the island of Penang and the port of Butterworth.

  ‘I’ve got land there now,’ Saya John said to Rajkumar, ‘and it’s waiting for the day when Matthew comes back.’

  Rajkumar, newly married and eager in his anticipation of the pleasures of domestic life, was not disposed to take his mentor seriously. ‘But, Saya, what does Matthew know about rubber or plantations?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. He’ll find out. And of course, he’ll have you to help him. We’ll be partners, the three of us: you, me, Matthew.’

  Rajkumar shrugged. ‘Saya, I know even less about this than Matthew does. My business is timber.’

  ‘Timber is a thing of the past, Rajkumar: you have to look to the future—and if there’s any tree on which money could be said to grow then this is it—rubber.’

  Rajkumar felt Dolly’s hand, pressing against his own, in anxious enquiry. He gave her a reassuring nudge as though to say: it’s just one of the old man’s fancies; there’s no need to worry.

  In the immediate aftermath of her widowhood, Uma returned to Lankasuka, her parents’ house, in Calcutta. Hers was a small family: she had only one brother, who was much younger than herself. Their house was spacious and comfortable, although not grand: it had two storeys, with a semi-circular balcony on each. The rooms were airy and bright with high

  ceilings and stone floors that stayed cool even in the hottest of summers.

  But Uma’s homecoming was not a happy one. Her father was an archaeologist and a scholar: he w
as not the kind of man to insist on all the customary observances of a Hindu widowhood, but nor was he so enlightened as to be wholly impervious to the strictures of his neighbours. Within his lights he did what he could to mitigate the rigours of his daughter’s situation. But as a widow living at home, Uma’s life was still one of rigid constraints and deprivation: her hair was shaved off; she could eat no meat nor fish and she was allowed to wear nothing but white. She was twenty-eight and had a lifetime ahead of her. As the months dragged by it became clear that some other solution would have to be thought of.

  Uma was now a woman of independent means, the beneficiary of a very substantial pension. During his lifetime the Collector had held one of the most lucrative jobs in the Empire, and on his death it was discovered that he had made many astute investments, several of them in Uma’s name. With her livelihood assured, and no children to care for, there was nothing to hold her at home and every reason to leave. The matter was decided when she received a letter from Dolly, inviting her to visit Rangoon. It was evident that the best possible solution was for her to go abroad.

  On the journey over, Uma kept her head covered, with a shawl to hide her shaven head. Dolly and Rajkumar met her at the Barr Street Jetty and the moment she stepped off, Dolly tore away her shawl.

  ‘Why are you hiding your face?’ she said. ‘I think you look nice like that.’

  Dolly and Rajkumar brought Uma directly to their new home in Kemendine: they had only recently moved in and the house was still under construction. Having been very rapidly erected, the house was a haphazard, old-fashioned structure— two floors of interconnected rooms, grouped around a square courtyard. The floors were of polished red stone and the courtyard was lined with corridor-like balconies. The balustrades were of spindly wrought-iron. Along the walls of the compound there were a number of small outhouses. These were inhabited by watchmen, gardeners and other household employees.

  Rangoon was almost as much a foreign city to Dolly as it was to Uma, and the two of them began to explore it together: they climbed the steps of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda; they visited Uma’s uncle in kalaa-basti, the Indian quarter; they attended the pony races at the Kyaikasan racecourse; they went walking in the narrow streets of Syriam, across the river, they promenaded around the Royal Lakes and went for drives around the Cantonment. Everywhere they went, Dolly was courted, sought after, besieged by armies of acquaintances, asked endless questions about the King and Queen and their life abroad. This was a subject of universal interest in Burma, and Dolly’s sharing of the Royal Family’s exile made her something of a celebrity herself.

  Uma’s time passed very pleasantly. She was often invited out with Dolly and was never at a loss for things to do. But as the weeks passed she found herself growing ever more painfully aware of the distance between Dolly’s ebullient happiness and her own circumstances. In the past, Uma had often wondered about Dolly’s marriage: had she married Rajkumar in order to escape the imprisonment of Outram House? Or was it just that she had fallen in love—that and nothing else? Now, watching them together, Uma saw that these reasons were not exclusive of each other: that each of these motives had played a part in creating a wholeness, as in the fitting together of the misshapen pieces of a puzzle. She saw also that this was a completeness that she, who had always prided herself on knowing her own mind in all things, had never known and perhaps would never know, because it was not within her to yield to the moment, in Dolly’s way.

  Dolly and Rajkumar seemed to have little knowledge of one another’s likes and dislikes, preferences and habits, yet the miracle was—and this too Uma could see clearly—that far from weakening their bond, their mutual incomprehension served rather to strengthen it. Between herself and the Collector, on the other hand, every eventuality had been governed by clearly defined rules and meanings. Whenever there was a question about what either of them might like or want, all they had to do was to refer implicitly to usage and etiquette. Now, thinking back, she saw that she herself had come to resemble the Collector more closely than she had ever thought to admit; that she too had become a creature of rules and method and dogged persistence, and was in this sense utterly unlike Dolly.

  As the days passed, she became conscious of a gathering grief, an emotion more powerful than any she had ever known. In the light of hindsight, she realised that those words that people had always used of the Collector—he’s a good man— were true; that he indeed had been a good man, an honest man—a man of great intelligence and ability who happened to have been born into a circumstance that could not offer him an appropriate avenue for the fulfilment of his talents. He had wielded immense power as a District Collector, yet paradoxically, the position had brought him nothing but unease and uncertainty; she recalled the nervous, ironic way in which he had played the part of Collector; she remembered how he’d watched over her at table, the intolerable minuteness of his supervision, the effort he had invested in moulding her into a reflection of what he himself aspired to be. There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation; a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines. But she was not Dolly and never would be; some part of her was irretrievably the Collector’s creation, and if nothing was to be served by mourning this disfigurement, then it was her duty to turn her abilities to the task of seeking a remedy.

  One day, Rajkumar said to her: ‘Everything we have we owe to you. If there’s anything you should ever need, we would want to be the first to be asked.’

  She smiled. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Well then, I am going to ask you to book me a passage, to Europe . . .’

  As Uma’s ship made its way westwards, a wake of letters and postcards came drifting back, to wash up at Dolly’s door in Kemendine. From Colombo there was a picture of the sea at Mount Lavinia, with a note about how Uma had met a family friend on board her ship, a Mrs Kadambari Dutt—one of the famous Hatkhola Dutts of Calcutta, a cousin of Toru Dutt, the poetess and a relative of the distinguished Mr Romesh Dutt, the writer and scholar. Mrs Dutt was a good deal older than herself and had lived a while in England; she was very experienced and knowledgeable about things—the perfect person to have on board, a godsend really. They were enjoying themselves together.

  From Aden there was a postcard with a picture of a narrow channel, flowing between two immense cliffs. Uma wrote that she’d been delighted to discover that this waterway—which formed the link between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea— was known in Arabic as the Bab al-Mandab, ‘the gateway of lamentation’. Could there possibly be a better-chosen name?

  From Alexandria there was a picture of a fortress, with a few wry remarks about how much friendlier the Europeans on the ship had become once they were past the Suez Canal. She, Uma, had been taken aback, but Mrs Dutt had said that it was always like this: there was something about the air of the Mediterranean that seemed to turn even the most haughty colonialists into affable democrats.

  From Marseilles, Uma sent her first long letter: she and her newfound friend, Mrs Dutt, had decided to spend a few days in that city. Mrs Dutt had changed into a European skirt before going ashore; she’d offered to lend Uma one, but Uma had felt awkward and had refused; she’d stepped off the ship in a sari. They hadn’t gone far before Uma was mistaken—of all things!—for a Cambodian; dozens of people had gathered around her, asking if she was a dancer. It turned out that King Sisowath of Cambodia had recently visited the city, with a troupe of dancers from his palace. The dancers had enjoyed a great
success; the whole city was mad for them; the great sculptor, Mr Rodin, had come down from Paris, just to draw their likenesses. Uma had almost wished that she did not have to disappoint everyone by explaining that she was an Indian, not Cambodian.

  They’d had a wonderful time, the two of them, she and Mrs Dutt; they’d walked around town and gone sightseeing and even ventured into the countryside. It had been strange, heady, exhilarating—two women travelling alone, unmolested, drawing nothing more than the occasional curious stare. She’d asked herself why it was not possible to do the same at home— why women could not think of travelling like this in India, revelling in this sense of being at liberty. Yet it was troubling to think that this privilege—of being able to enjoy this sense of freedom, however momentary—had become possible only because of the circumstances of her marriage and because she now had the money to travel. She had talked of this at length with Kadambari—Mrs Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available, for women everywhere? And Mrs Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they’d never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? That one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection? She’d had a long argument with Mrs Dutt and in the end she had succeeded in persuading her friend that hers was the correct view. She’d felt this to be a great triumph—for of course Mrs Dutt was much older (and a good deal better educated) and until then it was always she who was telling her, Uma, how she ought to think of things.