The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  She went through the motions of dressing for the races as though she were performing a half-forgotten ritual. When she went down to the driveway, U Ba Kyaw bowed her into their car as though he were welcoming her home after a long absence. The car was a Pic-Pic—a Swiss-manufactured Piccard-Pictet— a commodious, durable machine with a glass pane separating the driver’s seat from the interior cabin.

  The Pic-Pic circled around the Royal Lake, driving past the Chinese burial grounds and passing within sight of the Rangoon Club. Now Dolly too began to feel that she’d been away a long time. All the familiar sights seemed new and startling—the reflection of the Shwe Dagon, shimmering on the lake; the long, low-slung building of the Boat Club, perched on the shore. She found herself leaning forward in her seat, with her face half out of the window, as though she were looking at the city for the first time. The roads around the racecourse had been sealed off by the police, but the Pic-Pic was recognised and they were waved through. The stands looked festive with pennants and flags fluttering above the terraces. On the way to Rajkumar’s box, Dolly found herself waving to a great number of people whose names she had forgotten. Once they were seated, dozens of friends and acquaintances stopped by to welcome her back. She noticed, after a while, that Rajkumar was whispering their names to her, under cover of his programme, to remind her who they were—‘U Tha Din Gyi, he’s a Turf Club steward; U Ohn, the handicapper, Mr MacDonald, the totalizator . . .’

  Everyone was kind. Old Mr Piperno, the bookmaker, sent one of his sons to ask if she wanted to place any bets. She was touched and chose a couple of horses at random, from her programme. The band of the Gloucestershire Regiment came marching out and played a serenade from Friedemann’s Lola. Then they started on another piece, with a great flourish, and Rajkumar gave her arm a sudden tug.

  ‘It’s “God Save the King”,’ he hissed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rising quickly to her feet. ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

  At last, to her relief, the races started. There was a long wait before the next race and another after it was over. Just as everyone around her was becoming more and more excited, Dolly’s mind began to wander. It was weeks since she’d been away from Dinu for this long—but of course he probably hadn’t even noticed that she was gone.

  A sudden outburst of applause jolted her back to her surroundings. Sitting next to her was Daw Thi, the wife of Sir Lionel Ba Than, who was one of the stewards of the Turf Club. Daw Thi was wearing her famous ruby necklace, idly fingering the thumbnail-sized stones. Dolly saw that she was looking at her expectantly.

  ‘What’s happened?’ said Dolly.

  ‘Lochinvar has won.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Dolly.

  Daw Thi gave her a long look, and burst into laughter.

  ‘Dolly, you silly thing,’ she said, ‘have you forgotten? Lochinvar is your husband’s horse!’

  In the car, on the way back, Rajkumar was unusually quiet. When they were almost home, he leant over to slam shut the window that separated the driver’s seat from the rear. Then he turned to look at her a little unsteadily. He’d been plied with champagne after his visit to the winner’s paddock, and was slightly drunk.

  ‘Dolly?’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Something’s happened to you.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No. Nothing’s happened.’ ‘You’re changing . . . You’re leaving us behind.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me . . . Neel . . .’

  She flinched. She knew it was true that she’d neglected her elder son lately. But Neel was filled with energy, boisterousness and loud-voiced goodwill and Rajkumar doted on him. With Dinu on the other hand, he was nervous and tentative; frailty and weakness worried him, puzzled him: he had never expected to encounter these in his own progeny.

  ‘Neel doesn’t need me,’ Dolly said, ‘in the way that Dinu does.’

  He reached for her hand. ‘Dolly, we all need you. You can’t disappear into yourself. You can’t leave us behind.’

  ‘Of course not.’ She laughed uneasily. ‘Where would I go if I left you behind?’

  He dropped her hand and turned away. ‘Sometimes I can’t help feeling that you’ve already gone away—shut yourself behind a glass wall.’

  ‘What wall?’ she cried. ‘What are you talking about?’ She looked up to see U Ba Kyaw watching her, in the Pic-Pic’s rear-view mirror. She bit her lip and said nothing more.

  This exchange came as a shock. She couldn’t make sense of it at first. After a day or two she decided that Rajkumar was right, she ought to go out more, even if it was just to the Scott Market, to look round the shops. Dinu was already more self-sufficient; soon it would be time for him to start school. She would have to get used to being without him, and besides, it wasn’t healthy to be always shut away behind the walls of the house.

  She began to schedule little expeditions for herself. One morning she found herself stuck in one of the most crowded parts of the city, near Rangoon’s Town Hall. Just ahead, at the intersection of Dalhousie Street and Sule Pagoda Street there lay a busy roundabout. An ox-cart had collided with a rickshaw; someone was hurt. A crowd had gathered and the air was full of noise and dust.

  The Sule Pagoda was at the centre of this roundabout. It had been freshly whitewashed, and it rose above the busy streets like a rock rearing out of the sea. Dolly had driven past the pagoda countless times but had never been inside. She told U Ba Kyaw to wait nearby and stepped out of the car.

  She made her way carefully across the crowded roundabout and climbed a flight of stairs. Removing her shoes, she found herself standing on a cool, marble-paved floor. The noise of the street had fallen away and the air seemed clean, free of dust. She spotted a group of saffron-robed monks, chanting in one of the small shrines that ringed the pagoda’s circular nave. She stepped in and knelt behind them, on a mat. In a raised niche, directly ahead, there was a small gilded image of the Buddha, seated in the bhumisparshamudra, with the middle finger of his right hand touching the earth. Flowers lay heaped below—roses, jasmine, pink lotuses—and the air was heady with their scent.

  Dolly closed her eyes, trying to listen to the monks, but instead it was Rajkumar’s voice that echoed in her ears: ‘You’re changing . . . leaving us behind.’ In the tranquillity of that place, those words had a different ring: she recognised that he was right, that the events of the recent past had changed her no less than they had Dinu.

  In hospital, at night, lying in bed with Dinu, she’d found herself listening to voices that were inaudible during the day: the murmurs of anxious relatives; distant screams of pain; women keening in bereavement. It was as though the walls turned porous in the stillness of the night, flooding her room with an unseen tide of defeat and suffering. The more she listened to those voices, the more directly they spoke to her, sometimes in tones that seemed to recall the past, sometimes in notes of warning.

  Late one night she’d heard an old woman crying for water. The voice had been feeble—a hoarse, rasping whisper—but it had filled the room. Although Dinu had been fast asleep, Dolly had clapped a hand over his head. For a while she’d lain rigid on her side, clutching her child, using his sleeping body to shut out the sound. Then she’d slipped out of bed and walked quickly down the corridor.

  A white-capped Karen nurse had stopped her: ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘There was a voice,’ Dolly had said, ‘someone crying for water . . .’ She’d made the nurse listen.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the nurse had said, offhandedly, ‘that’s from the malaria ward below. Someone’s delirious. Go back to your room.’ The moans had stopped soon afterwards but Dolly had stayed up all night, haunted by the sound of the voice.

  Another time she had stepped out of the room to find a stretcher in the corridor. A child’s body had been lying on it, covered with a white hospital sheet. Although Dinu had been no more than a few feet away, sleeping peacefully, Dolly had not been able to quell the panic tha
t surged through her at the sight of the shrouded stretcher. Falling to her knees in the corridor, she had torn away the sheet that covered the corpse. The child had been a boy, of Dinu’s age, and not unlike him in build. Dolly had begun to cry, hysterically, overwhelmed as much by guilt as relief. A nurse and an orderly had had to lift her up to take her back to bed.

  Again that night, she had not been able to sleep. She’d thought of the child’s body; she’d thought of what her life would be like in Dinu’s absence; she’d thought of the dead boy’s mother. She’d begun to cry—it was as though her voice had merged with that of the unknown woman; as though an invisible link had arisen between all of them—her, Dinu, the dead child, his mother.

  Now, kneeling on the floor of the Sule Pagoda, she recalled the voice of King Thebaw, in Ratnagiri. In his later years the King had seemed more and more to dwell on the precepts he had learnt as a novice, in the palace monastery. She remembered a word he’d often used, karuna—one of the Buddha’s words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time will come, he had said to the girls, when you too will discover what this word karuna means, and from that moment on, your lives will never again be the same.

  Shortly after King Thebaw’s funeral, the Queen wrote to her gaolers asking for permission to move back to Burma. Her request was denied, on grounds of security, because of the war in Europe: it was felt that her presence might prove inflammatory at a delicate moment for the Empire. It was only after the end of the war that the Queen and her daughters were allowed to return to their homeland.

  The First Princess now occasioned a fresh crisis. Was she to leave Ratnagiri to go to Burma with her mother? Or was she to stay with Sawant?

  The Princess made a promise to her husband: she told him that she would travel with her mother to Burma and then return once Her Majesty had been safely installed in her new home. Sawant took her at her word and made no objection. But it was with a heavy tread that he walked down to the jetty at Mandvi, on the day of the royal party’s departure. For all he knew this was the last time that he or his children would ever see the Princess.

  The Queen’s party made its way slowly across the subcontinent, travelling eastwards from Bombay by rail. In Calcutta the Queen’s entourage stayed at the Grand Hotel. It so happened that the Second Princess was now also living in Calcutta, with her husband: she could scarcely ignore the presence of her mother and sisters. One evening the disowned Princess gathered her resolve and went over to the Grand Hotel to call on her mother.

  The Queen flatly refused to receive either her daughter or her son-in-law. The Princess, knowing her mother all too well, retreated in good grace—not so her husband, who summoned the temerity to venture uninvited into Her Majesty’s presence. This assault was quickly repulsed: with a single enraged shout the Queen sent her errant son-in-law fleeing down the Grand’s marble staircase, it was his misfortune to be shod in smooth-soled leather pumps. His feet slipped and sent him flying into the lobby, where a chamber ensemble was serenading an audience of assembled guests. He flopped into their midst like a leaping trout. A cello splintered and a viola twanged. Seated nearby was the Third Princess, whose nerves had been sadly strained by her recent travels. She broke into hysterics and could not be calmed. A doctor had to be sent for.

  On April 16, 1919, the Queen and her party boarded the R.M.S. Arankola. They arrived in Rangoon four days later and were spirited quietly off to a bungalow on Churchill Road. A fortnight went by in a flurry of activity. Then the First Princess took everybody aback by announcing that she was ready to go back to Sawant. The family’s advisors wrung their hands. It was suggested that the Princess, as the eldest daughter, had a duty to remain with her mother—promises were, after all, frequently allowed to lapse in the interests of good sense and decency. No one doubted that a means could be found for discreetly closing the door on Sawant.

  It was now that the First Princess showed herself to be a true daughter of her dynasty, every inch a Konbaung—her love for her family’s former coachman proved just as unshakable as her mother’s devotion to the late King. Defying her family, she went back to Sawant and never left Ratnagiri again. She lived the rest of her life with her husband and her children in a small house on the outskirts of town. It was there that she died twenty-eight years later.

  The Second Princess and her husband lived in Calcutta for several years before moving to the hill-station of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling. There the Princess and her husband opened a dairy business.

  So it happened that of the four Princesses, the two who’d been born in Burma both chose to live on in India. Their younger sisters, on the other hand, both born in India, chose to settle in Burma: both married and had children. As for the Queen, she spent her last years in her house on Rangoon’s Churchill Road. Such money as she could extract from the colonial authorities, she spent on religious charities and on feeding monks. She never wore anything but white, the Burmese colour of mourning.

  After the Queen’s arrival in Rangoon, Dolly wrote her several letters, entreating to be allowed to call at her residence. None was ever answered. The Queen died in 1925, six years after her return from Ratnagiri. Even though she’d been cloistered for so many years, there was a sudden surge of sentiment in the city and people poured out to mourn. She was buried near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon.

  seventeen

  In 1929, after a gap of several years, Dolly received a letter from New York. It was from Uma and she was writing to say that she was leaving America. Uma was fifty now and had been away from India for more than twenty years. In her absence her parents had died, leaving her the ground floor of their house, Lankasuka (the upper floor had gone to her brother, who was now married and the father of three children). She had decided to go home, to Calcutta, to settle.

  Because of various engagements in Tokyo, Shanghai and Singapore, Uma wrote, she would be sailing across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. One of the advantages of this route was that it would also enable her to visit friends—Matthew and Elsa in Malaya, and of course, Dolly and Rajkumar in Rangoon. She was writing now to propose that she and Dolly meet at Morningside and spend a fortnight there: it would be a pleasant holiday and afterwards they could travel back to Burma together—after so many years, there was a lot of catching up to be done. What would be better still was if Dolly came with Neel and Dinu: it would give her an opportunity to get to know the boys.

  Dolly was oddly shaken by this letter. Although happy to hear from her friend, she was more than a little apprehensive. To resume a friendship that had been so long dormant was no easy matter. She could not help admiring Uma for her forthrightness; she knew that she herself had drawn away from the world, become increasingly reclusive, unwilling to travel or even go out. She was content leading the life she did, but it worried her that the boys had seen very little of the world—of India or Malaya or any other country. It wasn’t right that they should never know any place other than Burma: no one could predict what lay ahead. Even through the shuttered windows of her room she could feel an unquietness in the land.

  Dolly had not been back to Morningside in fifteen years, ever since her first visit; nor had the boys. It was unlikely, she knew, that Rajkumar would consent to go. He was working harder than ever at his business and there were whole weeks when she hardly saw him. When she mooted the idea to him, he shook his head brusquely, just as she had known he would: no, he was too busy, he couldn’t go.

  But for her own part, Dolly found herself increasingly drawn to the idea of meeting Uma at Morningside. It would be interesting to see Matthew and Elsa again: the Martinses had come to stay with them once, in Burma, with their two children—after Alison, they’d had a boy, Timmy. The children were all very young then and had got on well together, even Dinu who was withdrawn by nature and very slow to make friends. But that was a long time ago: Dinu was fourteen now, a student at St James’s School, one of the best-known in Ra
ngoon. Neel was eighteen, brawny and outgoing, reluctantly engaged in pursuing a course of studies at Rangoon’s Judson College: he was eager to get into the timber business but Rajkumar had said that he would not take him into the family firm until his studies were finished.

  When Dolly sounded Neel out about going to Morningside, he was immediately enthusiastic, keen to be off. She was not really surprised; she knew that he was always on the lookout for ways of getting out of attending his classes. Dinu proved to be much less keen but said he was willing to strike a bargain: he would go, he said, if she bought him a Brownie camera from Rowe and Co. She agreed; she liked to encourage his interest in photography—partly because she believed it to have grown out of his childhood habit of looking over her shoulder while she sketched; and partly because she felt that she ought to encourage any activity that would draw him out of himself.

  The arrangements were quickly set in motion, with letters shooting back and forth between Burma, Malaya and the United States (Rangoon had recently acquired an air mail service, and this made communications much quicker than before). In April the next year, Dolly boarded a Malaya-bound steamer with her two sons. Rajkumar came to see the family off, and after Dolly had boarded, she looked over the side to find that he was waving to her from the jetty, gesticulating wildly, trying to draw her attention to something. She looked at the vessel’s bows and discovered that she was on the Nuwara Eliya, the same vessel that had brought her to Rangoon immediately after her marriage. It was an odd coincidence.

  Matthew and his family were waiting at the Georgetown docks when the Nuwara Eliya pulled in. It was Dinu who spotted them first, through the viewfinder of his Brownie. ‘There . . . over there . . . look.’

  Dolly leant over the gunwale, shading her eyes. Matthew looked very distinguished, with a thick frosting of grey around his head. Elsa had grown a little matronly since their last meeting, but in a regal and quite imposing way. Timmy was standing beside her, tall for his age and as thin as a string bean. Alison was there too, wearing a schoolgirl’s frock, her hair braided into long pigtails. She was an unusual-looking girl, Dolly thought, her face an arresting blend of elements taken from both her parents: she had Matthew’s cheekbones and Elsa’s eyes; his silky hair and her upright carriage. It was clear that she would grow into a real beauty one day.