The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘What have you got in there?’ she asked.

  He opened the bag and showed her. It was a new camera, a kind she’d never seen before.

  ‘It’s a Rolleiflex,’ he said. ‘A twin-lens reflex . . .’ He took it out of the bag and showed her how it worked; it opened like a hinged box, with its hood flipping back so that you had to look down on it from above.

  ‘I’ve got a tripod for it,’ he said. ‘You can look through it . . . when I set it up . . .’

  ‘Why’re you taking it to the station?’ she asked.

  He shrugged vaguely. ‘I saw some pictures recently,’ he said. ‘Railyard shots by Alfred Stieglitz . . . they made me wonder . . .’

  The camera caused a stir when Dinu set it up at Howrah. The station was crowded and many people gathered round to stare. Dinu adjusted the tripod’s height to suit Bela. ‘Here, come . . . look.’

  The platform was a long one, and it was topped with a steepled roof of corrugated steel. The late afternoon sunlight was filtering in from under the roof’s scalloped skirt, creating a stark, back-lit effect. In the foreground there were great numbers of people: red-jacketed porters, hurrying tea-boys, and waiting passengers with mountains of luggage.

  Dinu pointed out the details to Bela. ‘I think this is even better than the pictures I had in mind,’ he said, ‘because of all the people . . . and the movement . . .’

  Bela looked in again, and suddenly, as if by magic, Arjun appeared in the frame. He was hanging out of a carriage, holding on to the steel bar of the open doorway. He jumped off when he spotted them and the momentum of the still-moving train gave him a running start. He came racing out of the opaque white fog that was pouring from the engine’s steaming smoke-stack, laughing as he dodged the vendors and porters who were swarming across the platform. The tunic of his khaki uniform was drawn tight around his waist and his cap was tilted back on his head. He swept down on them with his arms outspread, laughing, and lifted Manju off her feet and swung her round and round.

  Bela stepped away from the camera, hoping to conceal herself until the first flush of Arjun’s homecoming exuberance was spent. But just then he spotted her. ‘Bela!’ He swooped down to fling her up, over his head, ignoring her cries of protest. As she flew upwards, with the tumult of the station whirling around her head, her eyes fastened on a soldier who had approached unseen and was standing just a step behind Arjun. He looked younger than Arjun and was smaller in build; she noticed that he was carrying Arjun’s luggage.

  ‘Who is that?’ she whispered into Arjun’s ear.

  He threw a glance over his shoulder, to see whom she was looking at. ‘That’s Kishan Singh,’ he said, ‘my batman.’

  He put her down and went on ahead, with the others, talking excitedly. Bela followed behind, keeping pace with Kishan Singh. She stole a glance: he was nice-looking, she thought; his skin had a sheen like dark velvet, and although his hair was very short she could tell that it was fine and straight; she liked the way it made a pattern along the edges of his forehead. His eyes were fixed ahead of him, as though he were a moving statue.

  It was only when they were about to get into the car that she knew without a doubt that he was aware of her presence. His eyes met hers for an instant and there was a fleeting change in his expression, a slight smile. Bela’s head reeled: she had never known that a smile could have a physical impact— like a blow from a flying object.

  As she was about to step into the car Bela heard Dinu say to Arjun: ‘Have you heard? Hitler’s signed a pact with Mussolini . . . there could be another war.’

  But her brother’s answer was lost to her. All the way home, she didn’t hear a word that anybody said.

  twenty-three

  Although Dinu and Arjun had known each other a long time they had never been friends. Dinu tended to think of Arjun on the analogy of a friendly and bumbling pet—a large dog perhaps, or a well-trained mule—a creature of unfailing, tail-wagging goodwill, but incurably indolent and barely capable of coherent utterance. But Dinu was not so arrogant as to be unwilling to correct himself. At Howrah station, on the day when he photographed Arjun running across the platform, he saw immediately that this was a significantly changed person from the boy he had known. Arjun had lost his somnolence, and his patterns of speech were no longer so garbled and indistinct as they had once been. This itself was an interesting paradox, for Arjun’s vocabulary seemed now to consist mainly of jargon intermixed with assorted bits of English and Punjabi slang—everyone was now either a ‘chap’ or a ‘yaar’.

  But on the way home from the station Arjun did something that astonished Dinu. In reminiscing about a tactical exercise, he launched into a description of a feature of topography— a hill. He listed its ridges and outcrops, the exact nature of its vegetation and the cover it afforded, he quoted the angle of the slope’s incline and laughed about how his friend Hardy had got it wrong so that his results ‘wouldn’t play’.

  Dinu understood words and images and the bridge of metaphor that linked the two—these were not languages with which he had ever thought to associate Arjun. Yet, by the end of Arjun’s description, Dinu felt that he could see the hill, in his head. Of those who listened to Arjun’s account, he alone was perhaps fully aware of the extreme difficulty of achieving such minuteness of recall and such vividness of description: he was awed, both by the precision of Arjun’s narrative and by the off-handed lack of self-consciousness with which it was presented.

  ‘Arjun,’ he said, fixing him with his dour, unblinking stare. ‘I’m amazed . . . you described that hill as though you’d remembered every little bit of it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Arjun. ‘My CO says that, under fire, you pay with a life for every missed detail.’

  This too made Dinu take notice. He’d imagined that he knew the worth of observation, yet he’d never conceived that its value might be weighed in lives. There was something humbling about the thought of this. He’d regarded a soldier’s training as being, in the first instance, physical, a matter of the body. It took just that one conversation to show him that he had been wrong. Dinu’s friends were mainly writers and intellectuals: he had never met a serviceman in all his life. Now suddenly, in Calcutta, he found himself surrounded by soldiers. Within hours of his arrival, Arjun had filled the house with his friends. It turned out that he knew a couple of officers at the Fort William cantonment in Calcutta. Once he’d made contact, his friends began to turn up at all times of day, in jeeps and occasionally even in trucks, their arrival signalled by booming klaxons and noisy boots.

  ‘This is how it always happens in the army, yaar,’ one of them said, by way of apologetic explanation. ‘Where one fauji goes, the whole paltan follows . . .’

  In the past Dinu’s attitude towards the army had varied between outright hostility and amused indifference. Now he found himself more puzzled than antagonistic, increasingly interested in the mechanisms that made them tick. He was astonished by the communal nature of their lives; by the pleasure that Arjun, for instance, took in ‘mucking in’ with the others. This was a way of thinking and working that was the antithesis of everything that Dinu stood for and believed in. He himself was always happiest when he was on his own, His friends were few and even with the best of them there was always a residue of unease, an analytic guardedness. This was one of the reasons why he derived so much pleasure from photography. There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.

  Arjun, on the other hand, seemed to find immense satisfaction in working on the details of plans that had been dictated by others—not necessarily people either, but manuals of procedure. Once, speaking of his battalion’s move from one cantonment to another, he described their ‘entrainment’ routines with as much pride as though he had personally guided every soldier into the station. But at the end it emerged that his part had consisted of nothing more than standing at the door of a carriage and filling in a roster. Dinu was astonished to note that it was precise
ly from this that his satisfaction derived: the slow accumulation of small tasks, a piling up of rosters that culminated in the movement of a platoon and then a battalion.

  Arjun was often at pains to explain that in the army, it was a vital necessity for ‘the chaps’ to possess a thorough and exhaustive understanding of one another; to know exactly how each of them would respond in certain circumstances. Yet, there was a paradox here that did not escape Dinu: when Arjun and his friends spoke of one another, their assessments were so exaggerated that they seemed to be inventing versions of themselves for collective consumption. In the fantastic bestiary of their table-talk, Hardy was the Spit-and-Polish perfectionist, Arjun a Ladies’ Man, another a Pukka Sahib and so on. These paper-thin portraits were a part of the collective lore of their camaraderie—a fellowship in which they took immense pride, investing it with metaphors that sometimes extended even beyond mere kinship. Usually they were just ‘brothers’ but at times they were also much more, even the ‘First True Indians’. ‘Look at us—’ they would say, ‘—Punjabis, Marathas, Bengalis, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims. Where else in India would you come across a group such as ours— where region and religion don’t matter—where we can all drink together and eat beef and pork and think nothing of it?’

  Every meal at an officers’ mess, Arjun said, was an adventure, a glorious infringement of taboos. They ate foods that none of them had ever touched at home: bacon, ham and sausages at breakfast; roast beef and pork chops for dinner. They drank whisky, beer and wine, smoked cigars, cigarettes and cigarillos. Nor was this just a matter of satisfying appetites: every mouthful had a meaning—each represented an advance towards the evolution of a new, more complete kind of Indian. All of them had stories to tell about how their stomachs had turned the first time they had chewed upon a piece of beef or pork; they had struggled to keep the morsels down, fighting their revulsion. Yet they had persisted, for these were small but essential battles and they tested not just their manhood, but also their fitness to enter the class of officers. They had to prove, to themselves as well as to their superiors, that they were eligible to be rulers, to qualify as members of an elite: that they had vision enough to rise above the ties of their soil, to overcome the responses instilled in them by their upbringing.

  ‘Look at us!’ Arjun would say, after a whisky or two, ‘we’re the first modern Indians; the first Indians to be truly free. We eat what we like, we drink what we like, we’re the first Indians who’re not weighed down by the past.’

  To Dinu this was profoundly offensive. ‘It’s not what you eat and drink that make you modern: it’s a way of looking at things . . .’ He’d fetch reproductions that he’d cut out of magazines, of photographs by Stieglitz, Cunningham and Weston.

  Arjun would shrug these off with a laughing retort: ‘To you the modern world is just something you read about. What you know of it you get from books and newspapers. We’re the ones who actually live with Westerners . . .’

  Dinu understood that it was through their association with Europeans that Arjun and his fellow-officers saw themselves as pioneers. They knew that to most of their compatriots the West was a distant abstraction: even though they might know themselves to be ruled by England, very few Indians had ever actually set eyes on an Englishman and fewer still had had occasion to speak to one. The English lived in their own enclaves and followed their own pursuits: most of the day-to-day tasks of ruling were performed by Indians. In the army, on the other hand, Indian officers were a band of the elect; they lived in a proximity with Westerners that was all but unknown to their compatriots. They shared the same quarters, ate the same food, did the same work: in this their situation was unlike that of any of the Empire’s other subjects.

  ‘We understand the West better than any of you civilians,’ Arjun liked to say. ‘We know how the minds of Westerners work. Only when every Indian is like us will the country become truly modern.’

  Meals with Arjun’s friends were boisterous events, accompanied by ‘lashings’ of beer, loud laughter and a great deal of acerbic joke-making, mainly by the officers, at each other’s expense. This they described as ‘ragging’ and most of it was good-natured. But there was an occasion once when the flow of the meal was ruptured by an odd little incident. Seeing a dish of hot, steam-puffed chapatis, one of the officers said, in a loud, derisory ‘ragging’ voice: ‘Hardy should have been here: he’s the one who really loves chapatis . . .’ These words, apparently innocuous, had a startling effect; the noise died abruptly and the officers’ faces turned suddenly grave. The lieutenant who’d spoken changed colour, as though in acknowledgement of a collective rebuke. Then, as if to remind his friends of the presence of outsiders—Dinu, Manju and Neel, in other words—Arjun loudly cleared his throat and the conversation turned instantly to another subject. The interruption lasted no longer than a moment and passed unnoticed by everyone but Dinu.

  Later that night, Dinu stopped by Arjun’s room and found him sitting in bed, with a book against his knees and a brandy in his hand. Dinu lingered.

  ‘You want to tackle me, don’t you?’ Arjun said. ‘About what happened this evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was nothing really.’

  ‘All the more reason to tell me . . .’

  Arjun sighed: ‘It was about a good friend of mine, Hardy. Odd to think he wasn’t even here.’

  ‘What were they talking about?’

  ‘It’s a long story. You see Hardy was in a row last year. It’ll sound idiotic to you . . .’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Are you sure you want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hardy’s a sardar,’ Arjun said, ‘a Sikh—from a family that’s been in the army for generations. You’d be surprised how many of the chaps are from that kind of family. I call them the real faujis. Fellows like me, who have no army connections, are the exception . . .’

  Hardy had grown up at the battalion’s depot in Saharanpur, Arjun said. His father and grandfather had both served in the 1st Jats. They had joined as private soldiers and worked their way up to the rank of Viceroy’s Commissioned Officer—which was the highest an Indian could rise in those days, somewhere between an NCO and an officer. Hardy was the first in his family to join the army as a commissioned officer, and he’d set his heart on getting into the 1/1 Jats. He used to joke that his dream was to be called ‘Sahib’ by his father’s old colleagues.

  But between the lives of officers and the other ranks there was a difference that Hardy had not reckoned with. The other ranks were served Indian food in their messes, prepared according to the precise dietary prescriptions of their various religions. The officers’ mess, on the other hand, served ‘English’ food—and the trouble with Hardy was that he was one of those chaps who, no matter how hard they tried, simply could not get by without his daily dal-roti. He dutifully ate whatever was served in the mess but at least once a day, he’d find a pretext to leave the cantonment so that he could eat his fill somewhere in town. This was a commonplace enough occurrence among Indian officers, but Hardy crossed an unseen line: he started visiting the other ranks’ messes. He enjoyed these little visits: he’d called some of the men ‘uncle’ as a child and he assumed that they would afford him the same indulgence and affection that he remembered from the past. They would keep his visits a secret, he thought. After all many of them were from the same village, the same extended family. Many had known his father.

  It turned out that he could not have been more wrong. Far from being pleased at serving under Hardy, his father’s old colleagues were deeply offended by his presence in the battalion. They were of the first generation of Indian soldiers to serve under Indian officers. Many of them were uneasy about this: their relationship with their British officers was the source of their pride and prestige. To serve under Indians was a dilution of this privilege.

  A day came when the battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bucky’ Buckland, recommended that Hardy be g
iven command of C Company. So far as the company’s NCOs were concerned, this was the last straw. Some of them knew Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland well; they had served with him for many years and it was part of their job to keep him informed about the happenings in the unit. They formed a delegation and went to see him. They told him: this boy, Hardayal Singh, to whom you’ve given charge of C Company, his father is known to us, his sisters are married to our brothers, his home is in the village next to ours. How can you expect us to treat this boy as an officer? Why, he cannot even stomach the food that officers eat. He steals secretly into our messes to eat chapatis.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland was deeply disturbed by these complaints: it was impossible not to be repelled by the murkiness of these sentiments. If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them? Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland gave the NCOs a sharp reprimand: ‘You are living in the past. The time has come when you will have to learn to take orders from Indians. This man is the son of your former colleague: do you really want to shame him in public?’

  The NCOs held fast, despite this berating. In the end, it was the Lieutenant-Colonel who had had to yield. There had always been an unspoken compact between the men and their English officers: on certain matters it was understood that their wishes had to be taken into account. The Lieutenant-Colonel was left with no choice but to send for Hardy—to tell him that his appointment couldn’t go through just yet. This proved to be the most difficult part of the whole affair. How were the charges to be explained to Hardy? How does a soldier defend himself against the accusation of being, as it were, a covert chapati-eater? What does this do to his self-respect?

  Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland dealt with the situation as tactfully as anyone could have, and Hardy emerged from the interview without showing any visible signs of discomfiture. Only his closest friends knew how deeply he’d been wounded; how hard it had been for him to face those NCOs the next day. And, of course, the army being a small, tight institution, word always got around and from time to time even friends would say the wrong thing, just as they had that night.