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The Glass Palace

Page 33

by Amitav Ghosh


  The town of Akyab, the capital of the Arakan, was their first stop. ‘This,’ said Neel proudly, ‘was where my father was born.’ The airline’s base lay in a natural sea-lane, a good distance from the town. All they saw of Akyab as the Centaurus came down was a clock-tower in the far distance. After a quick refuelling the plane was in the air again. The rain stopped and in the bright daylight the waters of the coast were revealed to be lined with miles of reef and great floating forests of seaweed—all clearly visible from above, as stains on the sparkling sea. Rangoon now lay due east, and the Centaurus soon turned inland, flying over a stretch of uninhabited countryside. The steward came by, handing out voluminous leather-bound menus.

  At the end of her breakfast, Manju found herself looking down on a vista of square paddy fields. Some were already green and others were in the process of becoming so, with lines of workers advancing through the mud, transplanting seedlings. The workers stood up as the plane flew over, throwing their heads back and waving huge conical hats.

  Manju caught sight of a river, curving across the landscape. ‘Is that the Irrawaddy?’ she asked Neel.

  ‘No,’ said Neel. ‘That’s the Rangoon river—the Irrawaddy doesn’t flow past the city.’

  Then a glint of sunlight drew her eye to an immense structure, far in the distance—a gilded mountain that tapered into a spire of gold. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s the Shwe Dagon Pagoda,’ Neel whispered in her ear. ‘We’re home.’

  Manju glanced at her watch and saw that the journey had lasted exactly five and a half hours. It seemed impossible that less than a day had passed since her wedding night, since the time when Neel had shut the door of their flower-bedecked bedroom. She thought of how frightened she’d been and she wanted to laugh. It was only now, circling above the city that was to be her home, that she acknowledged how completely she was in love. He was her present, her future, the entirety of her existence. Time and being held no meaning without him. She slipped her hand into his and looked down again on the great muddy river and the spire of gold. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m home.’

  part five

  Morningside

  twenty-five

  Manju and Neel had not been married quite three months when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, declared war on Germany, on behalf of Britain and her Empire. With the start of the war, an Air Raid Precautions scheme was prepared for Rangoon. The city was divided into sections and an ARP committee was formed for each. Medical officers were taught to deal with gas injuries; wardens were shown how to identify incendiary bombs; fire-fighting parties were formed and first-aid centres were set up. Rangoon’s water table was too high to allow the building of underground shelters, but slit trenches were dug at strategic points around the city. Periodically there were ‘blackouts’; trains entered and left the Rangoon railway station with darkened windows; wardens and civic guards stayed on duty through the night.

  There was nothing unsatisfactory about the conduct of these exercises: the city’s inhabitants followed their instructions good-humouredly and disturbances were few. But there was no denying the fact that a Rangoon blackout had more the feel of a performance than a drill: the public seemed to be going through the motions without being persuaded either of the imminence of war, or of its possible bearing on their lives. Certainly, in Burma, as in India, public opinion was deeply divided: in both places many important personages had expressed their support of the colonial Government. But many could also be heard to voice bitter condemnation of Britain’s declaration of war on their behalf, without any binding guarantees of eventual independence. The mood among Burma’s student activists was summed up in a slogan coined by a charismatic young student leader, Aung San: Colonialism’s difficulty, he said, was Freedom’s opportunity. One day, Aung San disappeared: a rumour circulated that he was on his way to China to seek the support of the Communists. Later it came to be known that he had gone instead to Japan.

  But these concerns were relatively distant from the life of the streets, where people seemed mainly to regard the ARP exercises as a species of entertainment, a mass diversion. Merrymakers strolled blithely through the darkened thoroughfares; young people flirted unseen in the parks; filmgoers flocked to see Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka at the Metro; When Tomorrow Comes had a long run at the Excelsior, and Irene Dunne was enshrined as one of the city’s idols. At the Silver Grill on Fytche Square, cabarets and dancing continued as usual.

  Dinu and his friend, Thiha Saw, were among the few who dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to the Air Raid Precautions scheme. At this time, both Dinu and Thiha Saw were deeply involved in student union politics. They were on the far left of the political spectrum and were involved in the publication of an anti-Fascist magazine. Participating in civil defences seemed a natural extension of their political work.

  Dinu still lived at the Kemendine compound, in a couple of rooms at the top of the house. But at home, he made no mention of the work he was doing as an ARP warden—partly because he knew that Neel would tell him that he was wasting his time and needed to do some real work, and partly also because experience had led him to assume that his opinions would always be violently at odds with his father’s. This was why he was taken completely by surprise at an ARP warden’s meeting when he found himself suddenly face-to-face with none other than his father.

  ‘You?’

  ‘You!’ There was no telling which of them was the more astonished.

  After this encounter, there developed—for the first time ever—a brief bond between Rajkumar and Dinu. The outbreak of war had brought them through opposite routes to a shared position: Rajkumar had come to be convinced that in the absence of the British Empire, Burma’s economy would collapse. Dinu’s support for the Allied war effort was rooted in other kinds of soil: in his leftist sympathies; in his support for the resistance movements in China and Spain; in his admiration of Charlie Chaplin and Robert Capa. Unlike his father, he was not a believer in colonialism—indeed his antipathy to British rule was surpassed only by his loathing of European Fascism and Japanese militarism.

  Whatever the reasons, this was an instance when father and son were in agreement—a situation that was without precedent in the memories of either. For the first time in their lives, they were working together—attending meetings, discussing such matters as the necessity of importing gas masks and the design of wartime posters. So novel was this experience that they both relished it in silence, speaking of it neither at home nor anywhere else.

  One night an ARP blackout was accompanied by a thunderstorm. Despite the rain Rajkumar insisted on accompanying the wardens on their rounds. He was drenched when he got home. The next morning he woke up shivering. A doctor came and diagnosed pneumonia. Rajkumar was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

  For the first few days, Rajkumar was barely conscious, unable to recognise Dolly, Dinu or Neel. His condition was judged to be serious enough for the doctors to bar all visitors. For several days he lay in a near-coma.

  Then, slowly, the fever began to recede.

  In his periods of lucidity Rajkumar took stock of his surroundings. It so happened that chance had brought him to a familiar place: the hospital room that Dolly and Dinu had occupied twenty-four years before. Looking around his bed, Rajkumar recognised the view from the window: the Shwe Dagon was framed exactly as he remembered. The blue and white curtains were slightly faded but still spotless and crisply starched; the tiled floors were, as ever, sparkling clean; and the dark, heavy furniture was recognisably the same, with inventory numbers stencilled on the varnished wood, in white paint.

  When at last he was well enough to sit up, Rajkumar saw that the room had two additions. One was a Carrier air conditioner and the other a bedside radio—a 7-valve Paillard, with a ‘magic eye’, a metal cabinet, and chromium-plated mountings. The air conditioner Rajkumar had no use for, but the radio intrigued him. He flipped a switch and found himself listening to a station in Singapore: a newsrea
der’s voice was recounting the latest developments in the war, describing the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk.

  After this, Rajkumar kept the radio on most of the time. Each night the nurse would turn it off when she was extinguishing the lights; Rajkumar would wait for her footsteps to die away before turning it on again. He would lie on his side and spin the knob, coasting from station to station. Twenty-four years before, at the time of Dolly’s stay in that room, Europe had been convulsed by another war. Dolly too had stayed awake in this room, listening to the sounds of the night. But the whispers she’d heard had come from within the hospital: now, the room was filled with voices from around the world—London, New Delhi, Chungking, Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney. The voices spoke with such urgency and insistence that Rajkumar began to feel that he had lost touch with the flow of events; that he had become one of those men who sleepwalk their way to disaster by failing to note the significance of what was happening round them.

  For the first time in many years, he allowed himself to think about the way he had been running his businesses. Day after day, month after month, he’d tried to handle every decision, review all the daily accounts, visit each location, every mill, every yard and outlet. He had been running his company as though it were a food-stall in a bazaar, and in the process he had blinded himself to the wider context.

  Neel had long been pushing for a bigger role in the running of the business; Rajkumar had responded by trying to shut him out. He’d handed him money and told him to go and put it in films—as though he were buying off a child with packets of sweets. The ploy had worked, if only because Neel was too much in awe of him to challenge his authority. Now, the business was foundering. This was a fact that he’d refused to face. He’d suppressed hints from his accountants and managers, shouted at them when they tried to give him warning. And the stark fact was that he had no one to blame but himself: he had simply lost sight of what he was doing, and why.

  As he lay listening to the radio’s crackling voices, remorse settled on Rajkumar like a damp, stilling quilt. The doctors pronounced him to be well on the way to a complete recovery but his family could see no sign of an improvement, in either his manner or his appearance. He was in his mid-sixties at this time, but looked much older: his eyebrows had turned grey and bushy and his cheeks had begun to sag into overlapping dewlaps and jowls. He seemed scarcely to register the presence of the people who came to his room to see him; often when they tried to speak to him, he would silence them by turning up the radio.

  One day Dolly unplugged the radio and shut the door. ‘Rajkumar, what’s on your mind? Tell me.’

  At first he wouldn’t speak but she prodded him until he answered.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Dolly.’

  ‘What about? Tell me.’

  ‘Do you remember how you and Dinu were in this room, that time . . .?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘That night, at Huay Zedi, when Dinu was ill and you said we had to get him to a hospital—I thought you were hysterical. I went along just for your sake . . .’

  She smiled: ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘But you were right.’

  ‘It was just luck—a premonition.’

  ‘That’s what you say. But when I look back now, I can see that you often are right. Even though you live so quietly, shut away in the house, you seem to know more about what’s happening in the world than I do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you’ve been saying these many years, Dolly.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘That we should leave.’

  With a long sigh of relief, Dolly reached for his hand. ‘So you’ve been thinking of that at last?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s hard, Dolly—it’s hard to think of leaving: Burma has given me everything I have. The boys have grown up here: they’ve never known any other home. When I first came to Mandalay the nakhoda of my boat said: This is a golden land—no one ever starves here. That proved true for me, and despite everything that’s happened recently, I don’t think I could ever love another place in the same way. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my life, Dolly, it is that there is no certainty about these things. My father was from Chittagong and he ended up in the Arakan; I ended up in Rangoon; you went from Mandalay to Ratnagiri and now you’re here too. Why should we expect that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives here? There are people who have the luck to end their lives where they began them. But this is not something that is owed to us. On the contrary, we have to expect that a time will come when we’ll have to move on again. Rather than be swept along by events, we should make plans and take control of our own fate.’

  ‘What are you trying to say, Rajkumar?’

  ‘Just that it doesn’t matter whether I think of Burma as home or not. What matters is what people think of us. And it’s plain enough that men like me are now seen as the enemy— on all sides. This is the reality and I have to acknowledge it. My job now is to find a way of making sure that Dinu and Neel are provided for.’

  ‘Surely they’re provided for already?’

  Rajkumar paused before answering. ‘Dolly, I think you’re aware that the business hasn’t been doing well lately. But you probably don’t know the full extent of it.’

  ‘And how bad is that?’

  ‘It’s not good, Dolly,’ he said quietly. ‘There are debts— many of them.’

  ‘But, Rajkumar, if we sold the house, the yards, our share in Morningside—surely something would be left so that the boys could make a start somewhere else?’

  Rajkumar began to cough. ‘That wouldn’t work, Dolly. As things stand at this minute, even if we sold everything it still wouldn’t be enough. As for Morningside, Matthew has troubles of his own, you know. Rubber was very badly hit by the Depression. We can’t rush into this, Dolly—that way we’re sure to run into disaster. This has to be done very, very carefully. We have to give it time . . .’

  ‘I don’t know, Rajkumar.’ Dolly began to pick worriedly at the end of her htamein. ‘Things are happening so fast now— people say that the war may spread; that Japan may get into it; that they could even attack Burma.’

  Rajkumar smiled. ‘That’s impossible, Dolly. You just have to look at a map. To get here the Japanese would have to come across Singapore and Malaya. Singapore is one of the most heavily defended places in the world. The British have tens of thousands of troops there. There are thirty-six-inch guns all along the shore. We can’t be chasing after smoke, Dolly, we can’t do things in a panic. If this is to work, we have to be realistic, we have to make careful plans.’

  Dolly leant over him to fluff up the pillows on his bed. ‘So do you have a plan then?’

  ‘Not yet, but I’ve been thinking. Whatever we do, it’ll take time—at least a year, maybe more. You have to prepare yourself. I want to make it possible for us to leave Burma with enough so that the boys can settle comfortably somewhere—in India, or wherever they want to go.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘The two of us will be free.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Well, you’ve already decided—you want to live in Sagaing.’ ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll come back too, Dolly. I sometimes think of living quietly in Huay Zedi—I’m sure Doh Say would have a place for me—and it wouldn’t be so far from you.’

  Dolly laughed. ‘So you’re going to sell everything, uproot all of us, go through all this, just to come back and live quietly in Huay Zedi?’

  ‘It’s not for myself that I’m thinking of doing this, Dolly— it’s for the boys.’

  Rajkumar smiled and allowed his head to fall back against his pillows. Once before in his life, he had known himself to be at a crossroads—that was when he was trying to get his first contract, for the Chota-Nagpur Railway. He’d thought hard and come up with a plan that had worked, laying the foundations of his future success. This time too he would have to think of som
ething, a plan that would work: this would be his last challenge, the last hill to cross. After that he would rest. There was no shame in growing old and seeking rest.

  The first months of the war found Arjun and his battalion on the frontiers of Afghanistan. Arjun was on garrison duty, at a small outpost called Charbagh, near the Khyber Pass. The border was quiet—unusually so, the older officers said—and the conflict in Europe seemed very far away. Charbagh was manned by a single company of soldiers, Arjun being the sole officer. The surroundings were spectacularly beautiful: craggy, ochre mountains, streaked with great slashes of brilliantly coloured rock. There was little to do apart from daily drills, barracks inspections and occasional marches with training columns. Arjun spent long hours reading and soon ran out of books.

  At regular fortnightly intervals, the battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bucky’ Buckland, stopped by on tours of inspection. The CO was a tall, professorial-looking man with a ruff of wiry hair clinging to the base of his high-domed, balding head.

  ‘And what do you do with your time, Lieutenant?’ the CO asked offhandedly on one of his visits. ‘Do you shoot at all? I’ve heard there’s plenty of game to be had here.’

  ‘Actually, sir,’ Arjun said quietly, ‘I read books . . .’

  ‘Oh?’ The CO turned to look at him with new interest. ‘I didn’t take you for a reader. And may I ask what you read?’

  Their tastes proved to be complementary: the CO introduced Arjun to Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. Arjun lent him his copies of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. These exchanges became a pleasurable part of Arjun’s life at Charbagh and he began to look forward to the CO’s visits. In between there were long days when nothing happened. There was little to do apart from talking to the occasional traveller.

 

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