The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘Who’s been telling you all this?’ Arjun said in surprise.

  ‘Everyone, sah’b. Even in the villages they know. My mother and my wife came to visit last week. They’d heard a rumour that we were about to leave.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘My mother said, “Kishan Singh, when are you going to come back”?’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  Kishan Singh was kneeling in front of Arjun now, checking his fly buttons and smoothing down his trousers, pinching the creases to restore their edge. Arjun could see only the top of his head, and the whorled patterns of his close-cropped hair.

  Suddenly, Kishan Singh looked up at him. ‘Sah’b, I told her that you would make sure that I came back . . .’

  Arjun, caught by surprise, felt the blood rushing to his face. There was something inexplicably moving about the sheer guilelessness of this expression of trust. He felt at a loss for words.

  Once, during their conversations at Charbagh, Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland had said that the reward of serving in India, for Englishmen of his father’s generation, lay in their bonds with ‘the men’. This relationship, he had said, was of an utterly different kind from that of the regular British army, the mutual loyalties of Indian soldier and English officer being at once so powerful and so inexplicable that they could be understood only as a kind of love.

  Arjun recalled how strange this word had sounded on the CO’s reticent lips and how he had been tempted to scoff. It seemed that in these stories ‘the men’ figured only as abstractions, a faceless collectivity imprisoned in a permanent childhood—moody, unpredictable, fantastically brave, desperately loyal, prone to extraordinary excesses of emotion. Yet, he knew it to be true that even for himself there were times when it seemed as though the attributes of that faceless collectivity—‘the men’—had been conjured into reality by a single soldier, Kishan Singh: that the bond that had come into being between them really was a kind of love. It was impossible to know how far this was Kishan Singh’s own doing and how far it was the product of the peculiar intimacy of their circumstances; or was it perhaps something else altogether, that Kishan Singh, in his very individuality, had become more than himself—a village, a country, a history, a mirror for Arjun to see refractions of himself?

  For an eerie instant Arjun saw himself in Kishan Singh’s place: as a batman, kneeling before a dinner-jacketed officer, buffing his shoes, reaching into his trousers to tuck in his shirt, checking his fly buttons, looking up from the shelter of his parted feet, asking for protection. He gritted his teeth.

  twenty-eight

  The morning after his arrival, Dinu borrowed a bicycle and went to look for the ruined chandis of Gunung Jerai. Alison drew him a map and he followed it: the track ran uphill most of the way from Morningside House and he had to mount and dismount several times, wheeling his machine up the steeper inclines. He made a couple of wrong turns but eventually found his way to the very spot where Alison had parked her car the last time. The stream lay below and its surroundings were exactly as he remembered: there was a shallow ford, bridged by flat stones. A little lower down the slope, the stream widened into a pool, ringed by massive boulders. On the far side, a narrow path led into the jungle.

  By this time his right leg was sore and aching. He hung his camera bags on a branch and stepped down to the pool. On the bank there was a boulder that was so shaped as to serve perfectly for a seat. Dinu kicked off his shoes, rolled his trousers up to his knees, and plunged his legs into the cool, rushing water.

  He’d been hesitant about coming to Malaya, but now that he was here, he was glad to be away from Rangoon, glad to leave behind the tensions of the Kemendine house and all the constant worrying about the business. And it was a relief, too, to put a distance between himself and the political infighting that seemed to be consuming all his friends. He knew his father wanted Alison to sell Morningside—it would be too much for her to manage on her own, he’d said; the estate would lose money. But as far as he could tell Morningside was running smoothly enough and Alison seemed to be very much in control. He couldn’t see that she had any need for his advice, but he was glad to be here anyway. It would give him a chance to think things over for himself: in Rangoon he was always too busy, with politics, with the magazine. He was twenty-eight now and this, if any, was the time to decide whether photography was going to be just a hobby or a career.

  He lit a cigarette and smoked it down to the butt, before picking up his camera bag to cross the stream. The path was more overgrown than he remembered, and in places he had to beat down the undergrowth. When he came to the clearing, he was awed by the serene beauty of the place: the colours of the moss-covered chandis were even more vivid than he remembered; the vistas in the background even more sweeping. He wasted no time in setting up his tripod. He exposed two rolls and it was sunset by the time he got back to Morningside House.

  He went back the next morning and the morning after that. The ride became a regular routine: he’d set off early, taking along a couple of rotis for lunch. When he got to the stream, he’d daydream for a while, sitting on his favourite rock, with his legs plunged deep in the water. Then he’d make his way to the clearing and set up his equipment. At lunchtime he’d take a long break and afterwards he’d have a nap, lying in the shade in one of the chandis.

  One morning, instead of stopping at the chandis, he went a little further than usual. Pushing into the forest he spotted an overgrown mound a short distance ahead. He beat a path through the undergrowth and found himself confronted with yet another ruin, built of the same materials as the two chandis—laterite—but of a different design: this one was roughly octagonal and shaped like a stepped pyramid or ziggurat. Despite the monumental design, the structure was modest in size, not much taller than his head. He climbed gingerly up the mossy blocks and at the apex he found a massive square stone, with a rectangular opening carved in the centre. Looking down, he found a puddle of rainwater trapped inside. The pool had the even shape and metallic glint of an antique mirror. He took a picture—a snapshot—and then sat down to smoke a cigarette. What was the opening for? Had it once been a base for a monumental sculpture—some gigantic, smiling monolith? It didn’t matter: it was just a hole now, colonised by a family of tiny green frogs. When he looked down on his rippling reflection the frogs croaked at him in deep affront.

  That evening, back at the house, he said to Alison: ‘Did you know that there was another ruin—a kind of pyramid— a little farther into the jungle?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, and there are others too. You’ll find them if you go deep enough.’

  The next day proved her right. Pushing a little further up the slope Dinu stumbled, quite literally, on a ten-foot-square platform made of laterite blocks—apparently the foundation of a small shrine. The plan of the temple was clearly visible on the floor, laid out like an architect’s sketch, with a line of square embrasures indicating the placement of a row of columns. A day or so later he found another, much stranger ruin: a structure that had the appearance of being suspended within an explosion, like a prop in a photographic illusion. A banyan had taken root within the temple, and in growing, had pushed the walls apart, carrying away adjoining blocks of masonry. A doorway had been split in two, as though a bomb had exploded on the threshold. One stone post had been knocked over, while another had been carried off, coiled in a tangle of greenery, to a distance of several feet off the ground.

  Sometimes, stepping into the ruins, Dinu would hear a rustle or a prolonged hiss. Occasionally the surrounding treetops would stir as though they’d been hit by a gust of wind. Dinu would look up to see a troop of monkeys examining him warily from the branches. Once he heard a sawing cough that could have been a leopard.

  As his intimacy with the ruins deepened, Dinu began to find that his eye would go directly to the place where the temple’s principal image would once have stood: his hands would reach automatically for the niches where offerings of flowers would
have been laid; he began to recognise the limits beyond which he could not step without removing his shoes. When he crossed the stream, after bicycling through the estate, it was no longer as though he were tiptoeing into a place that was strange and unfamiliar, where life and order yielded to darkness and shadow. It was when he crossed back into the monochrome orderliness of the plantation that he felt himself to be passing into a territory of ruin, a defilement much more profound than temporal decay.

  Late one afternoon, while standing at his tripod, he was alerted to the sound of a car by a commotion among the jungle’s birds. He made his way quickly down the path to a vantage point where a gap in the greenery permitted a view of the stream below. He spotted Alison’s red Daytona approaching on the far side. He left his tripod standing where it was and went hurrying down the path.

  Dinu had seen very little of Alison since the day of his arrival. She left the house before dawn, in order to be present at Muster, and when she came back, he was usually out on the mountainside taking pictures. They generally met only at dinnertime, when conversation was inevitably constrained by Saya John’s vacant silences. She seemed not to know how to fit a visitor into the fixed routines of her life on the plantation, and Dinu, for his part, was burdened by the knowledge of the task with which he had been entrusted. He knew that he would have to find a way of telling her that his father wanted to dispose of his share of Morningside and this seemed impossible at a time when she was so preoccupied, both with the grief of her parents’ death, and with the daily anxieties of keeping the plantation afloat.

  By the time Dinu reached the end of the path Alison had crossed the stream. Finding himself face to face with her now, he couldn’t think of what to say and began to fumble in his pockets for a cigarette.

  ‘Going back to the house?’ he said at last, through his teeth, while striking a match.

  ‘I thought I’d come by and see how you were getting on.’

  ‘I was just setting up my camera . . .’ He walked with her to the clearing, where his tripod was placed in front of one of the chandis.

  ‘Can I watch you take pictures?’ she asked brightly.

  He hesitated, raising the cigarette to his mouth, squinting into the smoke. As though sensing a reluctance, Alison said, ‘Would you mind? Would I be bothering you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not that . . . you wouldn’t be bothering me exactly . . . It’s just that when I’m shooting I have to concentrate very hard . . . or it’s a waste . . . It’s like any other kind of work, you know . . . it’s not easy to do if you’re being watched.’

  ‘I see.’ The hollow sound of her voice indicated that she’d read this as a rebuff. ‘Well, I’ll go then.’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘please stay . . . but then, if you’re going to be here, could I take a few pictures of you . . .?’

  She was quick to deal out a rebuff of her own. ‘No. I’m not really in the right frame of mind to become a part of your—your work.’ She turned on her heel and headed down the path, towards the stream.

  Dinu knew himself to be stranded unwittingly in a quarrel.

  ‘Alison . . . I didn’t mean . . .’ He hurried after her, but she was walking fast and his leg put him at a disadvantage. ‘Alison . . . please stay.’ He caught up with her at the edge of the stream. ‘Alison . . . I was just telling you what it’s like . . . when I make a picture . . . I didn’t mean to put you off . . . won’t you stay?’

  ‘Not now,’ she glanced at her watch. ‘Not today.’

  ‘Then you’ll come back?’

  She’d already started across the ford. In mid-stream, without turning round, she raised a hand to wave.

  Just before the battalion’s departure from Saharanpur, new war equipment tables arrived. This meant that Arjun and Hardy had to stay up all night, revising their carefully prepared Unit Mobilisation Scheme. But in the end all was well: the CO was pleased and the battalion was able to go ahead with its entrainment as planned. The train left for Bombay on schedule.

  At Ajmer there was a slight delay. The 1/1 Jats were shunted aside so that a trainload of Italian prisoners of war could pass by. The Italians and Indians stared at each other in silence across the platform, through the barred windows of their respective carriages. This was their first glimpse of the enemy.

  Next morning, they arrived at Bombay’s Victoria terminus. They were told that their troop ship, the H.M.T. Nuwara Eliya, was waiting at the harbour. They drove to the Sassoon docks to find that their embarkation orders had already been issued.

  The docks proved to be unexpectedly congested. It turned out that a British battalion was boarding another ship at exactly the same time. Soon the two battalions’ baggage and equipment were hopelessly entangled with each other. NCOs began to shout, spreading panic among the dockworkers. Hardy was thrown into the midst of the confusion: he was the baggage officer for the 1/1 Jats and it fell on him to try and restore order.

  Looking in Hardy’s roster, Arjun learnt that he had been allotted a cabin to himself. He had never been on a ship before and was barely able to contain his excitement. He went hurrying up the gangplank to look for his cabin, with Kishan Singh following close behind, carrying his luggage.

  They were the first to board and the ship was empty, but for its crew. Everything seemed new and startling: the white gunwales and narrow catwalks, the yawning hatches and the rounded frames of the portholes.

  As they were stepping on to the upper deck, Kishan Singh happened to glance over the side. ‘Sah’b—look!’ He pointed, drawing Arjun’s attention to an altercation on the docks below. Arjun saw that Hardy had got himself into a shouting match with a hulking British sergeant. They were standing toe to toe, with Hardy shaking a sheaf of papers under the sergeant’s nose.

  ‘Stay here.’

  Arjun went racing down the way he had come. He arrived on the scene just a moment too late. Another officer from their battalion had got there before him—Captain Pearson, the adjutant, a bluff, stocky Englishman, with a booming voice and a quick temper.

  Watching from a few paces away, Arjun saw Hardy turning to Captain Pearson. It was clear that Hardy was relieved to see the adjutant, fully confident that his senior would back him up—out of loyalty to a fellow-member of the battalion, if nothing else. But Captain Pearson had never made a secret of his belief that Hardy was ‘difficult’ and ‘overly sensitive’. Instead of supporting him, he let his annoyance show: ‘Lieutenant, have you got yourself into a row again . . .?’

  Arjun saw the look on Hardy’s face change from relief to seething outrage. It was painful to stand there as a silent witness to his friend’s humiliation. He turned and slipped away.

  Later that day, Hardy came to his cabin.

  ‘We’ve got to teach that bastard Pearson a lesson,’ he said. ‘That bloody sergeant called me a stinking nigger in front of the men. Pearson let him get away with it. Yaar, would you believe it, the bugger blamed me! The only way we can stop this kind of thing is by sticking together.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘I think we should boycott him.’

  ‘He’s the adjutant, Hardy,’ Arjun said. ‘How can we boycott him? Be reasonable.’

  ‘There are ways of getting a message across,’ Hardy said angrily. ‘But that can happen only when you know which side you’re on.’ Rising abruptly to his feet, he left Arjun’s cabin.

  For two days the Nuwara Eliya waited offshore, while nine other ships assembled in the harbour. There was a rumour that a German submarine was lurking nearby and the ships were assigned an escort of two destroyers, an armed merchantman and a light cruiser. When the convoy finally departed, it was in a westerly direction, heading towards the setting sun. Their destination was still unknown; they had no idea whether they were to go east or west.

  In Bombay, the CO had been handed a sealed envelope that was to be opened exactly twenty-four hours after their departure. When the time came, Arjun and the other officers gathered in a dining
room on the Nuwara Eliya’s upper deck. The CO opened the envelope in his usual deliberate way, prising the seal off the paper with a knife. The officers waited in expectant silence. Arjun could feel a clammy dampness welling up in the palms of his hands.

  Then at last, the CO looked up with a thin smile. He held the sheet of paper in front of him and read out aloud: ‘This ship is headed for Singapore.’

  Arjun stepped out on deck and found Hardy already there, leaning over the gunwale, humming softly under his breath. Behind them the white ribbon of the ship’s wake had already begun to describe a curve as the convoy slowly changed direction.

  twenty-nine

  Manju had never been happier than she was in the first months of her pregnancy. She relished every reminder of her changing condition: the often imaginary twitches and movements; the pangs of hunger that could never be properly satisfied; even the nausea that woke her every morning and the acid tingling of her teeth.

  The Kemendine house had changed greatly in the two years she’d been in Rangoon. Dinu was gone of course, and his apartment upstairs lay empty. Neel and Rajkumar were often away, arranging for the disposal of the family’s properties or buying new stocks of teak. For much of the time Manju and Dolly had the house to themselves. The compound had grown unkempt; where there had once been a lawn the grass now stood knee-high. Many rooms and outhouses were locked up; much of the furniture had been sold. The dozens of employees who had once populated the place were gone—the servants, watchmen, gardeners and their families. Even U Ba Kyaw, the chauffeur, had gone back to his village. The Packard was one of the few disposable possessions that Rajkumar had retained, but it was now driven mainly by Neel.

  Neither Manju nor Dolly regretted the emptying of the house. On the contrary, it was as though an enormous accumulation of cobwebs had been swept away, allowing them new and unaccustomed freedoms. In the past Dolly had often seemed remote and unapproachable to Manju, but now they became allies, colleagues, team-mates, working together for the family’s renewal. Between the two of them they had little difficulty in managing the house.