The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  But then one day there really was a glimmer of red on the far side of the stream and the Daytona really could be seen to be standing under a tree, half-obscured by a tangle of greenery. Dinu looked once more, incredulously, and spotted Alison. She was dressed in a dark-blue cotton frock, with a wide belt tied around her waist. But instead of making her way to the ford, she was heading downstream, to the very rock where he sat every morning, dangling his legs in the pool. He could tell from the practised way in which she seated herself—swinging her feet up and then pivoting around to plunge them into the water—that this was a familiar place, a spot where she often came to be alone.

  As her feet slid beneath the water, her fingers picked at the hem of her skirt and pulled it back. The water rose past her ankles, to her knees, and with it her skirt rose too, slowly climbing the long line of her thigh. Now, to his surprise, he made the discovery that he was no longer looking at her directly, but through the ground glass of his viewfinder, so that the image was partitioned from its surroundings and endowed with a startling clarity and vividness. The lines were clean, pure, beautiful—the curve of her thigh crossing his viewfinder diagonally, describing a gentle ellipsis.

  She heard the click and looked up, startled, her fingers instantly loosening their grip on her skirt so that the fabric dropped into the water and ballooned around her, swirling in the current.

  ‘Dinu?’ she called out. ‘Is that you?’

  He had only this one chance now, he knew that, and he was powerless to stop himself. He stepped away from the gap and began to walk down the path, moving with the slow deliberation of a sleepwalker, holding his camera immobile in front of him.

  ‘Dinu?’

  He didn’t try to answer but kept on moving, concentrating on the placing of one foot in front of the other, until he was clear of the greenery. From the far side of the pool, she looked into his eyes and swallowed back the words of greeting she’d been about to utter.

  Dinu kept on walking. He dropped his camera on the grass and walked straight down the sandy bank, into the pool, directly across from the spot from where she sat. The water rose to his knees as he waded in, then to his groin, his hips, almost to his chest. The current began to tug at his clothes and his thin canvas shoes filled with sand and grit. He slowed to keep his footing, and then he saw her feet, hanging in the water, rippling in the current. He kept his eyes fixed on the shimmering flow and when his hands made contact with her legs he felt a deep breath rising from his lungs. It was the water that made this possible, he was sure of that; it was the stream that had washed away the barriers of fear and hesitation that had chained his hands before. He began to move his fingers, up the curve of her ankle, along the fine edge of her shin bone. Then his hands began to move on their own, pulling him behind them, between her parted knees, until suddenly her thighs were level with his face. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to follow his hands with his mouth, to move his lips along the elliptical line of her thigh, all the way along its length until the line parted. There he came to a stop, his face buried in her, his arms raised to shoulder height, holding her around her waist.

  ‘Alison.’

  She slid off the rock and stood neck deep in the water beside him. Taking his hand, she led him back through the pool, exactly the way he had come, to the other bank. They walked hand in hand, fully clothed and dripping wet, up the path that led to the ruined chandis. She took him through the clearing, up to a stone floor where a bed of moss lay thick on the laterite.

  Then she reached for his hand and pulled him down.

  thirty

  Neither Arjun nor anyone else in the 1/1 Jats knew quite what to expect when they arrived at Sungei Pattani. Before their departure from Ipoh they had been briefed— sketchily—on the problems they might encounter there. They knew that a mutiny had been narrowly averted just a few months before, but they were still unprepared for the cloud of disquiet that shrouded the base.

  The troops at the Sungei Pattani base belonged to the 1st Bahawalpur Regiment. There had been a lot of friction between the battalion’s officers and their English CO. Their CO had taken no pains to disguise his low opinion of his Indian officers: he’d been known to call them ‘coolies’ and to threaten them with his swagger stick. On one infamous occasion he had even kicked an officer. Things had got so bad that the GOC of the 11th Division had had to intervene personally; the CO had been relieved of his command and a number of officers had been sent home to India.

  At their briefing the 1/1 Jats had been given to understand that these measures had substantially altered the situation; that the difficulties of the past had been resolved. But within a day of their arrival at Sungei Pattani it was evident that the troubles of the Bahawalpurs were far from over. Through the whole two hours of their first meal at the Bahawalpurs’ mess hardly a word was exchanged between their British and Indian officers. And if the tensions in the Bahawalpurs’ mess were clearly visible to Hardy and Arjun, they were certainly no less so to Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland. Over the next two days the Lieutenant-Colonel made a point of speaking to his officers individually, to let them know that fraternisation with the 1st Bahawalpurs would not be encouraged. In a way Arjun was glad. He knew this to be the right approach under the circumstances, and was more than ever grateful to have a commanding officer of the calibre and good sense of Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland. But the knowledge of this did not ease any of the small difficulties that arose in trying to avoid the Bahawalpurs’ officers—some of whom were acquaintances from the academy.

  Arjun had a room to himself, like all the officers of the 1/1 Jats. Their quarters, men and officers alike, consisted of attap huts—wooden barracks with palm-thatched roofs. These structures were mounted on pilings that were designed to keep out termites and damp. Yet, both insects and moisture figured large in the experience of living inside these barracks. The beds were frequently preyed upon by swarms of ants; after nightfall mosquitoes were so numerous that to climb out of bed for even a minute meant having to restring the whole mosquito net; the roofs often dripped and at night the rustling palm thatch seemed to come alive with rats and snakes.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland wanted the 1/1 Jats to use their time at Sungei Pattani on combat training, but circumstances conspired to confute all his plans. When they ventured into the surrounding rubber plantations the planters protested. Their attempts to acquaint the men with the terrain had to be called off. Then the medical corps began to complain about rising rates of malaria. As a result their plans for night training had to be cancelled. Frustrated in his more imaginative schemes, the CO set the battalion to a monotonous regimen of constructing fortifications around the base and the airstrip.

  The airfield at Sungei Pattani consisted of just a single concrete runway and a few hangars, but it was still one of the few bases in north-western Malaya that boasted an operational air-squadron. The airmen at the base could on occasion be persuaded to provide joy-rides in their heavy-bellied Blenheims and Brewster Buffaloes. Arjun went on several of these rides, circling above the slopes of Gunung Jerai, looking down on the rubber plantations, swooping low over the grand houses and villas. At the summit of the mountain there stood a small lodge that served as a popular destination for holiday-makers. The pilots would often buzz the lodge, passing so close that the joy-riders could wave to the diners sitting at the tables on the veranda.

  Through his first few weeks at Sungei Pattani Arjun had no idea that Dinu was living nearby. He was dimly aware that the Rahas owned shares in a rubber estate in Malaya, but he had no idea of where this plantation was. The first he knew of it was when he received a letter from Manju, posted in Rangoon.

  Manju was unaware of her twin’s exact location and knew only that he was somewhere in Malaya. She wrote to say that she was well and that her pregnancy was proceeding smoothly enough. But Neel and his parents were worried about Dinu: he’d gone over to Malaya several months before and hadn’t been heard from for a while. They would be glad if Arj
un would look him up. He was probably staying at the Morningside Estate with Alison, who had recently lost her parents. She provided a postal address.

  Later in the day Arjun borrowed an Alvis staff car and drove into Sungei Pattani. He went to a Chinese restaurant where he and Hardy had eaten a couple of times. He asked for Ah Fatt, the proprietor, and showed him the address.

  The proprietor took him outside into the shaded arcade and pointed across the street to a red roadster. That was Alison’s car, he told Arjun, everyone in town knew it by sight. She had gone to her hairdresser’s and would be out in a few minutes.

  ‘There she is.’

  She was wearing a cheongsam of black silk, with a slit that ran from her instep to her knee. Her hair framed her face like a polished helmet, its deep black sheen contrasting brightly with the soft glow of her skin.

  It was several weeks since Arjun had spoken to a woman, and a very long time since he had beheld such a strikingly attractive face. He removed his cap and began to turn it over in his hands. He was just about to cross over, to introduce himself, when the red car pulled away from the shop and disappeared down the road.

  Now the periodic disturbances of the mountainside did indeed become auguries of Alison’s arrival. The rising of the birds from the canopy was a sure sign for Dinu to go hurrying down to the gap to look below—and often enough it really was Alison, dressed in one of the sombre black dresses that she wore to the office. Knowing that he’d be there, she’d look up and wave, and even as she was crossing the stream she’d begin to unbutton her blouse and unfasten her belt. Her clothes would be gone by the time she stepped into the clearing and he would be waiting, with his shutter primed.

  It seemed that the hours he had spent attuning his eye to the mountainside had been an unconscious preparation for this—for Alison. He would spend long stretches of time thinking of where to place her, against which wall, or which part of the plinth; he’d imagine her seated upright, leaning against a lintel, one leg stretched straight in front of her and another bent back at the knee. In the gap between her legs he would glimpse a striation in the pitted surface of the laterite, or a soft mound of moss, as visual echoes of her body’s fissures and curves. But the materiality of her presence would quickly disarrange these carefully imagined schemes. Once her body was placed where he wanted it, something would prove to be not quite right; he would frown into his square canvas of ground glass and go back to kneel beside her, sinking his fingertips softly into the tensile firmness of her thighs, teasing out minute changes in the angles of her limbs. Coaxing her legs further apart—or closer together—he would run a finger through the triangular swell of her pubis, sometimes combing the curls down, sometimes raking them back. Framed within the unnatural clarity of his viewfinder, these details seemed to assume a monumental significance: kneeling between her legs, he would wet his forefinger to draw a thin trail of moisture, a glistening hairline.

  She would laugh at the intent seriousness with which he executed these intimate caresses, only to go hurrying back to his camera. When the reel was done, she would stop him before he could load another. ‘No. Enough. Come here now.’

  She would tug impatiently at his clothes—the shirt that was tucked carefully into his waistband, the undershirt beneath it. ‘Why don’t you just take these off when you come here—as I do?’

  He would turn gruff. ‘I can’t, Alison . . . it’s not my way . . .’

  She would make him sit on the stone plinth and then peel away his shirt. Pushing him back, she would make him lie prone upon the stone. He would shut his eyes and knot his fingers under his head while she knelt between his legs. When his head cleared he would see her smiling at him, like a lioness looking up from a kill, mouth glistening. The lines were as perfect as any that could be imagined, the horizontal planes of her forehead, her eyebrows and her mouth, perfectly balanced by the verticals of her black, straight hair, and the translucent filaments that hung suspended from her lips.

  She would see, reflected in his eyes, exactly what he beheld. Laughing out loud, she would say: ‘No. This is a picture you’ll never see anywhere but in your own head.’

  Then afterwards, quickly but methodically, he would dress himself again, tucking his shirt carefully into his trousers, fastening his belt, kneeling to tie the laces of his canvas shoes.

  ‘Why bother?’ she’d challenge him. ‘You’ll just have to take them off again.’

  He’d answer seriously, unsmiling: ‘I have to, Alison . . . I have to be dressed when I work.’

  Sometimes she would grow bored with the length of sitting. Often she would talk to herself while he was adjusting his camera, throwing in words of Malay, Tamil and Chinese, reminiscing about her mother and father, thinking aloud about Timmy.

  ‘Dinu,’ she cried one day in exasperation, ‘I feel I have more of your attention when you’re looking into your camera than when you’re lying here with me.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘I’m not just a thing, for your camera to focus on. Sometimes it’s as if you have no other interest in me but this.’

  He saw that she was upset and he left his tripod to sit with her. ‘I see more of you in this way than I would in any other,’ he said. ‘If I were to talk to you for hours I wouldn’t know you better. I don’t say this is better than talking . . . it’s just my way—my way of understanding . . . You mustn’t think this is easy for me . . . I never do portraits; they frighten me . . . the intimacy . . . being in someone’s company that long— I’ve never wanted to do them . . . nudes even less. These are my first and it’s not easy.’

  ‘Should I be flattered?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . but I feel my pictures have helped me know you . . . I think I know you better than I’ve ever known anyone.’

  She laughed. ‘Just because you’ve taken some pictures?’

  ‘Not just that.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Because this is the most intimate way that I can know anyone . . . or anything.’

  ‘Are you saying you wouldn’t have known me if it weren’t for your camera?’

  He looked down at his hands, frowning. ‘I can tell you this. If I hadn’t spent this time with you, here, taking pictures . . . I wouldn’t be able to say, with such certainty . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I’m in love with you.’

  She sat up, startled, but before she could speak, Dinu continued, ‘. . . And I also know . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I want you to marry me.’

  ‘Marry you!’ She rested her chin on her knees. ‘What makes you think I’d want to marry someone who can only talk to me through a camera?’

  ‘Don’t you then?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dinu.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘Why marriage? Isn’t this good enough?’

  ‘Marriage is what I want—not just this.’

  ‘Why spoil everything, Dinu?’

  ‘Because I want it . . .’

  ‘You don’t know me, Dinu.’ She smiled at him, running a hand over the back of his head. ‘I’m not like you. I’m wilful, I’m spoilt: Timmy used to call me wayward. You’d hate me in a week if you were married to me.’

  ‘I think that’s for me to judge.’

  ‘And what would we be marrying for? Timmy isn’t here and nor are my parents. You’ve seen how unwell my grandfather is.’

  ‘But what if . . .?’ He leant over to place a hand on her belly. ‘What if there’s a child?’

  She shrugged. ‘We’ll see then. For now—let’s just be content with what we have.’

  Without a single word being said on the subject, Dinu understood, soon after the time of their first meeting, that between himself and Ilongo there existed some sort of connection—a link that was known to Ilongo but of which he himself was unaware. This understanding arose gradually, out of their conversations, nurtured by a pattern of questions and occasional oblique asides—by Ilongo’s curiosity about the R
aha house in Rangoon, by his interest in family photographs, by the manner in which his references to ‘Your father’ slowly metamorphosed so that the pronoun disappeared.

  Dinu understood that he was being prepared, that when Ilongo judged it right he would let him know about whatever it was that lay between them. This awareness evoked strangely little curiosity in Dinu—and this was not merely because his attention was wholly claimed by Alison. It was also because of Ilongo himself—because there was something about him that was so transparently trustworthy that it caused Dinu no anxiety to concede to him his superior knowledge.

  Except for Alison, Dinu saw more of Ilongo than of anyone else at Morningside: he was dependent on him for many small things—posting letters, cashing cheques, borrowing bicycles. When he decided to set up his own dark room, it was Ilongo who helped him find second-hand equipment in Penang.

  One Sunday, Dinu accompanied Ilongo on his weekly trip to Sungei Pattani, with Saya John. They visited Ah Fatt’s restaurant, where Saya John handed over an envelope, as always. ‘I do it for my wife,’ he told Dinu. ‘She was Hakka you know, on both sides. She always said that I was Hakka too, except that no one could tell for sure, since I never knew my parents.’

  Afterward Dinu and Ilongo drove Saya John to the Church of Christ the King, on the outskirts of town. The church was bright and cheerful-looking with a soaring white-washed steeple and a facade that was ornamented with polished wooden rails. Under the shade of a flowering tree, a colourfully dressed congregation had gathered. A white-robed Irish priest led Saya John away, clapping him on the back: ‘Mr Martins! And how are you today?’

  Dinu and Ilongo went to the morning show at the cinema and saw Edward G. Robinson in I am the Law. On the way back, after collecting Saya John, they stopped at Ilongo’s mother’s house, for a bowl of noodles.