The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  There was a tree-stump directly in front of the tai, and Dinu seated himself on it. A gentle breeze started up, rustling the tall grass in the camp clearing. Beyond, wisps of mist were rising from the tops of the hundred-foot trees that surrounded the camp. The greenery was a dense, blank wall: Dinu knew that the Indian soldiers were somewhere beyond, watching him.

  In his cloth shoulder bag Dinu had some packets of boiled rice, wrapped in banana leaves. He opened one, and began to eat. While eating he listened to the sounds of the forest: a commotion among a flock of parrots told him that the soldiers were approaching. He sat still and went on eating.

  Presently, from the corner of his eye, he saw an Indian soldier stepping into the clearing. He rolled his banana leaf into a ball and tossed it away. The soldier’s head was just visible: he was wading through the grass with a high-stepping motion, using his gun to sweep aside the undergrowth.

  Dinu watched the man approach. His face was so gaunt that he looked almost wizened—although Dinu guessed, from his carriage and his build, that he was in his early twenties. His uniform was in tatters and his shoes were so badly worn that his toes were visible; the soles were tied to his foot with bits of string. The soldier stopped a couple of feet from Dinu and made a gesture with the tip of his rifle. Dinu stood up.

  ‘I have no weapons,’ he said in Hindustani.

  The soldier ignored him. ‘Show me what’s in your bag,’ he said.

  Dinu opened the mouth of his cloth bag.

  ‘What’s inside?’

  Dinu reached in and took out his water-container and a leaf-wrapped packet of boiled rice. There was a look in the soldier’s eyes that gave him pause. He undid the strings of the packet and handed it to him.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. Eat.’

  The soldier held the packet to his mouth and wolfed the rice down. Dinu saw that his condition was even worse than he’d first thought: the whites of his eyes had a jaundiced tinge and he looked malnourished, with discolourations on his skin and blisters at the corners of his mouth. After watching him for a minute, it seemed to Dinu that there was something about the soldier that looked familiar. Suddenly he knew who it was. In a disbelieving voice he said, ‘Kishan Singh?’ The soldier looked at him uncomprehendingly, narrowing his yellow-flecked eyes. ‘Kishan Singh—don’t you remember me?’

  The soldier nodded, still holding the rice to his mouth. His expression changed hardly at all: it was as though, by this time, he were too fatigued to make the effort of recognition.

  ‘Kishan Singh,’ Dinu said, ‘is Arjun with you?’

  Kishan Singh nodded again. Then he turned on his heel, tossed the leaf wrapper aside and went back into the trees.

  Dinu reached into his cloth bag. He took out a cheroot and lit it with a shaking hand. He seated himself again on the tree-stump. In the distance, another figure had stepped into the clearing, followed by a group of some thirty men. Dinu stood up. For some reason he couldn’t understand, his palms had begun to sweat, dampening his cheroot.

  Arjun stopped a few paces away. He and Dinu stood facing each other across the tree-stump. Neither of them said a word. At length Arjun gestured at the tai. ‘Let’s go up there.’

  Dinu nodded his agreement. Arjun set his men on guard round the tai, and he and Dinu climbed up the ladder, seating themselves on the rotting floor planks. Close up, Arjun looked to be in an even worse way than Kishan Singh. A part of his scalp had been eaten away by a sore; the wound extended from above his right ear, almost as far as his eye. His face was covered in lacerations and insect bites. His cap was gone and so were the buttons of his uniform; his tunic was missing a sleeve.

  Dinu would not have come if he’d known that he would be meeting Arjun. It was now more than three years since they had last met and so far as Dinu was concerned Arjun was guilty, by association, for much of the horror and devastation of those years. Yet now that they were face to face, Dinu felt neither anger nor revulsion. It was as though he were looking not at Arjun, but at his pounded remains, the husk of the man that he had once been. Dinu opened his cloth bag and took out his remaining packets of rice.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You look as if you need something to eat.’ ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just some rice . . .’

  Arjun raised the packets to his nose and sniffed them. ‘That’s good of you,’ he said. ‘The men will be grateful . . .’

  He got up and went to the ladder. Dinu heard him telling his men to distribute the rice among themselves. When he came back, Dinu saw that he had given away all the packets. He understood that pride would not allow Arjun to accept food from him.

  ‘What about a cheroot?’ Dinu said. ‘Can I give you one of those?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dinu handed him a cheroot and struck a match. ‘Why are you here?’ Arjun said.

  ‘I was asked to come,’ Dinu said. ‘I’ve been living in a village . . . not far from here. They heard that your men were heading in their direction . . . They were worried.’

  ‘They have nothing to worry about,’ Arjun said. ‘We try to stay away from local people. We have no dispute with them. You can tell them they’re safe—from us at any rate.’

  ‘They’ll be glad.’

  Arjun drew on his cheroot, and blew the smoke out through his nose. ‘I heard about Neel,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry—for you, for Manju . . .’

  Dinu acknowledged this with a gesture.

  ‘And what about your family?’ Arjun said. ‘Have you had any news—of Manju? The baby?’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything for the last three years,’ Dinu said. ‘They were here for a while . . . after Neel died . . . they were in the same place that I am now . . . with old family friends. Then they went to Mawlaik, to try to cross over . . . They haven’t been heard from since . . . my mother, my father . . . None of them . . .’

  Dinu chewed on his thumbnail and cleared his throat. ‘And did you hear about Alison . . . and her grandfather?’

  ‘No.’ Arjun’s voice was a whisper. ‘What happened?’ ‘They were heading south from Morningside . . . the car broke down and they ran into some Japanese soldiers . . . they were both killed . . . but she fought back . . .’

  Arjun covered his face with his hands. Dinu could tell from the rhythmic tremor in his shoulders that he was sobbing. Dinu felt only pity for Arjun now. He reached across the floor and put an arm around his shoulders.

  ‘Arjun . . . Stop . . . It won’t help . . .’

  Arjun shook his head, violently, as though he were trying to wake himself from a nightmare. ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’ll ever end.’

  ‘But, Arjun . . .’ Dinu was surprised by the gentleness in his own voice, ‘Arjun . . . it was you . . . you who joined them . . . of your own free will. And you’re still fighting on—now . . . even after the Japanese . . . Why? What for?’ Arjun looked up, his eyes snapping. ‘You see, Dinu—you don’t understand. Not even now. You think I joined them. I didn’t. I joined an Indian army that was fighting for an Indian cause. The war may be over for the Japanese—it isn’t for us.’

  ‘But, Arjun . . .’ Dinu’s voice was still gentle. ‘You must see that you don’t have a hope . . .’

  At this, Arjun laughed.

  ‘Did we ever have a hope?’ he said. ‘We rebelled against an Empire that has shaped everything in our lives; coloured everything in the world as we know it. It is a huge, indelible stain which has tainted all of us. We cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves. And that, I suppose, is where I am . . .’

  Dinu put his arms round Arjun again. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, yet there was nothing he could say; there was nothing to be said.

  This is the greatest danger, he thought, this point at which Arjun has arrived—where, in resisting the powers that form us, we allow them to gain control of all meaning; this is their moment of victory: it is in this way that they inflict their final and most terrible defeat. For Arjun, now, he felt not pity but compassion: what must
it be like to visualise defeat so accurately, so completely? There was a sort of triumph in this—a courage—the value of which he did not wish to diminish by arguing.

  ‘I should go now,’ Dinu said.

  ‘Yes.’

  They climbed down the vine-swathed ladder. At the bottom, they embraced again.

  ‘Be careful, Arjun . . . be careful.’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’ Arjun smiled. ‘One day we’ll laugh about this.’ He waved and walked away into the shoulder-high grass.

  Dinu leant against the tai’s ladder and watched him go. Long after the soldiers were gone, he remained where he was. When Raymond appeared, out of the darkness, Dinu said: ‘Let’s stay here tonight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t feel well enough to go.’

  This encounter with Arjun left Dinu profoundly shaken: now, for the first time, he began to understand the irreducible reality of the decision that Arjun had made; he saw why so many others whom he’d known—men such as Aung San— had made the same choices. He began to doubt his own absolute condemnation of them. How does one judge a person who claims to act on behalf of a subordinated people, a country? On what grounds can the truth of such a claim be established or refuted? Who can judge a person’s patriotism except those in whose name he claims to act—his compatriots? If the people of India chose to regard Arjun as a hero; if Burma saw Aung San as her saviour—was it possible for someone such as him, Dinu, to assume that there was a greater reality, a sweep of history, that could be invoked to refute these beliefs? He could no longer be confident that this was so.

  forty-five

  Arjun’s unit had initially numbered about fifty men: only twenty-eight now remained. Very few of these had been lost to hostile fire: most of the losses were due to desertion.

  At the outset, the unit was evenly split between professional soldiers and volunteers. The professionals were those who’d been recruited in India, men like Kishan Singh, and Arjun himself. When Singapore fell, there were some fifty-five thousand Indian troops on the island. Of these more than half joined the Indian National Army. The volunteers were recruits from the Indian population in Malaya and most of them were Tamil plantation workers.

  In the beginning some of Arjun’s fellow-officers had been sceptical about the abilities and endurance of the new recruits. The army that had trained them, the British Indian army, had not recruited Tamils: they were counted as one of the many Indian groups that were racially unfit for soldiering. Being professional soldiers, Arjun’s fellow-officers were steeped in the racial mythologies of the old mercenary army. Even though they knew those theories to be without foundation, they found it hard to rid themselves entirely of the old imperial notions about the kinds of men who made good soldiers and those who didn’t. It was only under fire that they’d come to recognise how false those myths were: experience had demonstrated the plantation recruits to be, if anything, much hardier and more dedicated than the professionals. In his own unit, Arjun found that there was a clear pattern to desertions: the men who’d melted away were almost all professionals; not a single plantation recruit had left. He’d been puzzled by this until Kishan Singh explained the reasons behind it. The professionals knew the men on the other side; the men they were fighting against were their relatives and neighbours; they knew that if they went over, they wouldn’t be badly treated.

  Arjun could tell that the plantation workers understood this too. They knew who the professional soldiers were and what class they came from; they knew exactly how their minds worked and why they deserted. Every time a few more ‘professionals’ went missing, Arjun would see a deepening contempt in their eyes; he knew that in private the plantation men laughed about the pampered lives the soldiers had been used to, about the way they’d been fed and fattened by their colonial masters. They—the plantation recruits—seemed to have recognised that in the end, theirs wasn’t the same struggle as that of the professionals; in a way, they weren’t even fighting the same war.

  Not all the plantation recruits spoke Hindustani: Arjun often had difficulty in communicating with them. There was only one man with whom Arjun could converse fluently: his name was Rajan. He was a lean, wiry man, all muscle and bone, with red-flecked eyes and a thick moustache. Arjun had recruited him himself, at Sungei Pattani. He’d wondered at the time whether Rajan was suitable material. But after his recruitment, Rajan had become another person altogether: training had transformed him. He seemed to have developed an aptitude for soldiering and had emerged as the most forceful personality among the plantation recruits.

  Once, going over a ridge, Rajan had asked Arjun to point in the direction of India. Arjun had shown him: it was to the west. Rajan stood a long time staring into the distance; so did many of the other men.

  ‘Have you ever been to India?’ Arjun asked. ‘No, sir.’ Rajan shook his head.

  ‘What do you think you’ll find there?’

  Rajan shrugged: he didn’t know and in a way, he didn’t seem to care. It was enough that it was India.

  Arjun discovered later that Rajan had been born in Malaya; his knowledge of India came solely from stories told by his parents. The same was true of all the plantation recruits: they were fighting for a country they had never seen; a country that had extruded their parents and cut them off. This made their fervour all the more remarkable. Why? What were their motivations? There was so much about their lives that he, Arjun, didn’t know and could not fathom—the way they talked about ‘slavery’ for instance, always using the English word. At first Arjun had thought that they were using the term loosely, as a kind of metaphor—for after all, it wasn’t true technically that they were slaves; Rajan knew that as well as Arjun did. What did he mean then? What was it to be a slave? When Arjun asked this question Rajan would always answer indirectly. He would begin to talk about the kind of work they’d done, on the plantation—every action constantly policed, watched, supervised; exactly so many ounces of fertiliser, pushed exactly so, in holes that were exactly so many inches wide. It wasn’t that you were made into an animal, Rajan said—no, for even animals had the autonomy of their instincts. It was being made into a machine: having your mind taken away and replaced by a clockwork mechanism. Anything was better than that.

  And India—what was India to them? This land whose freedom they were fighting for, this land they’d never seen, but for which they were willing to die? Did they know of the poverty, of the hunger their parents and grandparents had left behind? Did they know about the customs that would prevent them from drinking at high-caste wells? None of that was real to them; they had never experienced it and could not imagine it. India was the shining mountain beyond the horizon, a sacrament of redemption—a metaphor for freedom in the same way that slavery was a metaphor for the plantation. What would they find, Arjun wondered, when they crossed the horizon? And it was in the act of posing this question that Arjun began to see himself through their eyes—a professional, a mercenary, who would never be able to slough off the taint of his past and the cynicism that came with it, the nihilism. He saw why they might think of him with contempt—as an enemy even—for it was true in the end, that he was not fighting their war; that he did not believe as they believed; that he did not dream their dreams.

  It was Rajan who brought Kishan Singh back, with his hands tied, stumbling through the undergrowth. Kishan Singh’s condition was such that he hadn’t been able to get very far. Rajan had found him holed up under an overhang, hiding, shivering, praying.

  Rajan gave Kishan Singh a push, and he fell on his knees.

  ‘Get up,’ Arjun said. He couldn’t stand to look at Kishan Singh like this. ‘Utho—get up, Kishan Singh.’

  Rajan took hold of Kishan Singh’s collar and pulled him to his feet. Kishan Singh’s frame was so wasted that he was like a stick-figure, a broken puppet.

  Rajan had only contempt for Kishan Singh. He spoke to Arjun directly, looking him in the eyes: ‘And what will you do with him now?’

 
; There was no ‘sir’, no ‘sahib’, and the question wasn’t ‘what has to be done?’ but, ‘what will you do?’ Arjun could see the challenge in Rajan’s eyes; he knew what was in Rajan’s mind— that the professionals would stick together, that he would find a way of letting Kishan Singh off. Time. He had to make time.

  ‘We have to hold a court-martial,’ Arjun said.

  ‘Here?’

  Arjun nodded. ‘Yes. There’s a procedure. We have to try and keep to it.’

  ‘Procedures? Here?’ The sarcasm was audible in Rajan’s voice.

  Arjun could tell that Rajan was trying to show him up in front of the other men. Using the advantage of his height, he went up to him and stared into his eyes,

  ‘Yes,’ said Arjun. ‘Procedures. And we have to respect them. That’s how armies are run—that’s what make them different from street gangs.’

  Rajan shrugged and ran his tongue over his lips. ‘But where?’ he said. ‘Where are you going to find a place for a court-martial?’

  ‘We’ll go back to that teak camp,’ Arjun said. ‘It’ll be easier there.’

  ‘The camp? But what if we were followed?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ll go.’ The camp was an hour away: it would buy a little time.

  ‘Fall in.’ Arjun took the lead. He didn’t want to watch Kishan Singh being pushed along, with his hands tied behind his back.

  It began to rain and they were drenched by the time they got to the camp. Arjun led the way across the clearing, to the tai. The area under the stilts was dry, sheltered from the rain by the structure above. Rajan let Kishan Singh go and he sank to the ground, squatting on his haunches, shivering.