Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

It occurred to him that he would have liked to talk about this. He remembered that Kishan Singh had once told him that he’d been married off at the age of sixteen. He would have liked to ask Kishan Singh: what was it like when you were married? Had you known your wife before? On the night of your wedding how did you touch her? Did she look you in the face?

He tried to form the sentences in his head and found that he did not know the right words in Hindustani; did not even know the tone of voice in which such questions could be asked. These were things he did not know how to say. There was so much that he did not know how to say, in any language. There was something awkward, unmanly even, about wanting to know what was inside one’s head. What was it that Hardy had said the night before? Something about connecting his hand and his heart. He’d been taken aback when he said that; it wasn’t on for a chap to say that kind of thing. But at the same time, it was interesting to think that Hardy — or anyone for that matter, even he himself — might want something without knowing it. How was that possible? Was it because no one had taught them the words? The right language? Perhaps because it might be too dangerous? Or because they weren’t old enough to know? It was strangely crippling to think that he did not possess the simplest tools of self-consciousness— had no window through which to know that he possessed a within. Was this what Alison had meant, about being a weapon in someone else’s hands? Odd that Hardy had said the same thing too.

Waiting for the minutes to pass he could feel his mind fixing on his wounded leg. The pain grew steadily, mounting in intensity until it saturated his consciousness, erasing all other sensation. He began to breathe in gasps, through gritted teeth. Then, through the fog of pain in his head, he became aware of Kishan Singh’s hand, gripping his forearm, shaking his shoulder, in encouragement.

‘ Sabar karo, sah’b ; it’ll pass.’

He heard himself say: ‘I don’t know how long I can last,

Kishan Singh.’

‘You can last, sah’b. Just hold on. Be patient.’

Arjun had a sudden premonition of blacking out again, sinking face first into the rainwater, drowning where he lay. In panic he clutched at Kishan Singh, holding on to his arm as though it were a life raft.

‘Kishan Singh, say something. Talk. Don’t let me pass out again.’

‘Talk about what, sah’b?’

‘I don’t care. Just talk, Kishan Singh — about anything. Tell me about your village.’

Hesitantly Kishan Singh began to speak.

‘The name of our village is Kotana, sah’b, and it’s near Kurukshetra — not far from Delhi. It’s as simple a village as any, but there is one thing we always say of Kotana. .’

‘What is that?’

‘That in every house in Kotana you will find a piece of the world. In one there is a hookah from Egypt; in another a box from China. .’

Speaking through a wall of pain, Arjun said: ‘Why is that, Kishan Singh?’

‘Sah’b, for generations every Jat family in Kotana has sent its sons to serve in the army of the English sarkar.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since the time of my great-grandfather, sah’b — since the Mutiny.’

‘The Mutiny?’ Arjun recalled Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland’s voice, speaking of the same thing. ‘What does the Mutiny have to do with it?’

‘Sah’b, when I was a boy, the old men of the village used to tell us a story. It was about the Mutiny. When the uprising ended and the British re-entered Delhi it came to be known that a great spectacle was to be held in the city. From Kotana a group of elders was deputed to go. They set off at dawn and walked, with hundreds of others, towards the southern postern of the old capital. When they were still far away they saw that the sky above the city was black with birds. The wind carried an odour that grew stronger as they approached the city. The road was straight, the ground level and they could see a long way into the distance. A puzzling sight lay ahead. The road seemed to be lined by troops of very tall men. It was as though an army of giants had turned out to stand guard over the crowd. On approaching closer, they saw that these were not giants, but men — rebel soldiers whose bodies had been impaled on sharpened stakes. The stakes were arranged in straight lines and led all the way to the city. The stench was terrible. When they returned to Kotana the elders gathered the villagers together. They said, “Today we have seen the face of defeat and it shall never be ours.” From that day on, the families of Kotana decided that they would send their sons to the army of the English sarkar. This is what our fathers told us. I do not know whether this story is true or false, sah’b, but it is what I heard when I was a boy.’

In the confusion of his pain, Arjun had trouble following this. ‘What are you saying then, Kishan Singh? Are you saying that the villagers joined the army out of fear? But that can’t be: no one forced them — or you for that matter. What was there to be afraid of?’

‘Sah’b,’ Kishan Singh said softly, ‘all fear is not the same. What is the fear that keeps us hiding here, for instance? Is it a fear of the Japanese, or is it a fear of the British? Or is it a fear of ourselves, because we do not know who to fear more? Sah’b, a man may fear the shadow of a gun just as much as the gun itself — and who is to say which is the more real?’

For a moment, it seemed to Arjun that Kishan Singh was talking about something very exotic, a creature of fantasy: a terror that made you remould yourself, that made you change your idea of your place in the world — to the point where you lost your awareness of the fear that had formed you. The idea of such a magnitude of terror seemed absurd — like reports of the finding of creatures that were known to be extinct. This was the difference, he thought, between the other ranks and officers: common soldiers had no access to the instincts that made them act; no vocabulary with which to shape their self-awareness. They were destined, like Kishan Singh, to be strangers to themselves, to be directed always by others.

But no sooner did this thought take shape in his mind than it was transformed by the delirium of his pain. He had a sudden, hallucinatory vision. Both he and Kishan Singh were in it, but transfigured: they were both lumps of clay, whirling on potters’ wheels. He, Arjun, was the first to have been touched by the unseen potter; a hand had come down on him, touched him, passed over to another; he had been formed, shaped — he had become a thing unto itself — no longer aware of the pressure of the potter’s hand, unconscious even that it had come his way. Elsewhere, Kishan Singh was still turning on the wheel, still unformed, damp, malleable mud. It was this formlessness that was the core of his defence against the potter and his shaping touch.

Arjun could not blot this image from his mind: how was it possible that Kishan Singh — uneducated, unconscious of his motives — should be more aware of the weight of the past than he, Arjun?

‘Kishan Singh,’ he said hoarsely, ‘give me some water.’ Kishan Singh handed him a green bottle and he drank, hoping that the water would dissipate the hallucinatory brilliance of the images that were passing before his eyes. But it had exactly the opposite effect. His mind was inflamed with visions, queries. Was it possible — even hypothetically — that his life, his choices, had always been moulded by fears of which he himself was unaware? He thought back to the past: Lankasuka, Manju, Bela, the hours he had spent sitting on the windowsill, the ecstatic sense of liberation that had come over him on learning that he had been accepted into the Military Academy. Fear had played no part in any of this. He had never thought of his life as different from any other; he had never experienced the slightest doubt about his personal sovereignty; never imagined himself to be dealing with anything other than the full range of human choice. But if it were true that his life had somehow been moulded by acts of power of which he was unaware — then it would follow that he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness. Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion. And if this were so, how was he to find himself now?