Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

He saw a figure taking shape in the distance. He began to run.

‘Neel? Neel?’

It was Doh Say. His lined, wrinkled face was blackened with smoke. He was weeping.

‘Rajkumar. .’

‘Where’s Neel?’

‘Forgive me, Rajkumar.’ Doh Say covered his face. ‘There was nothing I could do. The elephants ran wild. I tried to send your boy away but he wouldn’t listen. The logs got loose and he fell under.’

Now Rajkumar saw that Doh Say had been dragging a body through the alley, pulling it away from the fire. He ran over to it and fell on his knees.

The body was almost unrecognisable, crushed by an immense weight. But despite the terrible disfigurement Rajkumar knew that this was his son and that he was dead.

Once, when she was still a girl, Manju had observed the shaving of a widow’s head. This was at a neighbour’s house in Calcutta: a barber had been paid to do it and the women of the family had been round to help.

In her sewing box Manju came upon a pair of scissors. Seating herself at her dresser she looked into the mirror and tried the scissors on her hair. The blades were dull with use and her hair was strong, thick and black — a young woman’s hair. The scissors were useless. She dropped them back into her sewing box.

The baby began to cry, so Manju shut the door on her. She went down the stairs to the kitchen — a dark, sooty, airless room, at the back of the house. She found a knife, a long, straight-bladed knife with a serrated edge and a wooden handle. She tried it on her hair but found that it was no more use than the scissors.

Casting around for a better instrument, Manju recalled the scythes that had once been used to cut the compound’s grass. These scythes were very sharp: she remembered how the hissing of their blades had echoed through the house. The malis who’d tended the grounds were long gone, but the scythes remained. She knew where they were to be found: in an outhouse by the front gate.

She opened the front door and ran across the compound to the outhouse. The scythes were exactly where she had thought, piled in a heap with the other gardening implements. She stood in the knee-deep grass of the compound and held up her hair, drawing it away from her head. She raised the scythe and hacked at it, blindly, because her hand was behind her head. She saw a lock of hair falling on to the grass and this gave her encouragement. She sawed at another handful and then another. She could see the pile of hair growing in the grass around her feet. The one thing she could not understand was the pain: why should it hurt so much to cut one’s hair?

She heard a voice, speaking softly, somewhere nearby. She turned around and saw that it was Raymond, standing beside her. He put out a hand, reaching for the scythe. She took a step away: ‘You don’t understand. .’ she said. She tried to smile, to let him know that she knew what she was doing and that it could not be done any other way. But suddenly his hands were on her wrist. He twisted her arm and the scythe fell from her grasp. He kicked it, sending it flying aside.

Manju was astonished at the strength of Raymond’s grip; at the way he was restraining her with a wrestler’s armlock. No one had ever held her in this way — as though she were a madwoman.

‘What do you think you’re doing, Raymond?’

He twisted her hands around so that they were in front of her face. She saw that her fingers were smeared with blood.

‘You’ve cut yourself,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve cut your scalp.’

‘I didn’t know.’ She tried to jerk her arms free but this only made him tighten his hold. He led her into the house and made her sit in a chair. He found some cottonwool and swabbed her scalp. The baby began to cry: they could hear her downstairs. Raymond led her to the stairs and gave her a nudge.

‘Go. The child needs you.’

She went up a few steps, and then she couldn’t go any more. She couldn’t bear to think of going into that room and picking up the child. It was pointless. Her breasts had run dry. There was nothing she could do. She buried her face in her hands.

Raymond came up the stairs and pulled her head back, gripping it by the remains of her hair. She saw him drawing his arm back and then his hand hit her across the cheek. She clutched her stinging face and looked at him. His gaze was steady and not unkind.

‘You are the mother,’ he said. ‘You must go to the child. A child’s hunger doesn’t stop, no matter what. .’ He followed her to the room and kept watch until she picked the baby up and held her to her breast.

The next day it was Christmas and in the evening Doh Say and Raymond left the house to go to church. Shortly afterwards the sirens sounded and the bombers came back. The baby had been sleeping but the sirens woke her. She began to cry.

The day of the first raid, Manju and Dolly had known exactly what to do: they’d gone to a windowless room on the ground floor and waited until the sirens sounded the all clear. There had been such a sense of urgency then: but now none of it remained. It was as though the house were already empty.

Manju stayed in bed with the baby while the bombs fell. That night the infant’s voice seemed louder than ever: louder than the sirens, the bombs, the distant explosions. After a while Manju could no longer bear the sound of the child’s crying. She climbed out of bed and went down the stairs. She opened the front door and stepped into the compound. It was very dark except for distant flames and flashes of light shooting through the sky.

She saw another figure ahead of her and somehow, even in the darkness, she knew that it was Rajkumar. This was the first time that she’d seen him since Neel’s death. He was still dressed in the clothes that he’d been wearing that morning: a pair of trousers and a shirt that was now blackened with soot. His head was thrown back and he was staring into the sky. She knew what he was looking for and she went to stand beside him.

The planes were far up in the sky, barely visible, like the shadows of moths. She longed for them to come closer; close enough to see a face. She longed to know what kind of being this was that felt free to unleash this destruction: what was it for? What sort of creature could think of waging war upon herself, her husband, her child — a family such as hers — for what reason? Who were these people who took it upon themselves to remake the history of the world?

If only she could find some meaning in this, she knew she would be able to restore order to her mind; she would be able to reason in accustomed ways; she would know when and why it was time to feed the baby; she would be able to understand why it was necessary to take shelter, to care for one’s children, to think of the past and the future and one’s place in the world. She stood with Rajkumar and looked into the sky. There was nothing to be seen but shadows far above and nearer at hand, flames, explosions and noise.

Doh Say and Raymond returned the next morning, after sheltering in a church through the night. The streets were mostly empty now, they said. The workers who serviced the city were mainly Indians and many of them had fled or gone into hiding. In some areas there was already a stench of uncleared nightsoil. At the port, ships were going up in flames, with their cargoes still intact in their holds. There were no stevedores left to do the unloading — they too were mainly Indian. The administration had opened the gates of the Rangoon lunatic asylum and the inmates were now wandering about trying to find food and shelter. There were looters everywhere, breaking into abandoned houses and apartments, carrying their trophies triumphantly through the streets.