Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

They came across a lady one day, dressed in a beautiful silk sari, a peacock-green Kanjeevaram. She looked to be from a wealthy family but she too had run out of food. She was trying to bargain with a group of people who were sitting by a fire. Suddenly she began to undress and when she’d stripped off her sari they saw that she had others on underneath, beautiful, rich silks, worth hundreds of rupees. She offered up one of these, hoping to exchange it for a handful of food. But no one had any use for it; they asked instead for kindling and wood. They saw her arguing vainly with them — and then, perhaps recognising finally the worthlessness of her treasured possession, she rolled the sari into a ball and put it on their fire: the silk burnt with a crackling sound, sending up leaping flames.

The firewood had splinters, which would work their way into your flesh, but Manju preferred carrying the wood to carrying her daughter. The baby cried whenever it came near her. ‘She’s just hungry,’ Dolly would say. ‘Give her your breast.’ They would stop and she would sit, in the rain, with the baby in her arms. Rajkumar would rig a shelter above them, with leaves and branches.

A little bit further, they said. India isn’t far now. Just a little bit more.

There was nothing in her body — Manju was certain of this— but somehow the baby would find a way of squeezing a few drops from her sore, chafing breasts. Then, when the trickle ran dry, she would begin to cry again — in an angry, vengeful way, as though she wanted nothing more than to see her mother dead. At times she would try to feed the baby other things — she would work a bit of rice into a paste and tuck it into a corner of the child’s mouth. She seemed to relish the taste: she was a hungry girl, greedy for life; more her grandparents’ child than her own.

One day Manju fell asleep sitting up with the baby in her arms. She woke to find Dolly standing over her, looking worriedly into her face. She could hear the buzz of insects, flying around her head. They were the shimmer-winged bluebottles that Rajkumar called ‘vulture-flies’ because they were always to be seen on people who were too weak to go on — or who were near death.

Manju heard the baby screaming in her lap, but for once the sound did not bother her. There was a restful numbness in her body: she wanted nothing more than to sit there as long she could, relishing the absence of sensation. But as always her tormentors were bearing down on her; Dolly was shouting at her: ‘Get up, Manju, get up.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Please let me be. Just a little longer.’ ‘You’ve been sitting there since yesterday,’ Dolly shouted.

‘You have to get up, Manju, or you’ll stay there for ever. Think of the baby; get up.’

‘The baby’s happy here,’ Manju said. ‘Let us be. Tomorrow we’ll walk again. Not now.’

But Dolly wouldn’t listen. ‘We won’t let you die, Manju. You’re young; you have the baby to think of. .’ Dolly took the child out of her arms and Rajkumar pulled her to her feet. He shook her hard, so that her teeth rattled.

‘You have to go on, Manju; you can’t give up.’

She stood staring at him in the pouring rain, in her white widow’s sari, her hair shorn. He was dressed in a tattered longyi, shod in mud-caked slippers. His belly was gone and his frame was wasted with hunger; his face was mottled with white stubble, his eyes blood-shot and red-rimmed.

‘Why, old man, why?’ she shouted at him. She called him buro in contempt; she no longer cared that he was Neel’s father and that she’d always been in awe of him: now he was just her tormentor, who would not let her enjoy the rest that she had earned. ‘Why do I have to go on? Look at you: you’ve gone on — and on and on and on. And what has it brought you?’

Then, to her surprise, tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down the cracks and fissures of his face. He seemed like a stricken child: helpless, unable to move. She thought for a moment she’d won at last, but then Dolly stepped in. She took his arm and turned him round so that he was looking ahead, to the next range of mountains. He stood where he was, his shoulders sagging, as though the truth of their condition had finally dawned on him.

Dolly pushed him on. ‘You can’t stop now, Rajkumar — you have to go on.’ At the sound of her voice, some inner instinct seemed to take hold of him. He slung the bundle of firewood over his shoulders and walked on.

There were places where the trails converged and became bottlenecks. Usually these were on the banks of streams and rivers. At each of these crossings there would be thousands and thousands of people gathered together, sitting, waiting— moving through the mud with tiny, exhausted steps.

They came to a river that seemed very broad. It flowed with the speed of a mountain stream and its water was as cold as ice. Here, on a stretch of sandy bank, surrounded by steep jungle, there was the largest gathering of people they had yet come across: tens of thousands — a sea of heads and faces.

They joined this great mass of people and sat squatting, on the river’s sandy bank. They waited, and in time, a raft arrived. It was unwieldy-looking and not very large. Manju watched it as it bobbed on the swollen river: it was the most beautiful craft that she had ever seen and she could tell that it was her saviour. It filled up in minutes and went away upstream, chugging slowly round a great bend. She did not lose faith; she was certain that it would return. And sure enough, in a while, the raft came back again. And again and again, filling up in minutes each time.

At last it was their turn and they climbed in. Manju handed the baby to Dolly and found herself a place by the raft’s edge, where she could sit by the water. The raft started off and she watched the river rushing past; she could see its whirlpools and its swirling currents — the patterns of its flow and movement were etched on its surface. She touched the water and found that it was very cold.

Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the baby crying. No matter how loud the noise around her, no matter how many people she was surrounded by, she always knew her daughter’s voice. She knew that Dolly would soon seek her out and bring the baby to her; that she would stand over her, watching, to make sure that the child was fed. She let her hand fall over the raft’s edge and thrilled to the water’s touch. It seemed to be pulling at her, urging her to come in. She let her arm trail a little, and then dipped her foot in. She felt her sari growing heavier, unfurling in the water, pulling away from her, tugging at her body, urging her to follow. She heard the sound of crying and she was glad that her daughter was in Dolly’s arms. With Dolly and Rajkumar the child would be safe; they would see her home. It was better this way: better that they, who knew what they were living for, should have her in their care. She heard Dolly’s voice, calling to her— ‘Manju, Manju stop — be careful. .’ and she knew the time had come. It was no effort at all to slip over, from the raft into the river. The water was fast, dark and numbingly cold.

Bela was eighteen when Dolly and Rajkumar crossed the mountains. The day when they arrived in Lankasuka was to live in her mind for ever.

This was in 1942, which was as terrible a year as any that Bengal had ever known. At the time, little was known in India about conditions in Burma and Malaya. Because of wartime security, news was sketchy and all the usual channels of communication had broken down. The year before, when the first evacuation ship from Rangoon arrived in Calcutta, Bela and her parents had gone to meet it at the docks. They had hoped to see Manju among the disembarking passengers. Instead they learnt that Rajkumar and his family had decided to stay on in Burma.