Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

The Collector was in the foreground, thin and dapper, dressed in a three-button linen suit. He was sitting perched on the edge of his chair like an alert bird, with his head cocked at a stiff and slightly distrustful angle. Uma, on the other hand, seemed very much at ease. There was a certain poise and self-assurance about her demeanour, about the way her hand rested lightly on her knees. She was wearing a plain, light-coloured sari, with an embroidered border; the end was draped shawl-like over her head. Her eyes were large and long-lashed, her face generous but also strong: Jaya remembered it well from her childhood. It was strange, in retrospect, to think how little Uma’s appearance had changed over the course of her life.

The gallery owner interrupted these reflections. ‘I take it you know this picture?’ she said.

‘Yes. The woman in the middle was my great-aunt. Her name was Uma Dey.’

And then Jaya noticed a detail. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘look how she’s wearing her sari.’

The gallery owner leaned over to examine the print. ‘I don’t see anything unusual in it. That’s how everyone wears it.’

‘Actually,’ said Jaya, ‘Uma Dey was one of the first women in India to wear a sari in this particular way.’

‘Which way?’

‘The way I’m wearing mine, for example — or you yours.’

The woman frowned. ‘This is how saris have always been worn,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Saris are a very ancient garment.’

‘Yes, they are,’ Jaya said quietly, ‘but not the ways of wearing them. The contemporary style of wearing a sari with a blouse and petticoat is not very old at all. It was invented by a man, in the days of the British Raj.’

Suddenly, across the years, she heard Uma’s voice, explaining the evolution of sari-wearing. It gave Jaya a thrill, even after all those years, to recall how astonished she’d been when she’d first heard the story. She’d always imagined saris to be a part of the natural order of the Indian universe, handed down from immemorial antiquity. It had come as a shock to discover that the garment had a history, created by real people, through human volition.

On her way out of the gallery, Jaya stopped to buy a postcard reproduction of the picture. On the back there was a brief explanatory note: it said that Ratnagiri lay between Bombay and Goa. On an impulse, Jaya pulled her railway timetable out of her bag: she saw that her train was scheduled to stop at Ratnagiri on its way to Goa. It occurred to her that she could easily stop there for a night or two: the conference wasn’t due to start until two days later.

Jaya walked out of the gallery and wandered into an Irani restaurant. She ordered some tea and sat down to think. She was suddenly possessed with the idea of going to Ratnagiri: she’d often thought of going and had always found reasons for putting it off. But perhaps the time was now: the photograph in the gallery seemed to be an indication of some kind — almost a sign. Ratnagiri was the place where her own, very particular, history had had its origins — but the thought of going there unsettled her, stirring up forgotten sediments of anxiety and disquiet.

She felt the need to talk to someone. She paid her bill and went outside. Bracing herself against the crowd, she walked up the street to a long-distance telephone booth. Stepping in, she dialled her own Calcutta number. After two rings her aunt answered. ‘Jaya? Where are you?’

‘Bombay. .’ Jaya explained what had happened. As she talked, she pictured her aunt, standing over the chipped black phone in her bedroom, frowning anxiously, her gold-rimmed reading glasses slipping down her long thin nose.

‘I’m thinking of spending a couple of nights in Ratnagiri,’ Jaya said. ‘My train stops there, on the way to Goa.’

There was a silence. Then she heard Bela’s voice, speaking quietly into the phone. ‘Yes — of course you must go; you should have gone years ago. .’

Ratnagiri’s setting was every bit as spectacular as Jaya had imagined. But she quickly discovered that very little remained of the places that she had heard about as a child. The jetty at Mandvi was a crumbling ruin; the Bhagavati temple, once just a spire and a shrine, was now a soaring mass of whitewashed concrete; Outram House, where King Thebaw and his entourage had lived for some twenty-five years, had been torn down and rebuilt. Ratnagiri itself was no longer the small, provincial town of Thebaw’s time. It was a thriving city, with industries clustered thickly around it on all sides.

But the strange thing was that through all of this, the town had somehow succeeded in keeping King Thebaw and his memory vibrantly alive. Thiba-Raja was omnipresent in Ratnagiri: his name was emblazoned on signs and billboards, on street-corners, restaurants, hotels. The King had been dead more than eighty years, but in the bazaars people spoke of him as though they’d known him at first hand. Jaya found this touching at first, and then deeply moving — that a man such as Thebaw, so profoundly untransportable, should be still so richly loved in the land of his exile.

Jaya’s first real find was the site of the Collector’s residence— the place where Uma had lived. It turned out that it was right around the corner from her hotel, on the crest of a hill that overlooked the bay and the town. The compound was government property and it was surrounded by a massive, forbidding wall. The hillside — thickly forested in Uma’s time— had since been cleared, with the result that the view was even more dramatic than before, a vast panorama of river, sea and sky. Ratnagiri lay spread out below, the perfect model of a colonial district town, with an invisible line separating its huddled bazaars from the ‘Cutchery’—the red-brick Victorian compound that housed the district courts and offices.

Impatient for a glimpse of the Collector’s residence, Jaya piled a few bricks against the compound’s walls and climbed up to look inside. She found another disappointment lying in wait: the old bungalow was gone, with its Grecian portico and its sloping lawn and terraced gardens. The grounds had been split up to accommodate several smaller houses.

Jaya was about to jump down when she was accosted by an armed guard. ‘Hey you,’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing? Get down from there.’

He came running up and fired off a volley of questions: Who was she? Where was she from? What was she doing there?

To distract him, she produced the postcard she had bought at the gallery in Bombay. It had exactly the effect she had hoped for. The guard stared at the picture and then led her down the road to a lookout point, on a tongue of land that hung poised above the valley.

‘There’s the Kajali river,’ he said, pointing, ‘and that over there’s the Bhate beach.’

Then he began to ask questions about the people in the photograph — the Collector, Uma. When his finger came to Rajkumar, he laughed.

‘And look at this fellow,’ he said, ‘he looks as though he owns the place.’

Jaya looked more closely at the picture. She saw that there was indeed a jaunty tilt to Rajkumar’s head, although he looked otherwise quite solemn. His face was massive and heavy-jawed, his eyes grave; he appeared gigantic beside the slim, diminutive form of the Collector. He was dressed in dark trousers, a linen jacket and a round-collared shirt. His clothes were neither as elegant nor as finely cut as the Collector’s, but he looked much more at ease; his legs were negligently crossed, and he had a slim silver cigarette case in one hand. He was holding it up as though it were an ace of trumps, pinched between finger and thumb.