Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

‘Let me see. .’ Bela paused, running her fingers through her short-clipped white hair. ‘It was Tun — something. Of course, in Burma the prefix changes as you grow older. If you’re a woman it goes from Ma to Daw and if you’re a man, you’re Maung and then Ko and then U. So if he were alive today, he would be U Tun. . Something like that anyway.’

Jaya produced the picture and pointed to the credit line. ‘Could it be this?’

Wrinkling her nose, Bela squinted through her gold-rimmed glasses. ‘U Tun Pe? Let me see. .’ She mumbled under her breath: ‘Ko Tun Pe. . U Tun Pe. . Why yes! That sounds right. .’ She turned the cutting over. ‘But when was this picture taken?’

‘Nineteen-eighty-eight.’

Bela pursed her lips. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Jaya.

But don’t get carried away. It could be someone else. In Burma thousands of people have the same name. And in any case, Dinu would have been seventy-four in 1988. That is to say, he’d be eighty-two if he were still alive. And he was never robust, what with his leg. It’s very unlikely. .’

‘You’re probably right,’ Jaya said, taking the picture back. ‘But I still have to find out. I have to know for sure.’

It was Bela who provided Jaya with her next lead. She gave her a name: Ilongo Alagappan. ‘Try to find him — if anyone knows about Dinu it will be him.’

Over the last two years, in order to keep in touch with her son, Jaya had familiarised herself with e-mail and the Internet. She had an account at a commercial computer centre and the next time she went by, she bought herself a half-hour on the Web. First, she keyed in a search under the words: ‘U Tun Pe’. Nothing turned up. She rested her fingers on the keyboard and took a deep breath. Then she typed in the words ‘Ilongo Alagappan’ and hit ‘enter’.

The search engine quivered, like a hound that had sniffed a hot trail. For a long, nerve-racking minute, an icon winked on the monitor. Suddenly the screen quivered again and a message appeared: the list of entries under ‘Ilongo Alagappan’ ran to five hundred and sixty items. Jaya got up from her chair and went to the manager’s desk. ‘I think I’m going to need an extra hour. Maybe two. .’

She went back to her seat and started with item number one. She began to copy paragraphs into a separate file. She discovered that Ilongo was a prominent figure in Malaysian politics; he’d been a minister in the Government and had been honoured with a title—‘Dato’. His career had started after the war, when plantation workers had begun to form trade unions. Many had become active in politics and Ilongo was one such; in a few short years he had become one of the most important trade-unionists in the country — something of a legend in the plantations. He had founded a co-operative and had raised enough money to buy the Morningside plantation. This was at a time when rubber prices had slumped and thousands of workers were losing their jobs. He had been responsible for transforming Morningside into one of the flagship enterprises of the co-operative movement. The plantation workers’ unions had grown into an extraordinary success story: there were health-care systems, pensions, educational programmes, worker-retraining projects.

One of the items on the screen listed a web page for the ‘Morningside Co-operative’. Jaya decided to take a chance. She logged in and left a message for Ilongo. She introduced herself and said that she was gathering material for a book— on her great-aunt Uma and her grandfather, Rajkumar. She very much wanted to interview him, she wrote; she would be grateful for the favour of a response.

The next day she got a phone call from the manager of the computer centre. He was very excited. ‘Good news, didi! Message for you! From Malaysia! We are all so happy! Someone is sending you a plane ticket. .’

So striking was Ilongo’s resemblance to Rajkumar that when Jaya first set eyes on him, at the Sungei Pattani railway station, the hairs rose on the back of her neck. Like Rajkumar, Ilongo was built on a generous scale: he was tall, wide-shouldered, very dark, and he too had a substantial belly, of the kind that is produced not by lethargy but rather by an excess of energy— his stomach was like an extra fuel tank, strapped to the outside of a truck. His hair was white and rumpled and he had a great deal of it, all over him — his arms, his chest, his knuckles: its lightness was a startling contrast to the colour of his skin. His face, like Rajkumar’s, was deeply creased, with heavy dewlaps and jowls; it was enormous, thorny, and it seemed to be constructed mainly of armature, as though nature had equipped it for survival in the deep seas.

Only his speaking voice came as a true surprise. He sounded nothing like Rajkumar, in either English or Hindustani. His English was distinctively Malaysian — soft, peppered with floating interrogatives— la? — a very engaging, congenial manner of speech.

They stepped out of the station and Ilongo led her to a boxy, four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser. The vehicle’s doors bore the logo of the co-operative that owned Morningside. They climbed in and Ilongo took out a flat tin box and lit a cheroot. This added to the eerie resemblance to Rajkumar.

‘So tell me about your book,’ he said. ‘What is it going to be about?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ she said. ‘Maybe after I’ve interviewed you. I’ll have a better idea.’

On the way to Morningside, Ilongo told her a little about his career and about the making of the Morningside co-operative. Timothy Martins, Alison’s brother, had served in the US army during the war, as an interpreter. He’d been in the Pacific Theatre and at the end of the war, he’d come to Sungei Pattani for a brief visit. Ilongo had gone to see him. ‘Aren’t you going to visit Morningside?’ he’d asked. Timothy had answered with a flat ‘No’. He had no wish to return; the estate was a living reminder of everything that he wished to erase from his memory — the death of his parents, his sister, his grandfather; he wanted nothing so much as to be rid of it. Besides he had no interest in running a plantation. It was clear that the future of rubber, as a commodity, was none too bright. The war had stimulated research; substitutes were on their way. ‘I’m going to put Morningside up for sale,’ Timothy had told Ilongo. ‘You should let everyone know.’

The estate was on the market for almost two years. There were no buyers. Timothy was not the only businessman who could see that the demand for rubber had run its course. All over Malaya, thousands of plantation workers were out of work; investors were buying up estates and selling off the land in parcels. In the end Ilongo had decided to take matters into his own hands: it was either that, or seeing everyone thrown out. He’d gone around with a begging bowl — quite literally— and in the end the money had been found.

‘There it is,’ Ilongo said proudly, pointing ahead. ‘Morningside.’

They drove under an arched sign. The legend Morningside Estate was emblazoned across it in fine but faded Gothic characters. Underneath, in brighter, but more simple lettering there appeared the words: A property of the Malaysian Plantation Workers’ Co-operative. Gunung Jerai lay directly ahead, its peak veiled by a dense curtain of cloud.

The road headed uphill, snaking through alternating tracts of rubber and a crop of another kind — a short, stubby palm. These were oil palms, Ilongo explained, currently a more profitable investment than rubber: the plantation was increasing the acreage of the one at the expense of the other.