Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Clearly she was in the right place, but the door was locked and it was evident that the place was closed. She was about to turn away, in disappointment, when she saw that the man in the pharmacy was gesturing in the direction of an alley, right next to the Glass Palace. She looked round the corner and saw a door that seemed to be fastened from the inside. Beyond lay a courtyard and the threshold of an old warren of a house. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the pharmacist was signalling vigorously, apparently urging her to step through. She knocked and when there was no answer, she banged hard, thumping the wood with the heel of her palm. Suddenly the doors flew apart. She stepped through and found herself in a walled courtyard. A couple of women were squatting in a corner, tending a cooking fire. She went up to them and asked: ‘U Tun Pe?’ They nodded, smiling, and pointed to a spiral staircase that led to the second floor: evidently Dinu lived in an apartment that was situated directly above his studio.

Climbing the stairs, Jaya became aware of a voice speaking in Burmese. It was the voice of an old man, quavering and feeble: the speaker appeared to be delivering some kind of discourse — a lecture or a speech. He was speaking in staccato bursts, the sentences punctuated by coughs and pauses. She came to the landing that led to the apartment: dozens of pairs of slippers and rubber sandals lay on the floor. The doors of the apartment stood open, but the entrance was angled in such a way that she could not see in. It was clear, however, that large numbers of people were gathered inside and it occurred to her that she might have stumbled upon a political meeting, even a clandestine one; she began to wonder whether her presence would constitute an unwelcome intrusion. Then she had a surprise: she heard the speaker uttering some words that were not Burmese; they were names that were familiar to her from the history of photography — Edward Weston, Eugene Atget, Brassai. At this point, curiosity triumphed over discretion. She kicked off her slippers and stepped up to the door.

Beyond lay a large room with a high ceiling: it was crammed full of people. A few were sitting on chairs but most were seated on mats, on the floor. The crowd was larger than the room could comfortably hold and despite the presence of several whirring table fans, the air was hot and close. At the far end of the room there were two tall windows with white shutters. The walls were a dank, patchy blue and parts of the ceiling were blackened with soot.

The speaker was sitting in a rattan armchair that was draped with a green antimacassar. His chair was so positioned that he was facing most of his listeners: she found herself looking at him directly, from across the room. His hair was neatly cropped and parted, grey only at the temples. He was wearing a dark purple longyi and a blue knit T-shirt, with some kind of logo embroidered on the chest. He was rail-thin and his forehead and cheeks were deeply scored, with creases and fissures that seemed to move with the fluidity of ripples on water. It was a very fine face, suffused with the enrichment of age: the mobility of its lines created the impression of a range of perception and feeling that exceeded the ordinary by several extra registers.

It struck Jaya for the first time that she had never seen a picture of her uncle Dinu: he’d always been behind the camera, never in front of it. Could this be he? Jaya saw no resemblance to Rajkumar: to her he looked completely Burmese — but then this was true of many people of Indian, or part-Indian parentage. Either way, she could not be sure.

Jaya noticed now that the speaker was holding something in his hands — a large poster. He appeared to be using it to illustrate his lecture. She saw that the picture was of a shell, closely photographed. Its voluptuously rounded tail curled into a trunk that seemed almost to rise out of the print’s surface. She recognised it as a reproduction of a monumental Weston nautilus.

Jaya had been standing at the door a couple of minutes without being noticed. All of a sudden every eye in the room turned in her direction. There was a silence and the place seemed to fill, almost instantaneously, with a fog of fear. The speaker put away the poster and rose slowly to his feet. He alone seemed calm, unafraid. He reached for a cane and came limping up, dragging his right foot behind him. He looked into her face and said something in Burmese. Jaya shook her head and tried to smile. He saw that she was a foreigner and she could almost hear him breathing a sigh of relief.

‘Yes?’ he said quietly in English. ‘May I help you?’

Jaya was about to ask for U Tun Pe when she changed her mind. She said: ‘I’m looking for Mr Dinanath Raha. .’

The creases of his face seemed to shimmer, as though a gust of wind had blown suddenly across a lake. ‘How did you know that name?’ he said. ‘It’s many, many years since I last heard it used.’

‘I’m your niece,’ she said. ‘Jaya — your brother’s daughter. .’

‘Jaya!’

Jaya realised that they had somehow switched languages and he was now speaking to her in Bengali. Letting his cane drop, he put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her closely, as though searching for a confirmation of her identity. ‘Come and sit beside me,’ he said, his voice falling to a whisper. ‘I’ll just be a few more minutes.’

Jaya helped him back to his chair and sat cross-legged on the floor while he resumed his lecture. She was facing Dinu’s audience now and she saw that it consisted of a motley mix of people, old and young, girls and boys, men and women. They were all Burmese but some looked to be of Indian origin, some Chinese. Some were smartly dressed while others were wearing cast-offs. There was a student in a black cap that said Giorgio Armani , and in one corner there sat a group of three monks in saffron robes. They were all listening to Dinu with intent attention; some were taking notes.

Rows of glass-fronted bookcases ringed the floor. On the walls there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of photographic reproductions that looked as though they had been cut out of books and magazines. Some were in wooden frames; some were pasted on cardboard. She recognised several of them; they were all reproductions of well-known photographs: there was a famous Weston image of a sea-shell; a print of Cartier-Bresson’s veiled women, standing grouped on a Kashmir hilltop; there was a Raghubir Singh picture of an old house in Calcutta.

In one corner of the room there stood a brightly decorated table. A hand-painted banner hung above: it said: ‘Happy Birthday’. On the table there were paper cups, snacks, presents wrapped in paper. .

She wished she knew what was going on.

Dinu’s talk ended in a wild outburst of cheering and laughter. He smiled and turned to her with apologies for keeping her waiting. ‘You found me in the middle of my weekly session. . I call it my glass palace day.’

‘It was not a long wait,’ she said. ‘What were you talking about?’

‘Pictures. . photography. . anything that comes to mind. I just start them off — then it’s everyone else’s turn. Listen.’ He smiled, looking round the room: it was filled with the noise of a dozen different conversations. At the back, a handful of people were blowing up balloons.

‘Is it a class?’ she asked. ‘A lecture course?’

‘No!’ He laughed. ‘They just come. . every week. . some are new, some have been here before. Some are students, some are artists, some have aspirations to becoming photographers. . Of course most of them cannot afford a camera — you know how poor we are in our Myanmar ’—he laughed satirically as he said the word ‘—and even if they could, they would not be able to pay for film or printing or developing. . But some of them have money — perhaps their parents are smugglers or contractors or colonels. . I don’t ask. . It’s better not to know. They take pictures and bring them here. . We pass them around and discuss them. . Or else I show them copies of old photographs and we talk about why they are good or why they are not. The Glass Palace is the only place in Yangon where you can see things like this. . works of contemporary art. .’ He lifted his cane and pointed to his bookcases. ‘Books, magazines. . these are very hard, almost impossible to find here, because of the censors. This is one of the few places where they are to be found. People know, so they come. .’