Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Arjun’s unit had initially numbered about fifty men: only twenty-eight now remained. Very few of these had been lost to hostile fire: most of the losses were due to desertion.

At the outset, the unit was evenly split between professional soldiers and volunteers. The professionals were those who’d been recruited in India, men like Kishan Singh, and Arjun himself. When Singapore fell, there were some fifty-five thousand Indian troops on the island. Of these more than half joined the Indian National Army. The volunteers were recruits from the Indian population in Malaya and most of them were Tamil plantation workers.

In the beginning some of Arjun’s fellow-officers had been sceptical about the abilities and endurance of the new recruits. The army that had trained them, the British Indian army, had not recruited Tamils: they were counted as one of the many Indian groups that were racially unfit for soldiering. Being professional soldiers, Arjun’s fellow-officers were steeped in the racial mythologies of the old mercenary army. Even though they knew those theories to be without foundation, they found it hard to rid themselves entirely of the old imperial notions about the kinds of men who made good soldiers and those who didn’t. It was only under fire that they’d come to recognise how false those myths were: experience had demonstrated the plantation recruits to be, if anything, much hardier and more dedicated than the professionals. In his own unit, Arjun found that there was a clear pattern to desertions: the men who’d melted away were almost all professionals; not a single plantation recruit had left. He’d been puzzled by this until Kishan Singh explained the reasons behind it. The professionals knew the men on the other side; the men they were fighting against were their relatives and neighbours; they knew that if they went over, they wouldn’t be badly treated.

Arjun could tell that the plantation workers understood this too. They knew who the professional soldiers were and what class they came from; they knew exactly how their minds worked and why they deserted. Every time a few more ‘professionals’ went missing, Arjun would see a deepening contempt in their eyes; he knew that in private the plantation men laughed about the pampered lives the soldiers had been used to, about the way they’d been fed and fattened by their colonial masters. They — the plantation recruits — seemed to have recognised that in the end, theirs wasn’t the same struggle as that of the professionals; in a way, they weren’t even fighting the same war.

Not all the plantation recruits spoke Hindustani: Arjun often had difficulty in communicating with them. There was only one man with whom Arjun could converse fluently: his name was Rajan. He was a lean, wiry man, all muscle and bone, with red-flecked eyes and a thick moustache. Arjun had recruited him himself, at Sungei Pattani. He’d wondered at the time whether Rajan was suitable material. But after his recruitment, Rajan had become another person altogether: training had transformed him. He seemed to have developed an aptitude for soldiering and had emerged as the most forceful personality among the plantation recruits.

Once, going over a ridge, Rajan had asked Arjun to point in the direction of India. Arjun had shown him: it was to the west. Rajan stood a long time staring into the distance; so did many of the other men.

‘Have you ever been to India?’ Arjun asked. ‘No, sir.’ Rajan shook his head.

‘What do you think you’ll find there?’

Rajan shrugged: he didn’t know and in a way, he didn’t seem to care. It was enough that it was India.

Arjun discovered later that Rajan had been born in Malaya; his knowledge of India came solely from stories told by his parents. The same was true of all the plantation recruits: they were fighting for a country they had never seen; a country that had extruded their parents and cut them off. This made their fervour all the more remarkable. Why? What were their motivations? There was so much about their lives that he, Arjun, didn’t know and could not fathom — the way they talked about ‘slavery’ for instance, always using the English word. At first Arjun had thought that they were using the term loosely, as a kind of metaphor — for after all, it wasn’t true technically that they were slaves; Rajan knew that as well as Arjun did. What did he mean then? What was it to be a slave? When Arjun asked this question Rajan would always answer indirectly. He would begin to talk about the kind of work they’d done, on the plantation — every action constantly policed, watched, supervised; exactly so many ounces of fertiliser, pushed exactly so, in holes that were exactly so many inches wide. It wasn’t that you were made into an animal, Rajan said — no, for even animals had the autonomy of their instincts. It was being made into a machine: having your mind taken away and replaced by a clockwork mechanism. Anything was better than that.

And India — what was India to them? This land whose freedom they were fighting for, this land they’d never seen, but for which they were willing to die? Did they know of the poverty, of the hunger their parents and grandparents had left behind? Did they know about the customs that would prevent them from drinking at high-caste wells? None of that was real to them; they had never experienced it and could not imagine it. India was the shining mountain beyond the horizon, a sacrament of redemption — a metaphor for freedom in the same way that slavery was a metaphor for the plantation. What would they find, Arjun wondered, when they crossed the horizon? And it was in the act of posing this question that Arjun began to see himself through their eyes — a professional, a mercenary, who would never be able to slough off the taint of his past and the cynicism that came with it, the nihilism. He saw why they might think of him with contempt — as an enemy even — for it was true in the end, that he was not fighting their war; that he did not believe as they believed; that he did not dream their dreams.

It was Rajan who brought Kishan Singh back, with his hands tied, stumbling through the undergrowth. Kishan Singh’s condition was such that he hadn’t been able to get very far. Rajan had found him holed up under an overhang, hiding, shivering, praying.

Rajan gave Kishan Singh a push, and he fell on his knees.

‘Get up,’ Arjun said. He couldn’t stand to look at Kishan Singh like this. ‘ Utho— get up, Kishan Singh.’

Rajan took hold of Kishan Singh’s collar and pulled him to his feet. Kishan Singh’s frame was so wasted that he was like a stick-figure, a broken puppet.

Rajan had only contempt for Kishan Singh. He spoke to Arjun directly, looking him in the eyes: ‘And what will you do with him now?’

There was no ‘sir’, no ‘sahib’, and the question wasn’t ‘what has to be done?’ but, ‘what will you do?’ Arjun could see the challenge in Rajan’s eyes; he knew what was in Rajan’s mind— that the professionals would stick together, that he would find a way of letting Kishan Singh off. Time. He had to make time.

‘We have to hold a court-martial,’ Arjun said.

‘Here?’

Arjun nodded. ‘Yes. There’s a procedure. We have to try and keep to it.’

‘Procedures? Here?’ The sarcasm was audible in Rajan’s voice.

Arjun could tell that Rajan was trying to show him up in front of the other men. Using the advantage of his height, he went up to him and stared into his eyes,