Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Ma Thin Thin Aye was slim, petite and neat in her movements. Every day, at four in the afternoon, she walked down the street, past the pharmacy, to the wooden door that led to the Glass Palace. Standing outside, she would sing out Dinu’s name—‘U Tun Pe!’—to let him know that she’d come. At seven-thirty she and Dinu would close the studio: she’d walk away down the street and Dinu would lock up and go round the corner to climb the stairs to his room.

After a few weeks, Dinu discovered that Ma Thin Thin Aye’s mornings were not spent solely on research. She was also a writer. Rangoon had a thriving culture of small literary magazines. One of these had published a couple of her short stories.

Dinu tracked down her stories. They took him by surprise. Her work was innovative and experimental; she was using the Burmese language in new ways, marrying classicism with folk usage. He was astonished by the wealth of allusion, by her use of dialect, by the intensity of her focus on her characters. It seemed to him that she had achieved much that he’d once aspired to himself — ambitions that he’d long abandoned.

Dinu was a little awed, and this made it hard for him to tell Ma Thin Thin Aye of his admiration for her work. Instead, he began to tease her, in his earnest, staccato way. ‘That story of yours,’ he said, ‘the one about the street where you live. . You say the people on the street are from many different places. . from the coasts and the hills. . Yet in your story they all speak Burmese. How is that possible?’

She was not at all put out.

‘Where I live,’ she said softly, ‘every house on the street speaks a different language. I have no choice but to trust my reader to imagine the sound of each house. Or else I would not be able to write at all about my street — and to trust your reader is not a bad thing.’

‘But look at Burma,’ Dinu went on, still teasing. ‘We are a universe on our own. . Look at all our people. . Karen, Kayah, Kachin, Shan, Rakhine, Wa, Pa-O, Chin, Mon. . Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your stories could contain each language, each dialect? If your reader could hear the vastness of the music? the surprise?’

‘But they do,’ she said. ‘Why do you think they don’t? A word on the page is like a string on an instrument. My readers sound the music in their heads, and for each it sounds different.’

At this point in his life, photography was no longer a passion for Dinu. He did only commercial work, making studio portraits and printing other people’s negatives. He bestowed a great deal of care and attention on what he did, but took no particular pleasure in it: mainly he was grateful for possessing a skill that could be parlayed into a livelihood. When people asked him why he no longer photographed outside his studio, he told them that his eyes had lost the habit of looking; his vision had withered for lack of practice.

The photographs that he thought of as his real work, he rarely showed. These pictures were, in any case, very few in number. His early prints and negatives had been destroyed when the Kemendine house went up in flames; the work he’d done in Malaya was still at Morningside. All he possessed of his own work were a few pictures taken in Loikaw — of his mother, of Doh Say and Raymond and their families. Some of these he’d framed and hung on the walls of his apartment. He fought shy of inviting Ma Thin Thin Aye upstairs to see them. She was so young — more than ten years his junior. It mattered very much that she not think badly of him.

A year went by and every day Ma Thin Thin Aye left and entered the studio by the door that led to the street. One day she said: ‘U Tun Pe, do you know what I find hardest in my writing?’

‘What?’

‘The moment when I have to step off the street and go into a house.’

He frowned. ‘Why. .? Why that?’

She wrung her hands together in her lap, looking exactly like the serious student that she was. ‘It is very hard,’ she said. ‘And to you it may seem like a small thing. But I do believe that it is this moment that marks the difference between classical and modern writing.’

‘Of all things. .! How so?’

‘You see, in classical writing, everything happens outside— on streets, in public squares and battlefields, in palaces and gardens — in places that everyone can imagine.’

‘But that is not how you write?’

‘No.’ She laughed. ‘And to this day, even though I do it only in my mind, nothing is more difficult for me than this— going into a house, intruding, violating. Even though it’s only in my head, I feel afraid — I feel a kind of terror — and that’s when I know I must keep going, step in, past the threshold, into the house.’

He nodded but made no comment. He gave himself a little time to think about what she’d said. One afternoon he bought biryani from Mughal Street and invited her up.

A few months later, they were married. The ceremony was a quiet one and they invited very few people. Afterwards, Ma Thin Thin Aye moved into Dinu’s two rooms. She marked off a corner for herself and set up a desk. She began to teach literature at the university. In the afternoons, she still helped at the studio. They were happy, content with the smallness and privacy of their world. Their childlessness did not seem a great lack. Her work began to gain notice, even beyond literary circles. She became one of the select group of Burmese writers whose presence was regularly sought at festivals in the countryside.

One morning, Daw Thin Thin Aye was tutoring a promising young student at the university, when she heard a burst of gunfire close at hand. She went to the window and saw hundreds of young men and women running by, some covered in blood.

Her student pulled her away from the window. They hid under a desk. After a couple of hours they were found by one of Daw Thin Thin Aye’s colleagues. There had been a coup, they learnt. General Ne Win had seized power. Dozens of students had been shot down, right inside the university.

Neither Dinu nor Daw Thin Thin Aye had ever been directly involved in politics. After the coup, they kept to themselves and waited for the winds to change. It was not until many years had passed that they realised that this was a storm that had come to stay.

U Thiha Saw was arrested and his newspaper was shut down. General Ne Win, the new dictator, began to juggle with the currency. Notes of certain denominations were declared to be valueless; overnight, millions of kyats became waste paper. Thousands of the country’s brightest young people fled into the countryside. Rebellions multiplied and flourished. Raymond went underground with several hundred followers. In the east, on the Thai border, the insurgents gave a name to the territories under their control: they became a Karen Free State— Kwathoolei, with its capital at the riverbank town of Manerplaw.

With each year the generals seemed to grow more powerful while the rest of the country grew ever feebler: the military was like an incubus, sucking the life from its host. U Thiha Saw died at Insein gaol, in circumstances that were not explained. His body was brought home bearing marks of torture and the family was not permitted a public funeral. A new censorship regime developed, growing out of the foundations of the system that had been left behind by the old Imperial Government. Every book and magazine had to be presented to the Press Scrutiny Board, for the perusal of a small army of captains and majors.

One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was ordered to report to the Scrutiny Board’s office. The building was plain and functional, like a school, and its long corridors smelt of toilets and disinfectant. She went to an office with a plywood door and sat for several hours on a bench. When at last she was shown in, she found herself facing an officer who looked to be in his late twenties. He was sitting at a desk and the manuscript of one of her stories was lying in front of him. His hands were in his lap and he seemed to be toying with something — she could not tell what it was.