Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

She stood at the desk, fidgeting with the hem of her blouse. He did not ask her to sit. He stared, looking her up and down. Then he jabbed a finger at the manuscript. ‘Why have you sent this here?’

‘I was told,’ she said quietly, ‘that that is the law.’

‘The law is for writers,’ he said. ‘Not for people like you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You do not know how to write Burmese. Look at all these mistakes.’

She glanced at her manuscript and saw that it was covered with red pencil marks, like a badly filled schoolbook.

‘I’ve wasted a lot of time correcting this,’ he said. ‘It’s not my job to teach you people how to write.’

He got up from his chair and she saw that he was holding a golf club in his hands. It struck her now that the room was full of golfing paraphernalia — caps, balls, clubs. He reached for her manuscript and crumpled it into a ball, with one hand. Then he put it on the ground between his feet. He took many little steps, swinging the head of his club back and forth. He swung, and the ball of paper went sailing across the room. He held the pose for a moment, admiring his swing— the bent knee, the flexed leg. He turned to her. ‘Pick it up,’ he said. ‘Take it home and study it. Don’t send anything to this office again until you’ve learnt to write proper Burmese.’

In the bus, on the way home, she smoothed out the pages, one by one. His vocabulary, she realised, was that of a child; he was barely literate. He had run his pencil through everything he hadn’t understood — puns, allusions, archaisms.

She stopped writing. Nothing could be published unless it had undergone the board’s scrutiny. Writing was hard enough, even with nothing to deal with except yourself. The thought of another such encounter made those hours at the desk seem unendurable. The newspapers were full of strident denunciations of imperialism. It was because of the imperialists that Burma had to be shut off from the world; the country had to be defended against neo-colonialism and foreign aggression.

These tirades sickened Dinu. One day he said to his wife: ‘Look at the way in which these thugs use the past to justify the present. And they themselves are much worse than the colonialists; at least in the old days, you could read and write.’

Daw Thin Thin Aye smiled and shook her head in reproof. She said: ‘To use the past to justify the present is bad enough— but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past. And you can be sure that there are plenty of people to do that too: it’s just that we don’t have to put up with them.’

Their lives became very quiet and stunted: they were like plants whose roots had been trimmed to contain them inside tiny pots. They mixed with very few people, and were always careful about what they said, even with friends. They grew gnarled with age, inside and outside: they moved round their rooms with slow deliberation, like people who are afraid of knocking things over.

But all was not quiet around them. There were changes under way that they did not know about. Their lives were so quiet, so shut off that they didn’t feel the first rumbles under the volcano. The eruption, when it came, took them by surprise.

It started with another of the general’s crazed whims— another juggling of the currency. But this time people were not content to see their life’s savings turned into waste paper. There were protests, quiet and hesitant at first. One day, in the university, there was a brawl in a teashop — a small, apparently innocuous event. But suddenly classrooms emptied, students came pouring out into the streets; leaders emerged and with astonishing speed, organisations developed.

One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was taken to a meeting. She went unwillingly, pushed on by her students. Afterwards, she helped write a pamphlet. When she picked up the pen her hand was shaking — she saw herself in the censor’s office again. But as she began to write, a strange thing happened. With every sentence she saw her crumpled pages coming alive, rising off the floor and hitting back at the golf club, knocking it out of the major’s hands.

She began to go to meetings all over town. She tried to get Dinu to come but he resisted. Then one day there was news of a new speaker: she was to address a huge gathering, near the Shwe Dagon — her name was Aung San Suu Kyi and she was the daughter of Dinu’s old acquaintance from the university, General Aung San.

Dinu was seventy-four at the time; with age his right leg had grown stiffer and he walked with difficulty, but this new name had an energising effect on him. He went to the meeting and after that he was not able to stay at home again. He began to take pictures; he travelled with his camera, putting together a pictorial record of the movement in its headiest and most joyful days.

On August 8, 1988 Dinu woke up with a mild fever. Daw Thin Thin Aye made him a meal and told him to stay in bed. There was to be an important march in the city that day: she left early in the morning. Some three or four hours later, Dinu heard repeated volleys of gunfire in the distance. He was too ill to go out; he lay in bed and waited for his wife to come home. In the late afternoon there was a knock on the door. He dragged himself out of bed and threw the door open.

There were three or four uniformed policemen standing on the stairs. Behind them were several longyi-clad plain-clothes men.

‘Yes?’ said Dinu. ‘What do you want?’

They pushed past him without a word. He looked on helplessly as they went through the flat, opening cupboards and closets, rifling through their possessions. Then a plain-clothes man pointed to a framed picture of Raymond. The others gathered around, whispering.

One of the policemen came over to Dinu, with the framed photograph in his hand. ‘Do you know this man?’ he said to Dinu.

‘Yes.’ Dinu nodded.

‘Do you know who he is?’

Dinu picked his words carefully. ‘I know his name.’

‘Do you know that he’s the leader of an insurgency? Did you know that he’s one of the most wanted terrorists in the country?’

‘No.’ Dinu’s answer was non-committal.

‘Anyway — you will have to come with us.’

‘Not right now,’ said Dinu. ‘I can’t. I’m ill and I’m waiting for my wife.’

‘Don’t worry about her,’ said the man in the uniform. ‘She’s already been taken to a place where she will be safe.’

On Jaya’s last day in Yangon, Dinu promised to take her to 38 University Avenue, to attend a public meeting at Aung San Suu Kyi’s house.

The year 1996 marked the sixth anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest. Despite her confinement, Aung San Suu Kyi’s compound was still the centre of the city’s political life. Twice every week, on Saturdays and Sundays, she held a meeting at her house: people gathered outside and she addressed them from the gate. These meetings had become pilgrimages. A hush fell on Rangoon on weekend afternoons and thousands poured into the city from all round the country.

Dinu came to Jaya’s hotel to pick her up. A friend of his had driven him there in a car — a 1954 Czech-built Skoda. The car was making loud coughing noises as it idled on the street. As she was stepping in, Jaya noticed that the car’s doors were all of different colours, all oddly misshapen, as though they’d been banged into shape with sledgehammers.

‘What a strange-looking car,’ she said.

Dinu laughed, ‘Yes. . this is a car that has been put together entirely from bits of other cars. . The bonnet is from an old Japanese Ohta. . one of the doors is from a Volga. . It’s a miracle that it runs at all. .’