Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

The geography of Uma’s flat mirrored their relationship. Uma slept in the master-bedroom, overlooking the park; Rajkumar’s room was a converted pantry, near the kitchen. It was only in the afternoons that he was allowed into Uma’s room and he always sat in the same place — a large divan that was ringed with cotton-stuffed bolsters. They had lived thus for twenty years.

But that morning when I ran into Uma’s room, I found, to my surprise, that Rajkumar was in her bed. They were fast asleep, their bodies covered by a thin, cotton sheet. They looked peaceful and very tired, as though they were resting after some great exertion. Their heads were thrown back on a bank of piled pillows and their mouths were open. This was the very pose that we children used in games that required the figuring of death: head bent back, mouth open, tongue protruding between the lips. That I should be confused was only natural.

I shouted: ‘Are you dead?’

They woke up, blinking short-sightedly. They were both extremely short-sighted and there ensued a flurry of bed-slapping and pillow-turning as they fumbled for their eyeglasses. In the process, their covers slipped off and their bodies were revealed to be naked. Uma’s skin looked very soft and was covered with a delicate tracery of tiny cracks; every single hair on Rajkumar’s body had turned white, creating a startlingly elegant effect against his dark complexion.

‘Why,’ I said stupidly, ‘your clothes are off. .’

They found their glasses and snatched the covers back. Uma produced a loud gargling sound, a kind of volcanic mumble. Her mouth was strangely puckered, and on looking more closely I realised that both she and Rajkumar were without their teeth.

I was fascinated by dentures, as all children are, and I knew exactly where Uma put hers when she retired at night: to prevent them from being knocked over, they were placed out of reach of the bed, immersed in water, in a large glass tumbler.

In an effort to be helpful, I approached the tumbler, so that I could spare them the trouble and embarrassment of getting out of bed naked. But when I looked at the tumbler, I discovered that there was not one, but two sets of dentures inside. What was more, they had somehow become entangled, so that their jaws were interlocked, each reaching deep into the mouth of the other, each biting down on the other’s teeth.

In a further effort to be helpful, I tried to pry the dentures apart. But Rajkumar had grown impatient and he snatched the tumbler from me. It was only after he had thrust his teeth into his mouth that he discovered that Uma’s dentures were clamped within his. And then, as he was sitting there, staring in round-eyed befuddlement at the pink jaws that were protruding out of his own, an astonishing thing happened— Uma leant forward and fastened her mouth on her own teeth. Their mouths clung to each other and they shut their eyes.

I had never seen a kiss before. In India, in those days, such things were excised from sight by unseen censors, in real life as in film. Even though I did not know that this embrace had a name, I did realise that to remain in that room would be to violate something that was beyond my understanding. I slipped away.

What I saw that morning in my great-great-aunt Uma’s bedroom remains to this day the most tender, the most moving sight I have ever seen, and from the day when I sat down to write this book — the book my mother never wrote — I knew that it was this that it would end.

The seed of this book was brought to India long before my own lifetime by my father and my uncle, the late Jagat Chandra Datta of Rangoon and Moulmein—‘The Prince’ as he was known to his relatives. But neither my father nor my uncle would have recognised the crop that I have harvested. By the time I started work on this book, the memories they had handed on to me had lost their outlines, surviving often only as patterns of words, moods, textures. In attempting to write about places and times that I knew only at second- and third-hand, I found myself forced to create a parallel, wholly fictional world. The Glass Palace is thus unqualifiedly a novel and I can state without reservation that except for King Thebaw, Queen Supayalat and their daughters, none of its principal characters bear any resemblance to real people, living or deceased.

Perhaps it was the very elusiveness of what I was trying to remember that engendered in me a near-obsessive urge to render the backgrounds of my characters’ lives as closely as I could. In the five years it took me to write The Glass Palace I read hundreds of books, memoirs, travelogues, gazetteers, articles and notebooks, published and unpublished; I travelled thousands of miles, visiting and re-visiting, so far as possible, all the settings and locations that figure in this novel; I sought out scores of people in India, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand.

In the process I amassed vast arrears in debts of gratitude — the one kind of insolvency that one may justly consider a form of riches — a roster so large indeed that I can, at best, hope only to make a few gestures of acknowledgement towards the most pressing of these debts.

Of the people who took the time to speak to me during my travels in 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1999, I would particularly like to record my gratitude to the following. In Malaysia: Janaki Bai Devadasan, G. Anthony Samy, E.R. Samikannu, Anjali Suppiah, A.V. Pillai, A. Ponnusamy, R. Chinamma Rangaswamy, S.P. Velusamy; Lt. K.R. Das, Abraham Muttiah, F.R. Bhupalan, M.Y.B. Abbas, M. Gandhinathan, Eva Jenny Jothi, Nepal Mukherjee, N.G. Choudhury, V. Irulandy, S.P. Narayanswamy, S. Natarajan and Y.B. Tan Sri Dato K.R. Somasundaram of the National Land Finance Co-operative Society Ltd. I would also like to thank D. Narain Samy and other members of the staff of the Bukit Sidim Estate for their hospitality during my stay. But I am beholden most of all to the storied Puan Sri Janaki Athinagappan of Kuala Lumpur, who introduced me to many of the above, and who has, over the years, taken me and my family into her own. In Singapore, my thanks go to Elizabeth Choy, Ranjit Das, Bala Chandran, Dr N.C. Sengupta and particularly my friend Dr Shirley Chew who opened many doors for me in that city. In Thailand, for their kindness in taking the time to talk to me, I would like to record my gratitude to: Pippa Curwen, U Aye Saung, Khun Kya Oo, Khun Kya Noo, Lyndell Barry, Sam Kalyani, Nyi Nyi Lwin, Abel Tweed, Aung Than Lay, Ma Thet Thet Lwin, Than Kyaw Htay, Oo Reh, Tony Khoon, David Saw Wah, Raymond Htoo, David Abel, Teddy Buri, and particularly Ko Sunny (Mahinder Singh). U Tin Htun (E.C. Nanabawa) also went out of his way to help me during my travels and I owe him many thanks.

In India I would like to thank: Aruna Chatterjee, Col. Chatterjee, Dr Sugato Bose, Capt. Lakshmi Sahgal, Lt-Gen N.S. Bhagat, Capt. Khazan Singh, Capt. Shobha Ram Tokas, Shiv Singh, Hari Ram, Major Devinder Nath Mohan, Capt. A. Yadav, Barin Das, Tarit Datta, Arabinda Datta and Derek Munro. Mrs Ahona Ghosh kindly allowed me to consult her father’s handwritten notes of the 1942 trek; I owe her many thanks. I am also deeply grateful to Nellie Casyab, of Calcutta, a survivor of that great trek which the historian Hugh Tinker calls the ‘Forgotten Long March’ of 1941. It was she who introduced me to the Burmese and Anglo-Burmese worlds of Calcutta and put me in touch with the few other remaining survivors of that terrible ordeal. I would also like to thank Albert Piperno, another survivor of the trek, for his efforts in recalling the bombing of Rangoon on December 23, 1941. I owe a very special debt to Lieutenant-Colonel Gurubakhsh Singh Dhillon, the last of the ‘Red Fort Three’, who met with me for several days and spent many hours recounting the events of December 1941.