Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Now Dolly’s eyes were drawn to a startling new sight: a motorcar — a gleaming, flat-topped vehicle with a rounded bonnet and glittering, twelve-spoked wheels. It was the only car in the compound and a small crowd had gathered around to marvel at its brass lamps and shining black paint.

The car was Matthew’s. ‘It’s an Oldsmobile Defender,’ he announced. ‘Quite a modest car really, but mint-new, this year’s model, a genuine 1914. It rolled out of the factory in January and was delivered to me six months later.’ He spoke like an American, Dolly noticed, and his voice bore no resemblance to his father’s.

Theirs was a sizeable party: there was an ayah for Dinu and Neel as well as a man to help with the luggage. The car was not large enough for all of them. After Dolly, Elsa and the children had been seated there was room only for the ayah and Matthew, who was driving. The others were left behind to follow in a buggy.

They drove through Sungei Pattani, along wide streets that were lined with tiled ‘shophouses’—storefronts whose facades were joined together to form long, graceful arcades. Then the town fell away and the car began to climb.

‘When was the last time you heard from Uma?’ Dolly said to Elsa.

‘I saw her last year,’ said Elsa. ‘I went to the States for a holiday and we met in New York.’ Uma had moved into an apartment of her own, Elsa said. She’d taken a job, as a publisher’s proof-reader. But she was doing other things too; she seemed to keep herself very busy.

‘What else is she doing exactly?’

‘Political things mainly, I think,’ Elsa said. ‘She talked about meetings and speeches and some magazine that she’s writing for.’

‘Oh?’ Dolly was still thinking about this when Elsa pointed ahead. ‘Look — the estate. That’s where it starts.’

They were climbing steeply, driving along a dirt road that was flanked on both sides by dense forest. Looking ahead, Dolly saw a wide gateway, with a sign that arched across the road. There were three words inscribed on the sign, in enormous gold lettering; Dolly read them out aloud, rolling them over her tongue: ‘Morningside Rubber Estate.’

‘Elsa named it,’ Matthew said.

‘When I was a child,’ Elsa explained, ‘I used to live near a park called Morningside. I always liked the name.’

At the gate, there was a sudden rent in the tangled curtain of greenery that covered the mountainside: ahead, stretching away as far as the eye could see, there were orderly rows of saplings, all of them exactly alike, all of them spaced with precise, geometrical regularity. The car went over a low rise and a valley appeared ahead, a shallow basin, cupped in the palm of a curved ridge. The basin had been cleared of trees and there was an open space in the middle. Grouped around this space were two ramshackle tin-roofed buildings, little more than huts.

‘These were meant to be the estate’s offices,’ Elsa said apologetically. ‘But we’re living in them for the time being. It’s very basic I’m afraid — which is why we need to build ourselves a habitable place.’

They settled in and later in the day, Elsa took Dolly for a walk through the rubber trees. Each tree had a diagonal slash across its trunk, with a halved coconut shell cupped underneath. Elsa swirled her forefinger through one of these cups, and dug out a hardened crescent of latex. ‘They call these cup-lumps,’ Elsa said, handing the latex to Dolly. Dolly raised the spongy grey lump to her nose: the smell was sour and faintly rancid. She dropped it back into the coconut-shell cup.

‘Tappers will come by to collect the lumps in the morning,’ Elsa said. ‘Not a drop of this stuff can be wasted.’

They headed through the rubber trees, walking uphill, facing the cloud-capped peak of Gunung Jerai. The ground underfoot had a soft, cushioned feel, because of the carpet of dead leaves shed by the trees. The slope ahead was scored with the shadows of thousands of trunks, all exactly parallel, like scratches scored by a machine. It was like being in a wilderness, but yet not. Dolly had visited Huay Zedi several times and had come to love the electric stillness of the jungle. But this was like neither city nor farm nor forest: there was something eerie about its uniformity; about the fact that such sameness could be imposed upon a landscape of such natural exuberance. She remembered how startled she’d been when the car crossed from the heady profusion of the jungle into the ordered geometry of the plantation. ‘It’s like stepping into a labyrinth,’ she said to Elsa.

‘Yes.’ said Elsa. ‘And you’d be amazed how easy it is to lose your way.’

They entered a large clearing and Elsa came to a stop. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is where Morningside House is going to be.’

Turning around, Dolly saw that the spot offered spectacular views on every side. To the west the mountain sloped gently into the reddening sunset sea; to the north rose the forested peak of Gunung Jerai, looking directly down on them.

‘It’s a wonderful spot,’ Dolly said. But even as she was saying the words it struck her that she would not have wanted to live there, under the scowling gaze of the mountain, in a house that was marooned in a tree-filled maze.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Elsa said. ‘But you should have seen what it looked like before it was cleared.’

She’d been horrified, she said, when she first came out to Gunung Jerai. The place was beautiful beyond imagining, but it was jungle — dense, towering, tangled, impassable jungle. Matthew had led her a little way in, on foot, and it was like walking up a carpeted nave, with the tops of the trees meeting far above, forming an endless, fan-vaulted ceiling. It was hard, almost impossible, to imagine that these slopes could be laid bare, made habitable.

Once the clearing of the forest started, Matthew had moved out to the land and built himself a small cabin, where the estate office now stood. She had lived away from him in a rented house, in Penang. She would have preferred to be with Matthew, but he wouldn’t let her stay. It was too dangerous, he said, like a battlefield, with the jungle fighting back every inch of the way. For a while Saya John had stayed with Matthew too, but then he’d fallen ill, and had had to move to Penang. Even though the plantation was his own idea, he’d had no conception of what would be involved in laying it out.

Several months went by before Elsa had been allowed to visit the location again and she understood then why Matthew had tried to keep her away. The hillside looked as though it had been racked by a series of disasters: huge stretches of land were covered with ashes and blackened stumps. Matthew was thin and coughed incessantly. She caught a glimpse of the workers’ shacks — tiny hovels, with roofs made of branches and leaves. They were all Indians, from the south: Matthew had learnt to speak their language — Tamil — but she couldn’t understand a word they said. She’d looked into the mud-walled hut where they went to be treated when they fell ill: the squalor was unimaginable, the floors covered with filth. She’d wanted to stay and work as a nurse, but Matthew had refused to let her remain. She’d had to go back to Penang.

But when she next returned, the transformation was again so great as to appear miraculous. The last time around she had felt as though she were entering a plague site; now the sensation was of walking into a freshly laid garden. The ashes had been washed away by the rain, the blackened tree-stumps had been removed and the first saplings of rubber had begun to grow.

For the first time, Matthew had allowed her to stay over, in his cabin. At daybreak she’d looked out of the window and seen the morning pouring down the side of the mountain, lying on their land like a sheet of gold.