Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

‘Dolly?’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Something’s happened to you.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No. Nothing’s happened.’ ‘You’re changing. . You’re leaving us behind.’

‘Who?’

‘Me. . Neel. .’

She flinched. She knew it was true that she’d neglected her elder son lately. But Neel was filled with energy, boisterousness and loud-voiced goodwill and Rajkumar doted on him. With Dinu on the other hand, he was nervous and tentative; frailty and weakness worried him, puzzled him: he had never expected to encounter these in his own progeny.

‘Neel doesn’t need me,’ Dolly said, ‘in the way that Dinu does.’

He reached for her hand. ‘Dolly, we all need you. You can’t disappear into yourself. You can’t leave us behind.’

‘Of course not.’ She laughed uneasily. ‘Where would I go if I left you behind?’

He dropped her hand and turned away. ‘Sometimes I can’t help feeling that you’ve already gone away — shut yourself behind a glass wall.’

‘What wall?’ she cried. ‘What are you talking about?’ She looked up to see U Ba Kyaw watching her, in the Pic-Pic’s rear-view mirror. She bit her lip and said nothing more.

This exchange came as a shock. She couldn’t make sense of it at first. After a day or two she decided that Rajkumar was right, she ought to go out more, even if it was just to the Scott Market, to look round the shops. Dinu was already more self-sufficient; soon it would be time for him to start school. She would have to get used to being without him, and besides, it wasn’t healthy to be always shut away behind the walls of the house.

She began to schedule little expeditions for herself. One morning she found herself stuck in one of the most crowded parts of the city, near Rangoon’s Town Hall. Just ahead, at the intersection of Dalhousie Street and Sule Pagoda Street there lay a busy roundabout. An ox-cart had collided with a rickshaw; someone was hurt. A crowd had gathered and the air was full of noise and dust.

The Sule Pagoda was at the centre of this roundabout. It had been freshly whitewashed, and it rose above the busy streets like a rock rearing out of the sea. Dolly had driven past the pagoda countless times but had never been inside. She told U Ba Kyaw to wait nearby and stepped out of the car.

She made her way carefully across the crowded roundabout and climbed a flight of stairs. Removing her shoes, she found herself standing on a cool, marble-paved floor. The noise of the street had fallen away and the air seemed clean, free of dust. She spotted a group of saffron-robed monks, chanting in one of the small shrines that ringed the pagoda’s circular nave. She stepped in and knelt behind them, on a mat. In a raised niche, directly ahead, there was a small gilded image of the Buddha, seated in the bhumisparshamudra , with the middle finger of his right hand touching the earth. Flowers lay heaped below — roses, jasmine, pink lotuses — and the air was heady with their scent.

Dolly closed her eyes, trying to listen to the monks, but instead it was Rajkumar’s voice that echoed in her ears: ‘You’re changing. . leaving us behind.’ In the tranquillity of that place, those words had a different ring: she recognised that he was right, that the events of the recent past had changed her no less than they had Dinu.

In hospital, at night, lying in bed with Dinu, she’d found herself listening to voices that were inaudible during the day: the murmurs of anxious relatives; distant screams of pain; women keening in bereavement. It was as though the walls turned porous in the stillness of the night, flooding her room with an unseen tide of defeat and suffering. The more she listened to those voices, the more directly they spoke to her, sometimes in tones that seemed to recall the past, sometimes in notes of warning.

Late one night she’d heard an old woman crying for water. The voice had been feeble — a hoarse, rasping whisper — but it had filled the room. Although Dinu had been fast asleep, Dolly had clapped a hand over his head. For a while she’d lain rigid on her side, clutching her child, using his sleeping body to shut out the sound. Then she’d slipped out of bed and walked quickly down the corridor.

A white-capped Karen nurse had stopped her: ‘What are you doing here?’

‘There was a voice,’ Dolly had said, ‘someone crying for water. .’ She’d made the nurse listen.

‘Oh yes,’ the nurse had said, offhandedly, ‘that’s from the malaria ward below. Someone’s delirious. Go back to your room.’ The moans had stopped soon afterwards but Dolly had stayed up all night, haunted by the sound of the voice.

Another time she had stepped out of the room to find a stretcher in the corridor. A child’s body had been lying on it, covered with a white hospital sheet. Although Dinu had been no more than a few feet away, sleeping peacefully, Dolly had not been able to quell the panic that surged through her at the sight of the shrouded stretcher. Falling to her knees in the corridor, she had torn away the sheet that covered the corpse. The child had been a boy, of Dinu’s age, and not unlike him in build. Dolly had begun to cry, hysterically, overwhelmed as much by guilt as relief. A nurse and an orderly had had to lift her up to take her back to bed.

Again that night, she had not been able to sleep. She’d thought of the child’s body; she’d thought of what her life would be like in Dinu’s absence; she’d thought of the dead boy’s mother. She’d begun to cry — it was as though her voice had merged with that of the unknown woman; as though an invisible link had arisen between all of them — her, Dinu, the dead child, his mother.

Now, kneeling on the floor of the Sule Pagoda, she recalled the voice of King Thebaw, in Ratnagiri. In his later years the King had seemed more and more to dwell on the precepts he had learnt as a novice, in the palace monastery. She remembered a word he’d often used, karuna— one of the Buddha’s words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time will come, he had said to the girls, when you too will discover what this word karuna means, and from that moment on, your lives will never again be the same.

Shortly after King Thebaw’s funeral, the Queen wrote to her gaolers asking for permission to move back to Burma. Her request was denied, on grounds of security, because of the war in Europe: it was felt that her presence might prove inflammatory at a delicate moment for the Empire. It was only after the end of the war that the Queen and her daughters were allowed to return to their homeland.

The First Princess now occasioned a fresh crisis. Was she to leave Ratnagiri to go to Burma with her mother? Or was she to stay with Sawant?

The Princess made a promise to her husband: she told him that she would travel with her mother to Burma and then return once Her Majesty had been safely installed in her new home. Sawant took her at her word and made no objection. But it was with a heavy tread that he walked down to the jetty at Mandvi, on the day of the royal party’s departure. For all he knew this was the last time that he or his children would ever see the Princess.

The Queen’s party made its way slowly across the subcontinent, travelling eastwards from Bombay by rail. In Calcutta the Queen’s entourage stayed at the Grand Hotel. It so happened that the Second Princess was now also living in Calcutta, with her husband: she could scarcely ignore the presence of her mother and sisters. One evening the disowned Princess gathered her resolve and went over to the Grand Hotel to call on her mother.