Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

The Queen flatly refused to receive either her daughter or her son-in-law. The Princess, knowing her mother all too well, retreated in good grace — not so her husband, who summoned the temerity to venture uninvited into Her Majesty’s presence. This assault was quickly repulsed: with a single enraged shout the Queen sent her errant son-in-law fleeing down the Grand’s marble staircase, it was his misfortune to be shod in smooth-soled leather pumps. His feet slipped and sent him flying into the lobby, where a chamber ensemble was serenading an audience of assembled guests. He flopped into their midst like a leaping trout. A cello splintered and a viola twanged. Seated nearby was the Third Princess, whose nerves had been sadly strained by her recent travels. She broke into hysterics and could not be calmed. A doctor had to be sent for.

On April 16, 1919, the Queen and her party boarded the R.M.S. Arankola. They arrived in Rangoon four days later and were spirited quietly off to a bungalow on Churchill Road. A fortnight went by in a flurry of activity. Then the First Princess took everybody aback by announcing that she was ready to go back to Sawant. The family’s advisors wrung their hands. It was suggested that the Princess, as the eldest daughter, had a duty to remain with her mother — promises were, after all, frequently allowed to lapse in the interests of good sense and decency. No one doubted that a means could be found for discreetly closing the door on Sawant.

It was now that the First Princess showed herself to be a true daughter of her dynasty, every inch a Konbaung — her love for her family’s former coachman proved just as unshakable as her mother’s devotion to the late King. Defying her family, she went back to Sawant and never left Ratnagiri again. She lived the rest of her life with her husband and her children in a small house on the outskirts of town. It was there that she died twenty-eight years later.

The Second Princess and her husband lived in Calcutta for several years before moving to the hill-station of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling. There the Princess and her husband opened a dairy business.

So it happened that of the four Princesses, the two who’d been born in Burma both chose to live on in India. Their younger sisters, on the other hand, both born in India, chose to settle in Burma: both married and had children. As for the Queen, she spent her last years in her house on Rangoon’s Churchill Road. Such money as she could extract from the colonial authorities, she spent on religious charities and on feeding monks. She never wore anything but white, the Burmese colour of mourning.

After the Queen’s arrival in Rangoon, Dolly wrote her several letters, entreating to be allowed to call at her residence. None was ever answered. The Queen died in 1925, six years after her return from Ratnagiri. Even though she’d been cloistered for so many years, there was a sudden surge of sentiment in the city and people poured out to mourn. She was buried near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon.

In 1929, after a gap of several years, Dolly received a letter from New York. It was from Uma and she was writing to say that she was leaving America. Uma was fifty now and had been away from India for more than twenty years. In her absence her parents had died, leaving her the ground floor of their house, Lankasuka (the upper floor had gone to her brother, who was now married and the father of three children). She had decided to go home, to Calcutta, to settle.

Because of various engagements in Tokyo, Shanghai and Singapore, Uma wrote, she would be sailing across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. One of the advantages of this route was that it would also enable her to visit friends — Matthew and Elsa in Malaya, and of course, Dolly and Rajkumar in Rangoon. She was writing now to propose that she and Dolly meet at Morningside and spend a fortnight there: it would be a pleasant holiday and afterwards they could travel back to Burma together — after so many years, there was a lot of catching up to be done. What would be better still was if Dolly came with Neel and Dinu: it would give her an opportunity to get to know the boys.

Dolly was oddly shaken by this letter. Although happy to hear from her friend, she was more than a little apprehensive. To resume a friendship that had been so long dormant was no easy matter. She could not help admiring Uma for her forthrightness; she knew that she herself had drawn away from the world, become increasingly reclusive, unwilling to travel or even go out. She was content leading the life she did, but it worried her that the boys had seen very little of the world — of India or Malaya or any other country. It wasn’t right that they should never know any place other than Burma: no one could predict what lay ahead. Even through the shuttered windows of her room she could feel an unquietness in the land.

Dolly had not been back to Morningside in fifteen years, ever since her first visit; nor had the boys. It was unlikely, she knew, that Rajkumar would consent to go. He was working harder than ever at his business and there were whole weeks when she hardly saw him. When she mooted the idea to him, he shook his head brusquely, just as she had known he would: no, he was too busy, he couldn’t go.

But for her own part, Dolly found herself increasingly drawn to the idea of meeting Uma at Morningside. It would be interesting to see Matthew and Elsa again: the Martinses had come to stay with them once, in Burma, with their two children — after Alison, they’d had a boy, Timmy. The children were all very young then and had got on well together, even Dinu who was withdrawn by nature and very slow to make friends. But that was a long time ago: Dinu was fourteen now, a student at St James’s School, one of the best-known in Rangoon. Neel was eighteen, brawny and outgoing, reluctantly engaged in pursuing a course of studies at Rangoon’s Judson College: he was eager to get into the timber business but Rajkumar had said that he would not take him into the family firm until his studies were finished.

When Dolly sounded Neel out about going to Morningside, he was immediately enthusiastic, keen to be off. She was not really surprised; she knew that he was always on the lookout for ways of getting out of attending his classes. Dinu proved to be much less keen but said he was willing to strike a bargain: he would go, he said, if she bought him a Brownie camera from Rowe and Co. She agreed; she liked to encourage his interest in photography — partly because she believed it to have grown out of his childhood habit of looking over her shoulder while she sketched; and partly because she felt that she ought to encourage any activity that would draw him out of himself.

The arrangements were quickly set in motion, with letters shooting back and forth between Burma, Malaya and the United States (Rangoon had recently acquired an air mail service, and this made communications much quicker than before). In April the next year, Dolly boarded a Malaya-bound steamer with her two sons. Rajkumar came to see the family off, and after Dolly had boarded, she looked over the side to find that he was waving to her from the jetty, gesticulating wildly, trying to draw her attention to something. She looked at the vessel’s bows and discovered that she was on the Nuwara Eliya , the same vessel that had brought her to Rangoon immediately after her marriage. It was an odd coincidence.

Matthew and his family were waiting at the Georgetown docks when the Nuwara Eliya pulled in. It was Dinu who spotted them first, through the viewfinder of his Brownie. ‘There. . over there. . look.’