Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Then one hot April day, Lankasuka’s afternoon torpor was shattered by the sound of Arjun’s voice uttering wild whoops and cries. Everyone in the house went running to the back balcony to look down into the courtyard.

‘Arjun, what do you think you’re doing?’ his mother said.

‘I’ve got in! I’ve got in!’ Arjun was dancing around the courtyard, dressed in his usual dirty vest and torn longyi, waving a letter in one hand.

‘Got into what?’

‘The Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun.’

‘Idiot boy. What are you talking about?’

‘Yes; it’s true.’ Arjun came running up the stairs, his face flushed, his hair falling over his eyes. ‘They’ve accepted me as an officer cadet.’

‘But how could this happen? How did they even know who you are?’

‘I sat for an examination, Ma. I went with—’ he named a school-friend—‘and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think I’d get in.’

‘But it’s impossible.’

‘Look.’

They passed the letter from hand to hand, marvelling at the fine stiff notepaper and the embossed emblem in the top right-hand corner. They could not have been more astonished if he’d announced that he’d sprouted wings or grown a tail. In Calcutta at that time, to join the army was almost unheard of. For generations, recruitment into the British Indian army had been ruled by racial policies that excluded most men in the country, including those from Bengal. Nor was it possible, until quite recently, for Indians to enter the army as commissioned officers. The founding of the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun dated back only five years and the fact that some of its seats were open to public examination had gone largely unnoticed.

‘How could you do this, Arjun? And without saying anything to us?’

‘I’m telling you, I never thought I’d get in. Besides, everyone’s always saying that I’ll never amount to anything — so I thought all right, let’s see.’

‘You wait till your father gets home.’

But Arjun’s father was not at all displeased by the news: on the contrary, he was so glad that he immediately organised an expedition of thanksgiving to the temple at Kalighat.

‘The boy’s settled now and there’s nothing more for us to worry about. .’ Relief was plainly visible on his face. ‘This is a ready-made career: whether he does well or not he’ll be pushed up the ladder. At the end, there’ll be an excellent pension. So long as he makes it through the academy, he’s taken care of for the rest of his life.’

‘But he’s just a boy, and what if he gets injured? Or worse still?’

‘Nonsense. The chances are very slight. It’s just a job like any other. Besides, think of the status, the prestige. .’

Uma’s response came as even more of a surprise. Since the time when she’d visited Mahatma Gandhi, at his ashram in Wardha, she had changed her political affiliations. She had joined the Congress Party and had started working with the women’s wing. Arjun had expected that she would try to argue him out of signing up. But what she said instead was: ‘The Mahatma thinks that the country can only benefit from having men of conscience in the army. India needs soldiers who won’t blindly obey their superiors. .’

Manju’s career took a very different turn from her twin’s. At the age of twenty-one she came to the attention of a prominent film personality — a director whose niece happened to be her classmate in college. A man of formidable reputation, the director was then engaged in a very public search for a lead actress. The story of his hunt had caused huge excitement in Calcutta.

Manju was spotted, unbeknownst to herself, while at college: the first she knew of it was when she was handed an invitation to a screen test. Manju’s instinct was to refuse: she knew herself to be shy and self-conscious and it was hard for her to imagine that she could ever enjoy acting. But when she returned to Lankasuka that afternoon, she found that the invitation was not quite so easily disposed of as she had imagined. She began to have doubts.

Manju’s bedroom had a large window: it was usually while sitting on the sill that she and Arjun had talked in the past. She’d never before had to decide on anything entirely on her own; she had always had Arjun to confer with. But Arjun was now many hundreds of miles away, at his battalion headquarters in Saharanpur, in northern India.

She sat on the sill alone, braiding and unbraiding her hair and watching the afternoon’s bathers splashing in the nearby lake. Presently she rose and went to fetch the Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tin in which she kept Arjun’s letters. The earliest ones dated back to his days as a ‘gentleman-cadet’ and the notepaper was embossed with the emblem of the Indian Military Academy. The pages crackled between her fingers. How well he wrote — in proper sentences and paragraphs. When they were together they always spoke Bengali, but the letters were in English — an unfamiliar, idiomatic English, with words of slang that she didn’t recognise and couldn’t find in the dictionary. He’d gone to a restaurant ‘in town’ with another cadet, Hardayal Singh — known as ‘Hardy’ to his friends — and they’d eaten ‘lashings’ of sandwiches and drunk ‘oodles’ of beer.

His latest letter had arrived just a few days ago. The notepaper was different now and it bore the insignia of his new regiment, the 1st Jat Light Infantry.

It’s quiet here, because we’re at our home station in Saharanpur. You probably think we spend all our time marching about in the sun. But it’s nothing like that. The only difficult thing is getting up early to go to the parade ground for P.T. with the men. After that it’s pretty quiet; we stroll around taking salutes and watching the NCOs as they put the men through their drills and their weapons training. But this takes only a couple of hours, and then we change for breakfast, which is at nine (stacks of eggs, bacon and ham). Then some of us go off to wait in the orderly room just in case any of the men are brought in. Once in a while the signals officers take us through the latest field codes, or else we get lessons in map-reading or double-entry book-keeping — that kind of thing. Then there’s lunch — and beer and gin if you want it (but no whisky!) — and after that you’re free to go off to your room. Later there’s usually time for a game of football with the men. At about 7.30 we drift off towards the mess lawn for a few whiskies before dinner. We call the mess the Nursery, as a joke, because potted plants die the moment they’re brought in — no one knows why. Some of the chaps say it’s because of the Dust of Colonels Past. We laugh about the Nursery but I tell you, sometimes halfway through dinner, or when we’re drinking a toast, I look around and even now, after all these months here, I just can’t believe my luck. .

The last time Manju had had a long talk with Arjun was on this very windowsill. It was a little more than a year ago, just after he graduated from the academy. She’d kept wanting to call him Second Lieutenant Arjun — partly to tease him, but also because she’d liked the sound of the words. She’d been disappointed that he didn’t wear his uniform more but he’d laughed at her when she told him this.

‘Why can’t you show me off to your friends as I am?’

The truth was that most of her friends at college were in love with him already. They’d badger her for news of him, and when they were over at the house they’d go to amazing lengths to ingratiate themselves with the family — hoping, of course, that someone would remember them when it came time to find a bride for Arjun.