Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Although Dinu and Arjun had known each other a long time they had never been friends. Dinu tended to think of Arjun on the analogy of a friendly and bumbling pet — a large dog perhaps, or a well-trained mule — a creature of unfailing, tail-wagging goodwill, but incurably indolent and barely capable of coherent utterance. But Dinu was not so arrogant as to be unwilling to correct himself. At Howrah station, on the day when he photographed Arjun running across the platform, he saw immediately that this was a significantly changed person from the boy he had known. Arjun had lost his somnolence, and his patterns of speech were no longer so garbled and indistinct as they had once been. This itself was an interesting paradox, for Arjun’s vocabulary seemed now to consist mainly of jargon intermixed with assorted bits of English and Punjabi slang — everyone was now either a ‘chap’ or a ‘ yaar ’.

But on the way home from the station Arjun did something that astonished Dinu. In reminiscing about a tactical exercise, he launched into a description of a feature of topography— a hill. He listed its ridges and outcrops, the exact nature of its vegetation and the cover it afforded, he quoted the angle of the slope’s incline and laughed about how his friend Hardy had got it wrong so that his results ‘wouldn’t play’.

Dinu understood words and images and the bridge of metaphor that linked the two — these were not languages with which he had ever thought to associate Arjun. Yet, by the end of Arjun’s description, Dinu felt that he could see the hill, in his head. Of those who listened to Arjun’s account, he alone was perhaps fully aware of the extreme difficulty of achieving such minuteness of recall and such vividness of description: he was awed, both by the precision of Arjun’s narrative and by the off-handed lack of self-consciousness with which it was presented.

‘Arjun,’ he said, fixing him with his dour, unblinking stare. ‘I’m amazed. . you described that hill as though you’d remembered every little bit of it.’

‘Of course,’ said Arjun. ‘My CO says that, under fire, you pay with a life for every missed detail.’

This too made Dinu take notice. He’d imagined that he knew the worth of observation, yet he’d never conceived that its value might be weighed in lives. There was something humbling about the thought of this. He’d regarded a soldier’s training as being, in the first instance, physical, a matter of the body. It took just that one conversation to show him that he had been wrong. Dinu’s friends were mainly writers and intellectuals: he had never met a serviceman in all his life. Now suddenly, in Calcutta, he found himself surrounded by soldiers. Within hours of his arrival, Arjun had filled the house with his friends. It turned out that he knew a couple of officers at the Fort William cantonment in Calcutta. Once he’d made contact, his friends began to turn up at all times of day, in jeeps and occasionally even in trucks, their arrival signalled by booming klaxons and noisy boots.

‘This is how it always happens in the army, yaar,’ one of them said, by way of apologetic explanation. ‘Where one fauji goes, the whole paltan follows. .’

In the past Dinu’s attitude towards the army had varied between outright hostility and amused indifference. Now he found himself more puzzled than antagonistic, increasingly interested in the mechanisms that made them tick. He was astonished by the communal nature of their lives; by the pleasure that Arjun, for instance, took in ‘mucking in’ with the others. This was a way of thinking and working that was the antithesis of everything that Dinu stood for and believed in. He himself was always happiest when he was on his own, His friends were few and even with the best of them there was always a residue of unease, an analytic guardedness. This was one of the reasons why he derived so much pleasure from photography. There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.

Arjun, on the other hand, seemed to find immense satisfaction in working on the details of plans that had been dictated by others — not necessarily people either, but manuals of procedure. Once, speaking of his battalion’s move from one cantonment to another, he described their ‘entrainment’ routines with as much pride as though he had personally guided every soldier into the station. But at the end it emerged that his part had consisted of nothing more than standing at the door of a carriage and filling in a roster. Dinu was astonished to note that it was precisely from this that his satisfaction derived: the slow accumulation of small tasks, a piling up of rosters that culminated in the movement of a platoon and then a battalion.

Arjun was often at pains to explain that in the army, it was a vital necessity for ‘the chaps’ to possess a thorough and exhaustive understanding of one another; to know exactly how each of them would respond in certain circumstances. Yet, there was a paradox here that did not escape Dinu: when Arjun and his friends spoke of one another, their assessments were so exaggerated that they seemed to be inventing versions of themselves for collective consumption. In the fantastic bestiary of their table-talk, Hardy was the Spit-and-Polish perfectionist, Arjun a Ladies’ Man, another a Pukka Sahib and so on. These paper-thin portraits were a part of the collective lore of their camaraderie — a fellowship in which they took immense pride, investing it with metaphors that sometimes extended even beyond mere kinship. Usually they were just ‘brothers’ but at times they were also much more, even the ‘First True Indians’. ‘Look at us—’ they would say, ‘—Punjabis, Marathas, Bengalis, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims. Where else in India would you come across a group such as ours— where region and religion don’t matter — where we can all drink together and eat beef and pork and think nothing of it?’

Every meal at an officers’ mess, Arjun said, was an adventure, a glorious infringement of taboos. They ate foods that none of them had ever touched at home: bacon, ham and sausages at breakfast; roast beef and pork chops for dinner. They drank whisky, beer and wine, smoked cigars, cigarettes and cigarillos. Nor was this just a matter of satisfying appetites: every mouthful had a meaning — each represented an advance towards the evolution of a new, more complete kind of Indian. All of them had stories to tell about how their stomachs had turned the first time they had chewed upon a piece of beef or pork; they had struggled to keep the morsels down, fighting their revulsion. Yet they had persisted, for these were small but essential battles and they tested not just their manhood, but also their fitness to enter the class of officers. They had to prove, to themselves as well as to their superiors, that they were eligible to be rulers, to qualify as members of an elite: that they had vision enough to rise above the ties of their soil, to overcome the responses instilled in them by their upbringing.

‘Look at us!’ Arjun would say, after a whisky or two, ‘we’re the first modern Indians; the first Indians to be truly free. We eat what we like, we drink what we like, we’re the first Indians who’re not weighed down by the past.’

To Dinu this was profoundly offensive. ‘It’s not what you eat and drink that make you modern: it’s a way of looking at things. .’ He’d fetch reproductions that he’d cut out of magazines, of photographs by Stieglitz, Cunningham and Weston.

Arjun would shrug these off with a laughing retort: ‘To you the modern world is just something you read about. What you know of it you get from books and newspapers. We’re the ones who actually live with Westerners. .’

Dinu understood that it was through their association with Europeans that Arjun and his fellow-officers saw themselves as pioneers. They knew that to most of their compatriots the West was a distant abstraction: even though they might know themselves to be ruled by England, very few Indians had ever actually set eyes on an Englishman and fewer still had had occasion to speak to one. The English lived in their own enclaves and followed their own pursuits: most of the day-to-day tasks of ruling were performed by Indians. In the army, on the other hand, Indian officers were a band of the elect; they lived in a proximity with Westerners that was all but unknown to their compatriots. They shared the same quarters, ate the same food, did the same work: in this their situation was unlike that of any of the Empire’s other subjects.