Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve been thinking about what you’ve been saying these many years, Dolly.’

‘What exactly?’

‘That we should leave.’

With a long sigh of relief, Dolly reached for his hand. ‘So you’ve been thinking of that at last?’

‘Yes. But it’s hard, Dolly — it’s hard to think of leaving: Burma has given me everything I have. The boys have grown up here: they’ve never known any other home. When I first came to Mandalay the nakhoda of my boat said: This is a golden land — no one ever starves here. That proved true for me, and despite everything that’s happened recently, I don’t think I could ever love another place in the same way. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my life, Dolly, it is that there is no certainty about these things. My father was from Chittagong and he ended up in the Arakan; I ended up in Rangoon; you went from Mandalay to Ratnagiri and now you’re here too. Why should we expect that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives here? There are people who have the luck to end their lives where they began them. But this is not something that is owed to us. On the contrary, we have to expect that a time will come when we’ll have to move on again. Rather than be swept along by events, we should make plans and take control of our own fate.’

‘What are you trying to say, Rajkumar?’

‘Just that it doesn’t matter whether I think of Burma as home or not. What matters is what people think of us. And it’s plain enough that men like me are now seen as the enemy— on all sides. This is the reality and I have to acknowledge it. My job now is to find a way of making sure that Dinu and Neel are provided for.’

‘Surely they’re provided for already?’

Rajkumar paused before answering. ‘Dolly, I think you’re aware that the business hasn’t been doing well lately. But you probably don’t know the full extent of it.’

‘And how bad is that?’

‘It’s not good, Dolly,’ he said quietly. ‘There are debts— many of them.’

‘But, Rajkumar, if we sold the house, the yards, our share in Morningside — surely something would be left so that the boys could make a start somewhere else?’

Rajkumar began to cough. ‘That wouldn’t work, Dolly. As things stand at this minute, even if we sold everything it still wouldn’t be enough. As for Morningside, Matthew has troubles of his own, you know. Rubber was very badly hit by the Depression. We can’t rush into this, Dolly — that way we’re sure to run into disaster. This has to be done very, very carefully. We have to give it time. .’

‘I don’t know, Rajkumar.’ Dolly began to pick worriedly at the end of her htamein. ‘Things are happening so fast now— people say that the war may spread; that Japan may get into it; that they could even attack Burma.’

Rajkumar smiled. ‘That’s impossible, Dolly. You just have to look at a map. To get here the Japanese would have to come across Singapore and Malaya. Singapore is one of the most heavily defended places in the world. The British have tens of thousands of troops there. There are thirty-six-inch guns all along the shore. We can’t be chasing after smoke, Dolly, we can’t do things in a panic. If this is to work, we have to be realistic, we have to make careful plans.’

Dolly leant over him to fluff up the pillows on his bed. ‘So do you have a plan then?’

‘Not yet, but I’ve been thinking. Whatever we do, it’ll take time — at least a year, maybe more. You have to prepare yourself. I want to make it possible for us to leave Burma with enough so that the boys can settle comfortably somewhere — in India, or wherever they want to go.’

‘And after that?’

‘The two of us will be free.’

‘To do what?’

‘Well, you’ve already decided — you want to live in Sagaing.’ ‘And what about you?’

‘Perhaps I’ll come back too, Dolly. I sometimes think of living quietly in Huay Zedi — I’m sure Doh Say would have a place for me — and it wouldn’t be so far from you.’

Dolly laughed. ‘So you’re going to sell everything, uproot all of us, go through all this, just to come back and live quietly in Huay Zedi?’

‘It’s not for myself that I’m thinking of doing this, Dolly— it’s for the boys.’

Rajkumar smiled and allowed his head to fall back against his pillows. Once before in his life, he had known himself to be at a crossroads — that was when he was trying to get his first contract, for the Chota-Nagpur Railway. He’d thought hard and come up with a plan that had worked, laying the foundations of his future success. This time too he would have to think of something, a plan that would work: this would be his last challenge, the last hill to cross. After that he would rest. There was no shame in growing old and seeking rest.

The first months of the war found Arjun and his battalion on the frontiers of Afghanistan. Arjun was on garrison duty, at a small outpost called Charbagh, near the Khyber Pass. The border was quiet — unusually so, the older officers said — and the conflict in Europe seemed very far away. Charbagh was manned by a single company of soldiers, Arjun being the sole officer. The surroundings were spectacularly beautiful: craggy, ochre mountains, streaked with great slashes of brilliantly coloured rock. There was little to do apart from daily drills, barracks inspections and occasional marches with training columns. Arjun spent long hours reading and soon ran out of books.

At regular fortnightly intervals, the battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bucky’ Buckland, stopped by on tours of inspection. The CO was a tall, professorial-looking man with a ruff of wiry hair clinging to the base of his high-domed, balding head.

‘And what do you do with your time, Lieutenant?’ the CO asked offhandedly on one of his visits. ‘Do you shoot at all? I’ve heard there’s plenty of game to be had here.’

‘Actually, sir,’ Arjun said quietly, ‘I read books. .’

‘Oh?’ The CO turned to look at him with new interest. ‘I didn’t take you for a reader. And may I ask what you read?’

Their tastes proved to be complementary: the CO introduced Arjun to Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. Arjun lent him his copies of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. These exchanges became a pleasurable part of Arjun’s life at Charbagh and he began to look forward to the CO’s visits. In between there were long days when nothing happened. There was little to do apart from talking to the occasional traveller.

Late in the summer, Arjun’s friend Hardy stopped by on his way to his own post, atop the Khyber Pass. Hardy was a quiet, clear-eyed man of medium height and average build. Whether in or out of uniform he was always neatly dressed— with the folds of his turban layered in precise order and his beard combed tight against his chin. Despite his soldiering background, Hardy did not in any way resemble the Sikh warriors of military lore — he was soft-spoken and slow-moving, with an expression of habitual sleepiness. He had a good ear for a tune and was usually the first in the mess to learn the latest Hindi film songs. It was his habit — annoying to some and entertaining to others — to hum these melodies under his breath as he went about his work. These quirks sometimes brought him a little more than his fair share of ‘ragging’—yet his friends knew that there were certain limits beyond which he could not be goaded: although generally slow to take offence, Hardy was inflexible when roused and had a long memory for grudges.

Hardy had just spent a period of leave in his village. On his first night at Charbagh he told Arjun about some odd rumours that he’d heard during his stay. Most of his neighbours had relatives in the army, and some of them had spoken of incidents of unrest: troops were said to be resisting transfer orders abroad. In Bombay, a Sikh unit — a squadron of the Central India Horse — was said to have mutinied. They had lain down their weapons and refused to board the ship that was to take them to North Africa. Two men had been executed. A dozen others had been exiled to the prisons of the Andaman Islands. Some of these men were from Hardy’s own village: there could be no doubt about the reliability of these reports.