Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

When Alison first broke the news of her parents’ deaths to Saya John, his response had consisted of nothing more than a slight smile. A series of questions had followed, asked almost playfully, as though the situation that was under discussion was at best a remote possibility — an imaginative hypothesis that Alison had propounded in order to explain her parents’ prolonged absence from the dinner table.

Alison had been so afraid of the impact the news might have on her grandfather that she had gone to great lengths to compose herself, caking make-up over the discolourations of her face and tying a scarf over her disarranged hair. Every eventuality that she could think of she had tried to prepare herself for. But the sight of her grandfather’s childlike smile proved beyond her bearing. She got up and ran out of the room.

Saya John was now in his late eighties. His lifelong regimen of early-morning exercise had served him well, and he was in relatively sound health. His hearing had not deteriorated greatly and although his eyesight had never been good, he was still able to see his way round the house and grounds. Before the accident his advancing age had occasionally betrayed itself in a tendency towards confusion. He would often forget things that had been said to him minutes before, while still being able to recall, in minute detail, events that had occurred forty or fifty years before. The accident greatly accelerated this tendency: Alison could see that contrary to his pretence, the news of her parents’ deaths had indeed registered on her grandfather’s mind. But his response was not unlike that of a child’s reaction to unwelcome noise: he had figuratively stopped his ears with his fingers, in order to shut out what he did not wish to know. With each passing day he spoke less and less. He would come down to eat with Alison, but he’d sit at the hardwood table in blank silence. Such sentences as he addressed to Alison, would begin, almost invariably, with observations like: ‘When Matthew comes back. .’, or ‘We must remember to tell Elsa. .’

In the beginning Alison responded to these remarks with undisguised fury, slamming her hands on the polished table, and repeating several times over: ‘Matthew is not coming back. .’ At the time nothing seemed more important than that he should make proper acknowledgement of what had happened. In this she envisaged, if not a lessening of her own grief, then at least a sharing of its burden. But he would smile through her outbursts, and at the end he would carry on where she had interrupted him: ‘. . and when they come back. .’

It seemed somehow indecent, even obscene — a profanation of parenthood — that he should respond so blandly to so great a loss. But she saw that her insistence and her banging of tables made no difference: that short of hitting him, she had no means of forcing a rupture in the protective blanket of confusion that he had drawn around himself. She forced herself to gain control of her anger, but this came at the cost of acknowledging a further loss — that of her grandfather. She and her Baba, as she called him, had always been very close. Now it was as though she were being forced to accept that he was no longer a sentient presence in her life; that the comforts of the companionship they had shared had ceased for ever; that he who had always been an unfailing source of support had now, in the hour of her greatest need, chosen to become a burden. Of all the betrayals he could have perpetrated, this seemed the most terrible — that he should become a child in this moment of her utter abandonment. She could never have imagined it.

These weeks would have been unendurable, but for a single fortuitous circumstance. Some years before, acting on a whim, Saya John had adopted one of the plantation workers’ children—‘that boy who’s always hanging around the house’— Ilongo. The boy had continued to live with his mother, but Saya John had paid for his schooling in the nearby town of Sungei Pattani. Later he had sent him to a technical institution in Penang and Ilongo had qualified as an electrician.

Ilongo was now twenty, a dark, curly-haired youth, slow-moving and soft-spoken, but of imposing height and build. On finishing his electrician’s course, Ilongo had returned to the vicinity of Morningside — his mother now lived in a small, tin-roofed house on the outskirts of the estate.

In the aftermath of the accident, Ilongo came often to see Saya John at Morningside House. Gradually, and without an unduly intrusive display of concern, he took over many of the daily functions of caring for the old man. His was an unobtrusive yet quietly reliable presence, and Alison soon found herself looking to him for help in running the plantation’s offices. Ilongo had grown up on Morningside and knew every worker on the estate. They in turn accorded him an authority unlike that of anyone else on the plantation. He had come of age on the estate, but he’d also stepped outside its boundaries, learnt to speak Malay and English, acquired an education. He had no need to raise his voice or utter threats in order to gain respect: they trusted him as one of their own.

Saya John too found reassurance in his company. Every Sunday Ilongo would borrow a truck from the estate and drive him down to the Church of Christ the King, in Sungei Pattani. On the way they would stop at the shaded arcades of the red-tiled shophouses that lined the town’s main street. Saya John would go into a small restaurant and ask for the proprietor, Ah Fatt, a large man with bright gold incisors. Ah Fatt had political connections in southern China, and Saya John had been a generous contributor ever since Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. Each week he would hand Ah Fatt a sum of money, in an envelope, to be sent on.

On those days when he was at Morningside House, it was Ilongo who answered the telephone. One day he came cycling down from the house to see Alison at the estate office.

‘There was a call. .’

‘From whom?’

‘Mr Dinu Raha.’

‘What?’ Alison was sitting at her desk. She looked up with a frown. ‘Dinu? Are you sure?’

‘Yes. He was calling from Penang. He’s just arrived from Rangoon. He’s coming to Sungei Pattani by train.’

‘Oh?’ Alison thought back to the letters that Dolly had written her in the weeks after her parents’ deaths: she recalled a reference to an impending visit — but the letter had said that it would be Neel who’d be coming, not Dinu.

‘Are you sure it was Dinu?’ she asked Ilongo again.

‘Yes.’

She glanced at her watch. ‘Perhaps I’ll go to the station to meet him.’

‘He said there was no need: he’d find a taxi.’

‘Oh? Well, I’ll see. There’s still time.’ Ilongo left and she sat back in her chair, turning to face a window that looked out over the plantation, towards the distant blue of the Andaman Sea. It was a long time since she’d last had a visitor. Immediately after her parents’ death, the house had been full. Friends and relatives had come from Penang, Malacca, Singapore — there had been piles of telegrams. Timmy had come all the way from New York, flying across the Pacific on PanAm’s China Clipper. In the overwhelming bewilderment of that time, Alison had found herself praying that Morningside would be filled for ever with people: it was inconceivable that she should have to face, on her own, those rooms and corridors — the stairway where every join in the wood was a reminder of her mother. But a week or two had gone by and then the house had emptied just as suddenly as it had filled up. Timmy had left to go back to New York. He had his own business now and couldn’t be too long away. In departing he had as good as handed Morningside over to her — to sell or run as she chose. In time, her sense of abandonment had yielded to the understanding that she could not look to the past to fill the gaps in her present; that she could not hope for the lingering traces of her parents’ lives to serve as a buffer between herself and the aching isolation of Morningside — the crushing monotony, the solitude that resulted from being always surrounded by the same faces, the same orderly rows of trees, the inescapable sight of the same clouds hanging upon the same mountain.