Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Hardy crossed the room quickly: ‘Arjun? Did you hear? We’ve got the orders.’

Arjun pulled back the curtain, with a towel fastened around his waist.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. Heard from Adjutant-sah’b.’

They looked at each other without knowing what else to say. Hardy seated himself on the edge of the bed and began to crack his knuckles. Arjun started to button his starched dress shirt, flexing his knees, so that he could see himself in the mirror. He caught a glimpse of Hardy behind him, staring morosely at the floor. Trying to sound jocular, he said: ‘At least we’ll get to see if those damned mobilisation plans that we drew up are any good or not. .’

Hardy made no answer, and Arjun glanced over his shoulder. ‘Aren’t you glad the waiting’s over? Hardy?’

Hardy’s hands were clasped between his knees. He looked up suddenly. ‘I keep thinking. .’

‘Of what?’

‘Do you remember Chetwode Hall? At the Military Academy in Dehra Dun?’

‘Of course.’

‘There was an inscription which said: The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time. The honour, welfare and comfort of the men you command come next . .’

‘. . And your own ease, comfort and safety come last, always and every time .’ Arjun laughed as he finished the quotation for Hardy. ‘Of course I remember. It was inscribed on the podium — stared us in the face every time we entered Chetwode Hall.’

‘Didn’t it ever puzzle you — that inscription?’

‘No. Why should it?’

‘Well, didn’t you ever think: this country whose safety, honour and welfare are to come first, always and every time— what is it? Where is this country? The fact is that you and I don’t have a country — so where is this place whose safety, honour and welfare are to come first, always and every time? And why was it that when we took our oath it wasn’t to a country but to the King Emperor — to defend the Empire?’

Arjun turned to face him. ‘Hardy, what are you trying to get at?’

‘Just this.’ said Hardy. ‘Yaar, if my country really comes first, why am I being sent abroad? There’s no threat to my country right now — and if there were, it would be my duty to stay here and defend it.’

‘Hardy,’ Arjun said lightly, ‘staying here wouldn’t do much for your career. .’

‘Career, career.’ Hardy clicked his tongue, in disgust. ‘Yaar, don’t you ever think of anything else?’

‘Hardy.’ Arjun gave him a look of warning, to remind him of Kishan Singh’s presence.

Hardy shrugged and looked at his watch. ‘All right, I’ll shut up,’ he said, standing up to go. ‘I’d better change too. We’ll talk later.’

Hardy left and Kishan Singh carried Arjun’s trousers into the dressing room. Kneeling on the floor, he held them open, by the waistband. Arjun stepped into them gingerly, taking care not to shatter the fragile sharpness of their glassy creases. Rising to his feet, Kishan Singh began to circle around Arjun, tucking his shirt-tails into his trousers.

Kishan Singh’s hand brushed against the small of Arjun’s back and he stiffened: he was on the verge of snapping at his batman to hurry up, when he stopped himself. It annoyed him to think that after two years as a commissioned officer he had still not succeeded in training himself to be at ease with the enforced intimacies of military life. This was one of the many things, he knew, that set him apart from the real faujis, the born-and-bred army-wallahs like Hardy. He’d once watched Hardy going through this very process of dressing for Guest Night with his batman’s help: he was oblivious of the man’s presence in a way that he, Arjun, never was of Kishan Singh’s.

Suddenly Kishan Singh spoke up, taking Arjun by surprise. ‘Sah’b,’ he said, ‘do you know where the battalion is going?’

‘No. Nobody does. We won’t know till we’re on the ship.’

Kishan Singh started wrapping Arjun’s cummerbund around his waist. ‘Sah’b,’ he said, ‘the NCOs have been saying that we’ll be going east. .’

‘Why?’

‘At first we were training for the desert and everyone said we would be going to North Africa. But the equipment we were sent recently was clearly meant for the rain. .’

‘Who’s been telling you all this?’ Arjun said in surprise.

‘Everyone, sah’b. Even in the villages they know. My mother and my wife came to visit last week. They’d heard a rumour that we were about to leave.’

‘What did they say?’

‘My mother said, “Kishan Singh, when are you going to come back”?’

‘And what did you tell her?’

Kishan Singh was kneeling in front of Arjun now, checking his fly buttons and smoothing down his trousers, pinching the creases to restore their edge. Arjun could see only the top of his head, and the whorled patterns of his close-cropped hair.

Suddenly, Kishan Singh looked up at him. ‘Sah’b, I told her that you would make sure that I came back. .’

Arjun, caught by surprise, felt the blood rushing to his face. There was something inexplicably moving about the sheer guilelessness of this expression of trust. He felt at a loss for words.

Once, during their conversations at Charbagh, Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland had said that the reward of serving in India, for Englishmen of his father’s generation, lay in their bonds with ‘the men’. This relationship, he had said, was of an utterly different kind from that of the regular British army, the mutual loyalties of Indian soldier and English officer being at once so powerful and so inexplicable that they could be understood only as a kind of love.

Arjun recalled how strange this word had sounded on the CO’s reticent lips and how he had been tempted to scoff. It seemed that in these stories ‘the men’ figured only as abstractions, a faceless collectivity imprisoned in a permanent childhood — moody, unpredictable, fantastically brave, desperately loyal, prone to extraordinary excesses of emotion. Yet, he knew it to be true that even for himself there were times when it seemed as though the attributes of that faceless collectivity—‘the men’—had been conjured into reality by a single soldier, Kishan Singh: that the bond that had come into being between them really was a kind of love. It was impossible to know how far this was Kishan Singh’s own doing and how far it was the product of the peculiar intimacy of their circumstances; or was it perhaps something else altogether, that Kishan Singh, in his very individuality, had become more than himself — a village, a country, a history, a mirror for Arjun to see refractions of himself?

For an eerie instant Arjun saw himself in Kishan Singh’s place: as a batman, kneeling before a dinner-jacketed officer, buffing his shoes, reaching into his trousers to tuck in his shirt, checking his fly buttons, looking up from the shelter of his parted feet, asking for protection. He gritted his teeth.

The morning after his arrival, Dinu borrowed a bicycle and went to look for the ruined chandis of Gunung Jerai. Alison drew him a map and he followed it: the track ran uphill most of the way from Morningside House and he had to mount and dismount several times, wheeling his machine up the steeper inclines. He made a couple of wrong turns but eventually found his way to the very spot where Alison had parked her car the last time. The stream lay below and its surroundings were exactly as he remembered: there was a shallow ford, bridged by flat stones. A little lower down the slope, the stream widened into a pool, ringed by massive boulders. On the far side, a narrow path led into the jungle.