Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

Soon their battalion was sent north. The Malayan countryside was a revelation to the Indian officers. They had never seen such prosperity, such beautiful roads, such tidy, well-laid-out little towns. Often, when they stopped, the local Indian residents would invite them to their houses. These were usually middle-class people with modest jobs — provincial lawyers and doctors, clerks and shopkeepers. But the signs of affluence in their homes were such as to amaze Arjun and his fellow-soldiers. It seemed that in Malaya even ordinary people were able to afford cars and refrigerators: some even had air conditioners and telephones. In India only Europeans and the richest of rich Indians could afford such things.

Driving along rural roads, the officers discovered that in Malaya the only people who lived in abject, grinding poverty were plantation labourers — almost all of whom were Indian in origin. They were astonished at the difference between the plantations’ ordered greenery and the squalor of their coolie lines. Hardy once remarked on the starkness of the contrast and Arjun responded by pointing out that in India, they would have taken such poverty for granted; that the only reason they happened to notice it now was because of its juxtaposition with Malaya’s prosperous towns. This thought made them both cringe in shame. It was as though they were examining their own circumstances for the first time, in retrospect; as though the shock of travel had displaced an indifference that had been inculcated in them since their earliest childhood.

Other shocks awaited. Out of uniform, Arjun and his friends found that they were often mistaken for coolies. In markets and bazaars shopkeepers treated them offhandedly, as though they were of no account. At other times — and this was worse still — they would find themselves being looked upon with something akin to pity. Once, Arjun got into an argument with a shopkeeper and found himself being called Klang— to his puzzlement. Later, enquiring about the meaning of this word, he discovered that it was a derogatory reference to the sound of the chains worn by the earliest Indian workers who were brought to Malaya.

Soon it seemed as though there was not a man in the battalion who had not found himself embroiled in an unsettling encounter of one kind or another. One evening, Kishan Singh was oiling Arjun’s revolver, squatting on the floor, when he looked up suddenly. ‘Sah’b,’ he said to Arjun, ‘can I ask you the meaning of an English word?’

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘ Mercenary— what does it mean?’

‘ Mercenary ?’ Arjun started in surprise. ‘Where did you hear this word?’

Kishan Singh explained that during one of their recent moves, their convoy of trucks had stopped at a roadside tea-stall, near the town of Ipoh. There were some local Indians sitting in the tea-stall. They had announced themselves to be members of a political group — the Indian Independence League. Somehow an argument had started. The civilians had told them that they — the 1/1 Jats — weren’t real soldiers; they were just hired killers, mercenaries. A fight would have broken out, if the convoy hadn’t got under way again. But later, when they were back on the road, they had begun to argue again— with each other this time — about the word mercenary and what it meant.

Arjun’s instinct was to bark an order at Kishan Singh, telling him to shut up and get on with what he was doing. But by now he knew his batman well enough to be aware that an order would not deter him from looking for an answer to his question. Thinking quickly Arjun embarked on an explanation: mercenaries were merely soldiers who were paid for their work, he said. In this sense all soldiers, in all modern armies, were mercenaries. Hundreds of years ago soldiers had fought out of religious belief, or because of allegiance to their tribes, or to defend their kings. But those days were long past: now soldiering was a job, a profession, a career. Every soldier was paid and there was none who was not a mercenary.

This seemed to satisfy Kishan Singh, and he asked no more questions. But it was Arjun himself who now came to be troubled by the answer he had given his batman. If it was true (and it undoubtedly was) that all contemporary soldiers were mercenaries, then why did the word have the sting of an insult? Why did he feel himself smarting at its use? Was it because soldiering was not just a job after all, as he had taught himself to believe? That to kill without conviction violated some deep and unalterable human impulse?

One night he and Hardy stayed up late, discussing this subject over a bottle of brandy. Hardy agreed that it was hard to explain why it was so shameful to be called a mercenary. But it was he who eventually put his finger on it: ‘It’s because a mercenary’s hands obey someone else’s head; those two parts of his body have no connection with each other.’ He paused to smile at Arjun: ‘Because, yaar, in other words, a mercenary is a buddhu , a fool.’

Arjun refused to be drawn into Hardy’s jocularity. He said: ‘So are we mercenaries, do you think?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘All soldiers are mercenaries today,’ he said. ‘In fact, why just stop with soldiers? In one way or another we’re all a little like that woman you went to in Delhi— dancing to someone else’s tune, taking money. There’s not that much difference.’ He tipped back his glass, with a laugh.

Arjun found an opportunity to take his doubts to Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland. He told him about the incident at the tea-stall and recommended that the other ranks’ contacts with the local Indian population be more closely supervised. Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland heard him out patiently, interrupting only to nod assent: ‘Yes, you’re right, Roy, something must be done.’

But Arjun came away from this conversation even more disturbed than before. He had a feeling that the Lieutenant-Colonel could not understand why he was so outraged at being described as a ‘mercenary’; in his voice there had been an undertone of surprise that someone as intelligent as Arjun could take offence at something that was no more than a statement of fact. It was as though the Lieutenant-Colonel knew something about him, that he, Arjun, either did not know or was not willing to recognise. Arjun was embarrassed now to think that he’d allowed himself to go off at the deep end. It was as though he were a child who’d taken umbrage at the discovery that he’d spoken prose all his life.

These experiences were so peculiar, so provocative of awkward emotions, that Arjun and the other officers could rarely bring themselves to speak of them. They had always known their country to be poor, yet they had never imagined themselves to be part of that poverty: they were the privileged, the elite. The discovery that they were poor too came as a revelation. It was as though a grimy curtain of snobbery had prevented them from seeing what was plainly before their eyes — that although they had never been hungry, they too were impoverished by the circumstances of their country; that such impressions as they’d had of their own wellbeing were delusions, compounded out of the unimaginable extremity of their homeland’s poverty.

The strange thing was that even more than Arjun, it was the real faujis — the second- and third-generation army-wallahs— on whom these experiences had the most powerful effect. ‘But your father and grandfather were here,’ Arjun said to Hardy. ‘It was they who helped in the colonisation of these places. They must have seen some of the things that we’ve seen. Did they never speak of all this?’

‘They didn’t see things as we do,’ Hardy said. ‘They were illiterate yaar. You have to remember that we’re the first generation of educated Indian soldiers.’