The Glass Palace (53 page)

As his intimacy with the ruins deepened, Dinu began to find that his eye would go directly to the place where the temple's principal image would once have stood: his hands would reach automatically for the niches where offerings of flowers would have been laid; he began to recognise the limits beyond which he could not step without removing his shoes. When he crossed the stream, after bicycling through the estate, it was no longer as though he were tiptoeing into a place that was strange and unfamiliar, where life and order yielded to darkness and shadow. It was when he crossed back into the monochrome orderliness of the plantation that he felt himself to be passing into a territory of ruin, a defilement much more profound than temporal decay.

Late one afternoon, while standing at his tripod, he was alerted to the sound of a car by a commotion among the jungle's birds. He made his way quickly down the path to a vantage point where a gap in the greenery permitted a view of the stream below. He spotted Alison's red Daytona approaching on the far side. He left his tripod standing where it was and went hurrying down the path.

Dinu had seen very little of Alison since the day of his arrival. She left the house before dawn, in order to be present at Muster, and when she came back, he was usually out on the mountainside taking pictures. They generally met only at dinnertime, when conversation was inevitably constrained by Saya John's vacant silences. She seemed not to know how to fit a visitor into the fixed routines of her life on the plantation, and Dinu, for his part, was burdened by the knowledge of the task with which he had been entrusted. He knew that he would have to find a way of telling her that his father wanted to dispose of his share of Morningside and this seemed impossible at a time when she was so preoccupied, both with the grief of her parents' death, and with the daily anxieties of keeping the plantation afloat.

By the time Dinu reached the end of the path Alison had crossed the stream. Finding himself face to face with her now, he couldn't think of what to say and began to fumble in his pockets for a cigarette.

‘Going back to the house?' he said at last, through his teeth, while striking a match.

‘I thought I'd come by and see how you were getting on.'

‘I was just setting up my camera . . .' He walked with her to the clearing, where his tripod was placed in front of one of the chandis.

‘Can I watch you take pictures?' she asked brightly.

He hesitated, raising the cigarette to his mouth, squinting into the smoke. As though sensing a reluctance, Alison said, ‘Would you mind? Would I be bothering you?'

‘No,' he said. ‘It's not that . . . you wouldn't be bothering me exactly . . . It's just that when I'm shooting I have to concentrate very hard . . . or it's a waste . . . It's like any other kind of work, you know . . . it's not easy to do if you're being watched.'

‘I see.' The hollow sound of her voice indicated that she'd read this as a rebuff. ‘Well, I'll go then.'

‘No,' he said quickly, ‘please stay . . . but then, if you're going to be here, could I take a few pictures of you . . .?'

She was quick to deal out a rebuff of her own. ‘No. I'm not really in the right frame of mind to become a part of your—your work.' She turned on her heel and headed down the path, towards the stream.

Dinu knew himself to be stranded unwittingly in a quarrel.

‘Alison . . . I didn't mean . . .' He hurried after her, but she was walking fast and his leg put him at a disadvantage. ‘Alison . . . please stay.' He caught up with her at the edge of the stream. ‘Alison . . . I was just telling you what it's like . . . when I make a picture . . . I didn't mean to put you off . . . won't you stay?'

‘Not now,' she glanced at her watch. ‘Not today.'

‘Then you'll come back?'

She'd already started across the ford. In mid-stream, without turning round, she raised a hand to wave.

Just before the battalion's departure from Saharanpur, new war equipment tables arrived. This meant that Arjun and Hardy had to stay up all night, revising their carefully prepared Unit Mobilisation Scheme. But in the end all was well: the CO was pleased and the battalion was able to go ahead with its entrainment as planned. The train left for Bombay on schedule.

At Ajmer there was a slight delay. The 1/1 Jats were shunted aside so that a trainload of Italian prisoners of war could pass by. The Italians and Indians stared at each other in silence across the platform, through the barred windows of their respective carriages. This was their first glimpse of the enemy.

Next morning, they arrived at Bombay's Victoria terminus. They were told that their troop ship, the H.M.T.
Nuwara Eliya
, was waiting at the harbour. They drove to the Sassoon docks to find that their embarkation orders had already been issued.

The docks proved to be unexpectedly congested. It turned out that a British battalion was boarding another ship at exactly the same time. Soon the two battalions' baggage and equipment were hopelessly entangled with each other. NCOs began to shout, spreading panic among the dockworkers. Hardy was thrown into the midst of the confusion: he was the baggage officer for the 1/1 Jats and it fell on him to try and restore order.

Looking in Hardy's roster, Arjun learnt that he had been allotted a cabin to himself. He had never been on a ship before and was barely able to contain his excitement. He went hurrying up the gangplank to look for his cabin, with Kishan Singh following close behind, carrying his luggage.

They were the first to board and the ship was empty, but for its crew. Everything seemed new and startling: the white gunwales and narrow catwalks, the yawning hatches and the rounded frames of the portholes.

As they were stepping on to the upper deck, Kishan Singh happened to glance over the side. ‘Sah'b—look!' He pointed, drawing Arjun's attention to an altercation on the docks below. Arjun saw that Hardy had got himself into a shouting match
with a hulking British sergeant. They were standing toe to toe, with Hardy shaking a sheaf of papers under the sergeant's nose.

‘Stay here.'

Arjun went racing down the way he had come. He arrived on the scene just a moment too late. Another officer from their battalion had got there before him—Captain Pearson, the adjutant, a bluff, stocky Englishman, with a booming voice and a quick temper.

Watching from a few paces away, Arjun saw Hardy turning to Captain Pearson. It was clear that Hardy was relieved to see the adjutant, fully confident that his senior would back him up—out of loyalty to a fellow-member of the battalion, if nothing else. But Captain Pearson had never made a secret of his belief that Hardy was ‘difficult' and ‘overly sensitive'. Instead of supporting him, he let his annoyance show: ‘Lieutenant, have you got yourself into a row again . . .?'

Arjun saw the look on Hardy's face change from relief to seething outrage. It was painful to stand there as a silent witness to his friend's humiliation. He turned and slipped away.

Later that day, Hardy came to his cabin.

‘We've got to teach that bastard Pearson a lesson,' he said. ‘That bloody sergeant called me a stinking nigger in front of the men. Pearson let him get away with it. Yaar, would you believe it, the bugger blamed me! The only way we can stop this kind of thing is by sticking together.'

‘What exactly do you mean?'

‘I think we should boycott him.'

‘He's the adjutant, Hardy,' Arjun said. ‘How can we boycott him? Be reasonable.'

‘There are ways of getting a message across,' Hardy said angrily. ‘But that can happen only when you know which side you're on.' Rising abruptly to his feet, he left Arjun's cabin.

For two days the
Nuwara Eliya
waited offshore, while nine other ships assembled in the harbour. There was a rumour that a German submarine was lurking nearby and the ships were
assigned an escort of two destroyers, an armed merchantman and a light cruiser. When the convoy finally departed, it was in a westerly direction, heading towards the setting sun. Their destination was still unknown; they had no idea whether they were to go east or west.

In Bombay, the CO had been handed a sealed envelope that was to be opened exactly twenty-four hours after their departure. When the time came, Arjun and the other officers gathered in a dining room on the
Nuwara Eliya
's upper deck. The CO opened the envelope in his usual deliberate way, prising the seal off the paper with a knife. The officers waited in expectant silence. Arjun could feel a clammy dampness welling up in the palms of his hands.

Then at last, the CO looked up with a thin smile. He held the sheet of paper in front of him and read out aloud: ‘This ship is headed for Singapore.'

Arjun stepped out on deck and found Hardy already there, leaning over the gunwale, humming softly under his breath. Behind them the white ribbon of the ship's wake had already begun to describe a curve as the convoy slowly changed direction.

twenty-nine

M
anju had never been happier than she was in the first months of her pregnancy. She relished every reminder of her changing condition: the often imaginary twitches and movements; the pangs of hunger that could never be properly satisfied; even the nausea that woke her every morning and the acid tingling of her teeth.

The Kemendine house had changed greatly in the two years she'd been in Rangoon. Dinu was gone of course, and his apartment upstairs lay empty. Neel and Rajkumar were often away, arranging for the disposal of the family's properties or buying new stocks of teak. For much of the time Manju and Dolly had the house to themselves. The compound had grown unkempt; where there had once been a lawn the grass now stood knee-high. Many rooms and outhouses were locked up; much of the furniture had been sold. The dozens of employees who had once populated the place were gone—the servants, watchmen, gardeners and their families. Even U Ba Kyaw, the chauffeur, had gone back to his village. The Packard was one of the few disposable possessions that Rajkumar had retained, but it was now driven mainly by Neel.

Neither Manju nor Dolly regretted the emptying of the house. On the contrary, it was as though an enormous accumulation of cobwebs had been swept away, allowing them new and unaccustomed freedoms. In the past Dolly had often seemed remote and unapproachable to Manju, but now they
became allies, colleagues, team-mates, working together for the family's renewal. Between the two of them they had little difficulty in managing the house.

On waking in the morning, Manju would find Dolly on her knees, dressed in a frayed old longyi, wiping the floors with tattered shreds of cloth. They would work together, going through a couple of rooms each day, breaking off when the monks came by for their daily visits.

For Manju these mid-morning breaks were the best-loved aspect of daily life in Rangoon. She'd always known that Buddhist monks lived by collecting alms, but it came as a surprise to observe the ways in which this tenet, more or less abstract, came to be translated into the mundane mechanics of everyday life—into the workaday reality of a tired-looking group of young men and boys, walking down a dusty street in saffron robes, with their baskets balanced on their hips. There was something magical about the fact that this interruption came always at a time of day when the tasks of the household were at their most pressing; when there was scarcely room in one's head but to think about what had to be done next. And in the midst of all that—to open the door and see the monks standing there, waiting patiently, with the sun beating down on their shaven heads: what better way could there be of unbalancing everyday reality?

Calcutta seemed very far away now. The flow of letters from India had suffered disruptions because of the threat of submarines in the Bay of Bengal. Steamer traffic between Calcutta and Rangoon had become so irregular that letters tended to arrive in bunches.

One such bunch brought news both of Arjun's impending departure and of his arrival in Malaya. Dolly was very glad to hear of this development: ‘Perhaps Arjun could find out what's become of Dinu,' she said. ‘It's a long time since we last heard from him.'