The Glass Palace (76 page)

The gallery owner interrupted these reflections. ‘I take it you know this picture?' she said.

‘Yes. The woman in the middle was my great-aunt. Her name was Uma Dey.'

And then Jaya noticed a detail. ‘Look,' she said, ‘look how she's wearing her sari.'

The gallery owner leaned over to examine the print. ‘I don't see anything unusual in it. That's how everyone wears it.'

‘Actually,' said Jaya, ‘Uma Dey was one of the first women in India to wear a sari in this particular way.'

‘Which way?'

‘The way I'm wearing mine, for example—or you yours.'

The woman frowned. ‘This is how saris have always been worn,' she said matter-of-factly. ‘Saris are a very ancient garment.'

‘Yes, they are,' Jaya said quietly, ‘but not the ways of wearing them. The contemporary style of wearing a sari with a blouse and petticoat is not very old at all. It was invented by a man, in the days of the British Raj.'

Suddenly, across the years, she heard Uma's voice, explaining the evolution of sari-wearing. It gave Jaya a thrill, even after all those years, to recall how astonished she'd been when she'd first heard the story. She'd always imagined saris to be a part of the natural order of the Indian universe, handed down from immemorial antiquity. It had come as a shock to discover that the garment had a history, created by real people, through human volition.

On her way out of the gallery, Jaya stopped to buy a postcard reproduction of the picture. On the back there was a brief explanatory note: it said that Ratnagiri lay between Bombay and Goa. On an impulse, Jaya pulled her railway timetable out of her bag: she saw that her train was scheduled to stop at Ratnagiri on its way to Goa. It occurred to her that she could easily stop there for a night or two: the conference wasn't due to start until two days later.

Jaya walked out of the gallery and wandered into an Irani restaurant. She ordered some tea and sat down to think. She was suddenly possessed with the idea of going to Ratnagiri: she'd often thought of going and had always found reasons for putting it off. But perhaps the time was now: the photograph in the gallery seemed to be an indication of some kind—almost a sign. Ratnagiri was the place where her own, very particular, history had had its origins—but the thought of going there unsettled her, stirring up forgotten sediments of anxiety and disquiet.

She felt the need to talk to someone. She paid her bill and went outside. Bracing herself against the crowd, she walked up the street to a long-distance telephone booth. Stepping in, she dialled her own Calcutta number. After two rings her aunt answered. ‘Jaya? Where are you?'

‘Bombay . . .' Jaya explained what had happened. As she talked, she pictured her aunt, standing over the chipped black phone in her bedroom, frowning anxiously, her gold-rimmed reading glasses slipping down her long thin nose.

‘I'm thinking of spending a couple of nights in Ratnagiri,' Jaya said. ‘My train stops there, on the way to Goa.'

There was a silence. Then she heard Bela's voice, speaking quietly into the phone. ‘Yes—of course you must go; you should have gone years ago . . .'

Ratnagiri's setting was every bit as spectacular as Jaya had imagined. But she quickly discovered that very little remained of the places that she had heard about as a child. The jetty at Mandvi was a crumbling ruin; the Bhagavati temple, once just a spire and a shrine, was now a soaring mass of whitewashed concrete; Outram House, where King Thebaw and his entourage had lived for some twenty-five years, had been torn down and rebuilt. Ratnagiri itself was no longer the small, provincial town of Thebaw's time. It was a thriving city, with industries clustered thickly around it on all sides.

But the strange thing was that through all of this, the town had somehow succeeded in keeping King Thebaw and his memory vibrantly alive.
Thiba-Raja
was omnipresent in Ratnagiri: his name was emblazoned on signs and billboards, on street-corners, restaurants, hotels. The King had been dead more than eighty years, but in the bazaars people spoke of him as though they'd known him at first hand. Jaya found this touching at first, and then deeply moving—that a man such as Thebaw, so profoundly untransportable, should be still so richly loved in the land of his exile.

Jaya's first real find was the site of the Collector's residence— the place where Uma had lived. It turned out that it was right around the corner from her hotel, on the crest of a hill that overlooked the bay and the town. The compound was government property and it was surrounded by a massive, forbidding wall. The hillside—thickly forested in Uma's time— had since been cleared, with the result that the view was even more dramatic than before, a vast panorama of river, sea and sky. Ratnagiri lay spread out below, the perfect model of a colonial district town, with an invisible line separating its huddled bazaars from the ‘Cutchery'—the red-brick Victorian compound that housed the district courts and offices.

Impatient for a glimpse of the Collector's residence, Jaya piled a few bricks against the compound's walls and climbed up to look inside. She found another disappointment lying in wait: the old bungalow was gone, with its Grecian portico and its sloping lawn and terraced gardens. The grounds had been split up to accommodate several smaller houses.

Jaya was about to jump down when she was accosted by an armed guard. ‘Hey you,' he shouted. ‘What are you doing? Get down from there.'

He came running up and fired off a volley of questions: Who was she? Where was she from? What was she doing there?

To distract him, she produced the postcard she had bought at the gallery in Bombay. It had exactly the effect she had hoped for. The guard stared at the picture and then led her down the road to a lookout point, on a tongue of land that hung poised above the valley.

‘There's the Kajali river,' he said, pointing, ‘and that over there's the Bhate beach.'

Then he began to ask questions about the people in the photograph—the Collector, Uma. When his finger came to Rajkumar, he laughed.

‘And look at this fellow,' he said, ‘he looks as though he owns the place.'

Jaya looked more closely at the picture. She saw that there
was indeed a jaunty tilt to Rajkumar's head, although he looked otherwise quite solemn. His face was massive and heavy-jawed, his eyes grave; he appeared gigantic beside the slim, diminutive form of the Collector. He was dressed in dark trousers, a linen jacket and a round-collared shirt. His clothes were neither as elegant nor as finely cut as the Collector's, but he looked much more at ease; his legs were negligently crossed, and he had a slim silver cigarette case in one hand. He was holding it up as though it were an ace of trumps, pinched between finger and thumb.

‘That was my grandfather,' Jaya said, by way of explanation.

The guard had already lost interest in Rajkumar. Through all this his eyes had kept straying to Dolly, seated in her corner beside Uma, her body half turned against the camera as though to defend herself from its gaze.

Dolly was dressed in a green silk longyi and a white blouse. Her face was long and slender, with a scaffolding of finely moulded bones standing outlined beneath her skin. Her hair was tied back, but a single strand had escaped, curling down from her temple. She was wearing no jewellery, but she had a spray of flowers, white-petalled frangipani, pinned above one of her ears. In her hands she was holding a garland of white jasmine.

‘She's very beautiful,' said the guard.

‘Yes,' said Jaya. ‘Everybody said so . . .'

The next day was Jaya's last in Ratnagiri. In the late afternoon she hired a scooter-rickshaw and asked the driver to take her to the Bhate beach. The scooter drove through the town, past the red-brick buildings of the high school and college, over the bridge that crossed the estuary, to a beach on the southern side of the bay. In the distance, the sun had swelled to fill the mouth of the bay, growing ever larger as it dipped towards the horizon. The sand was copper-coloured and it slipped beneath the water at a gentle incline. Coconut palms grew thick along the edge of the beach, their trunks leaning thirstily into the wind. Along the line where the sand changed into soil there was a densely tangled accumulation of grass and shells and dried seaweed.

It was there, hidden in the undergrowth, that Jaya found what she was looking for—a small stone memorial to her great-uncle, the Collector. The engraved lettering was worn thin by the combined action of wind, water and sand. There was just enough light to read the inscription. It said: ‘To the memory of Beni Prasad Dey Esq., District Collector, 1905– 1906.' Jaya stood up to look at the windswept beach, sloping gently down to the waves. The red sand had turned grey with the setting of the sun. Uma had told her, long ago, that if she were to walk from the memorial stone to the water, in a straight line, she would cross the very spot where the Collector's body had been found, along with the wreckage of his capsized boat.

forty-two

O
n her return to Calcutta, Jaya began to look through the huge collection of documents and papers that Uma had left her, in her will. Jaya had occasionally toyed with the idea of writing a biography of her great-aunt; an important publisher had even offered her a contract once. Jaya knew that there had been a great revival of interest in Uma recently, as a pioneering political figure. There was bound to be a biography soon—she was loath to think that it would appear under someone else's name.

It took Jaya several days to sort through Uma's papers, many of which had been eaten into by insects. The strange thing was that the more she read, the more she found herself thinking of Rajkumar. It was as though in this one regard, childhood habits of associative reasoning had remained with her. Through all the years that she'd known him, her grandfather had lived downstairs, in a small anteroom in Uma's flat. There was no inference of conjugality in these living arrangements: Rajkumar's status in the household was understood to fall somewhere between that of poor relative and employee. But the geography of the house being what it was, it meant that for Jaya, to think of the one was to think of the other: to go down to see her grandfather meant also seeing her great-aunt.

Recollections came flooding back to Jaya. She remembered
the particular tone of voice in which Rajkumar would say, several times each day: ‘Ah, Burma—now Burma was a golden land . . .' She remembered how he'd liked to smoke Burmese-style cheroots—longer and thicker than bidis but not as dark nor as big as cigars. Cheroots of this kind were not easily to be had in India, but there were certain substitutes that Rajkumar deemed acceptable. Not far from Lankasuka there was a paan shop that stocked these cheroots. Jaya would sometimes walk to this shop with her grandfather. She remembered how he'd narrow his eyes when he was lighting a cheroot. Then he would blow out a huge cloud of grey smoke and begin: ‘Ah, Burma—now . . .'

The paan-wallah who owned this shop was more irascible than most. She remembered an occasion when she'd heard him snap at Rajkumar: ‘Yes, yes, no need to tell us again. Your Burma is so golden you can pluck nuggets out of people's farts . . .'

She remembered how she'd go with Rajkumar to visit the Burmese temple in north Calcutta. She remembered the people who'd gather there—many of them Indians, people who'd left Burma in 1942, just like Rajkumar. There were Gujaratis, Bengalis, Tamils, Sikhs, Eurasians. In the temple they would all speak Burmese. Some had done well after their departure. They'd built new businesses, made new homes for themselves; others had dedicated themselves to their children and grandchildren—in much the same way that Rajkumar had built his new life around Jaya. Not all the people who came to the temple were Buddhists, by birth or conviction. They came because this was the one place where they could be sure of meeting others like themselves; people to whom they could say, ‘Burma is a golden land' knowing that their listeners would be able to filter these words through the sieves of exile, sifting through their very specific nuances. She recalled how they had thirsted for news of Burma—longed to hear word of those who had been left behind. She remembered the stir that greeted new arrivals; how they would be besieged with questions: ‘And what about . . .?' ‘. . . and did you hear about so-and-so?'
Rajkumar was always the noisiest of the questioners, taking advantage of his booming voice to shout questions—questions about someone with a Burmese name; someone whom she had not known to be her uncle until Bela told her at the age of ten—her uncle Dinu, whom she'd never met.