The Glass Palace (14 page)

Dolly gave his arm a grateful squeeze. ‘Mohanbhai!' For the first time in days she felt able to breathe again. How dependable he was, always ready with a solution. What would they do without him?

But now, how to get the Queen's consent? She was always complaining about how small the compound was, how
cramped, how much like a gaol. What would she say to the prospect of having the entire staff move up from town? But time was running out. Dolly went to the Queen's door. ‘Mebya.'

‘Yes?'

Dolly raised her head off the floor and sat back on her heels. ‘The servants have stopped coming because of the sickness in town. In a day or two they will escape to the countryside. No one will remain in Ratnagiri. Soon there will be no water in the house. The toilets will run over. We will have to carry the filth down the hill ourselves. Mohanbhai says, why not let the others build a few rooms around the compound, beyond the walls? When the fear is past they will leave. This will solve everything.'

The Queen turned away from the kneeling girl to look out of the window. She too was weary of dealing with servants— wretches, ungrateful wretches, what else could you say of them? The more you gave them the more they seemed to want—yes, even the good ones, like this girl Dolly. No matter what they received there was always something else, some other demand— more clothes, another necklace. And as for the rest, the cooks and sweepers and ayahs, why did they seem harder to find with every passing year? You had only to step outside to see thousands of people standing about, staring, with nothing better to do than loiter by the roadside. And yet when it came to finding servants you would think you were living in a world of ghosts.

And now, with this sickness spreading, they were sure to perish in their thousands. And what then? Those who were willing to work would become even rarer—like white elephants. Better have them move while there was still time. It was true what the girl said: it would be safer to have them on the hill, well away from town. Otherwise they might well carry disease into the compound. And there would be advantages to offset the unsightliness. They would be available to be called upon whenever necessary, night or day.

The Queen turned back to Dolly. ‘I have decided. Let them build their shelters on the hill. Tell Sawant to let them know that they can go ahead.'
Within days a
basti
arose around the compound, a settlement of shacks and shanties. In the bathrooms of Outram House, water began to flow; the toilets were clean again. The settlers in the basti daily thanked the Queen. Now it was her turn to be deified: overnight she became a guardian goddess, a protector of the unfortunate, an incarnate
devi
who had rescued hundreds from the ravages of the plague.

After a month the outbreak subsided. There were some fifty families living around the compound now. They showed no signs of returning to their old homes in the congested lanes of the town: it was far nicer on the breezy hill. Dolly talked the matter over with the Queen and they decided to let the settlers stay. ‘What if there's another epidemic?' the Queen said. ‘After all, we don't know that it's really over yet.'

The Princesses were delighted to have the shacks remain: they had never had playmates their own age before. Now they had dozens. The First Princess was eight, the youngest three. They spent their days running around the compound with their new friends, discovering new games. When they were hungry they would run into their friends' shacks and ask for something to eat; in the afternoons, when it was too hot to play outside, they would fall asleep on the mud floors of the palm-thatched shanties.

Four years later there was another outbreak of the plague. More people moved up the hill. Just as Sawant had predicted, the basti around the compound became a little village in its own right, with winding lanes and corner shops. No longer did the dwellings consist solely of shacks and shanties: tiled houses began to appear, one by one. But the little settlement had no provisions for sewage and no other facilities. When the breeze turned, a smell of excrement and refuse engulfed Outram House, wafting up from the ravines on the far side of the bluff.

An English district official became concerned about the Princesses' education and arranged for the hiring of an English governess. Only one of the Princesses showed any aptitude for study, the youngest. It was she and Dolly who profited the
most from the governess's stay. They both became quickly fluent in English and Dolly even began to paint with watercolours. But the governess didn't last long. She was so outraged by the conditions of the Royal Family's captivity, that she fell out with the local British officials. In the end she had to be sent back to England.

The Princesses were older now, and so were their playmates. Sometimes the boys would tweak the girls' pigtails and brush up close against them as they were running around the compound. It fell to Sawant to take on the role of their defender and champion. He would go storming off into the basti, only to return with bruises on his face and cuts on his lip. Dolly and the Princesses would gather round in silent awe: without asking they knew that his wounds had been acquired in their defence.

Sawant was by this time a tall, swarthy young man with a deep chest and a trimmed black moustache. He was not just a coachman now but a gatekeeper as well. In that capacity he had been allotted the guardroom beside the gate to use as his own. The room was small, with just a single window and a string bed, and its only adornment was a picture of the Buddha—a token of Sawant's conversion, under the King's influence.

In the normal course Sawant's room was forbidden to the girls, but they could scarcely stay away when he lay inside, nursing wounds that had been acquired on their behalf. They would find ways of slipping in, unnoticed, with plates of food and packets of sweets.

One hot July afternoon, entering Sawant's room on a household errand, Dolly found him asleep on his string bed. He was naked but for a white loincloth, a cotton
langot
, knotted between his legs. Seating herself beside him she watched his chest, undulating with his breath. Thinking to wake him she reached for his shoulder, but her hand dropped instead to his neck. His skin was slippery, covered with a thin film of moisture. She ran her forefinger down the centre of his chest, through the puddle of sweat that had gathered in the declivity,
to the spiral pit of his navel. A line of fine hair snaked downwards, disappearing into the damp folds of his cotton langot. She touched the filaments with the tip of her finger, brushing them backwards, against their grain, pushing them erect. He stirred and opened his eyes. She felt his fingers on her face, tracing the shape of her nose, pushing ajar her lips, grazing the tip of her tongue, following the curve of her chin down to her throat. When he reached her neckline, she stopped his hand.

‘No.'

‘You touched me first,' he challenged her.

She had no answer. She sat still as he fumbled with her strings and clasps. Her breasts were small, late-developing, tipped with tiny, blooming nipples. There were prickly calluses on his coachman's hands, and the ridges of his palms scraped hard against the soft tips of her breasts. She put her hands on his sides and ran them down the cage of his ribs. A lock of hair came loose at her temple, and drops of sweat went circling down the strands, dripping slowly off the end, on to his lips.

‘Dolly, you are the most beautiful girl in the world.'

Neither of them knew what to do. It seemed impossible that their limbs could be made to fit together. Their bodies slipped, fumbled, scraped. And then, suddenly, she felt the kindling of a great flame of pain between her legs. She cried out aloud.

He unrolled his cotton langot and dried her blood with it, swabbing it from her thighs. She took hold of one end of the cloth and wiped the red stains from his empurpled glans. He reached between her legs and patted her pubis clean. They sat back on their heels, facing each other, their knees thrust between each other's legs. He spread the wet, white cloth over their knitted limbs: the sunburst of her blood was flecked with the opacity of his semen. They stared at the vivid cloth in silent amazement: this was their handiwork, the banner of their union.

She returned the next day and for many days afterwards. Her bed was in a dressing room on the upper floor. In the
adjoining bedroom slept the First Princess. Beside Dolly's bed there was a window, and outside, within easy reach, stood a mango tree. Dolly took to slipping out at night and climbing back before dawn.

One afternoon, in Sawant's room, they fell asleep, sweating on the damp string of his bed. Then a scream filled the room and they sprang awake. It was the First Princess, standing over them, eyes blazing, hands on hips. In the heat of her anger she was transformed from a twelve-year-old girl into a woman.

‘I was wondering, and now I know.'

She ordered Dolly to dress, to leave the room. ‘If I ever see you alone again together, I will go to Her Majesty. You are servants. You will be thrown out.'

Sawant, all but naked, fell to his knees, clasping his hands together. ‘Princess, it was a mistake, a mistake. My family, they depend on me. Open your heart, Princess. It was a mistake. Never again.'

From that day on, the eyes of the First Princess followed them wherever they went. She told the Queen that she had seen a burglar climbing up the mango tree. The tree was cut down and bars were installed in the window frames.

It came to be decided that the Bombay newspapers would be delivered to Outram House, along with the King's shipments of pork. The first batch was found to carry reports on a subject of absorbing interest: a narrative of the European tour of King Chulalangkorn of Siam. This was the first time an Asian monarch had travelled to Europe on a state visit. The tour lasted several weeks and through that time no other interest existed for King Thebaw.

In London King Chulalangkorn stayed at Buckingham Palace. He was welcomed into Austria by the Emperor Franz Joseph; befriended in Copenhagen by the King of Denmark; feted in Paris by the President of France. In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm stood waiting at a railway station until his train
rolled in. King Thebaw read the reports over and over again, until he knew them by heart.

It was not so long ago that Thebaw's great-grandfather, Alaungpaya, and his grandfather, Bagyidaw, invaded Siam, crushed her armies, unseated her rulers, and sacked Ayutthaya, her premier city. In the aftermath, the defeated nobles had chosen a new ruler and Bangkok had become the country's new capital. It was because of the kings of Burma, because of Thebaw's ancestors, because of the Konbaung dynasty, that Siam had its present dynasty and its ruling king.

‘When our ancestor, the great Alaungpaya, invaded Siam,' Thebaw said to his daughters one day, ‘he sent a letter to the King of Ayutthaya. There was a copy in the Palace archives. This is what it said:
“There is no rival for our glory and our karma; to place you beside us is to compare the great Galon of Vishnu with a swallow; the sun with a firefly; the divine hamadryad of the heavens with an earthworm; Dhatarattha, the Hamsa king with a dung beetle.”
That is what our ancestor said to the King of Siam. But now they sleep in Buckingham Palace while we lie buried in this dungheap.'

There was no denying the truth of this. With the passing of the years Outram House had grown ever more to resemble the surrounding slums. Tiles had blown away and had not been replaced. Plaster had crumbled from the walls, baring great swathes of brick. Branches of peepul had taken root in the cracks and grown quickly into sturdy young saplings. Inside, mildew had crept upwards from the floor until the walls looked as though they had been draped in black velvet. Decay had become the Queen's badge of defiance. ‘The responsibility for the upkeep of this house is not ours,' she said. ‘They chose this to be our gaol, let them look after it.'

Newly arrived Collectors sometimes talked of razing the basti and moving the servants back to town. The Queen would laugh: how besotted they were, these men, in their arrogance, to imagine that in such a land as India they could hold a family imprisoned in isolation on a hill. Why the very soil would revolt against it!
The rare visitors who were allowed to call were shocked by the sight of the basti, the smell of waste and excrement, by the pall of woodsmoke that hung thick in the air. Often they descended from their carriages with looks of stunned surprise on their faces, unable to believe that the residence of Burma's last King had become the nucleus of a shantytown.

The Queen greeted them with her proud, thin-lipped smile. Yes, look around you, look at how we live. Yes, we who ruled the richest land in Asia are now reduced to this. This is what they have done to us, this is what they will do to all of Burma. They took our kingdom, promising roads and railways and ports, but mark my words, this is how it will end. In a few decades the wealth will be gone—all the gems, the timber and the oil—and then they too will leave. In our golden Burma where no one ever went hungry and no one was too poor to write and read, all that will remain is destitution and ignorance, famine and despair. We were the first to be imprisoned in the name of their progress; millions more will follow. This is what awaits us all: this is how we will all end—as prisoners, in shantytowns born of the plague. A hundred years hence you will read the indictment of Europe's greed in the difference between the kingdom of Siam and the state of our own enslaved realm.