The Glass Palace (40 page)

A
t the other end of the Bay of Bengal, in Calcutta, Uma's brother and his family were waiting to receive her at the Dum Dum airstrip.

Her brother was a quiet and somewhat colourless man who worked in the accounts department of a shipping company. His wife was a severe asthmatic who rarely left the house. Of their children, Bela, a girl, was the youngest, at six. Her siblings were twins and they were a full seven years older. The older twin was a boy, Arjun; the younger was a girl and she went by her family nickname, Manju. Her given name—marvellous to recount—was ‘Brihannala', which proved obdurately resistant to everyday use.

For the twins, Uma's arrival in Calcutta was an event of unparalleled significance. This was not just because of who she was: it was at least partly because no one in the family had ever had occasion to go to Dum Dum before. It was just ten years since an aeroplane was first seen in Calcutta: in 1920, a Handley Page had been received at the racecourse by cheering crowds. Since then, planes belonging to Imperial Airways and Air France had also touched down in the city. But it was KLM that had started the first regular passenger service and the drama of its recently instituted comings and goings had held the city in thrall for months.

On the day of Uma's arrival the excitement in the house
was such that the family went to the unprecedented step of hiring a car, a new 1930 Austin Chummy. But the twins' expectations were dashed on their arrival at the Dum Dum airstrip: there was nothing there but a stretch of tarmac, bordered by rice fields and coconut palms. This was too new a means of travel to have developed the trappings of ceremony. There was none of the pomp that accompanied an expedition to the docks: no uniformed sailors or peaked caps or beribboned harbourmasters. The terminal was a tin-roofed shed and the personnel consisted of foul-mouthed mechanics in grease-blackened overalls. What there was of a sense of occasion derived from the presence of the crowd of supporters who'd come to welcome Uma.

The waiting area consisted of a small, unroofed pen, fenced in with wire. The family, thoroughly intimidated, found itself pushed further and further back by Uma's exuberant well-wishers. They heard the Fokker F-VIII while it was still hidden by clouds. Arjun was the first to spot it when it broke through, its squat silver body glinting between its double wings. Its silver fuselage wobbled above the palm trees as it came in to land.

There was a long wait in the sun before Uma was cleared. When the people ahead began to cheer they knew Uma was through. And then, suddenly, there she was, in person, very simply dressed, in a white cotton sari.

To the twins Uma was a creature of legend: the firebrand aunt who had dedicated herself to a life of politics instead of accepting the usual lot of the Hindu widow. On finding themselves in her presence they were awed into silence: it seemed incredible that their heroine should be a frail-looking woman, with greying hair and a haggard face.

On the way back to Lankasuka, they sat crowded together in the Austin, exchanging news, catching up. Then Uma did something that took her relatives completely by surprise: unaccountably, for no reason that they could understand, she began to cry. They stared in horror as she sobbed into her sari. Intimidated by her legend, they could not bring themselves to
reach out to her. They sat in silence, fidgeting, no one daring to say a word.

When the ride was almost over, Uma collected herself. ‘I don't know what came over me,' she said, addressing no one in particular. ‘These last few months have been very hard. I feel as if I'm waking from a terrible dream. In Rangoon, just before I left there was a terrible quarrel. I must try to forget some of these things . . .'

It was a while before the family saw anything of Uma again. In the following months, she devoted all her energies to bringing the Burmese rebellion to the knowledge of the Indian public. She sent articles to Calcutta's
Modern Review
and wrote letters to major newspapers; she made every effort to alert her compatriots to the part that Indian soldiers were being made to play in the suppression of the uprising. Her writings had no perceptible effect. The Indian public was consumed with the preoccupations of local politics and had little time to spare for Burma.

One day, opening a Bengali newspaper, she saw a grisly illustration of sixteen decapitated heads lined up on a table. The accompanying article said:
These are the heads of Burmese rebels who fell in an encounter with Imperial troops in Prome District in Burma. It was believed that they were displayed at the military headquarters at Prome for the purpose of striking terror into the hearts of those who might be rebelliously inclined.

Uma tore the article out with shaking hands. She took it to her desk, intending to put it in the file where she kept her clippings. As she was putting it away, her eyes fell on the folder that held the remains of her KLM ticket: it had been lying forgotten on a corner of her desk ever since her arrival.

Looking at it now, she thought of the city she had flown out of in the silver Fokker; she thought of the businessmen— the timber merchants and oilmen—who were her fellow-
passengers; she thought of how they had all congratulated themselves on being present at the dawn of a new era, an age when aviation would make the world so small that the divisions of the past would disappear. She too had joined in: looking down from above, on the foaming waves of the Bay of Bengal, it seemed impossible not to believe that the shrunken world that had built this aircraft was a better one than those that preceded it.

And now, a few months later, here was this picture—of sixteen severed heads, put on display by the ruling power—as starkly medieval an image as could be imagined. She recalled that Prome was the site of the Shwe Sandaw Pagoda, almost equal in veneration to Rangoon's Shwe Dagon: she remembered a story that one of her fellow-passengers, a big, swarthy oilman, had told her. On the day of the earthquake he'd been sitting in the English Club at Prome, right beside the Shwe Sandaw Pagoda. Right before his eyes, the pagoda had been rent by the movement of the earth. A great part of it had come crashing down in the grounds of the club.

Uma's eyes filled with remembered images: of the terrible sight she'd witnessed, framed in the windscreen of Dolly's Packard; of Rajkumar and his chain of betrayals; of the quarrel in the car on the way to the airport; and now of the deaths of those sixteen rebels and their gruesome decapitation.

That day marked the beginning of a change in Uma that was no less profound than the upheaval that had followed upon the death of the Collector. With the defeat of Burma's Saya San rebellion, she started to rethink her political ideas in their entirety. It was precisely on an uprising such as this that she and her political associates in the Ghadar Party had once pinned their hopes. But she saw now that a popular insurrection, inspired by legend and myth, stood no chance of prevailing against a force such as the Empire—so skilful and ruthless in its deployment of its overwhelming power; so expert in the management of opinion. In retrospect it became clear that disarmed, technologically backward populations such as those of India and Burma could not hope to defeat by force
a well-organised and thoroughly modern military power; that even if such an effort were to succeed it would be at the cost of unimaginable bloodshed—a Saya San rebellion magnified many hundreds of times—that it would pit Indians against one another in such a way as to make victory just as undesirable as defeat.

In the past, she had been dismissive of Mahatma Gandhi's political thinking: non-violence, she had thought, was a philosophy of wish-fulfilment. She saw now that the Mahatma had been decades ahead of her in his thinking. It was rather the romantic ideas of rebellion that she had nurtured in New York that were pipe dreams. She remembered the words of the Mahatma, which she had often read and always disregarded: that the movement against colonialism was an uprising of unarmed Indians against those who bore arms—both Indians and British—and that its chosen instruments were the weapons of the weaponless, its very weakness its source of strength.

Once she had made up her mind, she was quick to act. She wrote to the Mahatma offering her services, and he, in return, invited her to his ashram at Wardha.

twenty-one

E
ven when they were very young, Uma's nephew and older niece, the twins, were celebrated for their good looks. Manju and Arjun shared a feature that gave them an unusual charm: a dimple that appeared when they smiled, but only on one cheek, the left for Manju and the right for Arjun. When they were together it was as though a circuit had been completed, a symmetry restored.

The attention that her looks brought her made Manju self-conscious about her appearance from an early age. She grew up with a keen awareness of the impression she made on people. In this one regard Arjun was her opposite: he was easy-going to the point of slovenliness and liked nothing better than to lounge around the house in a threadbare vest, with a longyi knotted around his waist.

Arjun was the kind of boy of whom teachers complain that their performance is incorrigibly below their potential. Everybody knew that he had the intelligence and ability to do well in school but his interests appeared to be directed only towards ogling girls and reading novels. At mealtimes, long after everyone else was done, he would linger lazily over his plate, chewing on fish bones and sucking the last bits of dal-sodden rice from his fingers. As he grew older, Arjun became a cause of increasing concern to everyone in the family. People began to shake their heads, saying, ‘Is that boy ever going to make anything of himself?'

Then one hot April day, Lankasuka's afternoon torpor was shattered by the sound of Arjun's voice uttering wild whoops and cries. Everyone in the house went running to the back balcony to look down into the courtyard.

‘Arjun, what do you think you're doing?' his mother said.

‘I've got in! I've got in!' Arjun was dancing around the courtyard, dressed in his usual dirty vest and torn longyi, waving a letter in one hand.

‘Got into what?'

‘The Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun.'

‘Idiot boy. What are you talking about?'

‘Yes; it's true.' Arjun came running up the stairs, his face flushed, his hair falling over his eyes. ‘They've accepted me as an officer cadet.'

‘But how could this happen? How did they even know who you are?'

‘I sat for an examination, Ma. I went with—' he named a school-friend—‘and I didn't tell you because I didn't think I'd get in.'

‘But it's impossible.'

‘Look.'

They passed the letter from hand to hand, marvelling at the fine stiff notepaper and the embossed emblem in the top right-hand corner. They could not have been more astonished if he'd announced that he'd sprouted wings or grown a tail. In Calcutta at that time, to join the army was almost unheard of. For generations, recruitment into the British Indian army had been ruled by racial policies that excluded most men in the country, including those from Bengal. Nor was it possible, until quite recently, for Indians to enter the army as commissioned officers. The founding of the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun dated back only five years and the fact that some of its seats were open to public examination had gone largely unnoticed.

‘How could you do this, Arjun? And without saying anything to us?'

‘I'm telling you, I never thought I'd get in. Besides, everyone's always saying that I'll never amount to anything—so I thought all right, let's see.'

‘You wait till your father gets home.'

But Arjun's father was not at all displeased by the news: on the contrary, he was so glad that he immediately organised an expedition of thanksgiving to the temple at Kalighat.

‘The boy's settled now and there's nothing more for us to worry about . . .' Relief was plainly visible on his face. ‘This is a ready-made career: whether he does well or not he'll be pushed up the ladder. At the end, there'll be an excellent pension. So long as he makes it through the academy, he's taken care of for the rest of his life.'