The Glass Palace (48 page)

Manju caught sight of a river, curving across the landscape. ‘Is that the Irrawaddy?' she asked Neel.

‘No,' said Neel. ‘That's the Rangoon river—the Irrawaddy doesn't flow past the city.'

Then a glint of sunlight drew her eye to an immense structure, far in the distance—a gilded mountain that tapered into a spire of gold. ‘What's that?'

‘That's the Shwe Dagon Pagoda,' Neel whispered in her ear. ‘We're home.'

Manju glanced at her watch and saw that the journey had lasted exactly five and a half hours. It seemed impossible that less than a day had passed since her wedding night, since the time when Neel had shut the door of their flower-bedecked bedroom. She thought of how frightened she'd been and she wanted to laugh. It was only now, circling above the city that was to be her home, that she acknowledged how completely she was in love. He was her present, her future, the entirety of her existence. Time and being held no meaning without him. She slipped her hand into his and looked down again on the great muddy river and the spire of gold. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘I'm home.'

part five

Morningside

 

twenty-five

M
anju and Neel had not been married quite three months when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, declared war on Germany, on behalf of Britain and her Empire. With the start of the war, an Air Raid Precautions scheme was prepared for Rangoon. The city was divided into sections and an ARP committee was formed for each. Medical officers were taught to deal with gas injuries; wardens were shown how to identify incendiary bombs; fire-fighting parties were formed and first-aid centres were set up. Rangoon's water table was too high to allow the building of underground shelters, but slit trenches were dug at strategic points around the city. Periodically there were ‘blackouts'; trains entered and left the Rangoon railway station with darkened windows; wardens and civic guards stayed on duty through the night.

There was nothing unsatisfactory about the conduct of these exercises: the city's inhabitants followed their instructions good-humouredly and disturbances were few. But there was no denying the fact that a Rangoon blackout had more the feel of a performance than a drill: the public seemed to be going through the motions without being persuaded either of the imminence of war, or of its possible bearing on their lives. Certainly, in Burma, as in India, public opinion was deeply divided: in both places many important personages had expressed their support of the colonial Government. But many could
also be heard to voice bitter condemnation of Britain's declaration of war on their behalf, without any binding guarantees of eventual independence. The mood among Burma's student activists was summed up in a slogan coined by a charismatic young student leader, Aung San: Colonialism's difficulty, he said, was Freedom's opportunity. One day, Aung San disappeared: a rumour circulated that he was on his way to China to seek the support of the Communists. Later it came to be known that he had gone instead to Japan.

But these concerns were relatively distant from the life of the streets, where people seemed mainly to regard the ARP exercises as a species of entertainment, a mass diversion. Merrymakers strolled blithely through the darkened thoroughfares; young people flirted unseen in the parks; filmgoers flocked to see Ernst Lubitsch's
Ninotchka
at the Metro;
When Tomorrow Comes
had a long run at the Excelsior, and Irene Dunne was enshrined as one of the city's idols. At the Silver Grill on Fytche Square, cabarets and dancing continued as usual.

Dinu and his friend, Thiha Saw, were among the few who dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to the Air Raid Precautions scheme. At this time, both Dinu and Thiha Saw were deeply involved in student union politics. They were on the far left of the political spectrum and were involved in the publication of an anti-Fascist magazine. Participating in civil defences seemed a natural extension of their political work.

Dinu still lived at the Kemendine compound, in a couple of rooms at the top of the house. But at home, he made no mention of the work he was doing as an ARP warden—partly because he knew that Neel would tell him that he was wasting his time and needed to do some real work, and partly also because experience had led him to assume that his opinions would always be violently at odds with his father's. This was why he was taken completely by surprise at an ARP warden's meeting when he found himself suddenly face-to-face with none other than his father.

‘You?'

‘You!' There was no telling which of them was the more astonished.

After this encounter, there developed—for the first time ever—a brief bond between Rajkumar and Dinu. The outbreak of war had brought them through opposite routes to a shared position: Rajkumar had come to be convinced that in the absence of the British Empire, Burma's economy would collapse. Dinu's support for the Allied war effort was rooted in other kinds of soil: in his leftist sympathies; in his support for the resistance movements in China and Spain; in his admiration of Charlie Chaplin and Robert Capa. Unlike his father, he was not a believer in colonialism—indeed his antipathy to British rule was surpassed only by his loathing of European Fascism and Japanese militarism.

Whatever the reasons, this was an instance when father and son were in agreement—a situation that was without precedent in the memories of either. For the first time in their lives, they were working together—attending meetings, discussing such matters as the necessity of importing gas masks and the design of wartime posters. So novel was this experience that they both relished it in silence, speaking of it neither at home nor anywhere else.

One night an ARP blackout was accompanied by a thunderstorm. Despite the rain Rajkumar insisted on accompanying the wardens on their rounds. He was drenched when he got home. The next morning he woke up shivering. A doctor came and diagnosed pneumonia. Rajkumar was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

For the first few days, Rajkumar was barely conscious, unable to recognise Dolly, Dinu or Neel. His condition was judged to be serious enough for the doctors to bar all visitors. For several days he lay in a near-coma.

Then, slowly, the fever began to recede.

In his periods of lucidity Rajkumar took stock of his surroundings. It so happened that chance had brought him to a familiar place: the hospital room that Dolly and Dinu had occupied twenty-four years before. Looking around his bed,
Rajkumar recognised the view from the window: the Shwe Dagon was framed exactly as he remembered. The blue and white curtains were slightly faded but still spotless and crisply starched; the tiled floors were, as ever, sparkling clean; and the dark, heavy furniture was recognisably the same, with inventory numbers stencilled on the varnished wood, in white paint.

When at last he was well enough to sit up, Rajkumar saw that the room had two additions. One was a Carrier air conditioner and the other a bedside radio—a 7-valve Paillard, with a ‘magic eye', a metal cabinet, and chromium-plated mountings. The air conditioner Rajkumar had no use for, but the radio intrigued him. He flipped a switch and found himself listening to a station in Singapore: a newsreader's voice was recounting the latest developments in the war, describing the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk.

After this, Rajkumar kept the radio on most of the time. Each night the nurse would turn it off when she was extinguishing the lights; Rajkumar would wait for her footsteps to die away before turning it on again. He would lie on his side and spin the knob, coasting from station to station. Twenty-four years before, at the time of Dolly's stay in that room, Europe had been convulsed by another war. Dolly too had stayed awake in this room, listening to the sounds of the night. But the whispers she'd heard had come from within the hospital: now, the room was filled with voices from around the world—London, New Delhi, Chungking, Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney. The voices spoke with such urgency and insistence that Rajkumar began to feel that he had lost touch with the flow of events; that he had become one of those men who sleepwalk their way to disaster by failing to note the significance of what was happening round them.

For the first time in many years, he allowed himself to think about the way he had been running his businesses. Day after day, month after month, he'd tried to handle every decision, review all the daily accounts, visit each location, every mill, every yard and outlet. He had been running his company as though it were a food-stall in a bazaar, and in the process he had blinded himself to the wider context.

Neel had long been pushing for a bigger role in the running of the business; Rajkumar had responded by trying to shut him out. He'd handed him money and told him to go and put it in films—as though he were buying off a child with packets of sweets. The ploy had worked, if only because Neel was too much in awe of him to challenge his authority. Now, the business was foundering. This was a fact that he'd refused to face. He'd suppressed hints from his accountants and managers, shouted at them when they tried to give him warning. And the stark fact was that he had no one to blame but himself: he had simply lost sight of what he was doing, and why.

As he lay listening to the radio's crackling voices, remorse settled on Rajkumar like a damp, stilling quilt. The doctors pronounced him to be well on the way to a complete recovery but his family could see no sign of an improvement, in either his manner or his appearance. He was in his mid-sixties at this time, but looked much older: his eyebrows had turned grey and bushy and his cheeks had begun to sag into overlapping dewlaps and jowls. He seemed scarcely to register the presence of the people who came to his room to see him; often when they tried to speak to him, he would silence them by turning up the radio.

One day Dolly unplugged the radio and shut the door. ‘Rajkumar, what's on your mind? Tell me.'

At first he wouldn't speak but she prodded him until he answered.

‘I've been thinking, Dolly.'

‘What about?
Tell me
.'

‘Do you remember how you and Dinu were in this room, that time . . .?'

‘Yes. Of course.'

‘That night, at Huay Zedi, when Dinu was ill and you said we had to get him to a hospital—I thought you were hysterical. I went along just for your sake . . .'

She smiled: ‘Yes. I know.'

‘But you were right.'

‘It was just luck—a premonition.'

‘That's what you say. But when I look back now, I can see that you often are right. Even though you live so quietly, shut away in the house, you seem to know more about what's happening in the world than I do.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I've been thinking about what you've been saying these many years, Dolly.'

‘What exactly?'

‘That we should leave.'

With a long sigh of relief, Dolly reached for his hand. ‘So you've been thinking of that at last?'

‘Yes. But it's hard, Dolly—it's hard to think of leaving: Burma has given me everything I have. The boys have grown up here: they've never known any other home. When I first came to Mandalay the nakhoda of my boat said: This is a golden land—no one ever starves here. That proved true for me, and despite everything that's happened recently, I don't think I could ever love another place in the same way. But if there's one thing I've learnt in my life, Dolly, it is that there is no certainty about these things. My father was from Chittagong and he ended up in the Arakan; I ended up in Rangoon; you went from Mandalay to Ratnagiri and now you're here too. Why should we expect that we're going to spend the rest of our lives here? There are people who have the luck to end their lives where they began them. But this is not something that is owed to us. On the contrary, we have to expect that a time will come when we'll have to move on again. Rather than be swept along by events, we should make plans and take control of our own fate.'

‘What are you trying to say, Rajkumar?'