The Glass Palace (49 page)

‘Just that it doesn't matter whether I think of Burma as home or not. What matters is what people think of us. And it's plain enough that men like me are now seen as the enemy— on all sides. This is the reality and I have to acknowledge it. My job now is to find a way of making sure that Dinu and Neel are provided for.'

‘Surely they're provided for already?'

Rajkumar paused before answering. ‘Dolly, I think you're aware that the business hasn't been doing well lately. But you probably don't know the full extent of it.'

‘And how bad is that?'

‘It's not good, Dolly,' he said quietly. ‘There are debts— many of them.'

‘But, Rajkumar, if we sold the house, the yards, our share in Morningside—surely something would be left so that the boys could make a start somewhere else?'

Rajkumar began to cough. ‘That wouldn't work, Dolly. As things stand at this minute, even if we sold everything it still wouldn't be enough. As for Morningside, Matthew has troubles of his own, you know. Rubber was very badly hit by the Depression. We can't rush into this, Dolly—that way we're sure to run into disaster. This has to be done very, very carefully. We have to give it time . . .'

‘I don't know, Rajkumar.' Dolly began to pick worriedly at the end of her htamein. ‘Things are happening so fast now— people say that the war may spread; that Japan may get into it; that they could even attack Burma.'

Rajkumar smiled. ‘That's impossible, Dolly. You just have to look at a map. To get here the Japanese would have to come across Singapore and Malaya. Singapore is one of the most heavily defended places in the world. The British have tens of thousands of troops there. There are thirty-six-inch guns all along the shore. We can't be chasing after smoke, Dolly, we can't do things in a panic. If this is to work, we have to be realistic, we have to make careful plans.'

Dolly leant over him to fluff up the pillows on his bed. ‘So do you have a plan then?'

‘Not yet, but I've been thinking. Whatever we do, it'll take time—at least a year, maybe more. You have to prepare yourself. I want to make it possible for us to leave Burma with enough so that the boys can settle comfortably somewhere—in India, or wherever they want to go.'

‘And after that?'

‘The two of us will be free.'

‘To do what?'

‘Well, you've already decided—you want to live in Sagaing.' ‘And what about you?'

‘Perhaps I'll come back too, Dolly. I sometimes think of living quietly in Huay Zedi—I'm sure Doh Say would have a place for me—and it wouldn't be so far from you.'

Dolly laughed. ‘So you're going to sell everything, uproot all of us, go through all this, just to come back and live quietly in Huay Zedi?'

‘It's not for myself that I'm thinking of doing this, Dolly— it's for the boys.'

Rajkumar smiled and allowed his head to fall back against his pillows. Once before in his life, he had known himself to be at a crossroads—that was when he was trying to get his first contract, for the Chota-Nagpur Railway. He'd thought hard and come up with a plan that had worked, laying the foundations of his future success. This time too he would have to think of something, a plan that would work: this would be his last challenge, the last hill to cross. After that he would rest. There was no shame in growing old and seeking rest.

The first months of the war found Arjun and his battalion on the frontiers of Afghanistan. Arjun was on garrison duty, at a small outpost called Charbagh, near the Khyber Pass. The border was quiet—unusually so, the older officers said—and the conflict in Europe seemed very far away. Charbagh was manned by a single company of soldiers, Arjun being the sole officer. The surroundings were spectacularly beautiful: craggy, ochre mountains, streaked with great slashes of brilliantly coloured rock. There was little to do apart from daily drills, barracks inspections and occasional marches with training columns. Arjun spent long hours reading and soon ran out of books.

At regular fortnightly intervals, the battalion's Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bucky' Buckland, stopped by on tours of inspection. The CO was a tall, professorial-looking
man with a ruff of wiry hair clinging to the base of his high-domed, balding head.

‘And what do you do with your time, Lieutenant?' the CO asked offhandedly on one of his visits. ‘Do you shoot at all? I've heard there's plenty of game to be had here.'

‘Actually, sir,' Arjun said quietly, ‘I read books . . .'

‘Oh?' The CO turned to look at him with new interest. ‘I didn't take you for a reader. And may I ask what you read?'

Their tastes proved to be complementary: the CO introduced Arjun to Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. Arjun lent him his copies of H.G. Wells's
War of the Worlds
and Jules Verne's
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
These exchanges became a pleasurable part of Arjun's life at Charbagh and he began to look forward to the CO's visits. In between there were long days when nothing happened. There was little to do apart from talking to the occasional traveller.

Late in the summer, Arjun's friend Hardy stopped by on his way to his own post, atop the Khyber Pass. Hardy was a quiet, clear-eyed man of medium height and average build. Whether in or out of uniform he was always neatly dressed— with the folds of his turban layered in precise order and his beard combed tight against his chin. Despite his soldiering background, Hardy did not in any way resemble the Sikh warriors of military lore—he was soft-spoken and slow-moving, with an expression of habitual sleepiness. He had a good ear for a tune and was usually the first in the mess to learn the latest Hindi film songs. It was his habit—annoying to some and entertaining to others—to hum these melodies under his breath as he went about his work. These quirks sometimes brought him a little more than his fair share of ‘ragging'—yet his friends knew that there were certain limits beyond which he could not be goaded: although generally slow to take offence, Hardy was inflexible when roused and had a long memory for grudges.

Hardy had just spent a period of leave in his village. On his first night at Charbagh he told Arjun about some odd rumours that he'd heard during his stay. Most of his neighbours had
relatives in the army, and some of them had spoken of incidents of unrest: troops were said to be resisting transfer orders abroad. In Bombay, a Sikh unit—a squadron of the Central India Horse—was said to have mutinied. They had lain down their weapons and refused to board the ship that was to take them to North Africa. Two men had been executed. A dozen others had been exiled to the prisons of the Andaman Islands. Some of these men were from Hardy's own village: there could be no doubt about the reliability of these reports.

Arjun was astonished to hear this. ‘You should tell Bucky,' he said. ‘He should know.'

‘He must know already,' Hardy said. ‘And if he hasn't said anything to us, it must be for a reason . . .' They looked at each other uneasily and dropped the subject: neither of them mentioned these stories to anyone else.

A few months later the 1/1 Jats moved back to their battalion's base at Saharanpur, near Delhi. With the descent into the plains the rhythms of their life underwent a dramatic change. The army was now expanding at a furious pace: regiments were raising new battalions and headquarters was looking everywhere for experienced personnel. Like every other battalion in the regiment, the 1/1 Jats were milked of several officers and NCOs. Suddenly they found themselves struggling to fill the gaps in their ranks. Newly recruited companies were sent up from the battalion's training centre and a fresh batch of officers arrived, as replacements for those who'd left. The new officers consisted mainly of expatriate British civilians with Emergency Commissions—men who had until recently held jobs as planters, businessmen and engineers. They had little experience of the Indian army and its intricate customs and procedures.

Arjun and Hardy were both full lieutenants now and they were among the few regular army officers left in the unit. Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland began to depend on them more and more for the day-to-day running of the battalion.

First he saddled them with the job of forming a new administrative platoon. Then, sooner than anyone had expected,
the battalion's motorised transport was brought up to authorised strength. Three dozen fifteen-hundredweight trucks arrived, along with a dozen smaller lorries. It was discovered that the battalion had mule-trainers aplenty, but lacked drivers. Arjun was taken off the administrative platoon and appointed Motor Transport Officer. It fell to him to teach the new drivers the tricks of threading heavyweight trucks through Saharanpur's narrow alleys and bazaars.

Even as the battalion was adjusting to its new vehicles, a shipment of armaments was sent up from New Delhi: 3-inch mortars, tommy guns and Vickers-Berthier light machine guns. Then came three Bren guns, with their carriers, six medium machine guns and five Boye's anti-tank rifles, one for each company. Hardy was given the responsibility of running weapons training courses for the men.

Just as Hardy and Arjun were settling cheerfully into their new jobs, the CO turned everything upside down again. He pulled both Arjun and Hardy from their assignments and set them to work on preparing a unit mobilisation scheme.

By this time, most of Arjun and Hardy's classmates from the Military Academy had already been sent abroad. Some were serving in North Africa, some in Eritrea (where one had won a Victoria Cross), and some in the East—Malaya, Hong Kong and Singapore. Arjun and Hardy assumed that they too would soon be going abroad to join other units of the Indian army. When the CO asked them to draft a mobilisation plan, they took it as a sign that their departure was imminent. But a month went by without any further news, and then another. On New Year's Eve, they saw 1941 in with a wan celebration. Despite the ban on shop talk at the mess, the conversation kept returning to the question of where they would be sent, east or west—to North Africa or towards Malaya.

Opinion was evenly divided.

Rajkumar was discharged from hospital with strict orders to remain in bed for at least a month. On returning home, he
insisted on being moved up to a room at the top of the house. A bed was brought up and placed by a window. Neel bought a radio, a Paillard just like the one in the hospital, and placed it on a table, beside the bed. When everything was exactly as he wanted, Rajkumar lay down, with a wall of pillows against his back, positioning himself so that he'd be able to look across the city, towards the Shwe Dagon.

As the days passed the outlines of a plan began to take shape, very slowly, before his eyes. During the last war the price of timber had soared. The profits he had made then had sustained him for a decade afterwards. It was not too far-fetched to imagine that something similar might happen again. The British and the Dutch were reinforcing their defences throughout the East—in Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Java, Sumatra. It stood to reason that they would need materials. If he could build up a stockpile of timber in his yards, it was possible that he'd be able to sell at a good price next year. The problem was liquidity: he would have to sell or mortgage all his assets to find cash—he would have to get rid of the yards, the mills, the timber concessions, even the Kemendine house. Perhaps he could persuade Matthew to buy him out of Morningside: there might be some cash there.

The more he thought of it, the more plausible the plan seemed. The risks were huge of course, but they always were when anything important was at stake. But the rewards too could be very great; enough to clear his debts and finance a new beginning for Neel and Dinu. And there would be other advantages to arranging things in this way: all his assets would have been disposed of by the time he made his final move. After that he'd be free to leave—nothing to hold him back, nothing more to worry about.

One afternoon, when Dolly brought him his meal, he sketched his plan for her. ‘I think it could work, Dolly,' he concluded. ‘I think it's our best chance.'