The Glass Palace (52 page)

It was mid-February when the long-awaited mobilisation orders finally arrived. Hardy was one of the first to know and he came running to Arjun's room.

‘Yaar—have you heard?

It was early evening and Hardy didn't bother to knock. He pushed the door open and looked in: ‘Arjun, where are you?'

Arjun was inside the curtained dressing room that separated his bathroom from the living area. He had just finished washing off the dirt of a football match and his mud-caked shoes and shorts lay heaped on the floor. It was a Thursday—a night when, by tradition, dinner jackets were worn at the mess, this being the day of the week when the news of Queen Victoria's death had been received in India. Kishan Singh was at work in Arjun's bedroom, laying out his clothes for the evening— dinner jacket, dress trousers, silk cummerbund.

Hardy crossed the room quickly: ‘Arjun? Did you hear? We've got the orders.'

Arjun pulled back the curtain, with a towel fastened around his waist.

‘You're sure?'

‘Yes. Heard from Adjutant-sah'b.'

They looked at each other without knowing what else to say. Hardy seated himself on the edge of the bed and began to crack his knuckles. Arjun started to button his starched dress shirt, flexing his knees, so that he could see himself in the mirror. He caught a glimpse of Hardy behind him, staring morosely at the floor. Trying to sound jocular, he said: ‘At least we'll get to see if those damned mobilisation plans that we drew up are any good or not . . .'

Hardy made no answer, and Arjun glanced over his shoulder. ‘Aren't you glad the waiting's over? Hardy?'

Hardy's hands were clasped between his knees. He looked up suddenly. ‘I keep thinking . . .'

‘Of what?'

‘Do you remember Chetwode Hall? At the Military Academy in Dehra Dun?'

‘Of course.'

‘There was an inscription which said:
The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time. The honour, welfare and comfort of the men you command come next
. . .'

‘. . .
And your own ease, comfort and safety come last, always and every time
.' Arjun laughed as he finished the quotation for Hardy. ‘Of course I remember. It was inscribed on the podium—stared us in the face every time we entered Chetwode Hall.'

‘Didn't it ever puzzle you—that inscription?'

‘No. Why should it?'

‘Well, didn't you ever think: this country whose safety, honour and welfare are to come first, always and every time— what is it? Where is this country? The fact is that you and I don't have a country—so where is this place whose safety,
honour and welfare are to come first, always and every time? And why was it that when we took our oath it wasn't to a country but to the King Emperor—to defend the Empire?'

Arjun turned to face him. ‘Hardy, what are you trying to get at?'

‘Just this.' said Hardy. ‘Yaar, if my country really comes first, why am I being sent abroad? There's no threat to my country right now—and if there were, it would be my duty to stay here and defend it.'

‘Hardy,' Arjun said lightly, ‘staying here wouldn't do much for your career . . .'

‘Career, career.' Hardy clicked his tongue, in disgust. ‘Yaar, don't you ever think of anything else?'

‘Hardy.' Arjun gave him a look of warning, to remind him of Kishan Singh's presence.

Hardy shrugged and looked at his watch. ‘All right, I'll shut up,' he said, standing up to go. ‘I'd better change too. We'll talk later.'

Hardy left and Kishan Singh carried Arjun's trousers into the dressing room. Kneeling on the floor, he held them open, by the waistband. Arjun stepped into them gingerly, taking care not to shatter the fragile sharpness of their glassy creases. Rising to his feet, Kishan Singh began to circle around Arjun, tucking his shirt-tails into his trousers.

Kishan Singh's hand brushed against the small of Arjun's back and he stiffened: he was on the verge of snapping at his batman to hurry up, when he stopped himself. It annoyed him to think that after two years as a commissioned officer he had still not succeeded in training himself to be at ease with the enforced intimacies of military life. This was one of the many things, he knew, that set him apart from the real faujis, the born-and-bred army-wallahs like Hardy. He'd once watched Hardy going through this very process of dressing for Guest Night with his batman's help: he was oblivious of the man's presence in a way that he, Arjun, never was of Kishan Singh's.

Suddenly Kishan Singh spoke up, taking Arjun by surprise. ‘Sah'b,' he said, ‘do you know where the battalion is going?'

‘No. Nobody does. We won't know till we're on the ship.'

Kishan Singh started wrapping Arjun's cummerbund around his waist. ‘Sah'b,' he said, ‘the NCOs have been saying that we'll be going east . . .'

‘Why?'

‘At first we were training for the desert and everyone said we would be going to North Africa. But the equipment we were sent recently was clearly meant for the rain . . .'

‘Who's been telling you all this?' Arjun said in surprise.

‘Everyone, sah'b. Even in the villages they know. My mother and my wife came to visit last week. They'd heard a rumour that we were about to leave.'

‘What did they say?'

‘My mother said, “Kishan Singh, when are you going to come back”?'

‘And what did you tell her?'

Kishan Singh was kneeling in front of Arjun now, checking his fly buttons and smoothing down his trousers, pinching the creases to restore their edge. Arjun could see only the top of his head, and the whorled patterns of his close-cropped hair.

Suddenly, Kishan Singh looked up at him. ‘Sah'b, I told her that you would make sure that I came back . . .'

Arjun, caught by surprise, felt the blood rushing to his face. There was something inexplicably moving about the sheer guilelessness of this expression of trust. He felt at a loss for words.

Once, during their conversations at Charbagh, Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland had said that the reward of serving in India, for Englishmen of his father's generation, lay in their bonds with ‘the men'. This relationship, he had said, was of an utterly different kind from that of the regular British army, the mutual loyalties of Indian soldier and English officer being at once so powerful and so inexplicable that they could be understood only as a kind of love.

Arjun recalled how strange this word had sounded on the CO's reticent lips and how he had been tempted to scoff. It seemed that in these stories ‘the men' figured only as
abstractions, a faceless collectivity imprisoned in a permanent childhood—moody, unpredictable, fantastically brave, desperately loyal, prone to extraordinary excesses of emotion. Yet, he knew it to be true that even for himself there were times when it seemed as though the attributes of that faceless collectivity—‘the men'—had been conjured into reality by a single soldier, Kishan Singh: that the bond that had come into being between them really was a kind of love. It was impossible to know how far this was Kishan Singh's own doing and how far it was the product of the peculiar intimacy of their circumstances; or was it perhaps something else altogether, that Kishan Singh, in his very individuality, had become more than himself—a village, a country, a history, a mirror for Arjun to see refractions of himself?

For an eerie instant Arjun saw himself in Kishan Singh's place: as a batman, kneeling before a dinner-jacketed officer, buffing his shoes, reaching into his trousers to tuck in his shirt, checking his fly buttons, looking up from the shelter of his parted feet, asking for protection. He gritted his teeth.

twenty-eight

T
he morning after his arrival, Dinu borrowed a bicycle and went to look for the ruined chandis of Gunung Jerai. Alison drew him a map and he followed it: the track ran uphill most of the way from Morningside House and he had to mount and dismount several times, wheeling his machine up the steeper inclines. He made a couple of wrong turns but eventually found his way to the very spot where Alison had parked her car the last time. The stream lay below and its surroundings were exactly as he remembered: there was a shallow ford, bridged by flat stones. A little lower down the slope, the stream widened into a pool, ringed by massive boulders. On the far side, a narrow path led into the jungle.

By this time his right leg was sore and aching. He hung his camera bags on a branch and stepped down to the pool. On the bank there was a boulder that was so shaped as to serve perfectly for a seat. Dinu kicked off his shoes, rolled his trousers up to his knees, and plunged his legs into the cool, rushing water.

He'd been hesitant about coming to Malaya, but now that he was here, he was glad to be away from Rangoon, glad to leave behind the tensions of the Kemendine house and all the constant worrying about the business. And it was a relief, too, to put a distance between himself and the political infighting that seemed to be consuming all his friends. He knew his
father wanted Alison to sell Morningside—it would be too much for her to manage on her own, he'd said; the estate would lose money. But as far as he could tell Morningside was running smoothly enough and Alison seemed to be very much in control. He couldn't see that she had any need for his advice, but he was glad to be here anyway. It would give him a chance to think things over for himself: in Rangoon he was always too busy, with politics, with the magazine. He was twenty-eight now and this, if any, was the time to decide whether photography was going to be just a hobby or a career.

He lit a cigarette and smoked it down to the butt, before picking up his camera bag to cross the stream. The path was more overgrown than he remembered, and in places he had to beat down the undergrowth. When he came to the clearing, he was awed by the serene beauty of the place: the colours of the moss-covered chandis were even more vivid than he remembered; the vistas in the background even more sweeping. He wasted no time in setting up his tripod. He exposed two rolls and it was sunset by the time he got back to Morningside House.

He went back the next morning and the morning after that. The ride became a regular routine: he'd set off early, taking along a couple of rotis for lunch. When he got to the stream, he'd daydream for a while, sitting on his favourite rock, with his legs plunged deep in the water. Then he'd make his way to the clearing and set up his equipment. At lunchtime he'd take a long break and afterwards he'd have a nap, lying in the shade in one of the chandis.

One morning, instead of stopping at the chandis, he went a little further than usual. Pushing into the forest he spotted an overgrown mound a short distance ahead. He beat a path through the undergrowth and found himself confronted with yet another ruin, built of the same materials as the two chandis—laterite—but of a different design: this one was roughly octagonal and shaped like a stepped pyramid or ziggurat. Despite the monumental design, the structure was modest in size, not much taller than his head. He climbed
gingerly up the mossy blocks and at the apex he found a massive square stone, with a rectangular opening carved in the centre. Looking down, he found a puddle of rainwater trapped inside. The pool had the even shape and metallic glint of an antique mirror. He took a picture—a snapshot—and then sat down to smoke a cigarette. What was the opening for? Had it once been a base for a monumental sculpture—some gigantic, smiling monolith? It didn't matter: it was just a hole now, colonised by a family of tiny green frogs. When he looked down on his rippling reflection the frogs croaked at him in deep affront.

That evening, back at the house, he said to Alison: ‘Did you know that there was another ruin—a kind of pyramid— a little farther into the jungle?'

She nodded. ‘Yes, and there are others too. You'll find them if you go deep enough.'

The next day proved her right. Pushing a little further up the slope Dinu stumbled, quite literally, on a ten-foot-square platform made of laterite blocks—apparently the foundation of a small shrine. The plan of the temple was clearly visible on the floor, laid out like an architect's sketch, with a line of square embrasures indicating the placement of a row of columns. A day or so later he found another, much stranger ruin: a structure that had the appearance of being suspended within an explosion, like a prop in a photographic illusion. A banyan had taken root within the temple, and in growing, had pushed the walls apart, carrying away adjoining blocks of masonry. A doorway had been split in two, as though a bomb had exploded on the threshold. One stone post had been knocked over, while another had been carried off, coiled in a tangle of greenery, to a distance of several feet off the ground.

Sometimes, stepping into the ruins, Dinu would hear a rustle or a prolonged hiss. Occasionally the surrounding treetops would stir as though they'd been hit by a gust of wind. Dinu would look up to see a troop of monkeys examining him warily from the branches. Once he heard a sawing cough that could have been a leopard.