The Glass Palace (78 page)

For over thirty years, Ilongo learnt, Dinu had been married to a well-known Burmese writer. His wife, Daw Thin Thin Aye, had been closely involved with the democracy movement. After the crackdown, both she and Dinu had been gaoled. They'd been let out after serving three years. But Daw Thin Thin Aye had contracted tuberculosis in prison and had died within a year of her release. That was four years ago, in 1992.

‘I asked if there was any way I could contact him,' Ilongo said. ‘The boy told me it wouldn't be easy—the junta has barred Dinu from having a phone or a fax. Even letters aren't safe, but that was the only way, he said. So I wrote, but I never heard back. I suppose someone kept the letter.'

‘But you have an address for him then?' Jaya said.

‘Yes.' Ilongo reached into his pocket and took out a sheet of paper. ‘He has a small photo studio. Does portraits, wedding pictures, group photographs. That sort of thing. The address is for his studio: he lives right above it.'

He held the paper out to her and she took it. The sheet was smudged and crumpled. She peered at it closely, deciphering the letters. The first words that met her eyes were: ‘
The Glass Palace: Photo Studio
.'

forty-three

A
few months later, Jaya found herself walking down a quiet and relatively uncrowded street in one of the older parts of Yangon. The flagstones on the footpaths were buckled and broken and weeds were growing out of the cracks. The houses along the road had plaster walls, most of them patched and discoloured. She caught glimpses of courtyards with trees growing over the doors. It was mid-December, a clear, cool day. There was very little traffic; children were back from school, playing football on the road. Barred windows looked down on the street from either side: it occurred to Jaya that she was the only person in sight who was dressed in anything other than a longyi; women in saris were few, and trousers seemed to be worn almost exclusively by policemen, soldiers and men in uniform. She had the feeling that she was being observed by a great many eyes.

Jaya's visa allowed her just one week in Myanmar. This seemed a very short time in which to find someone. What if Dinu were away, visiting friends, travelling? She had nightmare visions of waiting in a dingy hotel, in a place where she knew no one.

Earlier, at the airport in Calcutta, she had found herself exchanging glances with her fellow-passengers. They'd all been trying to sum each other up: why was he or she going to Yangon? What sort of business would take a person to
Myanmar? All the passengers were Indians, people like herself; she could tell at a glance that they were going for exactly the same reason that she was: to look for relatives and to explore old family connections.

Jaya had gone to some trouble to get a window seat on the plane. She had been looking forward to comparing her experiences of the journey to Yangon with all the accounts she had heard over the years. But once she was seated, a sense of panic set in. If she were to find Dinu, what was the surety that he would be willing to talk to her? The more she thought of it the more the imponderables seemed to mount.

Now here she was, on a street that bore the same name as the one on the address. The numbering of the houses was very confusing. There were numerals and fractions and complicated alphabetical demarcations. Small doorways led into courtyards that proved to be alleys. She stopped to ask directions at a pharmacy. The man behind the counter looked at her piece of paper and pointed her to the adjoining house. She stepped out to find herself looking at a pair of street-level doors that led to the outer room of a large old-style house. Then she noticed a small, hand-painted sign, hanging above the doorway. Most of the lettering was in Burmese, but at the bottom, almost as an afterthought, there were a few words in English:
The Glass Palace: Photo Studio.

Clearly she was in the right place, but the door was locked and it was evident that the place was closed. She was about to turn away, in disappointment, when she saw that the man in the pharmacy was gesturing in the direction of an alley, right next to the Glass Palace. She looked round the corner and saw a door that seemed to be fastened from the inside. Beyond lay a courtyard and the threshold of an old warren of a house. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the pharmacist was signalling vigorously, apparently urging her to step through. She knocked and when there was no answer, she banged hard, thumping the wood with the heel of her palm. Suddenly the doors flew apart. She stepped through and found herself in a walled courtyard. A couple of women were squatting in a
corner, tending a cooking fire. She went up to them and asked: ‘U Tun Pe?' They nodded, smiling, and pointed to a spiral staircase that led to the second floor: evidently Dinu lived in an apartment that was situated directly above his studio.

Climbing the stairs, Jaya became aware of a voice speaking in Burmese. It was the voice of an old man, quavering and feeble: the speaker appeared to be delivering some kind of discourse—a lecture or a speech. He was speaking in staccato bursts, the sentences punctuated by coughs and pauses. She came to the landing that led to the apartment: dozens of pairs of slippers and rubber sandals lay on the floor. The doors of the apartment stood open, but the entrance was angled in such a way that she could not see in. It was clear, however, that large numbers of people were gathered inside and it occurred to her that she might have stumbled upon a political meeting, even a clandestine one; she began to wonder whether her presence would constitute an unwelcome intrusion. Then she had a surprise: she heard the speaker uttering some words that were not Burmese; they were names that were familiar to her from the history of photography—Edward Weston, Eugene Atget, Brassai. At this point, curiosity triumphed over discretion. She kicked off her slippers and stepped up to the door.

Beyond lay a large room with a high ceiling: it was crammed full of people. A few were sitting on chairs but most were seated on mats, on the floor. The crowd was larger than the room could comfortably hold and despite the presence of several whirring table fans, the air was hot and close. At the far end of the room there were two tall windows with white shutters. The walls were a dank, patchy blue and parts of the ceiling were blackened with soot.

The speaker was sitting in a rattan armchair that was draped with a green antimacassar. His chair was so positioned that he was facing most of his listeners: she found herself looking at him directly, from across the room. His hair was neatly cropped and parted, grey only at the temples. He was wearing a dark purple longyi and a blue knit T-shirt, with some kind of logo embroidered on the chest. He was rail-thin and his forehead
and cheeks were deeply scored, with creases and fissures that seemed to move with the fluidity of ripples on water. It was a very fine face, suffused with the enrichment of age: the mobility of its lines created the impression of a range of perception and feeling that exceeded the ordinary by several extra registers.

It struck Jaya for the first time that she had never seen a picture of her uncle Dinu: he'd always been behind the camera, never in front of it. Could this be he? Jaya saw no resemblance to Rajkumar: to her he looked completely Burmese—but then this was true of many people of Indian, or part-Indian parentage. Either way, she could not be sure.

Jaya noticed now that the speaker was holding something in his hands—a large poster. He appeared to be using it to illustrate his lecture. She saw that the picture was of a shell, closely photographed. Its voluptuously rounded tail curled into a trunk that seemed almost to rise out of the print's surface. She recognised it as a reproduction of a monumental Weston nautilus.

Jaya had been standing at the door a couple of minutes without being noticed. All of a sudden every eye in the room turned in her direction. There was a silence and the place seemed to fill, almost instantaneously, with a fog of fear. The speaker put away the poster and rose slowly to his feet. He alone seemed calm, unafraid. He reached for a cane and came limping up, dragging his right foot behind him. He looked into her face and said something in Burmese. Jaya shook her head and tried to smile. He saw that she was a foreigner and she could almost hear him breathing a sigh of relief.

‘Yes?' he said quietly in English. ‘May I help you?'

Jaya was about to ask for U Tun Pe when she changed her mind. She said: ‘I'm looking for Mr Dinanath Raha . . .'

The creases of his face seemed to shimmer, as though a gust of wind had blown suddenly across a lake. ‘How did you know that name?' he said. ‘It's many, many years since I last heard it used.'

‘I'm your niece,' she said. ‘Jaya—your brother's daughter . . .'

‘Jaya!'

Jaya realised that they had somehow switched languages and he was now speaking to her in Bengali. Letting his cane drop, he put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her closely, as though searching for a confirmation of her identity. ‘Come and sit beside me,' he said, his voice falling to a whisper. ‘I'll just be a few more minutes.'

Jaya helped him back to his chair and sat cross-legged on the floor while he resumed his lecture. She was facing Dinu's audience now and she saw that it consisted of a motley mix of people, old and young, girls and boys, men and women. They were all Burmese but some looked to be of Indian origin, some Chinese. Some were smartly dressed while others were wearing cast-offs. There was a student in a black cap that said
Giorgio Armani
, and in one corner there sat a group of three monks in saffron robes. They were all listening to Dinu with intent attention; some were taking notes.

Rows of glass-fronted bookcases ringed the floor. On the walls there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of photographic reproductions that looked as though they had been cut out of books and magazines. Some were in wooden frames; some were pasted on cardboard. She recognised several of them; they were all reproductions of well-known photographs: there was a famous Weston image of a sea-shell; a print of Cartier-Bresson's veiled women, standing grouped on a Kashmir hilltop; there was a Raghubir Singh picture of an old house in Calcutta.

In one corner of the room there stood a brightly decorated table. A hand-painted banner hung above: it said: ‘Happy Birthday'. On the table there were paper cups, snacks, presents wrapped in paper . . .

She wished she knew what was going on.

Dinu's talk ended in a wild outburst of cheering and laughter. He smiled and turned to her with apologies for keeping her waiting. ‘You found me in the middle of my weekly session . . . I call it my
glass palace
day.'

‘It was not a long wait,' she said. ‘What were you talking about?'

‘Pictures . . . photography . . . anything that comes to mind. I just start them off—then it's everyone else's turn. Listen.' He smiled, looking round the room: it was filled with the noise of a dozen different conversations. At the back, a handful of people were blowing up balloons.

‘Is it a class?' she asked. ‘A lecture course?'