The Glass Palace

The Glass Palace

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Circle of Reason

The Shadow Lines

In an Antique Land

The Calcutta Chromosome

Dancing in Cambodia and Other Essays

Countdown

The Imam and the Indian

The Hungry Tide

Sea of Poppies

The Glass Palace

AMITAV GHOSH

 

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110017, India

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Ravi Dayal Publisher 2000

Published in Viking by Penguin Books India and Ravi Dayal Publisher 2008

Copyright © Amitav Ghosh 2000, 2008

All rights reserved

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 9780670082209

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

For sale in India, Bhutan and Nepal only

Typeset in Sabon by InoSoft Systems, Noida

Printed at Gopsons Papers Ltd, Noida

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this book.

To my father's memory

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

part one

Mandalay

part two

Ratnagiri

part three

The Money Tree

part four

The Wedding

part five

Morningside

part six

The Front

part seven

The Glass Palace

Author's Note

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

pp.
16
–
17
: adapted from W.S. Desai,
Deposed King Thebaw of Burma in India, 1885–1916
, Bharatiya Vidya Series, Vol. 25, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1967 (appendix VII, p.
119
)

p.
95
: adapted from Patricia Herbert,
The Hsaya San Rebellion (1930–1932)
Reappraised
, Monash Univ., Melbourne, 1982 (p.
5
)

p.
372
: from Majjhima Nikaya [adapted from
The Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan
, ed. W.T. de Bary, Vintage, New York, 1972; p.
27
]

p.
373
: from Samyutta Nikaya [adapted from
The Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan
, ed. W.T. de Bary, Vintage, New York, 1972; p.
16
]

part one

Mandalay

one

T
here was only one person in the food-stall who knew exactly what that sound was that was rolling in across the plain, along the silver curve of the Irrawaddy, to the western wall of Mandalay's fort. His name was Rajkumar and he was an Indian, a boy of eleven—not an authority to be relied upon.

The noise was unfamiliar and unsettling, a distant booming followed by low, stuttering growls. At times it was like the snapping of dry twigs, sudden and unexpected. And then, abruptly, it would change to a deep rumble, shaking the food-stall and rattling its steaming pot of soup. The stall had only two benches, and they were both packed with people, sitting pressed up against each other. It was cold, the start of central Burma's brief but chilly winter, and the sun had not risen high enough yet to burn off the damp mist that had drifted in at dawn from the river. When the first booms reached the stall there was a silence, followed by a flurry of questions and whispered answers. People looked around in bewilderment: What is it?
Ba le
? What can it be? And then Rajkumar's sharp, excited voice cut through the buzz of speculation. ‘English cannon,' he said in his fluent but heavily accented Burmese. ‘They're shooting somewhere up the river. Heading in this direction.'

Frowns appeared on some customers' faces as they noted
that it was the serving-boy who had spoken and that he was a
kalaa
from across the sea—an Indian, with teeth as white as his eyes and skin the colour of polished hardwood. He was standing in the centre of the stall, holding a pile of chipped ceramic bowls. He was grinning a little sheepishly, as though embarrassed to parade his precocious knowingness.

His name meant Prince, but he was anything but princely in appearance, with his oil-splashed vest, his untidily knotted
longyi
and his bare feet with their thick slippers of callused skin. When people asked how old he was he said fifteen, or sometimes eighteen or nineteen, for it gave him a sense of strength and power to be able to exaggerate so wildly, to pass himself off as grown and strong, in body and judgement, when he was, in fact, not much more than a child. But he could have said he was twenty and people would still have believed him, for he was a big, burly boy, taller and broader in the shoulder than many men. And because he was very dark it was hard to tell that his chin was as smooth as the palms of his hands, innocent of all but the faintest trace of fuzz.

It was chance alone that was responsible for Rajkumar's presence in Mandalay that November morning. His boat—the sampan on which he worked as a helper and errand-boy—had been found to need repairs after sailing up the Irrawaddy from the Bay of Bengal. The boatowner had taken fright on being told that the work might take as long as a month, possibly even longer. He couldn't afford to feed his crew that long, he'd decided: some of them would have to find other jobs. Rajkumar was told to walk to the city, a couple of miles inland. At a bazaar, opposite the west wall of the fort, he was to ask for a woman called Ma Cho. She was half-Indian and she ran a small food-stall; she might have some work for him.

And so it happened that at the age of eleven, walking into the city of Mandalay, Rajkumar saw, for the first time, a straight road. By the sides of the road there were bamboo-walled shacks and palm-thatched shanties, pats of dung and piles of refuse. But the straight course of the road's journey was unsmudged by the clutter that flanked it: it was like a
causeway, cutting across a choppy sea. Its lines led the eye right through the city, past the bright red walls of the fort to the distant pagodas of Mandalay hill, shining like a string of white bells upon the slope.

For his age, Rajkumar was well-travelled. The boat he worked on was a coastal craft that generally kept to open waters, plying the long length of shore that joined Burma to Bengal. Rajkumar had been to Chittagong and Bassein and any number of towns and villages in between. But in all his travels he had never come across thoroughfares like those in Mandalay. He was accustomed to lanes and alleys that curled endlessly around themselves so that you could never see beyond the next curve. Here was something new: a road that followed a straight, unvarying course, bringing the horizon right into the middle of habitation.

When the fort's full immensity revealed itself, Rajkumar came to a halt in the middle of the road. The citadel was a miracle to behold, with its mile-long walls and its immense moat. The crenellated ramparts were almost three storeys high, but of a soaring lightness, red in colour, and topped by ornamented gateways with seven-tiered roofs. Long straight roads radiated outwards from the walls, forming a neat geometrical grid. So intriguing was the ordered pattern of these streets that Rajkumar wandered far afield, exploring. It was almost dark by the time he remembered why he'd been sent to the city. He made his way back to the fort's western wall and asked for Ma Cho.

‘Ma Cho?'

‘She has a stall where she sells food—
baya-gyaw
and other things. She's half-Indian.'