The Glass Palace (10 page)

The King was sitting at a table rolling a cheroot. U Maung Gyi lunged at the nurse as she went running in. She tripped and grabbed at the tablecloth. Everything flew into the air: there was tobacco everywhere. The King sneezed and went on sneezing for what seemed like hours. When he finally stopped he was angrier than anyone had ever seen him before. This meant still more departures.

With the head nurse thinking herself to be a squirrel and another gone home to Burma, the Queen now had very few dependable nurses left. She decided to get an English midwife. Mr Cox found one for her, a Mrs Wright. She seemed pleasant and friendly enough, but her arrival led to other problems. She wouldn't shiko and she wouldn't go down on her hands and knees while waiting on the Queen. The Queen appealed to Mr Cox but the Englishman came out in support of Mrs Wright. She could bow, he said, from the waist, but she needn't shiko and she certainly wouldn't crawl. She was an Englishwoman.

The Queen accepted this ruling but it didn't endear Mrs Wright to her. She began to rely more and more on a Burmese masseur who had somehow attached himself to the royal entourage. He was very good with his hands and was able to make the Queen's pains go away. But the English doctor found out and made a huge fuss. He said that what the masseur was doing was an affront to medical science. He said that the man was touching Her Highness in unhealthy places. The Queen decided he was mad and declared that she would not send the masseur away. The doctor retaliated by refusing to treat her any more.

Fortunately the Queen's labour was very short and the delivery quick and uncomplicated. The child was a girl and she was named Ashin Hteik Su Myat Paya.

Everyone was nervous because they knew how badly the Queen had wanted a boy. But the Queen surprised them. She was glad, she said: a girl would be better able to bear the pain of exile.

For a while Mandalay became a city of ghosts.

After the British invasion, many of the King's soldiers escaped into the countryside with their weapons. They began to act on their own, staging attacks on the occupiers, sometimes materialising inside the city at night. The invaders responded by tightening their grip. There were round-ups, executions, hangings. The sound of rifle-fire echoed through the streets; people locked themselves into their homes and stayed away from the bazaars. Whole days went by when Ma Cho had no call to light her cooking fire.

One night Ma Cho's stall was broken into. Between the two of them, Rajkumar and Ma Cho succeeded in driving the intruders away. But considerable damage had already been caused; lighting a lamp, Ma Cho discovered that most of her pots, pans and utensils had been either stolen or destroyed. She let out a stricken wail. ‘What am I to do? Where am I to go?'

Rajkumar squatted beside her. ‘Why don't you talk to Saya John?' he suggested. ‘Perhaps he'll be able to help.'

Ma Cho snorted in tearful disgust. ‘Don't talk to me about Saya John. What's the use of a man who's never there when you need him?' She began to sob, her hands covering her face.

Tenderness welled up in Rajkumar. ‘Don't cry, Ma Cho.' He ran his hands clumsily over her head, combing her curly hair with his nails. ‘Stop, Ma Cho. Stop.'

She blew her nose and straightened up. ‘It's all right,' she said gruffly. ‘It's nothing.' Fumbling in the darkness, she reached for his longyi, leaning forward to wipe the tears from her face.

Often before, Ma Cho's bouts of tears had ended in this way, with her wiping her face on his thin cotton garment. But this time, as her fingers drew together the loose cloth, the chafing of the fabric produced a new effect on Rajkumar. He felt the kindling of a glow of heat deep within his body, and then, involuntarily, his pelvis thrust itself forward, towards her fingers, just as she was closing her grip. Unmindful of the intrusion, Ma Cho drew a fistful of cloth languidly across her face, stroking her cheeks, patting the furrows round her mouth and dabbing the damp hollows of her eyes. Standing close beside her, Rajkumar swayed, swivelling his hips to keep pace with her hand. It was only when she was running the tip of the bunched cloth between her parted lips that the fabric betrayed him. Through the layered folds of cloth, now wet and clinging, she felt an unmistakable hardness touching on the soft corners of her mouth. She tightened her grip, suddenly alert, and gave the gathered cloth a probing pinch. Rajkumar gasped, arching his back.

‘Oh?' she grunted. Then, with a startling deftness, one of her hands flew to the knot of his longyi and tugged it open; the other pushed him down on his knees. Parting her legs she drew him, kneeling, towards her stool. Rajkumar's forehead was on her cheek now; the tip of his skinned nose thrust deep into the hollow beneath her jaw. He caught the odour of turmeric and onion welling up through the cleft between her breasts. And then a blinding whiteness flashed before his eyes and his head was pulled as far back as it could go, tugged by convulsions in his spine.

Abruptly, she pushed him away, with a yelp of disgust. ‘What am I doing?' she cried. ‘What am I doing with this boy, this child, this half-wit kalaa?' Elbowing him aside, she clambered up her ladder and vanished into her room.

It was a while before Rajkumar summoned the courage to say anything. ‘Ma Cho,' he called up, in a thin, shaking voice. ‘Are you angry?'

‘No,' came a bark from above. ‘I'm not angry. I want you to forget Ma Cho and go to sleep. You have your own future to think of.'

They never spoke of what happened that night. Over the next few days, Rajkumar saw very little of Ma Cho: she would disappear early in the morning, returning only late at night. Then, one morning, Rajkumar woke up and knew that she was gone for good. Now, for the first time, he climbed the ladder that led up to her room. The only thing he found was a new, blue longyi, lying folded in the middle of the room. He knew that she'd left it for him.

What was he to do now? Where was he to go? He'd assumed all along that he would eventually return to his sampan, to join his shipmates. But now, thinking of his life on the boat, he knew he would not go back. He had seen too much in Mandalay and acquired too many new ambitions.

During the last few weeks he'd thought often of what Saya John's son, Matthew, had said—about the British invasion being provoked by teak. No detail could have been more precisely calculated to lodge in a mind like Rajkumar's, both curious and predatory. If the British were willing to go to war over a stand of trees, it could only be because they knew of some hidden wealth, secreted within the forest. What exactly these riches were he didn't know but it was clear that he would never find out except by seeing for himself.

Even while pondering this, he was walking quickly, heading away from the bazaar. Now, looking around to take stock of where he was, he discovered that he had come to the whitewashed facade of a church. He decided to linger, walking past the church once, and then again. He circled and waited, and sure enough, within the hour he spotted Saya John approaching the church, hand in hand with his son.

‘Saya.'

‘Rajkumar!'

Now, standing face to face with Saya John, Rajkumar found himself hanging his head in confusion. How was he to tell him about Ma Cho, when it was he himself who was responsible for the Saya's cuckolding?

It was Saya John who spoke first: ‘Has something happened to Ma Cho?'

Rajkumar nodded.

‘What is it? Has she gone?'

‘Yes, Saya.'

Saya John gave a long sigh, rolling his eyes heavenwards. ‘Perhaps it's for the best,' he said. ‘I think it's a sign that the time has come for this sinner to turn celibate.'

‘Saya?'

‘Never mind. And what will you do now, Rajkumar? Go back to India in your boat?'

‘No, Saya,' Rajkumar shook his head. ‘I want to stay here, in Burma.'

‘And what will you do for a living?'

‘You said, Saya, that if I ever wanted a job I was to come to you. Saya?'

One morning the King read in the newspapers that the Viceroy was coming to Madras. In a state of great excitement he sent for Mr Cox.

‘Is the Viceroy going to call on us?' he asked.

Mr Cox shook his head. ‘Your Highness, I have not been informed of any such plan.'

‘But protocol demands it. The Kings of Burma are the peers of such sovereigns as the kings of Siam and Cambodia and of the emperors of China and Japan.'

‘I regret, Your Highness, that it is probably too late to effect a change in the Viceroy's itinerary.'

‘But we must see him, Mr Cox.'

‘The Viceroy's time has already been spoken for. I am sorry.'

‘But we wish to find out what the Government plans to do with us. When we came here, we were told that this was not to be our permanent residence. We are eager to know where we are to live and when we are to go there.'

Mr Cox went away and came back a few days later. ‘Your Highness,' he said, ‘I am glad to be able to inform you that the matter of a permanent residence for you and your family has finally been resolved.'

‘Oh?' said the King. ‘And where is it to be?'

‘A place by the name of Ratnagiri.'

‘What?' The King stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Where is this place?'

‘Some hundred and twenty miles south of Bombay. An excellent place, with fine views of the sea.'

‘Fine views?'

The King sent for a map and asked Mr Cox to show him where Ratnagiri was. Mr Cox indicated a point somewhere between Bombay and Goa. The King was thoroughly alarmed to note that the place was too insignificant to be marked on the map.

‘But we would rather be in a city, Mr Cox. Here in Madras. Or Bombay. Or Calcutta. What will we do in a small village?'

‘Ratnagiri is a district headquarters, Your Highness, not a village by any means.'

‘How long are we to remain there? When will we be allowed to return to Burma?'

Now it was Mr Cox's turn to be nonplussed. It had not occurred to him that the King still harboured hopes of returning to Burma.

Mr Cox was a kindly man, in his gruff way. ‘Your Highness,' he said, in a quiet and gentle voice, ‘you must prepare yourself to be in Ratnagiri for some time, a considerable time I fear. Perhaps . . .'

‘Perhaps for ever?'

‘Those were not my words.' Mr Cox coughed. ‘Not at all. Those words were not mine. No, I must insist, they were not . . .'

The King rose to his feet abruptly and went to his room. He did not step out again for several days.

They left Madras a month later on a steamer called the
Clive.
The voyage was very different this time around. They sailed along the coast with the shore rarely out of sight. They went through the Palk Straits, with the northern tip of Ceylon visible on the left, and the southernmost point in India, Cape Comorin, in view on the right.

Four days after leaving Madras the
Clive
nosed into a wide and sunlit bay. There were cliffs at either end of the bay, a sweeping beach and a meandering river. The town was on a hill, above the bay; it was so thickly blanketed with coconut palms that very little could be seen of it.

They spent the night on the steamer and went ashore the next morning. The
Clive
pulled in beside a jetty that reached a long way out into the shallow bay. Carriages were waiting for them at the far end, near a fishing village. The King was greeted with a gun salute and a guard of honour. Then the carriages set off in single file down a narrow, tree-shaded path. There were red-tiled houses on either side, with gardens of mango trees and areca palms. There were policemen everywhere, holding back the people who'd gathered to watch. They passed a bazaar and a grey-walled gaol and a line of police-barracks. The road ended at a large, two-storeyed bungalow set inside a walled garden. It was on a bluff above the town, overlooking the bay. It was called Outram House.

The King went in first and climbed slowly up the stairs. He came to a large bedroom and went inside. The room was furnished with a desk, a bed and three armchairs. It opened on to a small balcony that faced westwards, towards the sea. The King walked very slowly round the room. He toyed with the slatted wooden shutters, scratched at a rosette of candlewax and ran a finger over a half-effaced mark on the wall, crumbling the flaking plaster between finger and thumb. There was a faintly musty smell in the room and a tracing of mildew on the wall. He tried to mark these things in his memory for he knew they would fade in time and a day would come when he would want to remember them—the vividness of his first encounter with the site of his captivity, the sour mildewed smell of it and the roughness of its texture upon the skin.