The Glass Palace (8 page)

‘How much time left?'

Sladen looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes.'

Just ten more minutes.

The King led Sladen into the pavilion and unlocked a door. A wedge of light fanned into the darkened room, igniting a firefly display of gold. The world's richest gem mines lay in Burma and many fine stones had passed into the possession of the ruling family. The King paused to run his hand over the jewelled case that held his most prized possession, the Ngamauk ring, set with the greatest, most valuable ruby ever mined in Burma. His ancestors had collected jewellery and gemstones as an afterthought, a kind of amusement. It was with these trinkets that he would have to provide for himself and his family in exile.

‘Colonel Sladen, how is all this to be transported?'

Sladen conferred quickly with his fellow officers. Everything would be taken care of, he reassured the King. The hoard would be transported under guard to the King's ship. But now it was time to leave; the guard of honour was waiting.

The King walked out of the pavilion, flanked by Queen Supayalat and her mother. Halfway down the meandering path the Queen turned to look back. The Princesses were following a few paces behind with the maids. The girls were
carrying their belongings in an assortment of boxes and bundles. Some had flowers in their hair, some were dressed in their brightest clothes. Dolly was walking beside Evelyn, who had the Second Princess on her hip. The two girls were giggling, oblivious, as though they were on their way to a festival.

The procession passed slowly through the long corridors of the palace, and across the mirrored walls of the Hall of Audience, past the shouldered guns of the guard of honour and the snapped-off salutes of the English officers.

Two carriages were waiting by the east gate. They were bullock-carts,
yetha
s, the commonest vehicles on Mandalay's streets. The first of the carts had been fitted out with a ceremonial canopy. Just as he was about to step in, the King noticed that his canopy had seven tiers, the number allotted to a nobleman, not the nine due to a king.

He paused to draw breath. So the well-spoken English colonels had had their revenge after all, given the knife of victory a final little twist. In his last encounter with his erstwhile subjects he was to be publicly demoted, like an errant schoolchild. Sladen had guessed right: this was, of all the affronts Thebaw could have imagined, the most hurtful, the most egregious.

The ox-carts were small and there was not enough room for the maids. They followed on foot, a ragged little procession of eighteen brightly dressed orphan girls carrying boxes and bundles.

Several hundred British soldiers fell in beside the ox-carts and the girls. They were heavily armed, prepared for trouble. The people of Mandalay were not expected to sit idly by while their King and Queen were herded into exile. Reports had been heard of planned riots and demonstrations, of desperate attempts to free the Royal Family.

The British high command believed this to be potentially the most dangerous moment of the entire operation. Some of
them had served in India and an incident from the recent past weighed heavily on their minds. In the final days of the Indian uprising of 1857, Major Hodson had captured Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last of the Mughals, on the outskirts of Delhi. The blind and infirm old emperor had taken refuge in the tomb of his ancestor, Humayun, with two of his sons. When it came time for the major to escort the emperor and his sons back into the city, people had gathered in large numbers along the roadside. These crowds had grown more and more unruly, increasingly threatening. Finally, to keep the mob under control, the major had ordered the princes' execution. They had been pushed before the crowd and their brains had been blown out in full public view.

These events were no more than twenty-eight years in the past, their memory freshly preserved in the conversation of messes and clubs. It was to be hoped that no such eventuality would present itself now—but if it did it would not find King Thebaw's escort unprepared.

Mandalay had few thoroughfares that could accommodate a procession of this size. The ox-carts rumbled slowly along the broader avenues, banking steeply round the right-angled corners. The city's streets, although straight, were narrow and unpaved.

Their dirt surfaces were rutted with deep furrows, left by the annual tilling of the monsoons. The ox-carts' wheels were solid, carved from single blocks of wood. Their rigid frames seesawed wildly as they ploughed over the troughs. The Queen had to crouch over her swollen stomach to keep herself from being battered against the sides of the cart.

Neither the soldiers nor their royal captives knew the way to the port. The procession soon lost its way in the geometrical maze of Mandalay's streets. It strayed off in the direction of the northern hills and by the time the mistake was discovered it was almost dark. The carts wound their way back by the light of oil-soaked torches.

During the daylight hours the townsfolk had been careful to keep away from the streets: they had watched the ox-carts
go by from windows and rooftops, at a safe distance from the soldiers and their bayonets. As dusk gathered, they began to trickle out of their homes. Reassured by the darkness, they attached themselves to the procession, in small and scattered groups.

Dolly looked very small when Rajkumar spotted her. She was walking beside a tall soldier, with a small cloth bundle balanced on her head. Her face was grimy and her
htamein
was caked with dust.

Rajkumar still had a few small things that he had found in the palace the night before. He went hurrying to a shop and exchanged them for a couple of handfuls of palm-sugar sweets. He wrapped the sweets in a banana leaf and tied the packet with string. Sprinting back, he caught up with the procession as it was making its way out of the town.

The British fleet was moored just a mile or so away, but it was dark now and the going was slow along the rough and uneven roads. With nightfall, thousands of Mandalay's residents came pouring out. They walked alongside the procession, keeping well away from the soldiers and their moving pools of torchlight.

Rajkumar sprinted ahead and climbed into a tamarind tree. When the first ox-cart came into view he caught a glimpse of the King, just visible through the tiny window. He was sitting straight-backed, his eyes fixed ahead of him, his body swaying to the cart's lurching motion.

Rajkumar worked his way slowly through the crowd until he was within a few feet of Dolly. He kept pace, watching the soldier who was marching beside her. The man turned his eyes away for a moment, to exchange a word with someone behind him. Rajkumar saw his chance: he darted through to Dolly and pressed his banana leaf packet into her hand.

‘Take it,' he hissed. ‘It's food.'

She stared at him, in uncomprehending surprise.

‘It's the kalaa boy from yesterday.' Evelyn jogged her elbow. ‘Take it.'

Rajkumar raced back into the shadows: he was no more than ten feet from Dolly, walking beside her, shrouded by the
night. She picked the packet open and stared at the sweets. Then she held the packet up in her hands, offering it to the soldier who was marching beside her. The man smiled and shook his head, in friendly refusal. Someone said something in English, and he laughed. Several of the girls laughed too, Dolly included.

Rajkumar was astonished, even angry. What was Dolly doing? Why was she giving these hard-won tidbits to the very men who were leading her into captivity and exile? But then, slowly, his initial sense of betrayal turned to relief, even gratitude. Yes, of course, this was what one must do; Dolly was doing exactly what had to be done. What purpose would it serve for these girls to make a futile show of resentment? How could they succeed in defiance when the very army of the realm had succumbed? No, better by far to wait, and in the meanwhile to smile. This way Dolly would live.

Half a mile from the port, the soldiers formed a cordon across the road to hold the crowd back. People began to climb trees and gather on rooftops, looking for vantage points. Unexpectedly Rajkumar came upon Ma Cho sitting on a tree-stump. She was weeping, and between sobs, telling anyone who would listen the story of her encounter with the Queen the night before.

Rajkumar tried to console her by running a hand gently over her head. He had never seen an adult cry like this before. What was she weeping for? He glanced up, as though looking for an answer on the faces around him. It was not till then that he noticed that many others were crying too. He had been so intent on keeping pace with Dolly that he had paid little attention to the people around him. Now, looking on either side, he could see that every face was streaked with tears.

Rajkumar recognised several people from the looting of the night before. He recalled how they had hacked at the furniture and dug up the floors. Now those very men and women were lying prostrate with grief, mourning the loss of their King and sobbing in what looked like inconsolable sorrow.

Rajkumar was at a loss to understand this grief. He was, in a way, a feral creature, unaware that in certain places there exist invisible bonds linking people to one another through personifications of their commonality. In the Bengal of his birth those ties had been sundered by a century of conquest and no longer existed even as memory. Beyond the ties of blood, friendship and immediate reciprocity, Rajkumar recognised no loyalties, no obligations and no limits on the compass of his right to provide for himself. He reserved his trust and affection for those who earned it by concrete example and proven goodwill. Once earned, his loyalty was given wholeheartedly, with none of those unspoken provisions with which people usually guard against betrayal. In this too he was not unlike a creature that had returned to the wild. But that there should exist a universe of loyalties that was unrelated to himself and his own immediate needs—this was very nearly incomprehensible.

An anguished murmur ran through the crowd: the captives were moving, alighting from their ox-carts, entering a ship. Rajkumar jumped quickly into the branches of a nearby tree. The river was far away and all he could see was a steamer and a line of tiny figures filing up a gangplank. It was impossible to tell the figures apart. Then the ship's lights went out and it disappeared into the darkness.

Many thousands kept vigil through the night. The steamer's name was
Thooriya
, the sun. At daybreak, when the skies lightened over the hills, it was gone.

five

A
fter five days on the Irrawaddy the
Thooriya
slipped into the Rangoon river in the near-darkness of late evening. It anchored at mid-river, a good distance from the city's busy dockside.

At first light the next day the King went up on deck, carrying a pair of gilded binoculars. The glasses were of French manufacture, a prized heirloom that had once belonged to King Mindon. The old King had been much attached to the binoculars and had always carried them with him, even into his Audience Hall.

It was a cold morning and an opaque fog had risen off the river. The King waited patiently for the sun to scorch away the mist. When it had thinned a little he raised his glasses. Suddenly, there it was, the sight he had longed to see all his life: the towering mass of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, larger even than he had imagined, its hti thrusting skywards, floating on a bed of mist and fog, shining in the light of the dawn. He had worked on the hti himself, helped with his own hands in the gilding of the spire, layering sheets of gold leaf upon each other. It was King Mindon who had had the hti cast, in Mandalay; it had been sent down to the Shwe Dagon in a royal barge. He, Thebaw, had been a novice in the monastery then, and everybody, even the seniormost monks, had vied with each other for the honour of working on the hti.

The King lowered his binoculars to scan the city's waterfront. The instrument's rims welled over with a busy mass of things: walls, columns, carriages and hurrying people. Thebaw had heard about Rangoon from his half-brother, the Thonzai Prince. The town was founded by their ancestor, Alaungpaya, but few members of their dynasty had ever been able to visit it. The British had seized the town before Thebaw's birth, along with all of Burma's coastal provinces. It was then that the frontiers of the Burmese kingdom were driven back, almost halfway up the Irrawaddy. Since then the only members of the Royal Family who had been able to visit Rangoon were rebels and exiles, princes who had fallen out with the ruling powers in Mandalay.