The Glass Palace

six

For Rajkumar and Saya John the busy time of year was when the rivers rose. Every few weeks they would load a cargo of sacks, crates and boxes on to one of the Irrawaddy Steamship Flotilla’s riverboats: shuddering, paddle-wheeled steamers, captained, more often than not, by Scotsmen, and crewed mainly by Chittagong khalasis, such as Rajkumar had himself once sought to be. With the weight of the engorged river behind them, they would go shooting downstream from Mandalay at such speeds as to put the flotilla’s itineraries to rout. At sunset, when it was time to pull into shore, they would frequently find themselves anchoring beside some tiny river-bank hamlet that consisted of nothing more than a few thatched huts, clustered around a police station parade ground.

No matter how small the village, a fair would materialise instantly around the anchored steamer: hawkers, food vendors, boat-borne shopkeepers, sellers of fried snacks and distillers of country liquor would come hastening with their wares, delighted by the unexpected netting of this great shoal of customers. Sometimes news of the steamer’s arrival would filter through to a travelling troupe of entertainers. At nightfall, to the accompaniment of a concert of rain-bred croaking, puppeteers’ screens would come alive above the banks and the gaunt, twitching outlines of the Bodaw and the Bayin, the Minthami and the Minthagyi, the Natkadaw and the Nan Belu would loom out of the darkness, as large and as familiar as the shadows on the moon.

Saya John liked to travel first-class, in a cabin: his business was flourishing and he had money to spare. He had moved into a large house on Mandalay’s 33rd Street — a dwelling that housed Rajkumar as well as everyone else who was in any way connected with his business. The British occupation had changed everything: Burma had been quickly integrated into the Empire, forcibly converted into a province of British India. Courtly Mandalay was now a bustling commercial hub; resources were being exploited with an energy and efficiency hitherto undreamt of. The Mandalay palace had been refurbished to serve the conquerors’ recondite pleasures: the west wing had been converted into a British Club; the Queen’s Hall of Audience had now become a billiard room; the mirrored walls were lined with months-old copies of Punch and the Illustrated London News; the gardens had been dug up to make room for tennis courts and polo grounds; the exquisite little monastery in which Thebaw had spent his novitiate had become a chapel where Anglican priests administered the sacrament to British troops. Mandalay, it was confidently predicted, would soon become the Chicago of Asia; prosperity was the natural destiny of a city that guarded the confluence of two of the world’s mightiest waterways, the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin.

Saya John was earning rich profits now, ferrying supplies and provisions to teak camps. Although not a man who had a great craving for luxuries, he felt it necessary to grant himself a good night’s sleep when he was setting out on one of his supply expeditions. A cabin on the first-class deck of an Irrawaddy steamship was, after all, but a small indulgence.

As for Rajkumar, he spent his shipboard nights on the lower deck. Some of the crew were boys his own age, whose job it was to hang over the bows of the vessel, plumb line in hand, just as he himself had once done, watching for shifting sandbanks and calling out the depths, ‘Ek gaz; do gaz; teen gaz. .’ With them he would slip into his own Chittagong tongue, and when the steamer lay at rest, they would rouse him from his deckside mat and take him over to land, to show him the places where boatmen went at night.

When it came time to go ashore, the next day, Rajkumar would be red-eyed and Saya John fresh, heartily breakfasted and eager to get his cargo unloaded, to be on his way to the camp where he was headed. The first part of the journey was usually by ox-cart. They would breast rivers of mud as they went creaking towards the distant mountains.

When everything went as planned, these journeys would end at some tiny inland hamlet, with a team of elephants waiting to relieve them of their cargo, leaving them free to turn back. But all too often they would arrive at their roadhead only to learn that the camp ahead could spare no elephants; that they would have to find their own porters to carry their cargo into the mountains. Then Rajkumar too had to yoke a basket to his back, a wickerwork pah with a deep cover and a forehead-strap. To his particular charge would fall the small bespoke luxuries that were specially ordered by the forest Assistants who ran the timber camps — cigars, bottles of whisky, tins of canned meat and sardines, once even a crystal decanter sent up by Rowe & Co., the big Rangoon department store.

They would set off at daybreak with Saya John leading a long line of porters and Rajkumar bringing up the rear; they would climb sideways, like mules, along the rain-sodden paths, digging the edges of their feet into the red, purchaseless mud. It was a ritual with Saya John, a kind of superstition, always to start these journeys in European clothes: a sola topee, leather boots, khaki trousers. Rajkumar went barefoot, like the porters, wearing nothing but a vest, a longyi and a farmer’s wide-brimmed hat.

But no matter how much care he took, Saya John’s costume never survived long intact: the undergrowth would come alive as they passed by, leeches unfurling like tendrils as they awoke to the warmth of the passing bodies. Being the most heavily clothed in the party, it was Saya John who invariably reaped the richest of these bloody harvests. Every hour or two he would call a halt. The trails were lined with thatched bamboo shelters, erected at regular intervals by the timbermen. Sitting huddled beneath the dripping thatch, Saya John would reach into his bags to retrieve the tarpaulin-wrapped packet in which Rajkumar had packed his matches and cheroots. Lighting a cheroot he would draw deep until a long, glowing tip had formed. Then he would go over his body, burning off his leeches, one by one.

The thickest clusters of leeches were gathered always along the fissures of the body, where cloth chafed on skin: the folds and creases would guide the creatures to their favourite destinations — armpits, the groin, the cracks between legs and buttocks. In his shoes Saya John would sometimes find scores of leeches, most of them clinging to the webbed skin between the toes — to a leech the most prized of the human body’s offerings. There were always some that had burst under the pressure of the boot, leaving their suckers embedded in the flesh. These were the sites that were most likely to attract fresh attacks, from insects as well as leeches; left unattended they would fester, turn into foul-smelling, deep-rooted jungle sores. To these spots Saya John would apply kow-yok—a tar-like touch of red tobacco, smeared on paper or cloth. The poultice would fasten itself so tightly to the skin as to stay attached even when immersed in water, drawing out the infection and protecting the wound. At each stop Saya John would shed an article of clothing, and within the space of a few hours he would be dressed like Rajkumar, in nothing more than a longyi and a vest.

Almost invariably they would find themselves following the course of a chaung, a rushing mountain stream. Every few minutes a log would come hurtling through the water, on its way down to the plain. To be caught in mid-stream by one of these hurtling two-ton projectiles was to be crippled or killed. When the path switched from one bank of the chaung to the other, a lookout would be posted to call out the intervals between logs so that the porters would know when it was safe to cross.

Often the logs came not singly but in groups, dozens of tons of hardwood caroming down the stream together: when they hit each other the impact would be felt all the way up the banks. At times a log would snag, in rapids or on the shore, and within minutes a tangled dam would rise out of the water, plugging the stream. One after another logs would go cannoning into one another, adding to the weight of the accumulated hardwood. The weight of the mass would mount until it became an irresistible force. Then at last something would give; a log, nine feet in girth, would snap like a matchstick. With a great detonation the dam would capsize and a tidal wave of wood and water would wash down the slopes of the mountain.

‘Chaungs are the tradewinds of teak,’ Saya John liked to say.

In the dry season, when the earth cracked and the forests wilted, the streams would dwindle into dribbles upon the slope, barely able to shoulder the weight of a handful of leaves, mere trickles of mud between strings of cloudy riverbed pools. This was the season for the timbermen to comb the forest for teak. The trees, once picked, had to be killed and left to dry, for the density of teak is such that it will not remain afloat while its heartwood is moist. The killing was achieved with a girdle of incisions, thin slits, carved deep into the wood at a height of four feet and six inches off the ground (teak being ruled, despite the wildness of its terrain, by imperial stricture in every tiny detail).

The assassinated trees were left to die where they stood, sometimes for three years or even more. It was only after they had been judged dry enough to float that they were marked for felling. That was when the axemen came, shouldering their weapons, squinting along the blades to judge their victims’ angles of descent.

Dead though they were, the trees would sound great tocsins of protest as they fell, unloosing thunderclap explosions that could be heard miles away, bringing down everything in their path, rafts of saplings, looped nets of rattan. Thick stands of bamboo were flattened in moments, thousands of jointed limbs exploding simultaneously in deadly splinter blasts, throwing up mushroom clouds of debris.

Then teams of elephants would go to work, guided by their handlers, their oo-sis and pe-sis, butting, prodding, levering with their trunks. Belts of wooden rollers would be laid on the ground, and quick-fingered pa-kyeiks, specialised in the tying of chains, would dart between the elephants’ legs, fastening steel harnesses. When finally the logs began to move such was the friction of their passage that water-carriers would have to run beside them, dousing the smoking rollers with tilted buckets.

Dragged to the banks of chaungs, the logs were piled into stacks and left to await the day when the chaungs would awaken from the hibernation of the hot season. With the first rains, the puddles along the streams’ beds would stir and stretch and join hands, rising slowly to the task of clearing away the debris accumulated over the long months of dessication. Then, in a matter of days, with the rains pouring down, they would rear up in their beds, growing hundreds-fold in height: where a week before they had wilted under the weight of twigs and leaves, they would now throw two-ton logs downstream like feathered darts.

Thus would begin the logs’ journey to the timberyards of Rangoon: with elephants nudging them over the slopes into the frothing waters of the chaungs below. Following the lie of the land they would make their way from feeder-streams to tributaries, until they debouched finally into the engorged rivers of the plains.

In years of bad rain, when the chaungs were too feeble to heft these great weights, the timber companies’ profits plummeted. But even in good years they were jealous, punishing taskmasters — these mountain streams. At the height of the season a single snagged tree could result in a pile-up of five thousand logs or even more. The servicing of these white waters was a science unto itself, with its own cadre of adepts, special teams of oo-sis and elephants who spent the monsoon months ceaselessly patrolling the forest: these were the famed aunging herds, skilled in the difficult and dangerous arts of clearing chaungs.

Once, while sheltering beside a dying and girdled trunk of teak, Saya John gave Rajkumar a mint leaf to hold in one hand and a fallen leaf from the tree in the other. Feel them, he said, rub them between your fingers.

Teak is a relative of mint, tectona grandis, born of the same genus of flowering plant, but of a distaff branch, presided over by that most soothing of herbs, verbena. It counts among its close kin many other fragrant and familiar herbs — sage, savoury, thyme, lavender, rosemary and most remarkably holy basil, with its many descendants, green and purple, smooth-leaved and coarse, pungent and fragrant, bitter and sweet.

There was a teak tree in Pegu once, with a trunk that measured one hundred and six feet from the ground to its first branch. Imagine what a mint’s leaf would be like if it were to grow upon a plant that rose more than a hundred feet into the air, straight up from the ground, without tapering or deviation, its stem as straight as a plumb-line, its first leaves appearing almost at the top, clustered close together and outspread, like the hands of a surfacing diver.

The mint leaf was the size of Rajkumar’s thumb while the other would have covered an elephant’s footprint; one was a weed that served to flavour soup while the other came from a tree that had felled dynasties, caused invasions, created fortunes, brought a new way of life into being. Yet even Rajkumar, who was in no way inclined to indulge the far-fetched or the fanciful, had to admit that between the faint hairiness of the one and the bristling, coarse-textured fur of the other, there was an unmistakable kinship, a palpably familial link.

It was by the bells of their elephants that teak camps made themselves known. Even when muted by rain or distance, the sound could always be counted on to produce a magical effect on a line of porters, lengthening their pace and freshening their step.

No matter how long he had walked or how tired he was Rajkumar would feel a surging in his heart when a camp loomed suddenly into view — a forest clearing with a few thatch-roofed huts clustered around a tai, an elongated wooden house on stilts.

Teak camps were always the same and yet they were all different, no two camps ever being built in the same place, from one season to the next. The initial felling of the forest was done by elephants with the result that the clearings were invariably scarred with upturned trees and ragged pits.

A tai stood at the centre of each campsite and it was occupied always by the forest Assistant, the company officer in charge of the camp. To Rajkumar’s eye these tais were structures of incomparable elegance: they were built on wooden platforms, raised some six feet off the ground on teakwood posts. Each was endowed with several large rooms, one leading into another, and ending finally in a wide veranda, always so oriented as to command the best possible view. In a camp where the forest Assistant was served by an industrious luga-lei, the veranda of the tai would be sheltered by a canopy of flowering vines, with blooms that glowed like embers against the bamboo matting. Here would sit the Assistant of an evening, with a glass of whisky in one hand and a pipe in another, watching the sun go down across the valley and dreaming of his faraway Home.

They were distant, brooding men, these Assistants. Before going to see them Saya John would always change into European clothes, a white shirt, duck trousers. Rajkumar would watch from a distance as Saya John approached the tai to call out a greeting, with one hand resting deferentially on the bottom rung of the ladder. If invited up he would climb the ladder slowly, placing one foot carefully after the other. There would follow a flurry of smiles, bows, greetings. Sometimes he would be back in a matter of minutes; sometimes the Assistant would offer him a whisky and ask him to stay to dinner.

As a rule the Assistants were always very correct in their manner. But there was a time once when an Assistant began to berate Saya John, accusing him of having forgotten something he had ordered. ‘Take that grinning face out of here. .,’ the Englishman shouted, ‘I’ll see you in hell, Johnny Chinaman.’

At the time Rajkumar knew very little English but there was no mistaking the anger and contempt in the Assistant’s voice. For an instant Rajkumar saw Saya John through the Assistant’s eyes: small, eccentric and erratically dressed, in his ill-fitting European clothes, his portliness accentuated by the patched duck trousers that hung in thick folds around his ankles, with his scuffed sola topee perched precariously on his head.

Rajkumar had been in Saya John’s service three years and had come to look up to him as his guide in all things. He found himself growing hot with indignation on his mentor’s behalf. He ran across the clearing to the tai, fully intending to haul himself up the ladder to confront the Assistant on his own veranda.

But just then Saya John came hurrying down, grim-faced and sombre.

‘Sayagyi! Shall I go up. .?’

‘Go up where?’

‘To the tai. To show that bastard. .’

‘Don’t be a fool, Rajkumar. Go and find something useful to do.’ With a snort of annoyance, Saya John turned his back on Rajkumar.

They were staying the night with the hsin-ouq, the leader of the camp’s oo-sis. The huts where the timbermen lived were well to the rear of the tai, so placed as not to interrupt the Assistant’s view. These structures were small, stilt-supported dwellings of one or two rooms, each with a balcony-like platform in front. The oo-sis built the huts with their own hands, and while they were living in a camp, they would tend the site with the greatest diligence, daily repairing rents in the bamboo screens, patching the thatch and building shrines to their nats. Often they would plant small, neatly fenced plots of vegetables around their huts, to eke out the dry rations sent up from the plains. Some would rear chickens or pigs between the stilts of their huts; others would dam nearby streams and stock them with fish.

As a result of this husbandry teak camps often had the appearance of small mountain villages, with family dwellings clustered in a semi-circle behind a headman’s house. But this was deceptive for these were strictly temporary settlements. It took a team of oo-sis just a day or two to build a camp, using nothing but vines, freshly cut bamboo and plaited cane. At the end of the season, the camp was abandoned to the jungle, only to be conjured up again the next year, at another location.

At every camp it was the hsin-ouq who was assigned the largest hut, and it was in these that Saya John and Rajkumar usually stayed. Often when they were at camp, Saya John and Rajkumar would sit on the huts’ balconies, talking late into the night. Saya John would smoke cheroots and reminisce— about his life in Malaya and Singapore and his dead wife.

The night when Saya John was berated by the Assistant, Rajkumar lay awake a long time, staring at the flickering lights of the tai. Despite Saya John’s admonitions, he could not put aside his indignation at the Assistant’s behaviour.

Just as he was drifting off to sleep, Rajkumar heard someone crawling out to the balcony. It was Saya John, armed with a box of matches and a cheroot. Rajkumar was suddenly awake again and just as angry as he had been earlier in the evening.

‘Sayagyi,’ Rajkumar blurted out, ‘why didn’t you say something when that man was shouting like that? I was so angry that I wanted to go up to the tai to teach him a lesson.’

Saya John glanced across the clearing to the Assistant’s tai, where a light was still shining. The Assistant’s silhouette was clearly visible, outlined against the thin cane walls; he was seated in a chair, reading a book.

‘You have no business to be angry, Rajkumar. In his place you would be no different, perhaps worse. What amazes me is that more of them are not like this one.’

‘Why, Sayagyi?’

‘Think of the kind of life they lead here, these young Europeans. They have at best two or three years in the jungle before malaria or dengue fever weaken them to the point where they cannot afford to be far from doctors and hospitals. The company knows this very well; it knows that within a few years these men will be prematurely aged, old at twenty-one; and that they will have to be posted off to city offices. It is only when they are freshly arrived, seventeen or eighteen, that they can lead this life, and during those few years the company must derive such profit from them as it can. So they send them from camp to camp for months on end with scarcely a break in between. Look at this one: I am told he has already had a bad bout of dengue fever. That man is not much older than you, Rajkumar — maybe eighteen or nineteen — and here he is, sick and alone, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people the likes of whom he has never known, deep inside a forest. And look at him: there he is, reading his book, with not a trace of fear on his face.’

‘You are far from home too, Sayagyi,’ said Rajkumar. ‘And so am I.’

‘But we are not so far as he is. And left to ourselves none of us would have been here, harvesting the bounty of this forest. Look at the oo-sis in this camp; look at the hsin-ouq, lying on his mat, dazed with opium; look at the false pride they have in their skill as trainers of elephants. They think, because their fathers and their families have all worked with elephants, that no one knows their animals as they do. Yet until the Europeans came none of them had ever thought of using elephants for the purposes of logging. Their elephants were used only in pagodas and palaces, for wars and ceremonies. It was the Europeans who saw that tame elephants could be made to work for human profit. It was they who invented everything we see around us in this logging camp. This entire way of life is their creation. It was they who thought of these methods of girdling trees, these ways of moving logs with elephants, this system of floating them downriver. Even such details as the structure and placement of these huts, the plan of the tai, the use of bamboo thatch and rattan — it was not the oo-sis with their hoary wisdom who thought of these things. All of this came from the minds of men like this one sitting in this tai — this boy who is not much older than you.’

The merchant thrust a finger at the silhouetted figure in the tai. ‘You see that man, Rajkumar?’ he said. ‘That is someone you can learn from. To bend the work of nature to your will; to make the trees of the earth useful to human beings — what could be more admirable, more exciting than this? That is what I would say to any boy who has his life before him.’

Rajkumar could tell that Saya John was thinking not of him, his luga-lei, but of Matthew, his absent son, and the realisation brought a sudden and startling pang of grief. But the pain lasted only an instant and when it had faded Rajkumar felt himself to be very much the stronger, better prepared. He was here, after all, in this camp — while Matthew was far away in Singapore.

seven

In Ratnagiri there were many who believed that King Thebaw was always the first to know when the sea had claimed a victim. He spent hours on his balcony every day, gazing out to sea with his gold-rimmed glasses. Fishermen had learnt to recognise the distinctive twin flashes of the King’s binoculars. Returning to the bay, of an evening, they would look up in the direction of the hilltop balcony, as though for reassurance. Nothing happened in Ratnagiri, people said, but the King was the first to know of it.

Yet, the King himself was never seen after that first day when he rode up from the harbour with his family. The royal coaches were a familiar sight around town, with their teams of dappled horses and their moustachioed coachman. But the King never went out in them, or if he did, it was impossible to tell. The Royal Family had two gaaris — one an open trap and the other a brougham with curtained windows. There were rumours that the King was sometimes hidden inside the brougham, but no one could be sure because of the heavy velvet curtains.

The Princesses, on the other hand, were seen around town three or four times every year, driving down to the Mandvi jetty or to the Bhagavati temple, or to the houses of those British officials whom they were permitted to visit. The townsfolk knew them all by sight — the First, Second, Third and Fourth Princesses (the last was born in Ratnagiri, in the second year of the King’s exile).

In their early years in India, the Princesses usually dressed in Burmese clothes — aingyis and htameins. But as the years passed their garments changed. One day, no one quite remembered when, they appeared in saris — not expensive or sumptuous saris, but the simple green and red cottons of the district. They began to wear their hair braided and oiled like Ratnagiri schoolgirls; they learned to speak Marathi and Hindustani as fluently as any of the townsfolk — it was only with their parents that they now spoke Burmese. They were pleasant-looking girls and there was something about them that was very direct and unaffected. When they drove through the streets they neither averted their gaze nor looked away. There was a hunger in their eyes, a longing, as though they yearned to know what it was like to walk through the Jhinjhinaka bazaar, to dawdle at the shops and bargain for saris. They sat alert and upright, taking everything in, and occasionally asking questions of the coachman: Whose sari shop is that? What sort of mangoes are those on that tree? What kind of fish is that hanging in that stall over there?

Mohan Sawant, the coachman, was a local boy, from an impoverished hamlet down by the river. He had dozens of relatives in town, working as rickshaw-pullers, coolies and tonga-wallahs: everyone knew him.

When he came down to the bazaar, people would seek him out: ‘Give the Second Princess these mangoes. They’re alphonsos from our garden.’ ‘Give the little girl a handful of this dried kokum. I saw her asking you about it.’

The Princesses’ eyes touched everyone they lit upon. They were children: what had they done that they should live like this? Why should they be prevented from visiting local families; from forming friendships with Marathi children of good education? Why should they grow to womanhood never knowing any company other than that of their servants?

Once or twice a year the Queen would ride out with her daughters, her face a white mask, stern and unmoving, her lips stained a deep, deathly mauve by her cheroots. People would crowd into the streets to look at her as she rode by, but she never seemed to notice anyone or anything, sitting as straight as a rod, her face stern and unmoving.

And then there was Miss Dolly, with her long, black hair and her chiselled face, as beautiful as a fairytale princess. Over the years, all the others who had accompanied the Royal Family to Ratnagiri had drifted slowly away — the maidservants and royal relatives and household officials. Only Miss Dolly stayed.

The King knew what people said of him in Ratnagiri, and if he was alarmed by the powers attributed to him, he was also amused and not a little flattered. In small ways he tried to do his duty by the role that had been thrust on him. Sometimes women would stand on their roofs, holding high their newborn children in the hope of attracting the imagined benedictions of his gaze. He would keep his glasses trained on these credulous mothers for several minutes at a time. It seemed a very small thing to ask for and why should he not grant those things that were in his power to give?

And the fact was that not everything that was said about him was untrue. The matter of the boatmen, for example: every day, when he stepped on the balcony at dawn, he would see the square white sails of the fishing fleet pasted across the bay like a string of stamps. The boats were horis, deep-hulled catamarans with single outriggers, from the fishing village of Karla at the mouth of the river. In the evenings, with the sun growing ever larger as it dipped towards the horizon, he would see the same boats tacking before the wind as they slipped into the bay. He was never aware of counting the boats that set sail in the morning, but somehow he always knew exactly how many there were. One day, when the catamarans were far out to sea, he saw a sudden squall sweeping down on them. That evening, when the fleet was straggling back, he could tell that the number wasn’t right, that one was missing.

The King sent for Sawant: he knew that the fishing village was not far from the hamlet where the boy’s family lived. Sawant was not yet a coachman at this time: he was fourteen and still just a syce, a groom.

‘Sawant,’ said the King, ‘there was a storm at sea.’ He explained what had happened. Sawant went hurrying down the hillside, and the news reached the fishing village before the boats were home. Thus began the legend of Ratnagiri’s watchful king.

From the vantage point of his balcony, the King had the best seaward view of anyone in the district: it was only natural that he should see certain things before others. Down on the bay, not far from the jetty, there stood a small boathouse, a thatched shed adjoining a godown. There was a story attached to the boathouse. It was said that a British general, Lord Lake, had once ridden into Ratnagiri, with a unit of crack troops known as the Royal Battalion. This was after a long campaign in which several native rulers had been put to rout. His Lordship was in high spirits and one night, after a long evening of merry-making, he’d organised a boat-race for his officers. Boats had been commandeered from the local fisherfolk and the officers of the Royal Battalion had gone wallowing across the bay in canoes and dug-outs, paddling furiously, cheered on by their soldiers. According to legend, His Lordship had won by a full length.

Subsequently it had become something of a tradition among the officialdom of Ratnagiri to go sculling on the bay. Other stations in India afforded diversions such as pigsticking and polo: the bay was Ratnagiri’s sole offering. Over the years the boathouse had acquired its own small pantheon of rowing heroes and sailing legends. The best-known of these concerned one Mr Gibb, a rowing blue from Cambridge and a district official of great repute. Mr Gibb was so expert an oarsman that he had been known to steer his long, slim racing shell through the bay’s narrow and turbulent channel, out into the open sea. It was the King who had observed the first performance of this amazing feat; it was through him that Ratnagiri had come to learn of it.

It was to the King too that the inhabitants of Ratnagiri looked for reliable information on the coming of the monsoons. One morning each year he would wake to see a faint but unmistakable deepening in the colour of the line that bisected his window. That smudge on the horizon, as fine as a line of antimony on an eyelid, would grow quickly into a moving wall of rain. Perched high on the hill, Outram House would mark the monsoon’s first landfall; rain would come smashing into the balcony; it would seep under the door and through the cracks in the shuttered windows, gathering inches deep under the King’s bed.

‘Sawant! The rains are here. Quick. Seal the shutters, put out the buckets and take everything off the floor.’

Within minutes the news would flow down the hillside. ‘The King has seen the rains.’ There would be a great stir below; grandmothers would rush to remove their pickles from the sun, and children would run cheering from their houses.

It was the King also who was the first to spot the steamers when they headed into the bay. In Ratnagiri, it was the comings and goings of these vessels that marked the passage of time, much as cannon-shots and clock-towers did in other district towns. On mornings when a steamer was expected people would congregate in large numbers at the Mandvi jetty. Fishing boats would slip into the bay at dawn, with cargoes of dried fish. Traders would ride in on ox-carts that were loaded with pepper and rice.

No one awaited the steamers’ arrival more impatiently than King Thebaw. Despite warnings from the doctor he had not been able to curb his craving for pork. Since there was none to be had in Ratnagiri, consignments of bacon and ham were shipped to him every week from Bombay; from Goa came spicy Portuguese choriço sausages, peppered with chillies.

The King tried, as best he could, to battle this unseemly longing. He thought often of his distant predecessor, King Narathihapati of Burma, famously a glutton for pork. For the infamy of abandoning his capital to the armies of Kubilai Khan, Narathihapati had earned the immortally shameful title ‘The King who ran away from the Chinese’. His own wife and son had handed him the poison that was to end his life. A love of pork was not a good portent in a king.

The King usually spotted the steamer when it was still far out to sea, an hour or so from the jetty. ‘Sawant! The boat!’ Within minutes the coachman would be on his way, in the brougham.

The carriage became the steamer’s harbinger. No longer did people have to wait all day on the jetty: the brougham’s descent gave them ample warning of the steamer’s arrival. In this way, the burden of marking the days passed slowly from the steamers to the black coach with the peacock crest: it was as though time itself had passed into Thebaw’s keeping. Unseen on his balcony Thebaw became the town’s guardian spirit, a king again.

The year Dolly turned fifteen there was an outbreak of the plague along the coast. Ratnagiri was particularly hard hit. Fires burnt night and day in the crematorium. The streets emptied. Many people left town; others locked themselves into their houses.

Outram House was situated at a good distance from the sites of the outbreak, far enough from the principal centres of population to be safe from the contagion. But as terror spread through the district it became evident that this isolation was not without its own perils: Outram House found itself besieged by neglect. The bungalow had no sewerage and no water supply. The toilets had to be emptied daily of nightsoil, by sweepers; water had to be carried up in buckets, from a nearby stream. But with the outbreak of the plague, the sweepers stopped coming and the coolies’ water-buckets lay upturned beside the kitchen.

It was Dolly who usually served as the intermediary between the compound’s staff and the Royal Family. By default, over the years, more and more of the household’s everyday duties had fallen on her. It was no easy job to deal with the scores of people who worked in the compound — the bearers, grooms, gardeners, ayahs, cooks. Even at the best of times Dolly had trouble finding servants and persuading them to stay. The trouble was that there was never enough money to pay their salaries. The King and Queen had sold almost everything they’d brought over from Mandalay: their treasure was gone, all except for a few keepsakes and mementos.

Now, with the town stilled by the fear of disease, Dolly had a taste of what it would mean to manage the house without help. By the end of the first day, the toilets were giving off an unbearable stench, the tanks were running empty and there was no water with which to wash or bathe.

The only servants who remained were the half-dozen who lived on the estate, Sawant among them. Sawant had risen quickly from the position of syce to that of coachman and his stolidity and cheerfulness had conferred a certain authority on him, despite his youth. In moments of crisis, it was to him that everyone turned.

For the first couple of days, with Sawant’s help, Dolly managed to make sure that the tanks in the Queen’s bedroom were kept filled. But there was no water for the King and the toilets were very nearly unusable. Dolly appealed to Sawant, ‘Do something, Mohanbhai, kuchh to karo.’

‘Wait.’

Sawant found a solution: if the Queen were to allow the household’s workers to build temporary shelters around the walls of the compound, then they too would be safe from the contagion. They would return and, what was more, they would always be on hand to do their jobs. No more would messengers have to run back and forth between the compound and the town, summoning this cook or that ayah; no more would there be any talk of quitting. They would become a self-contained little village, up on the hill.

Dolly gave his arm a grateful squeeze. ‘Mohanbhai!’ For the first time in days she felt able to breathe again. How dependable he was, always ready with a solution. What would they do without him?

But now, how to get the Queen’s consent? She was always complaining about how small the compound was, how cramped, how much like a gaol. What would she say to the prospect of having the entire staff move up from town? But time was running out. Dolly went to the Queen’s door. ‘Mebya.’

‘Yes?’

Dolly raised her head off the floor and sat back on her heels. ‘The servants have stopped coming because of the sickness in town. In a day or two they will escape to the countryside. No one will remain in Ratnagiri. Soon there will be no water in the house. The toilets will run over. We will have to carry the filth down the hill ourselves. Mohanbhai says, why not let the others build a few rooms around the compound, beyond the walls? When the fear is past they will leave. This will solve everything.’

The Queen turned away from the kneeling girl to look out of the window. She too was weary of dealing with servants— wretches, ungrateful wretches, what else could you say of them? The more you gave them the more they seemed to want — yes, even the good ones, like this girl Dolly. No matter what they received there was always something else, some other demand— more clothes, another necklace. And as for the rest, the cooks and sweepers and ayahs, why did they seem harder to find with every passing year? You had only to step outside to see thousands of people standing about, staring, with nothing better to do than loiter by the roadside. And yet when it came to finding servants you would think you were living in a world of ghosts.

And now, with this sickness spreading, they were sure to perish in their thousands. And what then? Those who were willing to work would become even rarer — like white elephants. Better have them move while there was still time. It was true what the girl said: it would be safer to have them on the hill, well away from town. Otherwise they might well carry disease into the compound. And there would be advantages to offset the unsightliness. They would be available to be called upon whenever necessary, night or day.

The Queen turned back to Dolly. ‘I have decided. Let them build their shelters on the hill. Tell Sawant to let them know that they can go ahead.’ Within days a basti arose around the compound, a settlement of shacks and shanties. In the bathrooms of Outram House, water began to flow; the toilets were clean again. The settlers in the basti daily thanked the Queen. Now it was her turn to be deified: overnight she became a guardian goddess, a protector of the unfortunate, an incarnate devi who had rescued hundreds from the ravages of the plague.

After a month the outbreak subsided. There were some fifty families living around the compound now. They showed no signs of returning to their old homes in the congested lanes of the town: it was far nicer on the breezy hill. Dolly talked the matter over with the Queen and they decided to let the settlers stay. ‘What if there’s another epidemic?’ the Queen said. ‘After all, we don’t know that it’s really over yet.’

The Princesses were delighted to have the shacks remain: they had never had playmates their own age before. Now they had dozens. The First Princess was eight, the youngest three. They spent their days running around the compound with their new friends, discovering new games. When they were hungry they would run into their friends’ shacks and ask for something to eat; in the afternoons, when it was too hot to play outside, they would fall asleep on the mud floors of the palm-thatched shanties.

Four years later there was another outbreak of the plague. More people moved up the hill. Just as Sawant had predicted, the basti around the compound became a little village in its own right, with winding lanes and corner shops. No longer did the dwellings consist solely of shacks and shanties: tiled houses began to appear, one by one. But the little settlement had no provisions for sewage and no other facilities. When the breeze turned, a smell of excrement and refuse engulfed Outram House, wafting up from the ravines on the far side of the bluff.

An English district official became concerned about the Princesses’ education and arranged for the hiring of an English governess. Only one of the Princesses showed any aptitude for study, the youngest. It was she and Dolly who profited the most from the governess’s stay. They both became quickly fluent in English and Dolly even began to paint with watercolours. But the governess didn’t last long. She was so outraged by the conditions of the Royal Family’s captivity, that she fell out with the local British officials. In the end she had to be sent back to England.

The Princesses were older now, and so were their playmates. Sometimes the boys would tweak the girls’ pigtails and brush up close against them as they were running around the compound. It fell to Sawant to take on the role of their defender and champion. He would go storming off into the basti, only to return with bruises on his face and cuts on his lip. Dolly and the Princesses would gather round in silent awe: without asking they knew that his wounds had been acquired in their defence.

Sawant was by this time a tall, swarthy young man with a deep chest and a trimmed black moustache. He was not just a coachman now but a gatekeeper as well. In that capacity he had been allotted the guardroom beside the gate to use as his own. The room was small, with just a single window and a string bed, and its only adornment was a picture of the Buddha — a token of Sawant’s conversion, under the King’s influence.

In the normal course Sawant’s room was forbidden to the girls, but they could scarcely stay away when he lay inside, nursing wounds that had been acquired on their behalf. They would find ways of slipping in, unnoticed, with plates of food and packets of sweets.

One hot July afternoon, entering Sawant’s room on a household errand, Dolly found him asleep on his string bed. He was naked but for a white loincloth, a cotton langot, knotted between his legs. Seating herself beside him she watched his chest, undulating with his breath. Thinking to wake him she reached for his shoulder, but her hand dropped instead to his neck. His skin was slippery, covered with a thin film of moisture. She ran her forefinger down the centre of his chest, through the puddle of sweat that had gathered in the declivity, to the spiral pit of his navel. A line of fine hair snaked downwards, disappearing into the damp folds of his cotton langot. She touched the filaments with the tip of her finger, brushing them backwards, against their grain, pushing them erect. He stirred and opened his eyes. She felt his fingers on her face, tracing the shape of her nose, pushing ajar her lips, grazing the tip of her tongue, following the curve of her chin down to her throat. When he reached her neckline, she stopped his hand.

‘No.’

‘You touched me first,’ he challenged her.

She had no answer. She sat still as he fumbled with her strings and clasps. Her breasts were small, late-developing, tipped with tiny, blooming nipples. There were prickly calluses on his coachman’s hands, and the ridges of his palms scraped hard against the soft tips of her breasts. She put her hands on his sides and ran them down the cage of his ribs. A lock of hair came loose at her temple, and drops of sweat went circling down the strands, dripping slowly off the end, on to his lips.

‘Dolly, you are the most beautiful girl in the world.’

Neither of them knew what to do. It seemed impossible that their limbs could be made to fit together. Their bodies slipped, fumbled, scraped. And then, suddenly, she felt the kindling of a great flame of pain between her legs. She cried out aloud.

He unrolled his cotton langot and dried her blood with it, swabbing it from her thighs. She took hold of one end of the cloth and wiped the red stains from his empurpled glans. He reached between her legs and patted her pubis clean. They sat back on their heels, facing each other, their knees thrust between each other’s legs. He spread the wet, white cloth over their knitted limbs: the sunburst of her blood was flecked with the opacity of his semen. They stared at the vivid cloth in silent amazement: this was their handiwork, the banner of their union.

She returned the next day and for many days afterwards. Her bed was in a dressing room on the upper floor. In the adjoining bedroom slept the First Princess. Beside Dolly’s bed there was a window, and outside, within easy reach, stood a mango tree. Dolly took to slipping out at night and climbing back before dawn.

One afternoon, in Sawant’s room, they fell asleep, sweating on the damp string of his bed. Then a scream filled the room and they sprang awake. It was the First Princess, standing over them, eyes blazing, hands on hips. In the heat of her anger she was transformed from a twelve-year-old girl into a woman.

‘I was wondering, and now I know.’

She ordered Dolly to dress, to leave the room. ‘If I ever see you alone again together, I will go to Her Majesty. You are servants. You will be thrown out.’

Sawant, all but naked, fell to his knees, clasping his hands together. ‘Princess, it was a mistake, a mistake. My family, they depend on me. Open your heart, Princess. It was a mistake. Never again.’

From that day on, the eyes of the First Princess followed them wherever they went. She told the Queen that she had seen a burglar climbing up the mango tree. The tree was cut down and bars were installed in the window frames.

It came to be decided that the Bombay newspapers would be delivered to Outram House, along with the King’s shipments of pork. The first batch was found to carry reports on a subject of absorbing interest: a narrative of the European tour of King Chulalangkorn of Siam. This was the first time an Asian monarch had travelled to Europe on a state visit. The tour lasted several weeks and through that time no other interest existed for King Thebaw.

In London King Chulalangkorn stayed at Buckingham Palace. He was welcomed into Austria by the Emperor Franz Joseph; befriended in Copenhagen by the King of Denmark; feted in Paris by the President of France. In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm stood waiting at a railway station until his train rolled in. King Thebaw read the reports over and over again, until he knew them by heart.

It was not so long ago that Thebaw’s great-grandfather, Alaungpaya, and his grandfather, Bagyidaw, invaded Siam, crushed her armies, unseated her rulers, and sacked Ayutthaya, her premier city. In the aftermath, the defeated nobles had chosen a new ruler and Bangkok had become the country’s new capital. It was because of the kings of Burma, because of Thebaw’s ancestors, because of the Konbaung dynasty, that Siam had its present dynasty and its ruling king.

‘When our ancestor, the great Alaungpaya, invaded Siam,’ Thebaw said to his daughters one day, ‘he sent a letter to the King of Ayutthaya. There was a copy in the Palace archives. This is what it said: “There is no rival for our glory and our karma; to place you beside us is to compare the great Galon of Vishnu with a swallow; the sun with a firefly; the divine hamadryad of the heavens with an earthworm; Dhatarattha, the Hamsa king with a dung beetle.” That is what our ancestor said to the King of Siam. But now they sleep in Buckingham Palace while we lie buried in this dungheap.’

There was no denying the truth of this. With the passing of the years Outram House had grown ever more to resemble the surrounding slums. Tiles had blown away and had not been replaced. Plaster had crumbled from the walls, baring great swathes of brick. Branches of peepul had taken root in the cracks and grown quickly into sturdy young saplings. Inside, mildew had crept upwards from the floor until the walls looked as though they had been draped in black velvet. Decay had become the Queen’s badge of defiance. ‘The responsibility for the upkeep of this house is not ours,’ she said. ‘They chose this to be our gaol, let them look after it.’

Newly arrived Collectors sometimes talked of razing the basti and moving the servants back to town. The Queen would laugh: how besotted they were, these men, in their arrogance, to imagine that in such a land as India they could hold a family imprisoned in isolation on a hill. Why the very soil would revolt against it! The rare visitors who were allowed to call were shocked by the sight of the basti, the smell of waste and excrement, by the pall of woodsmoke that hung thick in the air. Often they descended from their carriages with looks of stunned surprise on their faces, unable to believe that the residence of Burma’s last King had become the nucleus of a shantytown.

The Queen greeted them with her proud, thin-lipped smile. Yes, look around you, look at how we live. Yes, we who ruled the richest land in Asia are now reduced to this. This is what they have done to us, this is what they will do to all of Burma. They took our kingdom, promising roads and railways and ports, but mark my words, this is how it will end. In a few decades the wealth will be gone — all the gems, the timber and the oil — and then they too will leave. In our golden Burma where no one ever went hungry and no one was too poor to write and read, all that will remain is destitution and ignorance, famine and despair. We were the first to be imprisoned in the name of their progress; millions more will follow. This is what awaits us all: this is how we will all end — as prisoners, in shantytowns born of the plague. A hundred years hence you will read the indictment of Europe’s greed in the difference between the kingdom of Siam and the state of our own enslaved realm.

eight

The Irrawaddy was not the only waterway that Saya John used. His work often took him farther east, down the Sittang river and into the Shan highlands. A day’s journey inland from the river-bank town of Pyinmana, there stood a village called Huay Zedi. Many years before, when the teak companies first started to explore this stretch of forest, Huay Zedi was itself a temporary teak camp like any other. But with the passing of the years the annual camps had migrated higher and higher up the slopes so that the business of providing them with supplies had become increasingly difficult. In time, because of the advantages of its location, on the sloping hinge where the mountains joined the plain, Huay Zedi became a kind of roadhead for the highlands. Many of the loggers and elephant trainers who accompanied the company into that previously unpopulated region chose to settle in and around this village.

Very few of the oo-sis, pe-sis and pa-kyeiks who lived in Huay Zedi were Burman by origin: some were Karen, some Karenni, some Pa-O, some Padaung, some Kadu-Kanan; there were even a few families of Indian mahouts, elephant trainers from Koraput, in the eastern Ghats. The inhabitants of the village kept to themselves and had little to do with plainspeople; Huay Zedi was a place that was entire unto itself, a part of the new cycle of life that had been brought into being by teak.

The village stood just above a sandy shelf where a chaung had strayed into a broad, meandering curve. The stream was shallow here, spread thin upon a pebbled bed, and through most of the year the water rose only to knee-height — a perfect depth for the villagers’ children, who patrolled it through the day with small crossbows. The stream was filled with easy prey, silver-backed fish that circled in the shallows, dazed by the sudden change in the water’s speed. The resident population of Huay Zedi was largely female: through most of the year the village’s able-bodied males, from the age of twelve onwards, were away at one teak camp or another up on the slopes of the mountain.

The settlement was ringed with immense, straight-limbed trees, growing thickly together to form a towering wall of foliage. Hidden behind this wall were vast flocks of parakeets and troupes of monkeys and apes — white-faced langurs and copper-skinned rhesus. Even commonplace domestic sounds from the village — the scraping of a coconut-shell ladle on a metal pot, the squeaking wheel of a child’s toy — were enough to send gales of alarm sweeping through the dappled darkness: monkeys would flee in chattering retreat and birds would rise from the treetops in an undulating mass, like a wind-blown sheet.

The dwellings of Huay Zedi differed from those of teak camps only in height and size — in form and appearance they were otherwise very alike, being built of identical materials, woven bamboo and cane, each being similarly raised off the ground on shoulder-high teakwood posts. Only a few structures stood out prominently against the surrounding greenery: a timber bridge, a white-walled pagoda and a bamboo-thatched church topped by a painted teakwood cross. This last was used by a fair number of Huay Zedi’s residents, many of whom were of Karen and Karenni stock — people whose families had been converted by followers of the American Baptist missionary, the Reverend Adoniram Judson.

When passing through Huay Zedi, Saya John stayed usually with the matronly widow of a former hsin-ouq, a Karenni Christian, who ran a small shop from the vine-covered balcony of her tai. This lady had a son, Doh Say, who became one of Rajkumar’s closest friends.

Doh Say was a couple of years older than Rajkumar, a shy, gangling youth with a broad, flat face and a cheroot-stub nose. When Rajkumar first met him, he was employed as a lowly sin-pa-kyeik, an assistant to a pa-kyeik, a handler of chains: these were the men who dealt with the harnessing of elephants and the towing of logs. Doh Say was too young and too inexperienced to be allowed to do any fastening himself: his job was simply to heft the heavy chains for his boss. But Doh Say was a hard and earnest worker and when Rajkumar and Saya John next returned they found him a pa-kyeik. A year later he was already a pe-si, or back-rider, working with an aunging herd, specialising in the clearing of streams.

At camp, Rajkumar would attach himself to Doh Say, following on his heels, occasionally making himself useful by lighting a fire or boiling a pot of water. It was from Doh Say that Rajkumar learnt to brew tea the way that oo-sis liked it, thick, bitter and acid, beginning with a pot that was already half stuffed with leaves and then replenishing it with more at every filling. In the evenings he would help Doh Say with the weaving of cane walls, and at night he would sit on the ladder of his hut, chewing betel and listening to the oo-sis’ talk. At night the herd needed no tending. The elephants were hobbled with chain-link fetters and let loose to forage for themselves in the surrounding jungle.

It was lonely at the camp, and Doh Say would often talk about his sweetheart, Naw Da, a girl in her early teens, slender and blooming, dressed in a tasselled white tunic and a homespun longyi. They were to be married as soon as Doh Say was promoted to the rank of oo-si.

‘And what about you?’ Doh Say would ask. ‘Is there a girl you’re thinking of?’

Rajkumar usually shrugged this off, but once Doh Say persisted and he answered with a nod.

‘Who is she?’

‘Her name is Dolly.’

This was the first time that Rajkumar had spoken of her and it was so long ago now that he could scarcely recall what she’d looked like. She was just a child, and yet she had touched him like no one else and nothing before. In her wide eyes, saturated with fear, he had seen his own aloneness turned inside out, rendered visible, worn upon the skin.

‘And where does she live?’

‘In India I think. I don’t know for sure.’

Doh Say scratched his chin. ‘One day you’ll have to go looking for her.’

Rajkumar laughed. ‘It’s very far.’

‘You’ll have to go. There is no other way.’

It was from Doh Say that Rajkumar learnt of the many guises in which death stalked the lives of oo-sis: the Russell’s viper, the maverick log, the charge of the wild buffalo. Yet the worst of Doh Say’s fears had to do not with these recognisable incarnations of death, but rather with one peculiarly vengeful form of it. This was anthrax, the most deadly of elephant diseases.

Anthrax was common in the forests of central Burma and epidemics were hard to prevent. The disease could lie dormant in grasslands for as long as thirty years. A trail or pathway, tranquil in appearance and judged to be safe after lying many years unused, could reveal itself suddenly to be a causeway to death. In its most virulent forms anthrax could kill an elephant in a matter of hours. A gigantic tusker, a full fifteen arms’ length off the ground, could be feeding peacefully at dusk and yet be dead at dawn. An entire working herd of a hundred elephants could be lost within a few days. Mature tuskers were valued in many thousands of rupees and the cost of an epidemic was such as to make itself felt on the London Stock Exchange. Few were the insurers who would gamble against a disease such as this.

The word anthrax comes from the same root as anthracite, a variety of coal. When anthrax strikes human beings it shows itself first in small pimple-like inflammations. As these lesions grow little black dots become visible at their centres, tiny pustules, like powdered charcoal: thus the naming of the disease. When anthrax erupts on an elephant’s hide the lesions develop a volcanic energy. They appear first on the animal’s hindquarters; they are about the size of a human fist, reddish-brown in colour. They swell rapidly and in males, quickly encase the penis sheath.

The carbuncles are most numerous around the hindquarters and as they grow they have the effect of sealing the animal’s anus. Elephants consume an enormous amount of fodder and must defecate constantly. The workings of their digestive systems do not stop with the onset of the disease; their intestines continue to produce dung after the excretory passage has been sealed, the unexpurgated fecal matter pushing explosively against the obstructed anal passage.

‘The pain is so great,’ said Doh Say, ‘that a stricken elephant will attack anything in sight. It will uproot trees and batter down walls. The tamest cows will become maddened killers; the gentlest calves will turn upon their mothers.’

They were at a camp together once when an epidemic struck. Saya John and Rajkumar were staying, as was their custom, with the camp’s hsin-ouq, a small, stooped man with a shoelace moustache. Late one evening Doh Say burst in to tell the hsin-ouq that an oo-si was missing: it was thought that he had been killed by his own elephant.

The hsin-ouq could make no sense of this. This elephant had been in its oo-si’s care for some fifteen years and had not been known to cause trouble before. Yet just before his death the oo-si had led his mount away from the herd and shackled her to a tree. She was now standing guard over his corpse and would not let anyone approach. None of this was as it should have been. What had gone wrong? Late as it was, the hsin-ouq headed into the jungle, with Doh Say and a few others. Saya John and Rajkumar decided to go with them.

It so happened that the Assistant who was in charge of the camp was away for a couple of days, staying in the company’s chummery in Prome. In his absence there were no firearms in the camp. The oo-sis were armed only with flaming torches and their customary weapons, spears and das.

Rajkumar heard the elephant from far away. The noise grew very loud as they approached. Often before Rajkumar had been amazed at the sheer volume of sound that a single elephant could produce: the trumpeting, the squeals, the flatulence, the crashing of saplings and undergrowth. But this was something other than the usual feeding-time racket: there was a note of pain that pierced through the other accustomed sounds.

They arrived on the scene to find that the elephant had cleared a large space around itself, flattening everything within reach. The dead oo-si lay under a tree, battered and bloody, just a yard or two from the elephant’s chain-shackled feet.

Saya John and Rajkumar watched from a distance as the hsin-ouq and his men circled around the angry cow, trying to determine what had gone wrong. Then the hsin-ouq gave a cry and raised his hand to point at the animal’s rump. Dim though the torchlight was, Rajkumar could tell that there were swellings on the elephant’s rear, an angry red in colour.

Immediately the hsin-ouq and his men turned around and plunged headlong into the forest, racing back the way they had come.

‘Sayagyi, what is it? Why are they running?’

Saya John was hurrying through the undergrowth, trying to keep the oo-sis’ torches in sight. ‘Because of anthrax, Rajkumar.’ Saya John flung the word breathlessly over his shoulder.

‘What, Saya?’

‘Anthrax.’

‘But, Saya, why don’t they try to rescue the corpse?’

‘No one can approach the creature now for fear of contagion,’ said Saya John. ‘And in any case they have more pressing things to think of.’

‘More pressing than their friend’s body?’

‘Very much more. They could lose everything — their animals, their jobs, their livelihood. The dead man gave up his life in an effort to keep this elephant from infecting the rest. They owe it to him to get the herd out of harm’s way.’

Rajkumar had seen many epidemics come and go — typhoid, smallpox, cholera. He had even survived the outbreak that had killed his family: to him disease was a hazard rather than a danger, a threat that had to be lived with from day to day. He found it impossible to believe that the oo-sis would so easily abandon their comrade’s corpse.

Rajkumar laughed. ‘They ran as if a tiger was after them.’

At this Saya John, usually so equable and even-tempered, turned on him in a sudden fury. ‘Be careful, Rajkumar.’ Saya John’s voice slowed. ‘Anthrax is a plague and it was to punish pride that the Lord sent it down.’ His voice slowed and deepened as it always did when he was quoting the Bible: ‘And the Lord said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Take to you handfuls of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh. And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast, throughout all the land of Egypt.’

Rajkumar could understand only a few words of this but the tone of Saya John’s voice was enough to silence him.

They made their way back to camp to find that it had emptied. Doh Say and the others had departed with the evacuated herd. Only the hsin-ouq remained, to wait for the Assistant. Saya John decided to stay on in order to keep him company.

Early next morning they returned to the site of the accident. The infected elephant was quieter now than before, dazed by pain and weakened by its struggle with the disease. The swellings had grown to pineapple size and the elephant’s hide had begun to crack and break apart. As the hours passed the lesions grew yet larger and the cracks deepened. Soon the pustules began to leak a whitish ooze. Within a short while the animal’s hide was wet with discharge. Rivulets of blood-streaked pus began to drip to the ground. The soil around the animal’s feet turned into sludge, churned with blood and ooze. Rajkumar could no longer bear to look. He vomited, bending over at the waist, hitching up his longyi.

‘If that is what this sight has done to you, Rajkumar,’ Saya John said, ‘think of what it must mean to the oo-sis to watch their elephants perish in this way. These men care for these animals as though they were their own kin. But when anthrax reaches this stage the oo-sis can do nothing but look on as these great mountains of flesh dissolve before their eyes.’

The stricken elephant died in the early afternoon. Shortly afterwards the hsin-ouq and his men retrieved their comrade’s body. Saya John and Rajkumar watched from a distance as the mangled corpse was carried into the camp.

‘And they took ashes of the furnace,’ Saya John said, softly, under his breath, ‘and stood before Pharaoh; and Moses sprinkled it up toward heaven; and it became a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast. And the magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils; for the boil was upon the magicians, and upon all the Egyptians. .’

Rajkumar was eager to be gone from the camp, sickened by the events of the last few days. But Saya John was proof against his entreaties. The hsin-ouq was an old friend, he said, and he would keep him company until the dead oo-si was buried and the ordeal ended.

In the ordinary course of things, the funeral would have been performed immediately after the body’s retrieval. But because of the forest Assistant’s absence, there arose an unforeseen hitch. It was the custom for the dead to be formally released from their earthly ties by the signing of a note. Nowhere was this rite more strictly observed than among oo-sis, who lived their lives in daily hazard of death. The dead man’s note of release had still to be signed and only the Assistant, as his employer, could sign it. A messenger was dispatched to the Assistant. He was expected to return the next day with the signed note. It only remained to wait out the night.

By sunset the camp was all but deserted. Rajkumar and Saya John were among the few who remained. Rajkumar lay awake a long time on the hsin-ouq’s balcony. At the centre of the camp’s clearing, the tai was blazing with light. The Assistant’s luga-lei had lit all his lamps and in the darkness of the jungle there was an eerie grandeur to the empty tai.

Late at night Saya John came out to the balcony to smoke a cheroot.

‘Saya, why did the hsin-ouq have to wait so long for the funeral?’ said Rajkumar on a note of complaint. ‘What harm would have resulted, Saya, if he had buried the dead man today and kept the note for later?’

Saya John pulled hard on his cheroot, the tip glowing red on his glasses. He was so long silent that Rajkumar began to wonder whether he had heard the question. But just as he was about to repeat himself Saya John began to speak.

‘I was at a camp once,’ he said, ‘when there was an unfortunate accident and an oo-si died. That camp was not far from this one, two days’ walk at most, and its herds were in the charge of our host — this very hsin-ouq. The accident happened at the busiest time of year, towards the end of the rains. The season’s work was nearing its close. There were just a few stacks left when a very large log fell askew across the banks of the chaung, blocking the chute that was being used to roll the stacked teak down to the stream. The log wedged itself between two stumps, in such a way as to bring everything to a halt: no other logs could be rolled down until this one was moved.

‘The Assistant at that camp was a young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, and his name, if I remember right, was McKay — McKay-thakin they called him. He had been in Burma only two years and this was his first season of running a camp on his own. The season had been long and hard and the rain had been pouring down for several months. McKay-thakin was proud of his new responsibility and he had driven himself hard, spending the entire period of the monsoons in the camp, never giving himself any breaks, never going away for so much as one weekend. He had endured several bad bouts of fever. The attacks had so weakened him that on certain days he could not summon the strength to climb down from his tai. Now with the season drawing to a close, he had been promised a month’s leave, in the cool comfort of the Maymyo hills. The company had told him that he was free to go as soon as the territory in his charge was cleared of all the logs that had been marked for extraction. With the day of his departure drawing close, McKay-thakin was growing ever more restless, driving his teams harder and harder. The work was very nearly completed when the accident happened.

‘The jamming of the chute occurred at about nine in the morning — the time of day when the day’s work draws to a close. The hsin-ouq was at hand and he immediately sent his pa-kyeiks down to harness the log with chains so that it could be towed away. But the log was lodged at such an awkward angle that the chains could not be properly attached. The hsin-ouq tried first to move it by harnessing it to a single, powerful bull, and when this did not succeed he brought in a team of two of his most reliable cows. But all these efforts were unavailing: the log would not budge. Finally, McKay-thakin, growing impatient, ordered the hsin-ouq to send an elephant down the slope to butt free the obstinate log.

The slope was very steep and after months of pounding from enormous logs, its surface was crumbling into powder. The hsin-ouq knew that it would be very dangerous for an oo-si to lead an elephant into terrain of such uncertain footing. But McKay-thakin was by now in an agony of impatience and, being the officer in charge, he prevailed. Against his will, the hsin-ouq summoned one of his men, a young oo-si who happened to be his nephew, his sister’s son. The dangers of the task at hand were perfectly evident and the hsin-ouq knew that none of the other men would obey him if he were to order them to go down that slope. But his nephew was another matter. “Go down,” said the hsin-ouq, “but be careful, and do not hesitate to turn back.”

‘The first part of the operation went well, but just as the log sprang free the young oo-si lost his footing and was stranded directly in the path of the rolling, two-ton log. The inevitable happened: he was crushed. His body was unscarred when it was recovered, but every bone in it was smashed, pulverised.

‘This young oo-si, as it happened, was much loved, both by his peers and by his mount, a gentle and good-natured cow by the name of Shwe Doke. She had been trained in the company’s aunging herds and had been in his charge for several years.

‘Those who know them well claim to be able to detect many shades of emotion in elephants — anger, pleasure, jealousy, sorrow. Shwe Doke was utterly disconsolate at the loss of her handler. No less saddened was the hsin-ouq, who was quite crushed with guilt and self-reproach.

‘But worse was still to come. That evening, after the body had been prepared for burial, the hsin-ouq took the customary letter of release to McKay-thakin and asked for his signature.

‘By this time McKay-thakin was not in his right mind. He had emptied a bottle of whisky and his fever had returned. The hsin-ouq’s entreaties made no impression on him. He was no longer capable of understanding what was being asked of him.

‘In vain did the hsin-ouq explain that the interment could not be deferred, that the body would not keep, that the man must have his release before his last rites. He pleaded, he begged, in his desperation he even attempted to climb up the ladder and force his way into the tai. But McKay-thakin saw him coming and came striding out, with a glass in one hand and a heavy-bored hunting rifle in the other. Emptying one barrel into the sky, he shouted: “For pity’s sake can you not leave me alone just this one night?”

‘The hsin-ouq gave up and decided to go ahead with the burial. The dead man’s body was interred as darkness was gathering.

‘I was staying the night, as always, in the hsin-ouq’s hut. We ate a sparse meal and afterwards I stepped outside to smoke a cheroot. Usually a camp is full and bustling at that time of day: from the kitchen there issues a great banging of tin plates and metal pots and the darkness is everywhere pierced by the glowing tips of cheroots, where the oo-sis sit beside their huts, savouring their last smoke of the day and chewing a final quid of betel. But now I saw, to my astonishment, that there was no one about; I could hear nothing but frogs and owls and the feathery flapping of great jungle moths. Absent also was that most familiar and reassuring of a camp’s sounds, the tinkling of elephants’ bells. Evidently, no sooner had the soil been tamped down on the dead man’s grave than the other oo-sis had begun to flee the camp, taking their elephants with them.

‘The only elephant that was still in the camp’s vicinity was Shwe Doke, the dead man’s mount. The hsin-ouq had taken charge of his nephew’s riderless elephant after the accident. She was restless, he said, and nervous, frequently flapping her ears and clawing the air with the tip of her trunk. This was neither uncommon nor unexpected, for the elephant is, above all, a creature of habit and routine. So pronounced an upheaval as the absence of a long-familiar handler can put even the gentlest of elephants out of temper, often dangerously so.

‘This being the case, the hsin-ouq had decided not to allow Shwe Doke to forage through the night, as was the rule. Instead he had led her to a clearing, some half-mile’s distance from the camp and supplied her with a great pile of succulent treetop branches. Then he had tethered her securely between two immense and immovable trees. To be doubly sure of keeping her bound he had used, not the usual lightweight fetters with which elephants are shackled at night, but the heavy iron towing chains that are employed in the harnessing of logs. This, he said, was a precaution.

‘“A precaution against what?” I asked. By this time his eyes were dulled by opium. He gave me a sidelong glance and said, in a soft, slippery voice: “Just a precaution.”

‘There now remained in the camp only the hsin-ouq and me and of course, McKay-thakin in his tai. The tai was brightly lit, with lamps shining in all its windows, and it seemed very high, perched on its tall, teakwood stilts. The hsin-ouq’s hut was small in comparison and much closer to the ground, so that standing on its platform I had to tilt my head back to look up at McKay-thakin’s glowing windows. As I sat staring, a low, reedy wail came wafting out of the lamplit windows. It was the sound of a clarinet, an instrument the thakin sometimes played of an evening to while away the time. How strange it was to hear that plaintive, melancholy music issuing forth from those shining windows, the notes hanging in the air until they became indistinguishable from the jungle’s nightly noise. Just so, I thought, must a great liner look to the oarsmen of a palm-trunk canoe as it bears down on them out of the night, with the sounds of its ballroom trailing in its wake.

‘It had not rained much through the day, but with the approach of evening clouds had begun to mass in the sky, and by the time I blew my lamp out and rolled out my mat there was not a star to be seen. Soon the storm broke. Rain came pouring down and thunder went pealing back and forth across the valleys, echoing between the slopes. I had been asleep perhaps an hour or two when I was woken by a trickle of water, leaking through the bamboo roof. Rising to move my mat to a dry corner of the hut, I happened to glance across the camp. Suddenly the tai sprang out of the darkness, illuminated by a flash of lightning: its lamps had gone out.

‘I was almost asleep again when, through the chatter of the rain I heard a tiny, fragile sound, a distant tinkling. It was far away but approaching steadily, and as it drew nearer I recognised the unmistakable ringing of an elephant’s bell. Soon, in the subtle tensing of the hut’s bamboo beams, I could feel the animal’s heavy, hurrying tread.

‘“Do you hear that?” I whispered to the hsin-ouq. “What is it?”

‘ “It is the cow, Shwe Doke.”

‘An oo-si knows an elephant by its bell: it is by following that sound that he locates his mount every morning after its night-long foraging in the forest. To do his job well a hsin-ouq must know the sound of every animal in his herd; he must, if the need arises, be able to determine the position of all his elephants simply by concentrating on the ringing of their bells. My host was a hsin-ouq of great ability and experience. There was not, I knew, the slightest likelihood of his being mistaken in his identification of the approaching bell.

‘“Perhaps,” I ventured, “Shwe Doke was panicked by the storm; perhaps she managed to break loose of her fetters.”

‘“If she had broken loose,” the hsin-ouq said, “the chains would still be dragging on her feet.” He paused to listen. “But I hear no chains. No. She has been freed by a human hand.”

‘“But whose could that hand be?” I asked.

‘He silenced me abruptly, with a raised hand. The bell was very close now and the hut was shivering to the elephant’s tread.

‘I started to move towards the ladder but the hsin-ouq pulled me back. “No,” he said. “Stay here.”

The next moment the sky was split by lightning. In the momentary glare of that flat sheet of light, I saw Shwe Doke, directly ahead, moving towards the tai, with her head lowered and her trunk curled under her lip.

‘I jumped to my feet and began to shout in warning: “Thakin; McKay-thakin. .”

‘McKay-thakin had already heard the bells, felt the tremor of the elephant’s approaching weight. A flame flickered in one of the tai’s windows and the young man appeared on the veranda, naked, with a lantern in one hand and his hunting rifle in the other.

‘Ten feet from the tai Shwe Doke came to a standstill. She lowered her head as though she were examining the structure. She was an old elephant, trained in the ways of the aunging herd. Such animals are skilled in the arts of demolition. It takes them no more than a glance to size up a dam of snagged wood and pick a point of attack.

‘McKay-thakin fired just as Shwe Doke began her charge. She was so close now that he could not miss: he hit her exactly where he had aimed, in her most vulnerable spot, between ear and eye.

‘But the momentum of Shwe Doke’s charge carried her forward even as she was dying on her feet. She too hit the tai exactly where she had aimed, at the junction of the two cross-beams that held it together. The structure appeared to explode, with logs and beams and thatch flying into the air. McKay-thakin was catapulted to the ground, over Shwe Doke’s head.

‘Such is the footwork of the skilled aunging elephant that it can balance its weight on the lip of a waterfall, perch like a crane upon a small mid-stream boulder, turn in a space that would trip a mule. It was with those small, practised steps that Shwe Doke turned now, until she was facing the Assistant’s prone body. Then, very slowly, she allowed her dying weight to go crashing down on him, head first, her weight rolling over in a circular motion, in a technically perfect execution of the butting manoeuvre of the aunging elephant — an application of thrust so precise as to be able to cause a ten-thousand-ton tangle of teak to spring undone like a sailor’s knot. McKay-thakin’s lantern, which had been sputtering beside him, went out and we could see nothing more.

‘I threw myself down the hut’s ladder with the hsin-ouq close behind me. Running towards the tai I stumbled in the darkness and fell, face first on the mud. The hsin-ouq was helping me up when a bolt of lightning split the sky. Suddenly he let go of my hand and unloosed a hoarse, stammering shout.

‘ “What is it?” I cried. “What did you see?”

‘ “Look! Look down at the ground.”

‘Lightning flashed again and I saw, directly ahead of me, the huge scalloped mark of Shwe Doke’s feet. But beside it was a smaller impression, curiously shapeless, almost oblong.

‘ “What is it?” I said. “What made that mark?”

‘ “It is a footprint,” he said, “human, although crushed and mangled almost beyond recognition.”

‘I froze and stayed exactly where I was, praying for another bolt of lightning so that I would be able to ascertain for myself the truth of what he had said. I waited and waited but an age seemed to pass before the heavens lit up again. And in the meanwhile it had rained so hard that the marks on the ground had melted away.’

nine

In 1905, the nineteenth year of the King’s exile, a new District Collector arrived in Ratnagiri. The Collector was the district’s administrative head, the official who was ultimately responsible for dealing with the Burmese Royal Family. The job was an important one and the officials who were appointed to this post were almost always members of the Indian Civil Service— the august cadre of officials who administered Britain’s Indian possessions. To join the Indian Civil Service candidates had to pass a difficult examination that was held in England. The overwhelming majority of those who qualified were British, but there were also among them a small number of Indians.

The Collector who arrived in 1905 was an Indian, a man by the name of Beni Prasad Dey. He was in his early forties, and an outsider to the Ratnagiri region: he was a Bengali from Calcutta, which lay diagonally across the map of India, at the other end of the country. Collector Dey was slim and aquiline, with a nose that ended in a sharp, beak-like point. He dressed in finely cut Savile Row suits and wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He arrived in Ratnagiri accompanied by his wife, Uma, who was some fifteen years his junior, a tall, vigorous-looking woman, with thick, curly hair.

King Thebaw was watching from his balcony when Ratnagiri’s officialdom gathered at the Mandvi jetty to receive the new Collector and his young wife. The first thing he noticed about them was that the new Madame Collector was dressed in an unusual garment. Puzzled, he handed his binoculars to the Queen. ‘What’s that she’s wearing?’

The Queen took a long look. ‘It’s just a sari,’ she said at last. ‘But she’s wearing it in the new style.’ She explained that an Indian official had made up a new way of wearing a sari, with odds and ends borrowed from European costume — a petticoat, a blouse. She’d heard that women all over India were adopting the new style. But of course everything came late to Ratnagiri — she herself had never had an opportunity to look into this new fashion at first hand.

The Queen had seen many Collectors come and go, Indian and English; she thought of them as her enemies and gaolers, upstarts to be held in scant regard. But in this instance she was intrigued. ‘I hope he’ll bring his wife when he comes to call. It’ll be interesting to see how this kind of sari is worn.’

Despite this propitious beginning the Royal Family’s first meeting with the new Collector came close to ending in disaster. Collector Dey and his wife had arrived at a time when politics was much on people’s minds. Every day there were reports of meetings, marches and petitions: people were being told to boycott British-made goods; women were making bonfires of Lancashire cloth. In the Far East there was the war between Russia and Japan and for the first time it looked as though an Asian country might prevail against a European power. The Indian papers were full of news of this war and what it would mean for colonized countries.

It was generally not the King’s custom to meet with officials who came to Outram House. But he had been following the Russo-Japanese war very closely and was keen to know what people thought of it. When the new Collector and his wife came to call, the King’s first words were about the war. ‘Collector-sahib,’ he said abruptly, ‘have you seen the news? The Japanese have defeated the Russians in Siberia?’

The Collector bowed stiffly, from the waist. ‘I have indeed seen reports, Your Highness,’ he said. ‘But I must confess that I do not believe this to be an event of any great significance.’

‘Oh?’ said the King. ‘Well, I’m surprised to hear that.’ He frowned, in a way that made it clear that he wasn’t about to let the subject drop.

The night before Uma and the Collector had been briefed at length on their forthcoming visit to Outram House. They’d been told that the King was never present at these occasions: it was the Queen who would receive them, in the reception room on the ground floor. But they’d entered to find the King very much present: he was dressed in a crumpled longyi and was pacing the floor, smacking his thigh with a rolled-up newspaper. His face was pale and puffy, and his wispy grey hair was straggling unkempt down the back of his neck.

The Queen, on the other hand, was exactly where she was meant to be: sitting rigidly upright on a tall chair, with her back to the door. This, Uma knew, was a part of the set order of battle: visitors were expected to walk in and seat themselves on low chairs around Her Highness, with no words of greeting being uttered on either side. This was the Queen’s way of preserving the spirit of Mandalay protocol: since the representatives of the British were adamant in their refusal to perform the shiko she in turn made a point of not acknowledging their entry into her presence.

Uma had been told to be on her guard in the reception room to look out for delinquent sacks of rice and stray bags of dal. This room was sometimes used as an auxiliary storeroom and several unwary visitors were known to have come to grief in its hidden pitfalls: it was not unusual to find heaps of chillies hidden under its sofas and jars of pickles stacked on its bookshelves. On one occasion a beefy superintendent of police had sat down heavily on the spiny remains of a dried fish. Another time, ambushed by a powerful whiff of pepper, a venerable old district judge had sneezed his false teeth clear across the room. They had fallen clattering at the Queen’s feet.

These reception-room stories had caused Uma much apprehension, prompting her to secure her sari with an extravagant number of clips and safety-pins. But on entering the room she’d found its effects to be not at all as expected. Far from being put out she felt oddly comforted by the familiar fragrances of rice and mung dal. In any other setting Queen Supayalat, with her mask-like face and mauve lips, would have seemed a spectral and terrifying figure. But the odours of domesticity seemed to soften her edges a little, adding an element of succour to her unyielding presence.

Across the room, the King was smacking his newspaper loudly on his palm. ‘Well, Collector-sahib,’ he said, ‘did you ever think that we would live to witness the day when an Eastern country would defeat a European power?’

Uma held her breath. Over the last few weeks the Collector had conducted many heated arguments on the implications of a Japanese victory over Russia. Some had ended in angry outbursts. She watched anxiously now as her husband cleared his throat.

‘I am aware, Your Highness,’ the Collector said evenly, ‘that Japan’s victory has resulted in widespread rejoicing among nationalists in India and no doubt in Burma too. But the Tsar’s defeat comes as no surprise to anyone, and it holds no comfort for enemies of the British Empire. The Empire is today stronger than it has ever been. You have only to glance at a map of the world to see the truth of this.’

‘But in time. Collector-sahib, everything changes. Nothing goes on for ever.’

The Collector’s voice grew sharper. ‘May I remind Your Highness that while Alexander the Great spent no more than a few months in the steppes of central Asia, the satrapies he founded persisted for centuries afterward? Britain’s Empire is, by contrast, already more than a century old, and you may be certain, Your Highness, that its influence will persist for centuries more to come. The Empire’s power is such as to be proof against all challenges and will remain so into the foreseeable future. I might take the liberty of pointing out, Your Highness, that you would not be here today if this had been pointed out to you twenty years before.’

The King flushed, staring speechlessly at the Collector. It fell to the Queen to answer for him. She leant forward, digging her long, sharp fingernails into the arms of her chair. ‘That is enough, Mr Collector,’ she said. ‘Enough, bas karo.’ There was a moment of stillness in which the only sound was that of the Queen’s nails, raking the polished arms of her chair. The room seemed to shimmer as though the floor had given off a sudden haze of heat.

Uma was seated between Dolly and the Second Princess. She had listened to her husband’s exchange with the King in dismayed silence, sitting frozen in her place. On the wall ahead of her was a small watercolour. The painting was a depiction of a landscape at sunrise, a stark red plain dotted with thousands of mist-wreathed pagodas. Suddenly, with a clap of her hands, Uma uttered a loud cry. ‘Pagan!’

The word had the effect of an explosion in a confined space. Everyone jumped, turning to look in Uma’s direction. She raised a hand to point. ‘On the wall — it’s a picture of Pagan, isn’t it?’

The Second Princess was sitting next to Uma. She seized eagerly on this diversion. ‘Yes — that is it. Dolly can tell you— she painted it.’

Uma turned to the slim upright woman on her left. Her name was Dolly Sein, she recalled: they had been introduced on the way in. Uma had noticed that there was something unusual about her, but she’d been too busy concentrating on protocol to give the matter any further thought.

‘Did you really paint that?’ Uma said. ‘Why, it’s wonderful.’

‘Thank you,’ Dolly said quietly. ‘I copied it from a book of prints.’ Their glances crossed and they exchanged a quick smile. Suddenly Uma knew what it was that she’d been struck by: this Miss Sein was perhaps the loveliest woman she’d ever set eyes on.

‘Madame Collector,’ the Queen tapped a knuckle on the arm of her chair, ‘how did you know that was a picture of Pagan? Have you had occasion to visit Burma?’

‘No,’ Uma said regretfully. ‘I wish I had but I haven’t. I have an uncle in Rangoon and he once sent me a picture.’

‘Oh?’ The Queen nodded; she was impressed by the way the young woman had intervened to save the situation. Self-possession was a quality she’d always admired. There was something attractive about this woman, Uma Dey; the liveliness of her manner was a welcome contrast to her husband’s arrogance. If not for her presence of mind she would have had to order the Collector out of the house and that could only have ended badly. No, this Mrs Dey had done well to speak when she did.

‘We would like to ask you, Madame Collector,’ the Queen said, ‘what is your real name? We have never been able to accustom ourselves to your way of naming women after their fathers and husbands. We do not do this in Burma. Perhaps you would not object to telling us your own given name?’

‘Uma Debi — but everyone calls me Uma.’

‘Uma?’ said the Queen. ‘That is a name that is familiar to us. I must say, you speak Hindustani well, Uma.’ There was a note of unfeigned appreciation in her voice. Both she and the King spoke Hindustani fluently and this was the language she preferred to use in her dealings with officials. She had found that her use of Hindustani usually put the Government’s representatives at a disadvantage — especially the Indians. British civil servants often spoke Hindustani well and those who didn’t had no qualms about answering in English. The Indians, on the other hand, were frequently Parsees or Bengalis, Mr Chatterjee this or Mr Dorabjee that, and they were rarely fluent in Hindustani. And unlike their British counterparts they were hesitant about switching languages; it seemed to embarrass them that the Queen of Burma could speak Hindustani better than they. They would stumble and stutter and within minutes she would have their tongues tied in knots.

‘I learnt Hindustani as a child, Your Highness,’ Uma said. ‘We lived in Delhi for a while.’

‘Achha? Well, now we would like to ask something else of you, Uma.’ The Queen made a beckoning gesture. ‘You may approach us.’

Uma went over to the Queen and lowered her head.

‘Uma,’ the Queen whispered, ‘we would like to examine your garments.’

‘Your Highness!’

‘As you can see, my daughters wear their saris in the local style. But I prefer this new fashion. It is more elegant — the sari looks more like a htamein. Would it be too great an imposition to ask you to reveal the secrets of this new style to us?’

Uma was startled into laughter. ‘I would be glad to, whenever you please.’

The Queen turned stiffly to the Collector. ‘You, Collector-sahib, are no doubt impatient to be on your way to the Cutchery and the many pressing tasks that await you. But may I ask if you will permit your wife to remain with us a little longer?’

The Collector left, and in defiance of the initial auguries of disaster, the visit ended very amicably, with Uma spending the rest of the afternoon in Outram House, chatting with Dolly and the Princesses.

The Collector’s house was known as the Residency. It was a large bungalow with a colonnaded portico and a steep, red-tiled roof. It stood on the crest of a hill, looking southward over the bay and the valley of the Kajali river. It was surrounded by a walled garden that stretched a long way down the slope, stopping just short of the river’s gorge.

One morning Uma discovered a narrow entrance hidden behind a thicket of bamboo at the bottom of her garden. The gate was overgrown with weeds but she was able to open it just wide enough to squeeze through. Twenty feet beyond, a wooded out-crop jutted out over the valley of the Kajali river. There was a peepul at the lip of the gorge, a majestic old tree with a thick beard of aerial roots hanging from its gnarled grey branches. She could tell that goats came to graze there: the earth beneath the tree’s canopy had been cropped clean of undergrowth. She could see trails of black droppings leading down the slope. The goatherds had built themselves a platform to sit on by heaping earth and stones around the peepul’s trunk.

Uma was amazed by the view: the meandering river, the estuary, the curve of the bay, the windswept cliffs — she could see more of the valley from here than from the Residency on top of the hill. She returned the next day and the day after. The goat-herds came only at dawn and for the rest of the day the place was deserted. She took to slipping out of the house every morning, leaving the door of her bedroom shut, so that the servants would think she was still inside. She would sit in the peepul’s deep shade for an hour or two with a book.

One morning Dolly surprised her by appearing unexpectedly out of the peepul’s beard of hanging roots. She’d called to return some clothes that Uma had sent over to Outram House — petticoats and blouses, for the Princesses to have copied by their tailors. She’d waited in the drawing room of the Residency while the servants went looking for Uma. They’d looked everywhere before giving up: memsahib wasn’t at home, they said, she must have slipped out for a walk.

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘Our coachman is related to yours.’

‘Did Kanhoji tell you?’ Kanhoji was the elderly coachman who drove Uma around town.

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder how he knew about my secret tree.’

‘He said he’d heard about it from the herdsmen who bring their goats here in the morning. They’re from his village.’

‘Really?’ Uma fell silent. It was odd to think that the goatherds were just as aware of her presence as she was of theirs. ‘Well, the view’s wonderful, don’t you think?’

Dolly gave the valley a perfunctory glance. ‘I’ve grown so used to it I never give it a thought any more.’

‘I think it’s amazing. I come here almost every day.’

‘Every day?’

‘Just for a bit.’

‘I can see why you would.’ She paused to look at Uma. ‘It must be lonely for you here, in Ratnagiri.’

‘Lonely?’ Uma was taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to her to use that word of herself. It was not as though she never met anyone, or that she was ever at a loss for things to do — the Collector made sure of that. Every Monday his office sent up a memorandum listing her engagements for the week — a municipal function, a sports day at a school, a prize-giving at the vocational college. She usually had only one appointment a day, not so many as to keep her uncomfortably busy nor so few as to make her days seem oppressively long. She went through the list carefully when it arrived at the beginning of the week, and then she put it on her dressing table, with a weight on it, so it wouldn’t blow away. The thought of missing an appointment worried her, although there was little chance of that. The Collector’s office was very good about sending reminders: a peon came up to the Residency about an hour before each new appointment to tell Kanhoji to bring the gaari round. She’d hear the horses standing under the porch; they’d snort and kick the gravel, and Kanhoji would click his tongue, tuk-tuk-tuk.

The nicest part of these appointments was the journey into town and back. There was a window between the coach and the driver’s bench. Every few minutes Kanhoji would stick his tiny, wrinkled face into the window and tell her about the places around them — the Cutchery, the gaol, the college, the bazaars. There were times when she was tempted to get off so she could go into the bazaars and bargain with the fishwives. But she knew there would be a scandal; the Collector would come home and say: ‘You should just have let me know so that I could have arranged some bandobast.’ But the bandobast would have destroyed any pleasure she might have taken in the occasion: half the town would have gathered, with everyone falling over themselves to please the Collector. The shopkeepers would have handed over anything she so much as glanced at, and when she got home the bearers and the khansama would have sulked as though she’d dealt them a reproach.

‘What about you, Dolly?’ Uma said. ‘Are you lonely here?’

‘Me? I’ve lived here nearly twenty years, and this is home to me now.’

‘Really?’ It struck Uma that there was something almost incredible about the thought that a woman of such beauty and poise had spent most of her life in this small provincial district town.

‘Do you remember anything of Burma?’

‘I remember the Mandalay palace. Especially the walls.’

‘Why the walls?’

‘Many of them were lined with mirrors. There was a great hall called the Glass Palace. Everything there was of crystal and gold. You could see yourself everywhere if you lay on the floor.’

‘And Rangoon? Do you remember Rangoon?’

‘Our steamer anchored there for a couple of nights, but we weren’t allowed into the city.’

‘I have an uncle in Rangoon. He works for a bank. If I’d visited him I’d be able to tell you about it.’

Dolly turned her eyes on Uma’s face. ‘Do you think I want to know about Burma?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘But you’ve been away so long.’

Dolly laughed. ‘I think you’re feeling a little sorry for me. Aren’t you?’

‘No,’ Uma faltered. ‘No.’

‘There’s no point in being sorry for me. I’m used to living in places with high walls. Mandalay wasn’t much different. I don’t really expect much else.’

‘Do you ever think of going back?’

‘Never.’ Dolly’s voice was emphatic. ‘If I went to Burma now I would be a foreigner — they would call me a kalaa like they do Indians — a trespasser, an outsider from across the sea. I’d find that very hard, I think. I’d never be able to rid myself of the idea that I would have to leave again one day, just as I had to before. You would understand if you knew what it was like when we left.’

‘Was it very terrible?’

‘I don’t remember much, which is a kind of mercy, I suppose.

I see it in patches sometimes. It’s like a scribble on a wall— no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes through, but not enough to put together the whole.’

‘What do you see?’

‘Dust, torchlight, soldiers, crowds of people whose faces are invisible in the darkness. .’ Dolly shivered. ‘I try not to think about it too much.’

After this, in what seemed like an impossibly short time, Dolly and Uma became close friends. At least once a week, and sometimes twice and even more, Dolly would come over to the Residency and they would spend the day together. Usually they stayed in, talking and reading, but from time to time Dolly would have an idea for an expedition. Kanhoji would drive them down to the sea or into the countryside. When the Collector was away touring the district, Dolly would stay over to keep Uma company. The Residency had several guest rooms and Uma assigned one of these exclusively to Dolly. They would sit up talking late into the night. Often they would wake up curled on one another’s beds, having drifted off to sleep in mid-conversation.

One night, plucking up her courage, Uma remarked: ‘One hears some awful things about Queen Supayalat.’

‘What?’

‘That she had a lot of people killed. . in Mandalay.’ Dolly made no answer but Uma persisted. ‘Doesn’t it frighten you,’ she said, ‘to be living in the same house as someone like that?’

Dolly was quiet for a moment and Uma began to worry that she’d offended her. Then Dolly spoke up. ‘You know, Uma,’ she said in her softest voice. ‘Every time I come to your house, I notice that picture you have, hanging by your front door.’

‘Of Queen Victoria, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

Uma was puzzled. ‘What about it?’

‘Don’t you sometimes wonder how many people have been killed in Queen Victoria’s name? It must be millions, wouldn’t you say? I think I’d be frightened to live with one of those pictures.’

A few days later Uma took the picture down and sent it to the Cutchery, to be hung in the Collector’s office.

Uma was twenty-six and had already been married five years. Dolly was a few years older. Uma began to worry: what was Dolly’s future to be? Was she never to marry or have children? And what of the Princesses? The First Princess was twenty-three, the youngest eighteen. Were these girls to have nothing to look forward to but lifetimes of imprisonment?

‘Why doesn’t someone do something,’ Uma said to the Collector, ‘about arranging marriages for the girls?’

‘It’s not that no one’s tried,’ the Collector replied. ‘It’s the Queen who won’t allow it.’

In his offices at the Cutchery, the Collector had found a thick file of correspondence chronicling his predecessors’ attempts to deal with the question of the Princesses’ futures. The girls were in the prime of their womanhood. If there were to be a scandal or an accident at Outram House the incumbent Collector would be held responsible: the Bombay secretariat had left no room for doubt on this score. In order to protect themselves, several previous Collectors had tried to find suitable grooms for the Princesses. One had even written to his colleagues in Rangoon, to make enquiries about eligible Burmese bachelors — only to learn that there were only sixteen such men in the whole country.

The custom of the ruling dynasties of Burma was to marry very closely within their houses. Only a man descended of Konbaung blood in both lines was eligible to marry into the Royal Family. It was the Queen who was to blame for the fact that there were now very few such pure-blooded princes left: it was she who had decimated her dynasty by massacring all of Thebaw’s potential rivals. As for the few eligible men that there were, none found favour with the Queen. She announced that not a single one of them was a fit match for a true-born Konbaung Princess. She would not allow her daughters to defile their blood by marrying beneath themselves.

‘But what about Dolly?’ Uma said to the Collector. ‘Dolly doesn’t have to worry about finding a prince.’

‘That’s true,’ said the Collector, ‘but hers is an even stranger circumstance. She’s spent her whole life in the company of the four Princesses. But she’s also a dependant, a servant, of unknown family and origin. How would you set about finding a husband for her? Where would you start: here or in Burma?’

Uma had no answer for this. Neither she nor Dolly had ever broached the subject of marriage or children. With some of her other friends, Uma could talk of little else but of husbands, marriage, children — and of course, of remedies for her own childlessness. But with Dolly it was different: theirs was not the kind of friendship that was based on intimate disclosure and domesticity — quite the opposite. Both she and Dolly knew instinctively what could not be spoken of — Uma’s efforts to conceive, Dolly’s spinsterhood — and it was this that lent their meetings such an urgent wakefulness. When she was with Dolly, Uma felt as though a great burden had dropped from her mind, that she could look outside herself, instead of worrying about her own failings as a wife. Driving in the countryside for instance, she would marvel at the way in which people came running out of their houses to talk to Dolly, to hand her little odds and ends, fruits, a few vegetables, lengths of cloth. They would talk for a while, in Konkani, and when they were on their way again, Dolly would smile and say, in explanation, ‘That woman’s uncle [or brother or aunt] used to work at Outram House.’ Despite her shrugs of self-deprecation, Uma could tell that there was a depth to these connections that went far beyond the casual. Often Uma longed to know who exactly these people were and what they and Dolly were speaking of. But in these encounters it was she who was the outsider, the memsahib: to her, for once, fell the silence of exile.

Occasionally, when the crowds around them grew too large, Kanhoji would issue scoldings from his bench, telling the villagers to clear the way for the Collector’s gaari, threatening to call the police. The women and children would glance at Uma; on recognizing the Collector’s wife, their eyes would widen and they would shrink away.

‘You see,’ Dolly said once, laughing. ‘The people of your country are more at home with prisoners than gaolers.’

‘I’m not your gaoler.’

‘What are you then?’ Dolly said, smiling, but with a note of challenge audible in her voice.

‘A friend. Surely?’

‘That too, but by accident.’

Despite herself, Uma was glad of the note of scorn in Dolly’s voice. It was a tonic restorative to the envy and obsequiousness she met with everywhere else, as the wife of the Collector and the district’s pre-eminent memsahib.

One day, while driving out in the coach, Dolly had a sharp exchange of words with Kanhoji through the connecting window. They quickly became absorbed in their argument and Dolly seemed almost to forget Uma’s presence. At intervals she made attempts to resume her normal manner, pointing at landmarks, and offering anecdotes about villages. But each time her anger got the better of her so that within moments she was at it again, whipping round to hurl a few more words at the coachman.

Uma was mystified: they were speaking in Konkani and she could understand nothing of what they said. What could they possibly be arguing about with their voices tuned to the intimately violent pitch of a family quarrel?

‘Dolly, Dolly,’ Uma shook her knee, ‘what on earth is the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ Dolly said, pressing her lips primly together. ‘Nothing at all. Everything is all right.’

They were on their way to the Bhagavati temple, which stood on the windswept cliffs above the bay, sheltered by the walls of Ratnagiri’s medieval fort. As soon as the gaari came to a halt Uma took hold of Dolly’s arm and led her towards the ruined ramparts. They climbed up to the crenellations and looked over: beneath them, the wall fell away in a straight line, dropping sheer into the sea a hundred feet below.

‘Dolly, I want to know what the matter is.’

Dolly shook her head distractedly. ‘I wish I could tell you but I can’t.’

‘Dolly, you can’t shout at my coachman and then refuse to tell me what you were talking about.’

Dolly hesitated and Uma urged her again: ‘You have to tell me, Dolly.’

Dolly bit her lip, looking intently into Uma’s eyes. ‘If I tell you,’ she said, ‘will you promise not to tell the Collector?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘You promise?’

‘Solemnly. I promise.’

‘It’s about the First Princess.’

‘Yes? Go on.’

‘She’s pregnant.’

Uma gasped, her hand flying to her mouth in disbelief. ‘And the father?’

‘Mohan Sawant.’

‘Your coachman?’

‘Yes. That’s why your Kanhoji is so angry. He is Mohanbhai’s uncle. Their family want the Queen to agree to a marriage so that the child will not be born a bastard.’

‘But, Dolly, how could the Queen allow her daughter to marry a coachman?’

‘We don’t think of him as a coachman,’ Dolly said sharply. ‘He’s Mohanbhai to us.’

‘But what about his family, his background?’

Dolly flicked her wrist in a gesture of disgust. ‘Oh, you Indians,’ she said. ‘You’re all the same, all obsessed with your castes and your arranged marriages. In Burma when a woman likes a man, she is free to do what she wants.’

‘But, Dolly,’ Uma protested, ‘I’ve heard that the Queen is very particular about these things. She thinks there’s not a man in Burma who’s good enough for her daughters.’

‘So you’ve heard about the list of husbands-to-be?’ Dolly began to laugh. ‘But you know, those men were just names. The Princesses knew nothing about them. To marry one of them would have been a complicated thing, a matter of state. But what’s happened between Mohanbhai and the Princess is not a complicated thing at all. It’s very simple: they’re just a man and a woman who’ve spent years together, living behind the same walls.’

‘But the Queen? Isn’t she angry? The King?’

‘No. You see, all of us are very attached to Mohanbhai — Min and Mebya most of all. In our different ways I think we all love him a little. He’s been with us through everything, he’s the one person who’s always stood beside us. In a way it’s he who’s kept us alive, kept us sane. The only person who’s really upset by this is Mohanbhai. He thinks your husband will send him to gaol when he finds out.’

‘What about the Princess? How does she feel?’

‘It’s as though she’s been reborn — rescued from a house of death.’

‘And what of you, Dolly? We never talk of you or your future. What about your prospects of marriage, of having children of your own? Do you never think of these things?’

Dolly leant over the wall, fixing her eyes on the pounding sea. ‘To tell you the truth, Uma, I used to think of children all the time. But once we learnt about the Princess’s child— Mohanbhai’s child — a strange thing happened. Those thoughts vanished from my mind. Now when I wake up I feel that the child is mine, growing inside me. This morning, I heard the girls asking the First Princess: “Has the child grown?” “Did you feel her move last night?” “Where are her heels this morning?” “Can we touch her head with our hands?” I was the only one who didn’t need to ask her anything: I felt that I could answer every one of those questions myself; it was as though it were my own child.’

‘But, Dolly,’ Uma said gently, ‘this is not your child. No matter how much it may seem your own, it is not, and never will be.’

‘It must seem very strange to you, Uma. I can understand that it would, to someone like you. But it’s different for us. At Outram House we lead very small lives. Every day for the last twenty years we have woken to the same sounds, the same voices, the same sights, the same faces. We have had to be content with what we have, to look for what happiness we can find. For me it does not matter who is bearing this child. In my heart I feel that I am responsible for its conception. It is enough that it is coming into our lives. I will make it mine.’

Glancing at Dolly, Uma saw that her eyes were brimming with tears. ‘Dolly,’ she said, ‘don’t you see that nothing will be the same after the birth of this child? The life you’ve known at Outram House will end. Dolly, you’ve got to leave while you can. You are free to go: you alone are here of your own will.’

‘And where would I go?’ Dolly smiled at her. ‘This is the only place I know. This is home.’

ten

When the timber-heavy streams of the monsoons debouched into the Irrawaddy the impact was that of colliding trains. The difference was that this was an accident continuously in the making, a crash that carried on uninterrupted night and day, for weeks on end. The river was by now a swollen, angry torrent, racked by clashing currents and pock-marked with whirlpools. When the feeder streams slammed head-on into the river, two-ton logs were thrown cartwheeling into the air; fifty-foot tree trunks were sent shooting across the water like flat-bottomed pebbles. The noise was that of an artillery barrage, with the sound of the detonations carrying for miles into the hinterland.

It was at these points, where the river intersected with its feeder streams, that the teak companies’ profits were at greatest risk. So fast were the Irrawaddy’s currents in this season, that the timber was as good as lost unless quickly brought to shore. It was here, of necessity, that the logs passed from their terrestrial handlers to the aquatic, from oo-sis and elephants to river-folk and raftsmen.

The streams’ confluences were guarded by retrievers specialised in the capture of river-borne logs: for the sum of three annas per log these swimmers strung a human net across the river, wresting the logs from the currents and guiding them in to shore. At the start of the season whole villages moved location to take up stations along the river. Children kept watch along the banks, while their elders breasted the currents, darting between the giant trunks, treading water around churning whirlpools of teak. Some of these retrievers came back to shore lying prone on their captured logs while others sat astride them, legs dangling. A few rode in standing on their feet, guiding the spinning, moss-covered logs with prehensile toes: these were the monarchs of the river, the acknowledged masters of retrieval.

Once brought to the banks, the logs were anchored and moored. When enough had accumulated, skilled raftsmen bound them together into river-worthy craft. These rafts were all of the same size, the number of their logs being set, by the companies’ ordinance, at an exact three hundred and sixty in each, a round sum of thirty dozen. At one ton or more per log this gave each raft the tonnage of a small battleship and a deck space that was many times larger, wide enough to accommodate a fair or a parade ground. At the centre of each of these immense floating platforms, there stood a small hut, built by the raftsmen as housing for the crew. Like the temporary dwellings of teak camps, these raft-borne huts were erected in a matter of hours. They were all exactly the same in plan, and yet always different in execution — one being marked by the trailed shoots of a quick-growing vine, another by a chicken coop or even a shelter for a pig or a goat. Each raft bore a tall mast and a pole with a handful of grass affixed to the top, an offering to the river’s nats. Before being cut adrift the rafts were assigned numbers, to be displayed on their masts along with the flags of the companies that owned them. The rafts travelled only between dawn and dusk, covering some ten to fifteen miles a day, powered solely by the flow of the river, and guided only by oars. The journey to Rangoon from upcountry forests could take five weeks or even more.

Each season Rajkumar found one pretext or another to spend a few days on these rafts. There was something hypnotically pleasurable about the variable rhythms of life on these immense, rectangular platforms — in the contrast between the delectable languor of the daytime hours, when there was often nothing more to do than to watch a fish-hook trailing through the water, and the tense excitement of the sunset mooring, when ropes flew hissing between deck and shore, and everyone had to race to douse the smoking logs. Despite their immense size, the rafts were fragile in construction: running afoul of a shoal or sandbank, they could disintegrate in a matter of minutes. Solid in appearance, their surfaces were as deceptive as quicksand. Thousands of gaps constantly opened and closed between the logs, each a small but deadly ankle trap.

Many of the raftsmen were from Chittagong, and for Rajkumar there was a special satisfaction in being able to revert to the dialect of his boyhood; in savouring on his tongue the remembered heat of fish-head dals and fish-tail jhols, flecked with nigella seed and mustard; in watching once again, the changing flow of the river, slowing as it spread itself across a flood plain, and then abruptly speeding up again at the approach of a gorge; in observing the unexpected mutations of the landscape, now green and thickly wooded, and now a baked, red desert, dotted with the skeletal trunks of parched toddy palms.

Of all the river’s sights the strangest was one that lay a little to the south of the great volcanic hump of Mount Popa. The Irrawaddy here described a wide, sweeping turn, spreading itself to a great width. On the eastern bank of the river, there appeared a range of low, foul-smelling mounds. These hillocks were covered in a thick ooze, a substance that would sometimes ignite spontaneously in the heat of the sun, sending streams of fires into the river. Often at night small, wavering flames could be seen in the distance, carpeting the slopes.

To the people of the area this ooze was known as earth-oil: it was a dark, shimmering green, the colour of bluebottles’ wings. It seeped from the rocks like sweat, gathering in shiny green-filmed pools. In places, the puddles joined together to form creeks and rivulets, an oleaginous delta that fanned out along the shores. So strong was the odour of this oil that it carried all the way across the Irrawaddy: boatmen would swing wide when they floated past these slopes, this place-of-stinking-creeks — Yenangyaung.

This was one of the few places in the world where petroleum seeped naturally to the surface of the earth. Long before the discovery of the internal-combustion engine there was already a good market for this oil: it was widely used as an ointment, for the treatment of certain skin conditions. Merchants came to Yenangyaung from as far away as China to avail themselves of this substance. The gathering of the oil was the work of a community endemic to those burning hills, a group of people known as twin-zas, a tight-knit, secretive bunch of outcasts, runaways and foreigners.

Over generations twin-za families had attached themselves to individual springs and pools, gathering the oil in buckets and basins, and ferrying it to nearby towns. Many of Yenangyaung’s pools had been worked for so long that the level of oil had sunk beneath the surface, forcing their owners to dig down. In this way, some of the pools had gradually become wells, a hundred feet deep or even more — great oil-sodden pits, surrounded by excavated sand and earth. Some of these wells were so heavily worked that they looked like small volcanoes, with steep, conical slopes. At these depths the oil could no longer be collected simply by dipping a weighted bucket: twin-zas were lowered in, on ropes, holding their breath like pearl divers.

Often, when moored within walking distance of Yenangyaung, Rajkumar would go over to watch the twin-zas at their work. Standing on the lip of a well he would look on as a man went down the shaft, rotating slowly on a sling. The rope would be attached, by way of a pulley, to his wife, family and livestock. They would lower him in by walking up the slope of the well, and when they felt his tug they would pull him out again by walking down. The lips of the wells were slippery from spills and it was not uncommon for unwary workers and young children to tumble in. Often these falls went unnoticed: there were no splashes and few ripples. Serenity is one of the properties of this oil: it is not easy to make a mark upon its surface.

After these visits to Yenangyaung, oil-soaked spectres would haunt Rajkumar’s imaginings. What would it be like to drown in that ooze? To feel that green sludge, the colour of insects’ wings, closing over your head, trickling into your ears and nostrils?

When he was about eighteen, Rajkumar came upon an unfamiliar sight at Yenangyaung. He noticed a couple of foreigners, white men, walking from well to well. From that time on, whenever he returned, there were more and more of these men around the slopes, armed with instruments and surveyors’ tripods. They were from France, England and America, and, they were said to be offering the twin-zas good money, buying up their pools and wells. Wooden obelisks began to rise on the hillocks, cage-like pyramids inside which huge mechanical beaks hammered ceaselessly on the earth.

On one of these visits to Yenangyaung Rajkumar’s raft picked up a passenger. He was called Baburao and he was from Guntur, in India. Hair grew so thick upon his body that even when wearing a cotton vest he seemed to be coated in a fine wire mesh. He had a lot of money and dispensed liquor freely to the raftsmen, late into the night. He was a maistry, he said, a labour contractor: he had just transported forty-eight Cooringhees from eastern India to Yenangyaung. There was no quicker money to be made anywhere. Many foreign companies were busy digging for oil and they were desperate for labour. They needed workers and were willing to pay handsomely. It was hard to find workers in Burma: few Burmese were so poor as to put up with conditions like those of Yenangyaung. But back at home in India, Baburao said, there were uncountable thousands of people who were so desperate to leave that they would sign over many years’ earnings. A young man like Rajkumar could grow rich quickly in this trade. What easier way to make money? All one needed was a few hundred rupees to pay one-way passages for the recruits.

Rajkumar wandered slowly to the edge of the moored raft and lit a cheroot, lying flat on his chest. His face was inches from the water, and schools of tiny riverbank fish rose to the surface to snap at his flaking ash. The encounter with the maistry had come at a time when the future was much on his mind. For the better part of the last year Saya John had been talking to him of planning ahead: ‘Your days as a luga-lei are coming to their end, Rajkumar. The time has come when you have to make your own place in the world.’

What Rajkumar wanted most was to go into the timber business. Of this he was certain, for he knew he would never be so well acquainted with any other trade. But the problem was that he possessed none of the specialised skills that would have let him join a company’s workforce as an oo-si or a raftsman. Nor did the prospect of earning a meagre twenty or thirty rupees a month hold any appeal. What then?

The best possible way to enter the teak business, Rajkumar had decided, would be through the acquisition of a timberyard. On his journeys downriver, Rajkumar stopped occasionally at the river port of Henzada. His old friend Doh Say lived there now, with his wife, Naw Da, and their two children. He worked in a small dockside yard, supervising a team of two elephants. Doh Say had suggested to Rajkumar that he set up a timberyard of his own: warehousing was a good way of entering the trade. ‘You can start small,’ he’d said. ‘You can manage with just one elephant. I’ll come and work with you, for half the usual salary, in exchange for a share of the business.’ All that was needed was an outlay of capital.

It was Rajkumar’s practice never to collect more than a part of his salary, banking the rest with Saya John. But after all these years his savings still amounted to no more than some two hundred rupees. The cost of setting up a timberyard amounted to several thousand — too much to ask from Saya John. To go to India with Baburao on the other hand would take not much more than he had already saved. And if he could persuade Saya John to lend him the rest, well then, within a few years he might have enough for his yard.

Back in Mandalay he waited for a good time to approach Saya John. ‘All I need is a loan of a few hundred rupees,’ he said quietly, taking care not to explain too much. ‘And it’ll come back to you many times over. Saya?’

Three months later Rajkumar left for India with Baburao. It took four days from Rangoon to Calcutta and another four to travel down the coast in the direction of Madras. Baburao rented two ox-carts at a small market town and had them tricked out in festive cloths. He bought several sacks of parched rice from the bazaar and recruited some half-dozen stick-wielding lathiyals to act as guards.

They headed into the countryside accompanied by drummers: it was as though they were a bridal procession, journeying to a wedding. On the way Baburao asked passers-by about the villages ahead. Were they rich or poor? Did the villagers own land or work for shares? What were the castes of the people who lived in them?

They stopped at a small hamlet, a shabby little cluster of huts huddled around an immense banyan tree. Baburao seated himself under the tree and told the drummers to start beating their instruments. At once all other activity came to a halt. Men came running in from the fields, leaving their oxen tethered to their ploughs. Children came floundering across the rice paddies. Women slipped out of their huts with their babies balanced on their hips.

Baburao welcomed everyone to the shade of the tree. Once the crowd was thick and deep he began to talk, his voice slowing to a chant in the reverential manner of a reciter of the Ramayana. He spoke of a land of gold, Burma, which the British Sarkar had declared to be a part of India. He pointed to the tasselled shawl that hung round his neck and invited his listeners to touch it with their fingers; he held up his hand so that everyone could see his gold and ruby rings. All of this, said Baburao, had come from Burma, the golden land. Before going there, he had had nothing, not even a goat or cow.

‘And all these things can be yours too,’ Baburao said to his listeners. ‘Not in your next life. Not next year. Now. They can be yours now. All you need is an able-bodied man from your family to put his thumbprint on this sheet of paper.’ He took a handful of silver coins out of a velvet bag and let them fall back again, tinkling. ‘Are there any here who have debts? Are there any who owe money to their landlords? You can settle your obligations right now, right here. As soon as your sons and brothers make their marks on these contracts, this money will be yours. In a matter of a few years they will earn back enough to free themselves of debt. Then they will be at liberty to return or stay in Burma as they choose.’

Fifteen men signed on in that village and twenty-three in the next: some rushed eagerly forward, some were pushed on by their relatives and some had their hands held forcibly to the paper by their fathers and brothers. Carrying tin boxes and cloth bundles, the recruits followed Baburao’s ox-cart back to town. The lathiyals brought up the rear to make sure they kept in step. They stopped once every few hours, to eat parched rice and salt.

When they reached the coast, Baburao hired a country boat to take them to Calcutta. Many of the men had never been on the sea before. They were frightened by the waves and that night one of the men leapt overboard. Baburao jumped in after him, and pulled him back into the boat. The would-be runaway had swallowed a bellyful of water. He was limp and scrawny, with bones sticking out of his body. Baburao draped the man over the side of the boat, doubling him over the gunwale. Then he climbed on top of him, pinning his torso below with a bent knee. With a thrusting motion of his foot, he pushed the man against the beam, pumping his stomach until the water he had swallowed came dribbling out of his mouth, along with a spongy mass of parched rice and salt.

‘Where did you think you were going?’ Baburao crooned, almost tenderly, as though he were singing to a lover. ‘And what about all the money I gave your father so he could pay off his debts? What use would your corpse be, to him or to me?’

At Calcutta they boarded the S.S. Dufferin, which was owned by a British company. Baburao had an arrangement with the steward of the ship: he was a valued customer because of the business he brought. He was given free passage, second class. Pocketing Rajkumar’s fare he allowed him to sleep on the floor of his cabin. The thirty-eight men they had brought with them were sent below, to a holding space at the rear of the ship.

Some two thousand other would-be immigrants were there already. Most were men, but there were also some hundred and fifty women. At the back, jutting out over the ship’s wake, there was a narrow wooden platform with four holes to serve as toilets. The passage was rough and the floor of the holding area was soon covered with vomit and urine. This foul-smelling layer of slime welled back and forth with the rolling of the ship, rising inches high against the walls. The recruits sat huddled on their tin boxes and cloth bundles. At the first sight of land, off the Arakan coast, several men leapt off the ship. By the third day of the voyage the number of people in the hold had dwindled by a few dozen. The corpses of those who had died on board were carried to the stern and dropped into the ship’s churning wake.

On reaching the Rangoon docks, Baburao found that the voyage had cost him two men. He was not displeased. ‘Two out of thirty-eight is not bad,’ he told Rajkumar. ‘On occasion I’ve lost as many as six.’

They travelled together to Yenangyaung and then Rajkumar told Baburao that he needed to go up to Mandalay. But this was a ruse. Rajkumar set off in a northerly direction, but once he’d put a little distance between himself and Baburao, he doubled back, heading straight for Rangoon. At a small shop on Mogul Street he bought a gold chain and a bright turquoise ring. Then he went down to the docks and boarded the Dufferin. During his last crossing, he had taken care to work out his own deal with the stewards of the ship: he was now welcomed as a maistry in his own right.

Rajkumar went back to the same district that he had visited with Baburao. He hired an ox-cart at the same market and employed the same lathiyals. He succeeded in indenturing fifty-five men and three women. On the way back to Calcutta, mindful of what had happened the last time, he sat up all night in his hired country boat, keeping watch over his recruits. Sure enough, one night, he spotted a man trying to slip silently overboard. Rajkumar was bigger and more alert than Baburao and had no need to jump in. He pulled the man out of the water by his hair and held him dangling in front of the others. He succeeded in bringing the whole group intact to Yenangyaung, and there he sold their indenture contracts to a local boss. The money was enough to pay off Saya John’s loan.

Three years passed before Doh Say found a promising timberyard. By that time Rajkumar had made eight more trips to India. His accumulated savings now amounted to almost two-thirds of the asking price of the yard. Saya John lent him the rest.

The yard was in Rangoon, off Lower Kemendine Road. There were many sawmills in the area, and the air was always filled with the fragrance of sawdust. There was a Hindu cremation ground nearby, in Sanchaung, and sometimes, when the wind turned, clouds of ash would rise in circles above the funeral pyres. A brick wall ran most of the way round the compound, and at the back there was a narrow jetty, sticking like a tongue into the Rangoon river. At low tide the riverbank expanded into a vast shelf of cottony mud. In the front of the yard there were two small cabins, built of cast-off lumber and bamboo thatch. Rajkumar moved into the smaller of the two; the other went to Doh Say, Naw Da and their children, of whom there were now four.

On his first visit to the yard, Saya John ate a meal in the cabin where Doh Say and Naw Da lived. Saya John had not known that Doh Say was to be a partner in Rajkumar’s business, but he was not particularly surprised to find that this was so. Rajkumar had always possessed a dogged kind of consistency — this was a quality quite different from loyalty, but no less enduring. The same shadows seemed to recur over and over again in his life, just as they did on puppet screens.

The following year Saya John went into semi-retirement and moved from Mandalay to Rangoon. The sale of his firm had made him a wealthy man. He set up a small office in Merchant Street, and bought a flat on Blackburn Lane. He bought a lot of furniture for his flat, hoping that his son, Matthew, would soon come home. But the boy was farther away than ever — a relative had taken him to San Francisco and he had written to say that he was studying in a Catholic seminary. There was no telling when he’d come back.

With time on his hands, Saya John began to take long walks, to air his pet birds. Rajkumar’s timberyard was just a half-hour’s stroll from his home and it became a ritual with him to stop by every morning, with a birdcage in his hand and a newspaper under his arm.

One morning he arrived to find Rajkumar waiting at the gate, hopping with impatience. ‘You’re late today, Saya.’

‘Late? For what?’

‘Late with your paper, Saya.’ Rajkumar snatched the Rangoon Gazette out of Saya John’s hands. ‘Doh Say heard on the docks that an Indian railway company was going to put out a notice, asking for tenders for the supply of sleepers.’

‘Tenders for the supply of sleepers!’ The mynah inside Saya John’s birdcage chirruped in imitation of its owner’s chortling laugh. ‘And what of it, Rajkumar? A contract with a railway company would mean the shipping of thousands of tons of teak. To supply timber on that scale you would need teams of oo-sis, pe-sis, raftsmen, agents, Assistants. All you have is Doh Say and one elephant. How do you think you would fulfil this contract?’

‘This railway company is small and new, Saya, and it needs cheap supplies. I don’t have to start by acquiring the timber: I’ll start with the contract. Once I have it, the timber will follow automatically. You will see. There are dozens of yards here that are overstocked. Once they see that I’m offering down payments they’ll all come to me.’

‘And where will you get the money to make these down payments?’

‘Why, Saya,’ Rajkumar smiled, a little sheepishly, ‘from you, of course. Why would I offer such an opportunity to anyone else?’

‘But consider the risk, Rajkumar. The big English companies could destroy you, make you a laughing stock in Rangoon. You could be driven out of business.’

‘But, Saya, look at what I have here now.’ Rajkumar gestured at his rickety cabin and his half-empty yard. ‘Saya, this is no better than a roadside teashop — I might as well still be working for Ma Cho. If I’m ever going to make this business grow, I’ll have to take a few risks.’

‘Think, Rajkumar, think. You’re just starting out. You have no idea of how these deals are struck in Rangoon. All the big people here know each other. They go to the same clubs, eat at the same restaurants, put money on each other’s horses. .’

‘It’s not just the big people who always know everything, Saya,’ Rajkumar said. ‘If I could find out exactly how much the other companies are going to quote, then I might be able to put in a winning bid.’

‘And how would you find out?’

‘I don’t know, Saya. But I think I have a way. We’ll see.’

‘But, Rajkumar, you can’t even read English: how do you think you’re going to make this bid?’

Rajkumar grinned. ‘It’s true that I can’t read English, Saya, but I’ve learnt to speak it. And why do I need to read when you can do it for me? Saya?’

And so it fell to Saya John to deal with the paperwork for the bid. It was to him that Rajkumar went with the letter the company sent back.

Breaking open the florid seal, Saya John gave voice to an incredulous shout. ‘Rajkumar! You’ve been asked to meet with the directors of the Chota-Nagpur Railway Company next week. They are coming to Burma to scrutinise the bids. You are to go to the offices of the Chartered Bank on the Strand at ten o’clock on Thursday.’

Saya John clicked his tongue incredulously as he looked up from the crackling sheet of paper in his hands. ‘Rajkumar, I really never thought you would get this far.’

‘I told you, Saya.’ Rajkumar smiled. ‘I found out what the other companies were offering and I made a better bid.’

‘And how did you find out?’

Rajkumar smiled. ‘That will be my secret, Saya.’

‘Your secret isn’t going to be of any help to you now. It’s the meeting that will decide everything. That’s what you’ve got to think about.’ Saya John ran his eyes critically over Rajkumar’s green longyi and scuffed pinni vest. ‘For example: what are you going to wear? The Chartered Bank won’t even let you past its doors if you’re dressed like that.’

The next day Saya John came to the timberyard with a dapper young man. ‘This is U Ba Kyaw,’ he said to Rajkumar. ‘He was a valet to an English planter in Maymyo. He can teach you many things, like how to eat at a European table with a knife and fork. Buy exactly what he says and do exactly as he tells you.’

On the morning of the meeting Saya John arrived at the timberyard in a hired coach, dressed in his best black suit and equipped with a fine malacca cane and a new hat. He stepped into Rajkumar’s cabin to find him already clothed in his new trousers and shirt, standing rigidly still while U Ba Kyaw worked on his tie.

When Rajkumar’s costuming had been completed, Saya John looked him over and decided that there was nothing to fault in his appearance: his suit was appropriately plain and black, and his tie neatly tied, the collar turned to just the right angle. It was true that his clothes were not quite as well tailored as they would have been in Singapore or Hong Kong, but for Rangoon they were more than adequate. In any event, no matter how costly Rajkumar’s clothes or how well-fitting, it was a certainty that he would never be mistaken for a man who’d been born to wealth or office. There was a roughness to his face that was a surety against that.

‘I’m coming with you, Rajkumar,’ Saya John said. ‘Just to bring you luck.’

At the Chartered Bank Saya John and Rajkumar were shown into an anteroom by a cashier, an Indian. Saya John saw to his surprise that Rajkumar was already acquainted with this man — D.P. Roy was his name. ‘Everything is arranged,’ Mr Roy said, in an undertone. ‘The directors are in the boardroom now. They will call for you soon.’

The cashier left and they were on their own. The room was dark and cavernous, and its deep leather chairs smelt of cigar smoke. After a long wait a turbaned bearer came in to summon Rajkumar. Saya John rose to his feet too, with the intention of uttering a few words of encouragement and reassurance. But just as he was about to speak he stopped, his eyes resting on Rajkumar. It struck him that his one-time luga-lei was now so sure of himself, so confident, that there was nothing he could say that would not be superfluous. Saya John moved back a little, withdrawing a pace or two to observe him better. Suddenly, from that altered angle of vision he had the impression that he was looking at someone he had never seen before, a reinvented being, formidably imposing and of commanding presence. In that instant there flashed before Saya John’s eyes a clear vision of that Mandalay morning when he had gone racing down an alley to rescue Rajkumar— he saw him again as a boy, an abandoned kalaa, a rags-clad Indian who had strayed too far from home. Already then, the boy had lived a lifetime, and from the look of him now it was clear that he was embarking on several more.

Then Rajkumar did something he had never done before. Just as he was about to walk through the door, he stooped to touch Saya John’s feet, in the Indian way.

‘Give me your blessings, Saya.’

Saya John turned his head to hide the tears that had welled into his eyes. ‘That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him. The contract will be yours, Rajkumar. I was wrong to doubt it.’

eleven

The post came twice a week and was delivered directly to the Collector’s office in the Cutchery. Uma’s letters were usually picked out by the Collector and sent up to the Residency with a peon. Her mail was mostly from her parents but once or twice each month there was also a book or a magazine, posted by a Calcutta bookshop.

On maildays Uma spent hours daydreaming by the peepul tree. If she happened to have one of her official appointments she would be snappish and impatient, eager to get back to her letters. She’d think of her mother, at home in Calcutta, writing in bed, worrying about her inkwell and spills on the sheets.

One mailday morning the Collector’s peon delivered a letter with an unusual postmark. The Collector had scrawled a note on the envelope: ‘From Rangoon.’ Uma turned the envelope over and saw her uncle’s name on the back, D.P. Roy. She was surprised: it was years since she’d last heard from him. But after her marriage she’d grown accustomed to receiving letters from long-unseen relatives: the Collector wielded a lot of influence; he was a man who could get things done. She surmised that her uncle needed something.

She took the letter down to the peepul tree. Just as she’d expected, her uncle had written to ask a favour, on behalf of a friend — a Rajkumar Raha who was on his way to Bombay on business. The man had expressed a desire to come down to Ratnagiri for a quick visit. He was keen to pay his respects to the former King and Queen.

‘I would be very grateful, Uma, if your husband could arrange for Rajkumar-babu to call on the former King. Having somehow learnt of my connection with the Collector, he expressly sought me out to request my help in this matter. I might add that I am indebted to Rajkumar-babu for several good turns — indeed many members of our Bengali community in Rangoon have benefited from his assistance in one way or another.’

Rajkumar-babu, the letter continued, had lived in Rangoon many years but for much of that time he had had no contact with the other Bengalis of the city. Then suddenly one morning, he had dropped down like a hailstone from the sky, right into the Durga temple on Spark Street, the gathering-place of the city’s Hindu Bengalis. He had come perfectly costumed for the occasion, in a starched white dhoti and a gold-buttoned punjabi. To ease his entry he had taken the precaution of bringing along a substantial donation for the purohit.

It turned out that Mr Raha was in the timber trade. He was planning to make a bid for a major contract and had come to ask the purohit to pray for him. Like all his kind the purohit had the intuition of a famished tiger when it came to the judging of potential prey. He did much more than offer a blessing. At the temple there were several employees of the big European banks and timber companies: the purohit made it his business to introduce Rajkumar-babu to all these men.

Over the next few days messages had flown back and forth between Spark Street and Merchant Street, between the Kalibari and the offices of the timber companies. Finally, when the directors of the Chota-Nagpur Railway Company announced their decision, it was learnt that one Mr Rajkumar Raha, a name then unknown in the world of teak, had succeeded in underbidding all the major companies.

On that contract alone Rajkumar-babu had netted a profit of eight lakh rupees — a fortune. Out of gratitude he’d virtually rebuilt the temple, paving its floors in marble, gilding the walls of the shrine and erecting a beautiful new dwelling for the purohit and his family. Since that time he had had several other successes and had risen to eminence within the business community. And all this at the age of thirty, before he had even had time to marry.

You will understand what I mean, Uma, when I say that our Rajkumar-babu is not the kind of person to whose society you are accustomed. You may well find him somewhat rough and even uncouth in his manner. You will no doubt be astonished to learn that although he speaks several languages fluently, including English and Burmese, he is for all practical purposes, an illiterate, barely able to sign his own name.

At home in India a man like Rajkumar-babu would stand little chance of gaining acceptance in the society of people like ourselves. But here in Burma our standards are a little more lax. Some of the richest people in the city are Indians, and most of them began with nothing more than a bundle of clothes and a tin box.

I fully understand that in India a man of Rajkumar-babu’s station could scarcely hope to be entertained — or even received — by a District Collector. But you must consider that he has lived in Burma so long that he is now more Burmese than Indian and may well be counted as a foreigner. I hope you will make allowance for this, recalling that I for one would certainly be very grateful for your condescension in this matter.

Also associated with maildays was a special treat: fresh ice, shipped out from Bombay on the steamer. On mailday evenings the Collector liked to sit out in the garden, on a wicker chair, with an iced drink. Uma waited until the Collector had been served his whisky before she started reading him her uncle’s letter. At the end of her recital the Collector took the sheet of paper from her and read it through himself.

He handed the letter back with a gesture of regret. ‘If it were within my power,’ he said, ‘I would have liked to oblige your uncle. But unfortunately it’s out of the question. The Government’s instructions are quite clear. Their Highnesses are not to have visitors.’

‘But why not?’ Uma cried. ‘You’re the Collector. You could let him come if you wanted to. No one needs to know.’

The Collector placed his glass abruptly on the small peg table that stood by his chair. ‘It’s impossible, Uma. I’d have to forward the request to Bombay and from there it would be sent on to the Colonial Secretary in London. It could take months.’

‘Just for a visit to Outram House?’

‘Our teachers,’ the Collector began — it was a running joke with him to speak of his British colleagues as amader gurujon— ‘our teachers don’t want political trouble in Burma. It’s their richest province and they don’t want to take any risks. The King is the one person who could bring the country together, against them. There are more than a dozen different tribes and peoples there. The monarchy is the only thing they have in common. Our teachers know this and they want to make sure that the King is forgotten. They don’t wish to be cruel; they don’t want any martyrs; all they want is that the King should be lost to memory — like an old umbrella in a dusty cupboard.’

‘But what difference could a single visitor make?’

‘He might get back and talk. Something could get into the newspapers. The Colonial Office won’t even allow the King to be photographed for fear that the picture could get back to Burma. The other day I had a letter from a photographer, a Parsee woman. She’s out on a picture-taking tour and wanted to stop by to take some photographs at Outram House. I forwarded her request to Bombay and heard back within the week: no pictures of the Royal Family are to be allowed. Government policy.’

‘But that’s monstrous,’ Uma cried.

‘Not at all.’ The Collector’s eyes narrowed. ‘It’s merely judicious. Do you think Burma would be well served by political trouble? Do you think this man Raha would have been able to get rich if Thebaw were still ruling? Why, if it were not for the British, the Burmese would probably have risen up against these Indian businessmen and driven them out like sheep.’

Uma knew she would not be able to best the Collector in an argument. She lowered her voice and placed a hand on his arm.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s not for the King’s sake, or even my uncle’s that I’m asking you this.’

‘Then why?’

Uma hesitated.

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s because of Dolly.’

‘Dolly?’

‘She’s lived here all her life, as a virtual prisoner, and she can’t imagine anything other than the life she has. But she’ll have to leave Outram House some day, and where is she to go? She’s forgotten about Burma and I think she needs to talk to people who can remind her of it.’

‘Dolly can go back to Burma whenever she wants.’

‘But she doesn’t have any family in Burma and she doesn’t know anyone there. That’s exactly why she needs to meet people who live there.’

The Collector fell silent and Uma sensed that he was beginning to relent. ‘It’s such a small thing,’ she prompted. ‘I’m sure there’s a solution.’

‘All right then,’ he said at last, on a note of exasperation. ‘Since it means so much to you I suppose there is one thing I could do.’

‘What?’

‘I could invite this Raha here as my personal guest. I could say he’s a relative by marriage. And then, if he were to pay a visit to Outram House, it would be just a private visit— nothing official

‘I’d be so glad. .’

The very next morning a telegram was dispatched to Uma’s uncle in Rangoon, to tell him that his friend, Mr Raha, was welcome to visit Ratnagiri; he would be received as the Collector’s personal guest.

twelve

Within moments of the steamer’s arrival, word went out along the waterfront that there was a rich prince on board, one Rajkumar, a foreigner who was very free with his money. An uproar ensued: coolies and porters laid siege to the gangplank; idlers drifted in from the shaded shoreline and gathered on the beach.

Rajkumar was still asleep in his cabin when the steamer docked. It was U Ba Kyaw who woke him. It was Rajkumar’s practice to bring a number of his people with him, when he was travelling abroad. This was his way of protecting himself from the pitfalls of his new circumstances. This particular journey had induced apprehensions of a novel kind and as a result his retinue was even larger than usual. Along with a stenographer and an accountant he had also brought U Ba Kyaw, his most trusted employee.

Rajkumar sent U Ba Kyaw ahead to distract the crowd and then slipped quickly off the steamer. There were two carriages waiting at the far end of the jetty: one was from the Residency. The Collector was out of town that morning, but he had left careful instructions on how the visitor was to be received. Kanhoji was to drive him to the Dak Bungalow where he was to stay. In the evening he was to dine at the Residency.

The other carriage at the jetty was the Outram House phaeton. Along with Kanhoji, Sawant was leaning on a rail, watching the uproar on the jetty. Both men were taken by surprise when Rajkumar was pointed out to them. Of all the party he looked the least likely to be the man whom Kanhoji had been sent to meet.

After dropping Rajkumar at the Dak Bungalow, Kanhoji headed back to the Residency to give Uma a full account of the uproar at the jetty. His report was unsparingly detailed: he told Uma about the half-chewed cheroot in Rajkumar’s mouth, the dishevelled untidiness of his attire, his crumpled longyi, his greasy vest and his uncombed hair. Uma was left with a sense of lingering unease. Was it prudent to invite someone like this to dinner? What exactly did he eat?

In a striking departure from custom, the Collector had entrusted the organising of the evening’s meal to Uma. Usually it was he who oversaw the Residency’s entertaining. Although otherwise uninterested in domestic matters, he was very particular about his dinner parties: he liked to examine the table and the place settings personally, tweaking the flowers and pointing out the plates and glasses that needed another round of polishing. It was to him that the servants went for their instructions on what to serve and which dinner service to use.

That morning when the khansama came to enquire about the menu, Uma had been taken by surprise. Thinking quickly, she told him to serve exactly what he had served the week before, when the Director of Public Education came to dinner. She remembered shepherd’s pie and fried fish and blancmange.

‘I want all of that tonight,’ she’d told the cook, ‘ekdum woh hi cheez.’ Then, on an impulse she wrote a note to the Anglo-Indian Superintendent of Police, Mr Wright, asking him to come to dinner, with his wife. She had already asked Mr Justice Naidu and Mrs Naidu — an elderly couple, unfailingly pleasant, undemanding. And of course Dolly was to come too: that had been arranged long before.

As evening approached, Uma tried to recall everything the Collector did before a dinner party. For once, she told herself, she would be a good memsahib. She went to the dining room and fussed with the plates and forks and flowers. But when the Collector came home, she discovered that she might as well have spared herself the effort. The Collector was plainly unimpressed. After stepping into the dining room to inspect her handiwork, he emerged with an unspoken rebuke on his face.

‘The fish-knives weren’t in the proper place,’ he said. ‘And there was dust on the wine glasses. .’ He made her go back to rearrange everything. ‘I’ll come back again later to check.’

Waiting for the guests to arrive, Uma sat by a window, her hands folded in her lap like a chastened schoolgirl. Perhaps it was a mistake, this dinner party, inviting Dolly to meet this stranger. Perhaps even her own presence here was a mistake. This was a thought that had never occurred to her before, but its chill shadow lengthened quickly in her mind. Was this what they called a premonition?

‘Madame. .’

It was the Naidus, grey-haired, tall, brimming with soft-voiced goodwill. ‘How nice. .’ And then in came the Wrights, with Dolly following a few minutes later.

Rajkumar was the last to arrive. Rising to greet him, Uma found that her first impressions were unexpectedly favourable. Looking over her folded hands, she noted that he had gone to some trouble to dress neatly and plainly, in ‘English’ clothes: a sober black suit, a carefully knotted tie. His pumps were polished to a fine sheen and in his hands he was carrying a malacca cane with a handle of delicately carved jade. He looked much older than she’d expected: his face was weathered with hard use and his lips were heavy and richly coloured, very red against his dark skin. Along the line of his jaw there was a fold of flesh that hinted at jowls to come. He was far from good-looking, but there was something arresting about him, a massiveness of construction, allied with an unlikely mobility of expression — as though life had been breathed into a wall of slate.

Glancing over her shoulder, Uma spotted Dolly sitting half-hidden behind the scrolled arm of a chaise-longue. She was wearing a mauve htamein and an aingyi of white silk. A lily glowed like a light against the black sheen of her hair.

‘Dolly!’ Uma made a gesture of introduction in Rajkumar’s direction. ‘This is Mr Raha; I don’t believe you’ve met. .’

He recognised her at once, at first glance, beyond the remotest possibility of doubt. It was not that she looked the same, because she didn’t: her face was much longer than he remembered, and around the corners of her eyes and mouth there was a fine, almost invisible, filigree of lines, like the tracings of a goldsmith’s awl. What he remembered was something else — an element of her expression, a kind of forlornness in her eyes. It was this that had held him that night at the Glass Palace and now it held him again.

‘Mr Raha—’ there was a note of concern in Uma’s voice— ‘is something the matter?’

‘No.’ He looked down to find that he was holding his cane suspended in midair. ‘No. Not at all. Nothing is the matter.’

To prevent himself from leaving the room, he sat down heavily in the nearest chair. It was too soon: he had not expected to see her here. There was nothing he hated more than to be taken unawares. He had expected to prepare himself for this encounter in slow, measured steps. It had been difficult enough to walk into this house. Even now, after two years of dinners and parties, he found it hard to cope with this atmosphere of constrained enactment.

‘Did you have a pleasant journey, Mr Raha?’

It was his hostess, the Collector’s wife: there was a look on her face that told him that she was trying to draw him out. He nodded and tried to smile. He could feel his gaze straying towards the chaise-longue and he quickly dropped his eyes. There were others approaching, he could feel them hovering at his shoulder. What was he to say to them? He had never so much wanted to be left alone.

‘Dinner. Shall we. .?’

On the way to the dining room Uma found herself momentarily alone with Dolly. ‘What do you think of our guest?’ she said quickly, under her breath.

‘He’s not what I expected: not at all like a big magnate.’

‘Because he’s so quiet, you mean?’

‘He doesn’t seem to be much at ease, does he?’

‘Have you noticed how he keeps looking at you? It’s almost as though he’s seen you somewhere before.’

Dolly’s eyes widened. ‘That’s such a strange thing to say, Uma. I wonder what could have made you say that?’

The Residency’s dining room was too large to be properly lit. Its long mahogany table floated adrift in an island of darkness. There were several enormous candlestands on the table but because of the hand-pulled punkah overhead, the candles in the silver branches could not be lit. As a result the diners’ faces were half-obscured, never quite visible, even to their neighbours.

Uma had seated Rajkumar on her right and Mr Wright, the Superintendent of Police, on her left. Dolly was at the other end of the table, sitting next to the Collector. Along the walls, at a distance of some half-dozen paces from the table, there stood a line of bearers, one behind each chair. As was the custom, the diners had each brought their own bearer, all except Dolly, who was as good as a member of the household. The Naidus’ bearers were local men, Mr Wright’s a Sikh. Behind Rajkumar’s chair stood U Ba Kyaw, in a pink gaung-baung and a purple longyi: everyone else was drab by comparison.

Presently, the Collector laid down his napkin, and looked across the table at Rajkumar. ‘Burma, Mr Raha,’ he said in his ironical way. ‘You have told us very little about it. What took you there in the first place?’

‘Accident,’ Rajkumar said shortly.

‘What kind of accident carries a man to another country?’

‘I was working on a boat and found myself stranded in Mandalay. This was at the start of the British invasion. The river was closed to traffic.’

‘An eventful time.’

‘A strange time, sir.’

‘Indeed? How so?’

Dolly was watching him from across the table. Hers was the only face he could see: the others were all wrapped in shadow.

‘The British fleet took two weeks to move up the river,’ Rajkumar said. ‘And through most of that time Mandalay was very quiet. I was only a boy then, but I was one of the few in the city who seemed to be aware that trouble was on its way.’

At this juncture there occurred an odd little incident, the fish having just been served, Rajkumar glanced impatiently at the knives and forks that surrounded his plate. Then, as though in exasperation at the profusion of cutlery, he held up his right hand and snapped his fingers. Even before he had completed the gesture U Ba Kyaw had appeared at his side, to hand him the appropriate utensil. This took no more than an instant, but everyone in the room took startled notice. Only Rajkumar himself seemed to be unmindful of the interruption. He resumed his narrative as though nothing had happened.

‘One morning we heard cannon-shots somewhere in the distance. When the noise stopped, everything went on again, just as usual. It was only when the foreign soldiers marched into the city that people understood what had happened: that the King had been defeated, the city conquered. Towards evening we saw troops marching out of the fort with sacks of loot. Palace workers too. A crowd gathered around the walls of the fort. I had never been past the walls. When I saw people crossing the moat, I went to join them. We went running in. At the walls of the palace we found a breached gateway. We broke through, hundreds of us. I suppose you could say it was a kind of riot. None of us knew what we were doing, everyone was following someone else. We went running into the rear of the palace: the women’s section. The most valuable objects were already gone, but to us what was left seemed to be of an unimaginable sumptuousness, precious beyond imagining. People fell upon everything that was within reach, everything in sight, breaking the furniture, digging stones from the floor. After a while I left the main hallway and turned into an anteroom. There was a woman inside. She was small and slight of figure, and even though I had never seen her before I knew at once that she was Queen Supayalat.’

‘The Queen?’

‘Yes. Her Majesty herself. I imagine she had come there to salvage whatever was left of her possessions. She was without guards, without an escort. She should have been frightened, but she was not. She shouted at us, threatened us. But what was still more remarkable was that everyone who came into the room fell instantly to the floor, to shiko to the Queen. Imagine how strange this was: there they were, looting the palace and at the same time paying homage to their Queen! I was mesmerised: I sat in a corner, watching. And when I had been there a while I realised that the Queen was not alone. She had two children with her, and some attendants, a group of young girls. Of the children the older was perhaps three. I took her to be a Princess, from the style of her clothes. Standing beside the Princess was an attendant, also a child, perhaps a year or two younger than me, perhaps more, I could not be sure, for this was a child like none I had ever seen before— beautiful beyond belief, beyond comprehension. She was like the palace itself, a thing of glass, inside which you could see everything of which your imagination was capable. All around us there was noise, the sound of knives, axes, running feet. It was evident that the girl was frightened, and yet, at the same time, she was perfectly calm. I could not take my eyes off her. I knew I was watching something I would never forget.’

‘Who was she?’ Uma broke in. ‘This girl — who was she? Did you ever find out?’

‘To tell you the truth. .’ Rajkumar was about to go on, when Dolly cut him short.

‘It would seem,’ she said curtly, addressing the Collector, ‘it would seem that this was all a great sport for Mr Raha.’

‘No.’ Rajkumar’s voice grew louder. ‘Not at all.’

Dolly kept her gaze away from him. ‘Mr Raha,’ she said, ‘appears to have enjoyed himself thoroughly.’

‘No. That was not what I meant.’

Glancing at Rajkumar, Uma saw a look of inexpressible dismay cross his face. Suddenly she was sorry for him: Dolly was being needlessly cruel, unfair; anyone could see that the man had not intended any disrespect.

‘Mr Raha. .’ Uma put out her hand to tap him on his wrist, to bring him back to the present and remind him that he was in company. But her elbow brushed accidentally against the table as she was reaching out. A fork slipped off her plate and fell tumbling to the floor. The sound was very small, thinly metallic, but within the confines of that space, it achieved the amplitude of an explosion. Two bearers leapt simultaneously from their places at the wall: one snatched the fallen utensil from the floor while the other proffered a napkin-wrapped replacement.

‘Ah, Madame. .’

The Collector’s voice was expansive and loud, filled with mirthful irony. At the sound of it she shrank into her chair, in mortification. She had come to dread this note of derision, this inflexion that so often accompanied his comments on her small acts of clumsiness. She knew the incident would be mentioned many times that evening; there would be innumerable jokes, references, arch asides: these would constitute her punishment.

‘Ah, Madame,’ the Collector continued, ‘may I urge you once again to refrain from juggling with the Government’s silver?’

She shivered, her eyes fixed on her plate. How was it possible to endure this? She looked at the new fork, lying on her plate, and as though of its own accord her hand began to move. Her wrist snapped up, sending the fork cartwheeling into the air.

Just before the utensil had completed its arc, Rajkumar shot out a hand and snatched it out of the air. ‘There,’ he said, slapping it down on the tablecloth. ‘No harm done.’

Across the table the Collector was watching in astonishment. ‘Uma!’ he cried, the note of irony gone from his voice. ‘Uma! What is the matter with you today?’

There followed an instant of silence in which they heard the sound of a carriage, rumbling up to the Residency’s gate. ‘Kaun hai?’ came the sentry’s shouted challenge. The reply was muffled and indistinct but Dolly started at once to her feet. ‘It’s Mohanbhai. Something must have happened at Outram House.’

A bearer came in, bowing, and presented the Collector with an envelope. ‘Urgent, sir.’

Slitting the envelope the Collector took out a sheet of embossed notepaper. He read the letter through and looked up, smiling gravely. ‘I’m afraid I must leave these revels. A summons. Her Highness wants me at Outram House. At once.’

‘Then I should go too.’ Dolly pushed back her chair.

‘By no means.’ The Collector gave her hand a pat. ‘Stay and enjoy yourself. It’s me she wants. Not you.’

Dolly and Uma exchanged glances: they both knew at once that the Queen had summoned the Collector in order to announce the Princess’s pregnancy. Dolly could not decide whether it would be better to go back to Outram House or to stay away.

‘Stay, Dolly,’ Uma urged.

‘All right,’ Dolly nodded. ‘I’ll stay.’

The complicity of the two women was not lost on the Collector. He looked from Uma to Dolly and back again. ‘What exactly is going on at Outram House?’ he said. ‘Does either of you have any idea?’

‘No.’ Uma was quick to answer, her voice a note higher than usual. ‘Whatever it is, I’m sure it won’t require Dolly’s presence.’

‘All right then.’ The Collector moved quickly around the table, saying his goodbyes. ‘I’ll be back when Her Highness sees fit. Do keep yourselves amused. .’

The suddenness of the Collector’s departure set the others astir. The Naidus and the Wrights rose whispering to their feet. ‘It’s very late. .’ ‘Ought to be on our way. .’ There was a flurry of leave-taking and handshakes. Following her guests to the door, Uma stopped to whisper to Dolly: ‘I’ll be back after I see them off. Wait for me. .’

Dolly went dazedly into the drawing room and opened one of the French windows. Stepping out into the garden, she stopped to listen to the voices of the departing guests. They were saying their goodbyes. ‘Thank you. .’ ‘So nice. .’ One of the voices was Uma’s, but it seemed very far away. She couldn’t think clearly right now: everything seemed a little blurred. It struck her that she should shut the French window to keep the insects out of the house. But she let it pass: there was too much to think about.

Right now, at this very moment, at Outram House, the Princesses were probably sitting by their windows looking down the road, waiting for the sound of the Collector’s carriage. Downstairs, the reception room was probably open already, the lamps lit, just two, to save on oil. The Queen would soon be on her way down, in her patched crimson htamein; in a moment she would seat herself with her back to the door. And there she would wait until the Collector was shown in.

This was how the accustomed world of Outram House would end: they’d known this, all along, she and the Princesses. This was exactly how it would happen: one day, suddenly, the Queen would decide the time had come. The Collector would be sent for immediately, not a minute to waste. The next day everyone would know: the Governor, the Viceroy, all of Burma. Mohanbhai would be sent away; perhaps the Princesses too. Only she, Dolly, would remain, to bear the blame.

‘Miss Dolly.’

She recognised the voice. It was that man, the visitor from Burma.

‘Miss Dolly.’

She turned on him, her temper rising. ‘How did you know my name?’

‘I heard. .’ He stopped to correct himself. ‘The truth is that it was you who told me your name.’

‘Impossible.’

‘You did. Do you not remember? That night, in the Glass Palace. You were the girl with the Princess. You must remember. I spoke to you, asked you your name.’

Dolly clapped her hands over her ears. ‘It’s a lie. Every word of it. You’ve made it all up. Everything, every last word. There was not a line of truth in anything you said tonight. Min and Mebya were gods to the people of Mandalay. No one would have dared do the things you described. . People cried when we were taken away.’

‘They did. That is true. But this too is true: the mob, the palace. I was there, and so were you. You must recall — that night in the palace, someone had snatched something from you — a box. I found it and gave it back. That was when you told me your name: Dolly. I can still hear your voice.’

She averted her face. ‘And you are here because of this? Because of what you saw that night at the palace?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve made a mistake, Mr Raha.’ Her voice rose to a cry of plaintive denial. ‘It wasn’t me you saw. It was someone else. Children change as they grow. I have no memory of what you describe. I was not there. There were many of us — girls working in the palace. Perhaps it was someone else. I don’t know. It wasn’t me. I was not there.’

‘I remember what I saw.’

‘How can you be sure? I remember nothing of that time. I have never wanted to. And you yourself were a boy, a child.’ ‘But I still remember.’

‘And for that you came here looking for me?’

‘Miss Dolly, I have no family, no parents, no brothers, no sisters, no fabric of small memories from which to cut a large cloth. People think this sad and so it is. But it means also that I have no option but to choose my own attachments. This is not easy, as you can see. But it is freedom of a kind, and thus not without value.’

‘And what did you expect to find? Did you come here thinking to find me still a child? Someone who could take you back to your boyhood?’

‘I came because I could. Expecting nothing.’

Dolly fanned her face with her hands. She could smell the evening’s fallen frangipani dying on the grass around her. ‘Mr Raha.’ She was calmer now, breathing more evenly. ‘You are a rich man, I am told — a successful man. You have evidently lived a colourful life. I am at a loss to understand what it is exactly that has brought you here. I should tell you that, as far as I am concerned, this is my home and I have no other. I have spent twenty years here. I lead a very simple, practical life. There is nothing in me or the life I lead that can be of the remotest interest to someone like yourself.’

‘I would like to say, with respect, that that is not for you to judge.’

‘Mr Raha, it is best that you leave now.’

‘I could not bring myself to leave without telling you that you had misunderstood me tonight at the dinner table. That is why I doubled back on my way out. I have come a long way. I could not leave on that note.’

A shadow appeared in the distance, framed against the drawing room’s open window. It was Uma, calling out through cupped hands. ‘Where are you, Dolly? In the garden?’

Dolly lowered her voice. ‘Mr Raha, I am sorry if I said anything unjust or unkind. I am sure you meant no harm. But your coming here was a mistake and you would do best to put it behind you as quickly as possible. It is a pity that you have wasted so much time and effort.’

‘It was not a waste.’

‘There is nothing more to say Mr Raha.’ Dolly joined together the palms of her hands. ‘I must go now. I do not think we shall meet again, but I wish you well. Namaste.’

The Queen received the Collector, as always, seated in her ornate black armchair, with her back to the door. Her face was a painted mask, her lips a sunburst of red. Her ivory skin seemed almost translucent in the dim candlelight. She was dressed in a htamein of red silk and her stockinged feet were enclosed in black slippers, embroidered with fraying threads of gold.

Gesturing to the Collector to seat himself, she began without preamble, speaking in Hindustani. ‘It is His Majesty the King’s wish, Collector-sahib, that you be informed that our eldest daughter, Princess Ashin Hteik Su Myat Phaya Lat, is pregnant and that her confinement is perhaps just a week or two away. We would be grateful if you would convey the good news to your superiors in the Government of India.’

The Collector’s first instinct was to correct her. ‘But Your Highness this cannot be, for the Princess has no husband.’

‘Not to your knowledge perhaps.’

‘This is not a matter of opinion,’ said the Collector. ‘I have not issued a licence for the Princess’s marriage. Therefore she cannot be legally married.’

The Queen was silent for a moment and then a slight smile appeared on her face.

‘Collector-sahib, you keep yourself so well informed. I’m surprised that none of your spies have ever thought to tell you that children can be born without a licence.’

‘So you mean the child. .’

‘Yes. By your laws, the child will be a bastard.’

‘And the father?’

‘You’ve met him often.’ She fixed him with an unwavering gaze. ‘He is our coachman, a fine young man.’

It was only now that the Collector began to grasp the full import of what she had said. ‘But what am I to report? What am I to tell the Government?’

‘You will convey what you have been told: you will say that our daughter is soon to have a child and that the father is our coachman, Sawant.’

‘But, Your Highness,’ the Collector said, ‘consider the Princess’s reputation, consider your standing in society.’

‘Our standing? And what exactly is that, Collector-sahib?’ ‘Your husband is the King of Burma, albeit deposed. Your daughter is a Princess.’

‘I assure you, Collector-sahib, that you of all people need not trouble to remind us of this.’

He could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead. There was still time, he told himself: the matter could be handled discreetly, without any inkling of it reaching the public. The young man could be persuaded to go quietly back to his village and family. If he made trouble, Mr Wright and his policemen would deal with him.

‘Your Highness, I beg you to reflect. Is it appropriate that a Princess of Burma should link herself to a household employee, a servant?’

A tiny, trilling laugh escaped the Queen’s lips. ‘Collector-sahib, Sawant is less a servant than you. At least he has no delusions about his place in the world.’

The Collector stared at her. ‘I am frankly amazed,’ he said, ‘that Your Highness should choose to make light of such a scandal.’

‘Scandal?’ The Queen’s eyes hardened as she repeated the English word. ‘You have the insolence to come here and speak to us of scandals? There is no scandal in what my daughter has done. The scandal lies in what you have done to us; in the circumstances to which you have reduced us; in our very presence here. What did my daughters ever do, Collector-sahib, that they should have to spend their lives in this prison? Did they commit a crime? Were they tried or sentenced? We have heard so many lectures from you and your colleagues on the subject of the barbarity of the Kings of Burma and the humanity of the Angrez; we were tyrants you said, enemies of freedom, murderers. The English alone understand liberty, we were told; they do not put kings and princes to death; they rule through laws. If that is so, why has King Thebaw never been brought to trial? Where are these laws that we hear of? Is it a crime to defend your country against an invader? Would the English not do the same?’

The Collector knew that the appropriate response was to make a gesture of protest, a show of indignation. But under the Queen’s hard-eyed scrutiny he was unable to find the right words.

‘Your Highness,’ he said at last, ‘I am not your enemy. On the contrary I have acknowledged to you many times that I believe your grievances to be well-founded. The matter unfortunately is not in my hands. Please believe me when I say that I have only your best interests at heart. It is solely out of concern for you and your family that I am requesting you to reconsider your decision to accept this man — this coachman— into your family. I implore you, Your Highness, to think of how the public will view this — of the damage to your family’s reputation.’

The Queen tilted her head. ‘We are not public servants, Collector-sahib. To us the opinions of people at large are a matter of utter indifference.’

‘I see your mind is made up.’

‘Shame on you, Collector-sahib, that you should presume to judge the conduct of my children; shame on you that you should have the effrontery to come into this house and speak to me of scandal.’

The Collector rose to his feet. ‘Your Highness, may I mention one last consideration? I do not expect it to weigh very greatly with you, but I feel that I have the right none the less, to bring it to your attention. You should be aware that if this matter becomes public, as your custodian-in-chief it is I, in all likelihood, who will bear the blame. Indeed it would almost certainly mean the end of my tenure here as Collector.’

‘I assure you, Collector-sahib’—the Queen laughed—‘we are well aware of this.’ She laughed again, raising a tiny hand to cover her mouth. ‘I am sure you will find a way to preserve yourself. Public officials usually do. If not you’ll have only yourself to blame.’

There was nothing more to say. With a few mumbled words of regret the Collector excused himself from the Queen’s presence. On his way out, he spotted Sawant coming out of the gatehouse. He could hear a woman’s voice, calling out from within. Walking past the door, eyes discreetly averted, he caught a whiff of the hot, damp air inside. He quickened his pace. Was this where they cohabited then, the coachman and the First Princess, in that tiny hutch of a room? A profusion of images welled up before his eyes: Sawant, leaning on the doorpost, stroking his oiled moustache, beckoning to the girl with a smile; the Princess, stealing in through an unlatched door while the rest of the household lay asleep; the rank little room, reeking of sweat and echoing to their muffled cries; the creaking of a charpai.

He hurried into his gaari, calling impatiently to Kanhoji, ‘Chalo! Jaldi chalo, jaldi, to the Residency, quickly.’ He leant out of the gaari’s window, breathing hard, but even the cool night air could not clear his nostrils of the smell of that room. Was this love then: this coupling in the darkness, a princess of Burma and a Marathi coachman; this heedless mingling of sweat?

And the Queen, with her snapping black eyes? He had heard it said once that she had always really loved Thebaw. But what could they possibly know of love, of any of the finer sentiments, these bloodthirsty aristocrats, these semi-illiterates who had never read a book in all their lives, never looked with pleasure upon a painting? What could love mean to this woman, this murderer, responsible for the slaughter of scores of her own relatives? And yet it was a fact that she had chosen captivity over freedom for the sake of her husband, condemned her own daughters to twenty years of exile. Would Uma do the same for him? Would anyone? He shivered, stretching out his arms to steady himself against the sides of the carriage.

At the Residency, Uma was waiting up. She came running to the door to let him in, waving the servants away. ‘What happened? What did she say? Tell me.’

‘Where’s Dolly?’ the Collector asked.

‘She was tired. She went straight to bed.’

‘Come.’

The Collector led her to their bedroom and shut the door. ‘You knew. Didn’t you?’

‘About what?’

‘Uma, whatever I am, I’m not a fool. I’m talking about the Princess’s pregnancy.’

Uma sat down on the edge of their mosquito-netted bed, averting her gaze.

‘So you knew, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dolly told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it never occurred to you to tell me? That this might be a matter of some importance? That it would have consequences for me?’

‘How could I tell you? I promised not to.’

He came to stand beside her, looking down at her lowered head.

‘And your promise to Dolly meant more than the bond between us, you and me?’ He reached for her hands and took them gently into his own. ‘Look at me, Uma. Why could you not trust me? Have I ever betrayed you, in any way? Did you think I would not be discreet?’

‘I promised.’

He stared at her in bemusement. ‘You’ve known of this for days, perhaps months. We were together all that time. Did you never once feel the desire to talk of this with me? Not as the Collector of Ratnagiri, not even as your husband, but just as a companion, someone in whose company you spend your days?’

She pulled her hands free of his grip. What did he want of her? She did his bidding in all things: she went to the Club when he told her to; she went to all her appointments. What more was there to give?

She began to sob, covering her face with her hands. The wifely virtues she could offer him he had no use for: Cambridge had taught him to want more; to make sure that nothing was held in abeyance, to bargain for a woman’s soul with the coin of kindness and patience. The thought of this terrified her. This was a subjection beyond decency, beyond her imagining. She could not bring herself to think of it. Anything would be better than to submit.

thirteen

It seemed to Uma that she had only just drifted off, after many long hours of sleeplessness, when she heard a voice at her bedside: ‘Memsahib! Memsahib!’

She stirred drowsily, pushing her pillows back against the polished headboard. ‘Memsahib!’ It was an ayah, her face veiled by the cloudy gauze of the mosquito net. ‘Get up, memsahib! Get up!’ The windows were open and the ceiling was bathed in reflected sunlight. There was a smell of freshly mown grass in the air. She heard scythes hissing in the garden and remembered that she’d told the malis to mow the lawn.

‘Memsahib, wake up. A gentleman is waiting in the baithak-khana.’

‘A gentleman? Who?’

‘The one who was here for dinner yesterday — the bahaarka gentleman.’

‘Mr Raha?’ Uma sat up with a start. ‘What is he doing here?’

‘He asked to see you. And Dolly memsahib.’

‘Have you told her this?’

‘Dolly memsahib isn’t here. She left early this morning.’

‘When?’

‘Very early. Kanhoji took her back to Outram House.’

The mosquito net had somehow worked its coils around Uma: she couldn’t get the webbing off her face.

‘Why wasn’t I told?’

‘Collector-sahib said not to wake you.’

She scratched impatiently at the net with clawed fingers. There was a tearing sound and a gap opened suddenly in front of her. She climbed through the rent, swinging her legs off the bed.

It wasn’t like Dolly to leave in such a hurry, without a word.

‘Send some tea to the baithak-khana,’ she said to the ayah. ‘And tell the gentleman I’ll be out soon.’

She dressed quickly and went hurrying down the corridor. She took the ayah with her into the drawing room, and left her squatting by the door for propriety.

‘Mr Raha?’

He was on the far side of the room, blowing smoke through an open window. At the sound of her voice, he spun round, flicking away his cheroot. He was wearing ‘English’ clothes— a white linen suit.

‘Madame Collector, I am sorry to have disturbed you. .’

‘No. Not at all.’ She began to cough. The room was foggy with acrid tobacco smoke.

‘I’m sorry.’ He dispelled a cloud of smoke with an apologetic wave. ‘I came to thank you. . for last night.’ There was a pause in which she heard him swallow as though he were trying to collect himself to say something. ‘And I wanted to thank Miss Sein too, if I could.’

‘Dolly? But she isn’t here. She’s gone back to Outram House.’

‘Oh.’ He fell into a chair, his lips working silently, as though he were saying something to himself. She noticed that his hair was dishevelled and his eyes bleary from lack of sleep.

‘May I ask if she is likely to return here today?’

‘Mr Raha,’ said Uma quietly, ‘I have to say that I am a little surprised that you should concern yourself so much with someone you hardly know.’

He looked up at her. ‘Madame Collector. .’

‘Yes?’

‘There is something I should tell you.’

‘Go on.’

‘I have not been entirely frank with you. Or your uncle.’

‘How so?’

‘This was not my first meeting with Miss Sein. The truth is that it is because of her that I am here. I came in search of her.’

‘What?’ Uma tried to laugh. ‘There must be some mistake, Mr Raha. You are surely thinking of someone else. You could not have met Dolly before this. Dolly has lived here all her life. I can assure you of that. She hasn’t left Ratnagiri since she was ten years old.’

‘The girl I spoke of last night — the girl in the Glass Palace?’

‘Yes?’

‘That was her — Dolly, Miss Sein.’

Uma felt the breath rushing out of her body. She rose unsteadily to her feet, and stepped through one of the French windows into the garden. ‘Come, Mr Raha.’ Without waiting for him, she set off across the freshly cut lawn. The malis were busy sweeping the cut grass to take home to their cows and goats; they looked up and salaamed as she swept by.

Rajkumar caught up with her at the bottom of the garden, just as she was opening the wicket gate. ‘This must seem very strange to you.’

‘Yes. It does.’

She led him to the earthen seat beneath the peepul tree. The Kajali river shone like glass in the valley below. ‘Please sit down, Mr Raha.’

‘I didn’t know I would find her here,’ Rajkumar said. ‘Not for sure. This was just a place to begin — a way of settling a score with myself. As long as there existed a place where I could make enquiries, I had to come. I had no choice. I was sure that I’d find the matter settled: she would be married, I thought, or carrying someone else’s child. Or dead, or turned into something unrecognisable. That would be that, the sight of her would wash the memory from my mind, set me free. Then I walked into your house last night, and there she was. I knew her at once: her face, her expression. And then the matter was indeed out of my hands, but not in the way I expected.’

‘And you’d only seen her that one time?’

‘Twice. In Mandalay. But if I had met her a thousand times it would have been no different. I know that. I am sure of that. When I was very young, I used to work on a boat, a Chittagong sampan. This was a long time ago, even before I went to Mandalay. One day we were caught in a storm. We were on the open sea and the storm came up very suddenly, as they do off the coast of Bengal. Water began to pour into the boat, over the stern. I was roped to a mast and given a bucket to bale with. Soon the sky grew so dark that my surroundings became invisible, except by lightning. During one of those flashes, I noticed something. It was an animal, a small, green-backed turtle. It had been washed aboard by a wave and had somehow got itself caught in some netting. It was just beyond my reach, and the waves were hitting the boat so hard I didn’t dare undo my rope. We were both bound in our places, the turtle and I. At every flash of lightning, I looked up and there he was. And so it went, through that long, long night: the animal and I, watching one another, through the waves and the wind. Towards dawn the storm abated. I undid my ropes and unloosed the turtle from the net. I can see it clearly to this day. If you were to set a thousand turtles in front of me now, they would not be as real to me as that one animal.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Mr Raha?’

‘Who else can I tell?’

‘Tell Dolly.’

‘I tried to. Last night. I saw her going into the garden and I doubled back after leaving you.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She was determined to be angry — just as she was at dinner. She found fault with everything I said. She told me to go back. She would not see me again. I stayed up all night, thinking what do I do next? In any other place, I would have had people to turn to: my friends would have learnt her mind from her friends. I would have asked someone to speak to her family. Then I would have gone myself to meet her father. We would have discussed money, settlements. Things like that. I would have had some help. People to speak for me.’

‘Yes.’ Uma nodded. ‘There would have been intermediaries. Go-betweens. People who can explain us better than we can ourselves.’

He was right, she knew — that was how these things happened: someone carried word from one mouth to another and so it went, whispers travelling like tendrils along hothouse trellises. That was exactly how it had happened in her own case: one night, a gaari had come clattering into the paved courtyard of their family home in Calcutta — the house to which her father had given the name Lankasuka. There was a loud banging on the front door, downstairs. It was late, after dinner. Her father was in his study, busy working on his treatise on temple architecture. Her mother was preparing to go to bed. ‘Someone must have died,’ her mother had declared. ‘There’s only ever bad news at this time of night.’

Uma and her little brother had gone running to the veranda that overlooked the courtyard. One of their aunts was standing by the door downstairs. ‘Has someone died?’ Uma had shouted.

‘Died?’ Her aunt had burst into laughter. ‘No, you silly girl. Let me in.’

Uma and her brother had listened at the door while their mother conferred with the visitor. They heard them mention the Collector’s name and recognised it: they’d read about him recently, in newspapers and magazines. He was known to be a brilliant man. As a student, he’d done so well at Calcutta University that the well-to-do families of his neighbourhood had pooled their resources together to send him to Cambridge. He’d returned a minor hero, having been accepted into the grandest and most powerful imperial cadre, the Indian Civil Service.

It transpired that he had seen Uma at a puja: she’d been sixteen at the time, a schoolgirl. On his return from Cambridge, he’d made enquiries about her. His family was none too pleased: they’d had proposals from all over the city and thought they could do much better. But he persisted, insisting that he didn’t want a conventional marriage. He’d be working with Europeans: it wouldn’t do to have a conservative, housebound wife. He needed a girl who would be willing to step out into society; someone young, who wouldn’t be resistant to learning modern ways.

‘And he’s asking about my Uma?’

Her mother’s incredulous shriek had resounded through the house. Uma was by no means the best-looking or the most accomplished girl in her circle: she could neither sing nor sew; her hair wasn’t quite straight and she was thought to be too tall to be graceful.

‘My Uma?’

Her brother had backed away from her, his mouth falling open in disbelief. ‘You!’ To tease him she’d said: ‘Well, he can hardly marry you.’ He’d burst into tears, as though that were exactly what he’d been hoping for.

‘Why me?’ Uma had asked the question over and over again, of all the usual intermediaries and go-betweens. ‘Why me?’ The most that anyone had been able to tell her was: ‘He thinks you’ll be quick to learn.’

Their wedding was unlike any other. The Governor came, and many English civil servants and army officers. Instead of a shehnai there was a military band from Fort William.

When they were alone, in the flower-hung bedroom of the first night, they’d both sat a long while silent on the bed, held still by shyness, he no less than she. They’d listened to the voices of their friends and relatives, clustered round the closed door, laughing, making the usual ribald jokes. At last, to her relief, he’d begun to talk: he’d told her about Cambridge, about the cobbled streets and stone bridges, about concerts he’d attended. He’d hummed a tune: it was by his favourite composer, he said. She liked the liveliness of the tune and asked: what is it called? He was pleased that she’d asked.

‘It’s from “The Trout”,’ he explained, ‘by Schubert.’

‘It’s nice. Hum it again.’ She’d drifted off to sleep, waking hours later to his touch. The pain was not as terrible as she’d been told — not much worse than going to the doctor — and the room was very dark, which made it easier. When her mother asked the next day, she was embarrassed that she didn’t have a fearsome story to tell, like everyone else.

‘He was kind, gentle.’

‘What more could anyone ask?’ her mother had said. ‘Treasure your good fortune, Uma. Don’t let a day go by without being grateful for what you’ve got.’

A month later, in a train, the Collector had asked suddenly if she remembered the name of the tune he’d hummed that night. Her mind had gone empty. They were heading through the stark flatness of Western Rajputana and she was entranced by the landscape. ‘I don’t remember,’ she’d said. He had turned abruptly away, his face lengthening into a downcurl of disappointment. She had felt a tremor of dismay creeping slowly through her body like palsy. There would be more of this, she knew: these small episodes of disappointment would follow quickly on each other, in a long leaden chain.

Rajkumar’s voice startled her back to the present: ‘Will you help me then, Madame? You are the only person through whom I can reach Dolly now. There is no one else I can turn to.’

She tried to picture Dolly through the eyes of the man who was sitting beside her, this virtual stranger. Suddenly she felt her heart brimming over with tenderness, with love. Whose was it, this love? Was it his? Or her own? Or perhaps both? What would she do if Dolly left? Such brightness as there was in her life came from Dolly, although by rights, it should have been the other way round. It was Dolly who was the prisoner, after all: she was the lucky one, Mrs Uma Dey, of whom everyone always said, what more could you ask? But now, thinking of what it would be like in Ratnagiri without Dolly, she felt tears flooding into her eyes. She reached for the edge of the earthen bench to steady herself and her hand brushed against his.

‘Madame? Mrs Dey?’ He was peering at her, frowning in concern. ‘Mrs Dey, are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes.’ She snatched her hand away. ‘Just a little dizzy. I don’t know what the matter is.’

‘Shall we go back inside?’

‘Yes.’ She rose to her feet. ‘Mr Raha, you still haven’t told me. What is it that you expect of me?’

‘Perhaps you could speak to her.’

‘You must speak to her yourself, Mr Raha. Things never turn out well when there are go-betweens.’

He looked at her closely and then, suddenly, taking her by surprise, he said: ‘The Collector is a fine man, Mrs Dey, a good man. Men like him are worth many—’

‘Yes, of course,’ she interrupted him quickly. ‘Yes. Come let us go in.’

The ayah led Dolly to the drawing room and showed her the open window. ‘Madame went into the garden — just a few minutes ago.’ Dolly nodded: of course, at this time of the day Uma was always to be found under the peepul tree. She went hurrying down the lawn, past the salaaming malis, to the wicket gate. Just as she was fumbling with the latch, she heard voices. Before she could turn back, Uma and Rajkumar appeared before her, stepping suddenly out of the peepul’s gnarled grey beard. They stood staring at each other, all three of them.

Uma was the first to speak. ‘Mr Raha,’ she said quietly, ‘I hope you will not take it amiss if I ask you to leave us for a minute? I would like to talk to Dolly — just a few words. Perhaps you could wait for us here by the garden gate?’

‘Of course.’

Uma took Dolly’s arm. ‘Come, let’s go and sit under the tree for a bit.’

As they were picking their way through the labyrinth of roots beneath the peepul tree, Dolly whispered: ‘What was he doing here, Uma? What does he want?’

‘He was talking. About you.’

‘What did he say?’

‘I think he was trying to tell me that he’s in love with you.’ Uma seated herself under the tree and pulled Dolly down beside her.

‘Oh, Uma.’ Dolly buried her face in her hands. ‘Last night, in your garden, he said so many things to me. It was so strange, so upsetting. I couldn’t sleep, I kept thinking of home — Mandalay, the palace, the walls of glass.’

‘He said you had no memory of him.’

‘I thought not.’

‘Do you then?’

‘I’m not sure Uma. I remember someone, a boy, very dark; I remember being given a little packet of food; I remember Evelyn saying, take it, take it. But nothing is clear. It was so long ago, and whenever I think of it, I am frightened.’

‘I think he really is in love with you, Dolly.’

‘He’s in love with what he remembers. That isn’t me.’

‘What about you, Dolly? What do you feel?’

‘I’m frightened, Uma. I’ve made such terrible mistakes in the past. I promised myself I would never allow myself to make another.’

‘What mistakes?’

‘I’ve never told you this Uma, but many years ago, I thought I was in love with Mohanbhai — our coachman. Then the Princess found out. She threatened us. I suppose she was already in love with him herself.’

‘Did you want to marry him?’

‘I don’t know, Uma. I was very young, and I didn’t really understand what was happening. During the day I would keep him out of my mind. But at night I would dream of him and then I would wake up and think: Why can’t we run away? Why can’t I just wrap my things in a bundle right now, and go down to him and wake him up and say: “Mohanbhai, let’s go, there’s nothing for us here at Outram House”? But where could we have gone? And what would we have done? His family is very poor and they depend on him. In my heart I knew that even if I had begged him he would not have left.

And this was the worst part of it, the humiliation. I would think, to myself, have I too become a servant, in my heart, as he has?’

‘Did you ever tell him?’

‘No. We never spoke, except of everyday matters. And after a while the dreams stopped and I thought, I am free of him now, it’s all right at last. But last night, when I was sleeping in that room of yours, I began to dream again. I was at Outram House, in my bed. There was a mango tree beside my window. I got out of my bed and tied my things together, in a bundle, and slung it over my back. I climbed down and went running through the compound to the gatehouse. The door was open and I went in. It was dark and all I could see of him was his white langot, knotted tightly between his legs, rising and falling with his breath. I put my hand on his body. My knuckle fitted perfectly into the hollow at the base of his throat. He woke up and he looked at me and touched my face. And then he said: Shall we go? We went outside, and when we were in the moonlight I saw that it was not Mohanbhai.’

‘Who was it?’

‘It was him.’ She inclined her head in the direction of the gate, where they had left Rajkumar.

‘And then?’

‘I woke up. I was terrified. I was in your house, in that bedroom. I couldn’t bear to stay another moment. I went and woke Kanhoji.’

‘Dolly. I think you have to tell him.’

‘Whom?’

‘Mr Raha.’

‘No.’ Dolly began to sob with her head on Uma’s shoulder. ‘No. Uma, all I can think of now is the birth of my child. There is no space in my head for anything else.’

Gently, Uma ran her hand over Dolly’s head. ‘The child is not yours, Dolly.’

‘But it could have been.’

‘Dolly, listen to me.’ Putting her hands on Dolly’s shoulders, Uma propped her up so she could look into her face. ‘Dolly, will you believe me if I tell you that I love you like I’ve never loved anyone before? I was just a girl before I met you. You’ve shown me what courage is, what human beings can endure. I can’t bear to think of being without you. I don’t think I could remain here a single day if you weren’t here. But I know this too, Dolly: you must go if you can. You must go now. The birth of this child will drive you out of your mind if you stay on at Outram House.’

‘Don’t say that, Uma.’

‘Dolly, listen to me. This man loves you. I am convinced of it. You must at least allow yourself to listen to him.’

‘Uma, I can’t. Not now. Not with the child coming. If it was last year. .’

‘Then you must tell him that yourself. You owe him that.’

‘No. Uma, no.’

Uma rose to her feet. ‘I’m going to send him here. It’ll only take a minute.’

‘Don’t leave, Uma. Please.’ She clutched at Uma’s hands. ‘Please don’t.’

‘This is something that has to be done, Dolly. There is no way round it. I’ll send him here. Then I’ll go to the house. I’ll be waiting. Come and tell me what happens.’

Rajkumar spotted her as he was picking his way round the tree: Dolly was sitting erect on the earthen bench, her hands folded neatly in her lap. He threw away his dying cheroot and put another to his lips. His hand was shaking so hard that it took him several tries to light a match.

‘Miss Dolly.’

‘Mr Raha.’

‘My name is Rajkumar. I would be glad if you would call me that.’

She mouthed the syllables hesitantly. ‘Rajkumar. .’ ‘Thank you.’

‘Uma wanted me to speak to you.’

‘Yes?’

‘But the truth is I have nothing to say.’

‘Then let me—’

She held up a hand to stop him. ‘Please. Let me finish. You must understand. It’s impossible.’

‘Why is it impossible? I would like to know. I am a practical man. Tell me and I will try to do something about it.’

‘There is a child.’

‘A child?’ Rajkumar removed the cheroot from his mouth. ‘Whose child? Yours?’

‘The First Princess is with child. The father works in Outram House. I too was once in love with him — the father of the Princess’s child. You should know this. I am not the nine-year-old girl I was in Mandalay.’

‘Are you in love with him now?’

‘No.’

‘Then the rest is immaterial to me.’

‘Mr Raha, you must understand. There are things you cannot change no matter how much money you have. Things might have been different for us in another time, another place. But it’s too late now. This is my home. I have lived all my life here. My place is here at Outram House.’

Now, at last, the hopes that had sustained him this far began slowly to leak away. He had said all he could. He could think of no other way to plead with her, and she silenced him before he could begin.

‘Please. I beg you, do not say anything more. You will merely cause unnecessary pain. There are things in this world that cannot be, no matter how much we may want them.’

‘But this can be. . could be, if only you would allow yourself to think of it.’

‘No. Please say no more. I’ve made up my mind. There is only one thing I want to ask of you now.’

‘What is that?’

‘I ask that you leave Ratnagiri as soon as you can.’ He flinched, then bowed his head.

‘I can see no reason to refuse.’ Without another word, he turned and walked away, into the shadows of the bearded peepul.

fourteen

Sawant.’

Removing his binoculars from his eyes, the King pointed in the direction of the bay. A boat stood moored at the jetty, a large country craft of a type known locally as a hori: a deep-hulled catamaran with a single outrigger.

‘Sawant, he is leaving.’

‘Min?’ It was very early and Sawant had brought the King the cup of tea he liked to drink at daybreak.

‘The man who arrived the other day on the Bombay steamer. He is leaving. They are loading his luggage at the jetty.’

‘Min, there is no steamer today.’

‘He’s hired a boat.’ At this time of year, soon after the departure of the monsoons, there was a change in the prevailing currents and the waters round the mouth of the bay became, for a short while, exceptionally hazardous. During these weeks horis were the only sailing craft that would brave the swirling undertow that swept the coast.

‘Min.’ Sawant placed the pot of tea beside the King’s chair and backed quickly out of the room.

Apart from the King and Sawant himself, the house was still asleep. The anteroom where Dolly slept was just a couple of doors down the corridor. Dolly had the suite to herself now, for the First Princess rarely came upstairs any more, preferring mainly to stay in the gatehouse, with Sawant.

Pushing Dolly’s door open, Sawant slipped inside. She was asleep, lying on the same narrow cot that she had used for the last twenty years. Her hair had come loose during the night and lay fanned across her pillow. In repose her skin looked almost translucent, and her face had the serene beauty of a temple carving. Standing over her bed, watching the slow rhythms of her breath, Sawant hesitated.

Yesterday, on his way to his village on the estuary, Sawant had met a goatherd who was returning from the direction of the Residency. They had talked for a while, about the peepul tree, about the Collector’s memsahib, about the rich prince from Burma and how he was besotted with Dolly.

It was impossible to think of Outram House without Dolly; impossible to imagine Ratnagiri emptied of her presence. But better that than to see her waste away before his eyes. No, he owed her this. He kneeled beside her and raised his hand.

She was wearing a crumpled night-time sari. The cloth was white and it hung like a veil over her long slender limbs. He thought of the time when they’d sat together on his sagging rope bed, with his blood-stained langot draped over their interlocking limbs. Just as he was about to wake her, his hand froze. To think of being without Dolly: it was madness! He began to back away. But then again he stopped. No, he owed her this.

Suddenly she opened her eyes. ‘You!’ She sat upright, folding her arms over her chest.

He put a finger to his lips. ‘Quiet. Everyone’s asleep. Quick. Get dressed.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s leaving. Your man.’

Her eyes widened, in dismay. ‘So soon?’

‘Yes.’

‘But there’s no steamer. And at this time of year, I didn’t think he would be able to go.’

‘He’s hired a hori.’

‘But isn’t it too late now?’

‘No. They won’t be able to leave until the light’s better. Quick. You have to stop him. Too much has gone wrong for you, Dolly. Not again. Come. Quick.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll harness the trap and take you down to Mandvi. Quick.’

By the time she was dressed, the trap was outside, ready to go. Sawant had harnessed it to his fastest horse, a grey mare. He held out a hand to help Dolly in and then flicked the tip of his whip over the mare’s head. The trap lurched forward, and they went rattling down the hill, past the police lines, the gaol, the Cutchery. At the Jhinjhinaka bazaar, a pack of guard dogs ran howling after them as they went racing past. From a long way off they saw the hori, casting off its moorings and pulling away, under oar, into the bay.

‘Mohanbhai!’

He cracked his whip. ‘I can go no faster, Dolly.’

When they reached the jetty the boat was a long way gone, approaching the mouth of the bay. ‘Run, Dolly, run!’ Sawant leapt off and gripped the mare’s bit. ‘Run! Run!’

She ran down the jetty, waving: in the distance the boat was trying to manoeuvre its bows so that it would be able to slip through the shoals and currents ahead. Its stern bucked furiously as it approached the pounding waters of the open sea. In a few minutes it would be out of the bay. She waved again and just as she was about to give up the hori’s bows began to turn, away from the bay’s mouth. Circling all the way around the bay the heavy craft came back to the waterfront, pulling up at the end of the jetty. The hori sat high in the water and Rajkumar easily vaulted the distance between the boat and the jetty’s outermost plank.

He walked up to her puffing on his cheroot. ‘Yes?’

She could feel herself flushing, the blood rising to her face. ‘Mr Raha,’ she said, picking her words with care. ‘The currents are dangerous at this time of year and the Dak Bungalow has been booked for a week. There is no reason to leave in such a hurry.’

‘But it was you who said—’

‘Yes, but there is sometimes a difference between what one says and what one means. .’

Rajkumar took the cheroot from his mouth with a hand that was moving very slowly, as though in stunned disbelief. Then he uttered a shout of laughter and threw his cheroot high into the air. They stood looking at it, side by side, laughing, watching as it rose circling above them. Suddenly the glowing tip disintegrated and a shower of sparks came floating down. It was as though fireworks were raining down from the heavens.

The Collector gave the appearance of being delighted when Uma told him that Rajkumar and Dolly were to be married. ‘Splendid!’ he said. ‘Splendid!’

Uma explained that Dolly wanted to have a very quiet ceremony: she was sure that the Queen would do her best to stop the marriage if she got to know of it.

In the spirit of the moment the Collector offered several suggestions. Why not have the ceremony at the Residency? He would issue the licence himself and preside over their marriage in person. Afterwards, perhaps champagne; just for the four of them — Uma must make sure to be careful in husbanding the last batch of ice from Bombay. . The enthusiasm in his voice was such that Uma couldn’t help feeling that her husband was delighted by the prospect of seeing the last of Dolly.

The day came and Uma provided two garlands, of marigolds and jasmine. She wove them herself, with flowers picked from the garden. At the end of the civil ceremony, in the Collector’s ‘camp office’, Dolly and Rajkumar garlanded each other, smiling like children.

The plan was for the couple to spend their wedding night at the Dak Bungalow where Rajkumar was staying. Dolly had smuggled a few belongings and a bagful of clothes out of Outram House with the help of the First and Second Princesses. The First Princess had given her a pair of earrings and the Second a jade bracelet. They were happy for her and they were sure the other girls would be too. But for the moment in order to keep the news a secret, they hadn’t told the two younger Princesses. Later, when everything was safely signed and sealed, Dolly could go back to Outram House with her new husband to pay her respects.

Everything went as planned until it came time for Dolly and Rajkumar to sign the register. Uma was the only available witness and Dolly balked at asking the bearers. But just then, quite miraculously, Mrs Khambatta, a lady photographer from Bombay, drew up in a gaari, toting her bags and her camera. Rajkumar went running out to rope her in. She readily agreed to be a witness and afterwards they all went out to the garden. The Collector called for champagne. A gentle breeze was blowing in from the sea. The light was mellow and golden.

Mrs Khambatta’s camera was an instrument of superb craftsmanship: a 1901 Graflex single-lens reflex, with a cube-like body, a bellows extension and a four-sided hood. It was fitted with a Globe wide-angle lens which proved perfect for the panorama deployed before the shutter. Before exposing her first plate, Mrs Khambatta spent a full half-hour working with a Hurter and Driffield Actinograph Exposure Calculator, peering at its slide rule and calibrating its rotary cylinder for the present time and latitude. Then, signalling her readiness with an upraised hand, she exposed several plates in quick succession, standing back from her camera to squint at the group before squeezing the bulb of her Guery Flap-Shutter.

At dusk Rajkumar and Dolly gathered up their belongings. Uma lent them Kanhoji’s gaari. On the way to the Dak Bungalow Dolly changed her mind.

‘Let’s go to Outram House now,’ she said to Rajkumar. ‘Let’s talk to the Queen. Let’s get it over with.’

It was dark by the time they got there. A lamp was shining in the King’s room and another in Sawant’s by the gate. The Princesses would be downstairs, Dolly thought, sitting around a single light, to save oil. How surprised they would be!

The gates were locked, so she told Kanhoji to use the knocker. He banged hard for a full five minutes but there was no answer.

Dolly went to the gatehouse window and knocked on the wooden shutters. ‘Mohanbhai,’ she called out. ‘Open the gates. It’s me, Dolly. I’ve come to say goodbye. Open the gates.’

The lights in the room went out and a minute or two later, she heard Sawant’s voice, whispering: ‘Dolly?’

‘Where are you Mohanbhai?’

‘Here. By the gatepost.’ He was peering through the crack between the wall and the gate. ‘Dolly, Mebya knows. She’s told me not to let you in, not to open the gates.’

Dolly gasped. How could she leave Ratnagiri without saying goodbye to Min and Mebya, to the Princesses? ‘But, Mohanbhai, it’s me, Dolly. Let me in.’

‘I can’t, Dolly. You know I would if I could. But Mebya is in one of her rages. You know how angry she gets.’

There was a pause and then a cloth bundle appeared at the top of the gate.

‘Mebya had us pack some of your things,’ said Sawant. ‘She told me to make sure you got this.’

Dolly let the bundle drop to the ground.

‘Mohanbhai, let me in.’ She was pleading now. ‘Just for a few minutes. Just to say goodbye.’

‘I can’t, Dolly. I really can’t. Mebya said she would sack me if I did; she said we couldn’t ever say your name again in this house.’

Dolly began to sob, knocking her head against the gatepost. ‘Don’t cry, Dolly.’ Sawant looked through the crack. ‘We’ll miss you, all of us. Look, the girls are waving to you from up there.’

The four Princesses were standing close together, at one of the windows upstairs. They waved and she tried to wave back too, but her legs buckled under her. She fell to her knees, sobbing. Rajkumar rushed to lift her off the ground. Holding her up with one arm, he picked up her bundled clothes with his free hand.

‘Come, Dolly. Let’s go. There’s nothing to be done.’ He had to lift her bodily off the ground to get her inside the gaari.

‘Chalo, chalo, jaldi chalo.’

When they were trotting past the police-barracks, near the parade ground, some of the constables’ wives and children came out to wave. They all seemed to know that Miss Dolly was going away.

She waved back, wiping the tears fiercely from her eyes. She would not allow herself to be robbed of this last glimpse of the lane: the leaning coconut palms, the Union Jack, flapping above the gaol on its crooked pole, the rickety teashop at the entrance to the lane. This was home, this narrow lane with its mossy walls of laterite. She knew she would never see it again.

She sat bent over in her seat, hugging her old clothes. A cloth bundle, once again: only this time she wasn’t carrying it on her head.

With her hand raised to knock, Uma noticed that the door of the Collector’s study was slightly ajar. She could see him through the crack. He was sitting upright in his straight-backed chair. His glasses were dangling around his neck and he was staring into space.

He turned with a start when she knocked. ‘Come in.’

She seated herself opposite him, in a chair that had no arms. This was where his stenographer sat, she guessed, little Mr Ranade, with a pad on his knees, taking dictation. They looked at each other silently across the broad, leather-covered expanse of the desk. A letter lay open in front of him; she noted, in passing, that it was sealed with a florid rosette of red wax. She was the first to drop her eyes and it was only then that he spoke.

‘You have come to tell me that you want to go home,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘May I ask why?’

‘I am useless here. There’s nothing I can do for you that you cannot do better for yourself. And with Dolly gone. .’

He cleared his throat, cutting her short. ‘And may I ask when you will be coming back?’

She made no answer, looking silently down at her lap.

‘Well?’

‘You deserve better than me.’

He turned his face away abruptly, so that she could see only one side of his face.

‘You can marry again,’ she said quickly, ‘take another wife. I will see that my family makes no objection.’

He raised a finger to silence her.

‘Could you tell me,’ he said in a coldly formal voice. ‘What did I do wrong? Did I mistreat you? Behave badly?’ ‘No. Never.’ The tears welled up in her eyes, blinding her. ‘You have been nothing but kind and patient. I have nothing to complain of.’

‘I used to dream about the kind of marriage I wanted.’ He was speaking more to himself now than to her. ‘To live with a woman as an equal, in spirit and intellect: this seemed to me the most wonderful thing life could offer. To discover together the world of literature, art: what could be richer, more fulfilling? But what I dreamt of is not yet possible, not here, in India, not for us.’ He ran his fingers over the letter in front of him, picking idly at the heavy wax seal.

‘So you’ll go back to live with your parents then?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve picked a good time.’ He gave her his thin, ironic smile. ‘You would have had to pack your things soon enough anyway.’

‘Why?’ She was suddenly alert. ‘What are you talking about?’ He picked the letter off his desk and tapped it with his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘This is from the Chief Secretary, in Bombay. It came today. A reprimand, as it were. The Princess’s pregnancy has awoken our teachers suddenly to the enormity of what they have done to this family. All the letters that I and my predecessors wrote had no effect whatever. But the smell of miscegenation has alarmed them as nothing else could have: they are tolerant in many things, but not this. They like to keep their races tidily separate. The prospect of dealing with a half-caste bastard has set them rampaging among their desks. I am to be the scapegoat for twenty years of neglect. My tenure here is terminated and I am to return to Bombay.’

He brought his fingertips together and smiled across the desk in his thinly ironic way.

‘As I said, you’ve chosen a good time to leave.’

In the Ratnagiri boathouse there was one craft that was rarely used. This was the double-oared racing scull that had once belonged to Mr Gibb, the rowing legend.

It was the Collector’s practice to go down to the Ratnagiri boat-house a couple of times each week. He had done a little rowing at Cambridge and would have done more if he had not been so busy studying for the Civil Service examinations. He enjoyed the focused concentration of the sport, the sense of moving ahead at a regulated pace, quick but unhurried. Besides, he had an almost religious belief in the importance of exercise.

Today, as he was walking into the boathouse, the Collector’s eyes fell on Mr Gibb’s racing shell. The elderly chowkidar who looked after the boathouse talked often of Mr Gibb. He was a rowing blue, Mr Gibb, and a skilled sailor besides. In the history of the Ratnagiri Club he was the only person who was known to have taken the slim, fragile craft out into the open sea and come back to tell the tale.

On his departure Mr Gibb had donated his shell to the boathouse. Since that time the boat had turned into a monument of sorts, a reliquary of Mr Gibb. It lay at one end of the shed and was never used. The Collector said to the chowkidar: ‘How about this one?’

‘That was Mr Gibb’s boat,’ came the answer. ‘It was in that boat that Gibb-sahib used to row out to sea.’

‘Is it usable?’

‘Yes, sahib. Of course.’ The chowkidar was proud of his job and worked hard to keep his boats in good repair.

‘Well then, perhaps I’ll take it out today.’

‘You, sahib?’ The chowkidar gasped. ‘But Mr Gibb was very experienced—’

The Collector bridled at his tone. ‘I think I can manage it,’ he said coldly.

‘But, sahib—’

‘Please do as you’re told.’

The boat was carried out to the water and the Collector climbed in and picked up the oars. He rowed once across the bay and turned round. He felt oddly exhilarated. The gap between the two arms of the bay began to beckon.

For several weeks now, he’d been thinking of trying the sea channel. He’d watched the local fishermen when they were slipping out of the bay, marking in his mind the precise point of their exit, the route through which they led their crafts into the open sea.

One day, he’d told himself, one day. . He would start with a short, experimental foray, to test the waters, as it were. One day. But there were no more days now. Next week he would be in Bombay, in a windowless office, dealing with municipal taxation. He scarcely noticed that his craft had veered from its trajectory; that its nose had turned westwards, pointing towards the opening of the bay. It was as though the shell had been reclaimed by the spirit of some other, departed official, as though it were steering itself.

He felt strangely reassured, at peace. It was best to leave these things to men like Mr Gibb: you would always be safe with them, looked after, provided for.

There was no reason to hurry back to the Residency. No one was waiting for him there. The sea seemed warm and inviting and the scull seemed to know its own way.

High above the bay, in Outram House, the King was on his way to the balcony, with his father’s gilded glasses clasped in one hand. He had lain awake much of the night and was up even earlier than usual. Dolly’s departure had created an unquietness in the house. He was sensitive to these things; they upset him. It wasn’t easy to cope with change at his age. He’d found it hard to sleep.

He lifted the glasses to his eyes. The light was not good. The fishermen of Karla village were not out of the estuary yet. Then he spotted the thin, long shape of a racing shell arrowing across the dark water. The oarsman was rowing in a strong, steady rhythm, almost touching his knees with his forehead before straightening out again.

He was taken aback. It was a long time since he had last seen the shell steering for the open sea — not since Mr Gibb, and that was a long time ago, more than ten years now. And even Mr Gibb had never ventured out on the sea during the monsoons: he wouldn’t have thought of it, he knew about the cross-currents that swept the shore during the rains.

He watched in surprise as the streamlined craft shot forward in the direction of the foaming white line that separated the calm waters of the bay from the pounding monsoon sea. Suddenly the boat buckled and its nose shot out of the water. The oarsman flung up an arm, and then the undertow took hold of him and sucked him down, beneath the surface. The King started to his feet, in shock. Gripping the balcony’s rails, he leant over the balustrade. He began to shout: ‘Sawant! Sawant!’

It was early in the morning and his voice had grown prematurely feeble. Sawant was asleep in the gatehouse, on his string bed, with one arm thrown protectively over the First Princess.

‘Sawant, Sawant!’

It was the Queen who heard his shouts. She too had been up all night — thinking of Dolly, remembering how she’d come to her as a child, of how she’d been the only person in the palace who could quiet the Second Princess; of how she had stayed on when the others left.

‘Sawant.’

She climbed slowly out of bed and went over to see what the King wanted.

The King pointed to a few bits of wreckage, drifting in the distance, at the mouth of the bay. ‘The Collector!’

She took a long look with his gilded binoculars.

‘Is he dead?’

‘I think so.’

If it were not for that man Dolly would still be at Outram House: Dolly, whom she’d adopted and brought up and loved like her own child. But Dolly was gone now, and it was right that he should pay. She leant over the balustrade and spat into the garden, in commemoration of her gaoler’s death.