The Glass Palace

fifteen

Rangoon’s Barr Street Passenger Jetty was something of a curiosity. It was built to resemble a floating pavilion, with fine woodwork and a peaked roof, like that of an Alpine cottage. Saya John held on to one of its carved posts as he leant over the jetty’s side, scanning the river for the Nuwara Eliya, the steamer in which Rajkumar was returning to Rangoon with Dolly. When at last he spotted the ship, it was still a long way off, just approaching the mouth of the Pazundaung Creek, fighting the powerful currents that tore at the river’s mud-brown surface.

It had been decided that Rajkumar and Dolly would stay initially with Saya John, at his spacious second-floor flat on Blackburn Lane — such accommodation as there was at Rajkumar’s Kemendine compound was too rudimentary for the two of them to inhabit together. Saya John had sent a telegram to Rajkumar to let him know that he and Dolly were welcome to stay at Blackburn Lane until such time as they were able to build a habitable home.

The Pazundaung Creek was the wide inlet that marked the southern boundary of the city. Many of Rangoon’s sawmills and rice mills were concentrated along the shores of this waterway — among them also the timberyard that was Rajkumar’s principal place of business. When the steamer drew abreast of the creek, Rajkumar, watching from the Nuwara Eliya’s bows, caught a brief glimpse of the raised teakwood cabin that served as his office. Then the whole Rangoon waterfront opened up in front of him: the Botataung Pagoda, the stately buildings of the Strand, the golden finial of the Shwe Dagon in the distance.

Rajkumar turned impatiently away and headed for his cabin. Since early that morning he had been trying to persuade Dolly to step outside: he was eager to show her this vista of Rangoon from the river; eager also to see whether she remembered any of it from her journey out, twenty-five years before. But over the last three days, as their ship approached Burma, Dolly had grown increasingly withdrawn. That morning she had refused to step out on deck; she’d said that she was seasick; that she would come out later, when she felt better; for the time being she wanted only to rest and collect herself.

But now there was no time at all. They would be at the jetty in a matter of minutes. Rajkumar burst into the cabin, his voice loudly exuberant: ‘Dolly — we’re home. Come on— outside. .’ When she didn’t answer he broke off. She was sitting on the bed, curled up, with her forehead resting on her knees, dressed in the red, silk htamein that she’d changed into for the occasion.

‘What’s the matter Dolly?’ He touched her shoulder to find that she was shivering. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing.’ She shrugged his hand off. ‘I’m all right. I’ll come later; just let me sit here until everyone else is off the ship.’

He knew better than to make light of her apprehensions. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back for you in twenty minutes.’

‘Yes. I’ll be ready then.’

Dolly stayed as she was, with her head resting on her knees, trying to calm herself. She felt a jolt as the steamer docked and then she heard the voices of coolies and porters ringing through the gangways. Rippling patterns of opalescent light were dancing on the ceiling, shining in through a porthole, off the river’s silt-dark surface. In a while, the cabin door squeaked open, and she heard Rajkumar’s voice: ‘Dolly. .’

She looked up to see Rajkumar ushering someone into the cabin: a small, portly, owlish man, dressed in a grey suit and a felt hat. The visitor doffed his hat and smiled, so broadly that his eyes almost disappeared into the creases of his deeply lined face. This had to be Saya John, she knew, and the knowledge of this made her more apprehensive than ever. This was the meeting she had most dreaded: Rajkumar had talked of his mentor at such length that Saya John had become the equivalent of a father-in-law in her mind, to be either feared and propitiated, or else to be resisted and fought with — she had no idea how things would turn out between the two of them. Now, faced with him in person, she found herself folding her hands together, in the Indian way, unconsciously, through the force of long habit.

He laughed and came quickly across the cabin. Addressing her in Burmese, he said, ‘Look, I have something for you.’ She noticed that his accent was thickly foreign.

He reached into his pocket and took out a filigreed gold bracelet, wrapped in tissue paper. Taking hold of her wrist, he slipped the bracelet over her knuckles. ‘It belonged to my wife,’ he said. ‘I put it aside for you.’

She spun the bracelet around her wrist. The polished gold facets gleamed in the dappled light that was shining in through the portholes. He put his arm around her and under the pressure of his hand, she felt her apprehensions seeping away. She glanced at him shyly and smiled. ‘It’s beautiful, Saya. I’ll treasure it.’

Rajkumar, watching from the doorway, saw a lightening in the mists that had gathered around her over the last few days. ‘Come,’ he said quickly. ‘Let’s go. The gaari is waiting.’

On the way to Blackburn Lane, in the carriage, Saya John reached into his pocket once again. ‘I have something for you too, Rajkumar.’ He took out a small, spherical object, also wrapped in tissue paper. He handed it carefully to Rajkumar.

Undoing the tissue paper, Rajkumar found himself holding a spongy ball, made of whitish-grey strings that were tangled around each other, like wool. He raised the ball to his face, wrinkling his nose at the unfamiliar odour. ‘What is it?’

‘Rubber.’ Saya John used the English word.

‘Rubber?’ Rajkumar recognised the word, but had only a dim awareness of what it referred to. He handed the ball to Dolly and she sniffed it, recoiling: its smell was more human than botanical, the scent of a bodily secretion, like sweat.

‘Where did you get this, Saya?’ Rajkumar said, in puzzlement.

‘In my hometown — Malacca.’

Saya John had been travelling too, while Rajkumar was away in India: he had gone east, to Malaya, visiting friends and looking up his relatives by marriage. He’d stopped at Malacca, to visit his wife’s grave. It was some years since he’d last been back, and he’d noticed immediately that something had changed in the interim, something new was afoot. For years, ever since he could remember, Malacca had been a town that was slowly dying, with its port silted up and its traders moving away, either northwards to Penang, or southwards to Singapore. But now, suddenly, Malacca was a changed place; there was a palpable quickening in the muddied veins of the sleepy old city. One day a friend took him to the outskirts of the town, to a place that he, John Martins, remembered from his childhood, an area that had once been home to dozens of small spice gardens, where pepper plants grew on vines. But the vines were all gone now, and in their place there were long straight rows of graceful, slender-trunked saplings.

Saya John had looked hard at the trees and had not been able to name them. ‘What are they?’

‘Rubber.’

Some nine years before, Mr Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil. But Mr Ridley was himself the first to admit that it might take as many as ten years for a rubber plantation to become productive. Malaya’s European planters had backed away on learning this. But Mr Tan Chay Yan, persevering undeterred, had succeeded in milking rubber from his trees in three short years. Now everyone, even the most timid British corporation, was following his lead, planting rubber; money had been pouring into the city. The B.F. Goodrich company had sent representatives all the way from Akron, Ohio, urging the planters of Malaya to plant this new crop. This was the material of the coming age; the next generation of machines could not be made to work without this indispensable absorber of friction. The newest motor cars had dozens of rubber parts; the markets were potentially bottomless, the profits beyond imagining.

Saya John had made enquiries, asking a few knowledgeable people about what was involved in planting rubber. The answers were always short: land and labour were what a planter needed most; seed and saplings were easily to be had. And of the two principal necessities, land was the easier to come by: of labour there was already a shortage. The British Colonial Government was looking to India to supply coolies and workers for the plantations.

Saya John had begun to toy with the idea of buying some land for Matthew, his son. He’d quickly discovered that land prices around Malacca had risen steeply; he was advised to travel north, in the direction of the Siam border. He’d set off, not quite convinced still. He was too old to start up a vast new project, this he knew; but there was Rajkumar to be counted on — he would know what to do about building a workforce — and of course there was always Matthew, who had been away in America many years. No one knew exactly what Matthew was doing there; the last he’d heard, the boy had travelled east, to New York. There had been a letter a while back; he’d said something about looking for a job— nothing at all about coming home. Perhaps this was exactly what was needed to bring the boy home: a huge new enterprise to which he could dedicate himself: something that would be his own; something that he could build up. He could see himself growing old, living with Matthew — the boy would have a family, children; they’d live together in a quiet place, surrounded by trees and greenery.

These ideas were still forming in his mind, when he glimpsed the perfect place, from the deck of a ferry boat: the south-facing slope of a mountain, an extinct volcano that reared out of the plain like the head of some fantastic beast. The place was a wilderness, a jungle; but at the same time, it was within easy distance of the island of Penang and the port of Butterworth.

‘I’ve got land there now,’ Saya John said to Rajkumar, ‘and it’s waiting for the day when Matthew comes back.’

Rajkumar, newly married and eager in his anticipation of the pleasures of domestic life, was not disposed to take his mentor seriously. ‘But, Saya, what does Matthew know about rubber or plantations?’

‘It doesn’t matter. He’ll find out. And of course, he’ll have you to help him. We’ll be partners, the three of us: you, me, Matthew.’

Rajkumar shrugged. ‘Saya, I know even less about this than Matthew does. My business is timber.’

‘Timber is a thing of the past, Rajkumar: you have to look to the future — and if there’s any tree on which money could be said to grow then this is it — rubber.’

Rajkumar felt Dolly’s hand, pressing against his own, in anxious enquiry. He gave her a reassuring nudge as though to say: it’s just one of the old man’s fancies; there’s no need to worry.

In the immediate aftermath of her widowhood, Uma returned to Lankasuka, her parents’ house, in Calcutta. Hers was a small family: she had only one brother, who was much younger than herself. Their house was spacious and comfortable, although not grand: it had two storeys, with a semi-circular balcony on each. The rooms were airy and bright with high

ceilings and stone floors that stayed cool even in the hottest of summers.

But Uma’s homecoming was not a happy one. Her father was an archaeologist and a scholar: he was not the kind of man to insist on all the customary observances of a Hindu widowhood, but nor was he so enlightened as to be wholly impervious to the strictures of his neighbours. Within his lights he did what he could to mitigate the rigours of his daughter’s situation. But as a widow living at home, Uma’s life was still one of rigid constraints and deprivation: her hair was shaved off; she could eat no meat nor fish and she was allowed to wear nothing but white. She was twenty-eight and had a lifetime ahead of her. As the months dragged by it became clear that some other solution would have to be thought of.

Uma was now a woman of independent means, the beneficiary of a very substantial pension. During his lifetime the Collector had held one of the most lucrative jobs in the Empire, and on his death it was discovered that he had made many astute investments, several of them in Uma’s name. With her livelihood assured, and no children to care for, there was nothing to hold her at home and every reason to leave. The matter was decided when she received a letter from Dolly, inviting her to visit Rangoon. It was evident that the best possible solution was for her to go abroad.

On the journey over, Uma kept her head covered, with a shawl to hide her shaven head. Dolly and Rajkumar met her at the Barr Street Jetty and the moment she stepped off, Dolly tore away her shawl.

‘Why are you hiding your face?’ she said. ‘I think you look nice like that.’

Dolly and Rajkumar brought Uma directly to their new home in Kemendine: they had only recently moved in and the house was still under construction. Having been very rapidly erected, the house was a haphazard, old-fashioned structure— two floors of interconnected rooms, grouped around a square courtyard. The floors were of polished red stone and the courtyard was lined with corridor-like balconies. The balustrades were of spindly wrought-iron. Along the walls of the compound there were a number of small outhouses. These were inhabited by watchmen, gardeners and other household employees.

Rangoon was almost as much a foreign city to Dolly as it was to Uma, and the two of them began to explore it together: they climbed the steps of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda; they visited Uma’s uncle in kalaa-basti, the Indian quarter; they attended the pony races at the Kyaikasan racecourse; they went walking in the narrow streets of Syriam, across the river, they promenaded around the Royal Lakes and went for drives around the Cantonment. Everywhere they went, Dolly was courted, sought after, besieged by armies of acquaintances, asked endless questions about the King and Queen and their life abroad. This was a subject of universal interest in Burma, and Dolly’s sharing of the Royal Family’s exile made her something of a celebrity herself.

Uma’s time passed very pleasantly. She was often invited out with Dolly and was never at a loss for things to do. But as the weeks passed she found herself growing ever more painfully aware of the distance between Dolly’s ebullient happiness and her own circumstances. In the past, Uma had often wondered about Dolly’s marriage: had she married Rajkumar in order to escape the imprisonment of Outram House? Or was it just that she had fallen in love — that and nothing else? Now, watching them together, Uma saw that these reasons were not exclusive of each other: that each of these motives had played a part in creating a wholeness, as in the fitting together of the misshapen pieces of a puzzle. She saw also that this was a completeness that she, who had always prided herself on knowing her own mind in all things, had never known and perhaps would never know, because it was not within her to yield to the moment, in Dolly’s way.

Dolly and Rajkumar seemed to have little knowledge of one another’s likes and dislikes, preferences and habits, yet the miracle was — and this too Uma could see clearly — that far from weakening their bond, their mutual incomprehension served rather to strengthen it. Between herself and the Collector, on the other hand, every eventuality had been governed by clearly defined rules and meanings. Whenever there was a question about what either of them might like or want, all they had to do was to refer implicitly to usage and etiquette. Now, thinking back, she saw that she herself had come to resemble the Collector more closely than she had ever thought to admit; that she too had become a creature of rules and method and dogged persistence, and was in this sense utterly unlike Dolly.

As the days passed, she became conscious of a gathering grief, an emotion more powerful than any she had ever known. In the light of hindsight, she realised that those words that people had always used of the Collector—he’s a good man— were true; that he indeed had been a good man, an honest man — a man of great intelligence and ability who happened to have been born into a circumstance that could not offer him an appropriate avenue for the fulfilment of his talents. He had wielded immense power as a District Collector, yet paradoxically, the position had brought him nothing but unease and uncertainty; she recalled the nervous, ironic way in which he had played the part of Collector; she remembered how he’d watched over her at table, the intolerable minuteness of his supervision, the effort he had invested in moulding her into a reflection of what he himself aspired to be. There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation; a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines. But she was not Dolly and never would be; some part of her was irretrievably the Collector’s creation, and if nothing was to be served by mourning this disfigurement, then it was her duty to turn her abilities to the task of seeking a remedy.

One day, Rajkumar said to her: ‘Everything we have we owe to you. If there’s anything you should ever need, we would want to be the first to be asked.’

She smiled. ‘Anything?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Well then, I am going to ask you to book me a passage, to Europe. .’

As Uma’s ship made its way westwards, a wake of letters and postcards came drifting back, to wash up at Dolly’s door in Kemendine. From Colombo there was a picture of the sea at Mount Lavinia, with a note about how Uma had met a family friend on board her ship, a Mrs Kadambari Dutt — one of the famous Hatkhola Dutts of Calcutta, a cousin of Toru Dutt, the poetess and a relative of the distinguished Mr Romesh Dutt, the writer and scholar. Mrs Dutt was a good deal older than herself and had lived a while in England; she was very experienced and knowledgeable about things — the perfect person to have on board, a godsend really. They were enjoying themselves together.

From Aden there was a postcard with a picture of a narrow channel, flowing between two immense cliffs. Uma wrote that she’d been delighted to discover that this waterway — which formed the link between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea— was known in Arabic as the Bab al-Mandab, ‘the gateway of lamentation’. Could there possibly be a better-chosen name?

From Alexandria there was a picture of a fortress, with a few wry remarks about how much friendlier the Europeans on the ship had become once they were past the Suez Canal. She, Uma, had been taken aback, but Mrs Dutt had said that it was always like this: there was something about the air of the Mediterranean that seemed to turn even the most haughty colonialists into affable democrats.

From Marseilles, Uma sent her first long letter: she and her newfound friend, Mrs Dutt, had decided to spend a few days in that city. Mrs Dutt had changed into a European skirt before going ashore; she’d offered to lend Uma one, but Uma had felt awkward and had refused; she’d stepped off the ship in a sari. They hadn’t gone far before Uma was mistaken — of all things! — for a Cambodian; dozens of people had gathered around her, asking if she was a dancer. It turned out that King Sisowath of Cambodia had recently visited the city, with a troupe of dancers from his palace. The dancers had enjoyed a great success; the whole city was mad for them; the great sculptor, Mr Rodin, had come down from Paris, just to draw their likenesses. Uma had almost wished that she did not have to disappoint everyone by explaining that she was an Indian, not Cambodian.

They’d had a wonderful time, the two of them, she and Mrs Dutt; they’d walked around town and gone sightseeing and even ventured into the countryside. It had been strange, heady, exhilarating — two women travelling alone, unmolested, drawing nothing more than the occasional curious stare. She’d asked herself why it was not possible to do the same at home— why women could not think of travelling like this in India, revelling in this sense of being at liberty. Yet it was troubling to think that this privilege — of being able to enjoy this sense of freedom, however momentary — had become possible only because of the circumstances of her marriage and because she now had the money to travel. She had talked of this at length with Kadambari — Mrs Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available, for women everywhere? And Mrs Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they’d never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? That one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection? She’d had a long argument with Mrs Dutt and in the end she had succeeded in persuading her friend that hers was the correct view. She’d felt this to be a great triumph — for of course Mrs Dutt was much older (and a good deal better educated) and until then it was always she who was telling her, Uma, how she ought to think of things.

Dolly was in bed when she read this letter. She was drinking a pungent concoction prescribed by a midwife and trying to rest. Some weeks earlier she had begun to suspect that she was pregnant and this intuition had been recently confirmed. As a result she’d been put on a regimen that required many different medicinal infusions and much rest. But rest was not always easy to come by in a household as busy and chaotic as her own. Even as she sat reading Uma’s letter, there were frequent interruptions — with the cook and U Ba Kyaw and the master-bricklayers bursting in to ask for instructions. In between trying to guess what was to be prepared for dinner and how much money U Ba Kyaw would have to be advanced for his next visit home, she tried to think of Uma, revelling in the freedom of being able to walk out alone, in Europe. She understood intuitively why Uma took such pleasure in this, even though she herself would not have cared for it at all. Her mind seemed to have no room for anything but the crowded eventlessness of her everyday life. It struck her that she rarely gave any thought to such questions as freedom or liberty or any other such matters.

When she picked up a pen to write back to Uma, she could think of nothing to say; there was something incommunicable about the quotidian contentments of her life. She could try, for instance, to write about how her friend Daw Thi had stopped by last Wednesday and how they’d gone to look at the new furniture at Rowe and Co.; or else she could describe her last visit to the Kyaikasan racecourse and how Rajkumar had won almost one thousand rupees and had joked about buying a pony. But none of this seemed worth putting down on paper — certainly not in response to such concerns as Uma had expressed. Or else she could write about her pregnancy, about Rajkumar’s happiness, about how he’d immediately started to think of names (the child was to be a boy of course). But she was superstitious about these things: neither she nor Rajkumar was telling people yet and wouldn’t do so until it was unavoidable. Nor did she want to write to Uma about this subject: it would be as though she were flaunting her domesticity in her friend’s face; underscoring her childlessness.

Two months passed without any further communication from Uma. As the days went by Dolly found herself less and less able to sleep. Shooting abdominal pains made her double over in bed at night. She moved into a room of her own, so as not to disturb Rajkumar. The midwife told her that everything was proceeding normally, but Dolly was not persuaded: she was increasingly sure that something had gone wrong. Then, late one night, the now-familiar pains changed suddenly into convulsions that shook the whole of her lower body. She realised that she was miscarrying and shouted for Rajkumar. He roused the household and sent people off in every direction — to fetch doctors, nurses, midwives. But it was too late and Rajkumar was alone with Dolly when the stillborn foetus was ejected from her body.

Dolly was still convalescing when Uma’s next letter arrived. The letter bore a London address and opened with profuse apologies and an implied reproach. Uma wrote that she was saddened to think that they had allowed so many months to pass without an exchange of letters. She herself had been very busy in London, she said. Mrs Dutt had helped her find accommodation — as the paying guest of an elderly missionary lady who’d spent much of her life in India. The arrangement had worked out well and Uma had not lacked for company. Shortly after her arrival, people had begun to seek her out: mainly former friends and colleagues of the Collector’s, most of them English. Some of them had known her late husband at Cambridge, others had worked with him in India. They had all been very kind, showing her around the city, taking her to events of the sort the Collector had liked to attend— concerts, plays, lectures at the Royal Academy. After a while, Uma had begun to feel as though the Collector were with her again; she would hear his voice describing Drury Lane or Covent Garden, pointing to the notable features; telling her what was in good taste and what was not.

Fortunately, she’d also kept up her connection with her shipboard friend, Mrs Dutt. It turned out that Mrs Dutt knew every Indian living in London, or almost. Through her she’d met many interesting people, most notably a lady by the name of Madame Cama. A Parsee from Bombay, Madame Cama seemed, at first glance, more European than Indian — in clothes, manner and appearance. Yet she, Uma, had never known anyone who spoke more truthfully or forthrightly on matters concerning India. She’d been kind enough to introduce Uma into her circle. Uma had never met such people — so interesting and idealistic, men and women whose views and sentiments were so akin to her own. Through these people Uma had begun to understand that a woman like herself could contribute a great deal to India’s struggle from overseas.

Lately Madame Cama had been urging her, Uma, to visit the United States. She had friends among the Irish in New York, many of whom, she said, were sympathetic to India’s cause. She thought it important for Uma to meet these people and felt that she might like living in that city. Uma was thinking the matter over quite seriously. Of this she was certain at any rate: that she would not long remain in England. In London she was haunted by the notion that the whole city was conspiring to remind her of her late husband.

Exhausted by the effort of reading this letter, Dolly dropped it on her bedside table. Later that day, when Rajkumar came home, he saw it lying there and picked it up.

‘From Uma?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does she say?’

‘Read it.’

Rajkumar smoothed down the page and read the letter through, slowly, following Uma’s cramped handwriting with his forefinger, asking for Dolly’s help with such words as he could not follow. At the end, he folded the pages and put them back on Dolly’s bedside table.

‘She’s talking of going to New York.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s where Matthew is.’

‘Yes. I’d forgotten.’

‘You should send her his address. If she goes there, Matthew could help her settle in.’

‘That’s true.’

‘And if you write to her you could also say that Saya John is worried about Matthew. He’s been writing to Matthew to come home — but Matthew hasn’t answered. Sayagyi can’t understand why he won’t come back. Perhaps Uma will be able to solve the puzzle.’

Dolly nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’ll give me something to write about.’ She spent a week composing a letter, writing out the paragraphs one at a time. She made no mention of her condition. Having said nothing about her pregnancy, it seemed out of place to refer to a miscarriage. She wrote mostly about Saya John and Rajkumar and posted the letter to Uma’s London address.

By the time Dolly heard back, Uma had already crossed the Atlantic; she was in New York, and had been there several weeks already. Again, she was full of apologies for not having written earlier — there was so much to write about that she did not know where to start. New York had proved to be all that she had hoped — a kind of haven for someone like herself, except that the shelter it afforded consisted not of peace and quiet but the opposite. It was the kind of place where one could lose oneself in the press of people. She had decided to remain here for the time being: even on the way over, she had known that this was a place that would be to her taste because so many of the other passengers were people who were tired of the ruthless hypocrisies of Europe, just as she was.

But she also had something important to report, on the very subject that Dolly had written to her about. She had met Matthew Martins soon after her arrival in America; he had come to see her, at the Ramakrishna Mission in Manhattan, where she was staying temporarily. He was not at all the person she had expected; his resemblance to his father was very slight. He was athletic in build and very good-looking, extremely urbane in manner. She had quickly discovered that he had a great passion for motor cars; it had been instructive to walk down the streets with him, for he would point here and there and announce, like a magician: ‘there goes a brand-new new 1908 Hutton’; or ‘there’s a Beeston Humber’ or ‘that’s a Gaggenau. .’

As for the ‘mystery’ of his reluctance to leave New York, that had been very quickly solved. It turned out that he had an American fiancee, a woman by the name of Elsa Hoffman. He’d introduced her to Elsa and Uma had thought her to be a very pleasant woman: her demeanour was briskly good-natured, in the American way, and she was fine-looking too, with a gentle, heart-shaped face and long black hair. They’d quickly become friends, she and Elsa, and one day Elsa had confided that she was secretly engaged to Matthew. She hadn’t told her family because she knew they’d disapprove and was afraid that they might try to send her away. And Matthew too was uncertain of how his father would respond — what with Elsa being a foreigner and a Protestant as well. Uma’s feeling was that this was all that prevented Matthew from returning. If only Saya John were to drop Matthew a hint, that he had nothing to fear on this score, then it was quite likely that he would change his mind about staying in America. .

By the time this letter was delivered to her, Dolly was perfectly recovered. She was so excited by Uma’s report that she decided to go immediately to Rajkumar’s timberyard, to give him the news. A hired gaari took her rattling down the dusty, village-like roads of Kemendine, to the black macadam of the Strand, where cargo ships stood moored along the wharves, past the Botataung Pagoda, with its goldfish-filled pools, across the railway crossing, and through the narrow lanes of Pazundaung to the walled compound that marked the premises of Rajkumar’s yard. Inside, a team of elephants was hard at work, stacking logs. Dolly spotted Rajkumar standing in the shade of the raised wooden cabin that served as his office. He was dressed in a longyi and vest, smoking a cheroot, his face and head powdered with sawdust.

‘Dolly!’ He was startled to see her at the yard.

‘I have news.’ She waved the letter at him.

They climbed the ladder that led up to Rajkumar’s office. She stood over him while he read Uma’s letter and when he reached the end, she said: ‘What do you think, Rajkumar? Do you think Sayagyi would disapprove — about Matthew’s fiancee not being Catholic, and all that?’

Rajkumar laughed out loud. ‘Sayagyi’s no missionary,’ he said. ‘He keeps his religion to himself. In all the years I worked for him he never once asked me to go to church.’

‘But still,’ said Dolly, ‘you have to be careful when you tell him. .’

‘I will be. I’ll go and see him today. I think he’ll be relieved to know that this is all it is.’

Soon after this, Dolly learnt that she was pregnant again. She forgot about Matthew and Elsa and even Uma: all her energies went into making sure that nothing went wrong again. Seven months went quickly by and then, on the doctors’ advice, she was moved to a mission hospital on Dufferin Road, not far from Kemendine.

One day, Saya John came to see her. He seated himself beside her bed and took her hand, pressing it between his. ‘I’ve come to thank you,’ he said.

‘For what, Sayagyi?’

‘For giving me back my son.’

‘What do you mean, Sayagyi?’

‘I had a letter from Matthew. He’s coming home. He’s already making the arrangements. I know it’s you who’s to be thanked. I haven’t even told Rajkumar yet. I wanted you to be the first to know.’

‘No, Sayagyi — it’s Uma who’s to be thanked. It’s all because of her.’

‘Because of the both of you.’

‘And Matthew? Is he coming alone?’

Saya John smiled, his eyes shining. ‘No. He’s bringing home a bride. They’re going to be married by special licence, just before they leave, so that they can travel together.’

‘So what will this mean, Sayagyi?’

‘It means that it’s time for me to move too. I’m going to sell my properties here. Then I’m going to go to Malaya, to get things ready for them. But there’s plenty of time yet. I’ll be here for the birth of your child.’

Six weeks later Dolly was delivered of a healthy, eight-pound boy. To celebrate, Rajkumar shut down his yards and announced a bonus of a week’s wages for his employees. An astrologer was called in to advise them on the child’s names: he was to have two, as was the custom among Indians in Burma. After deliberations that lasted for several weeks, it was decided that the boy’s Burmese name would be Sein Win; his Indian name was to be Neeladhri — Neel for short. The names were decided on just in time for Saya John to hear of them before leaving for Malaya.

Four years later, Dolly had a second child, another boy. Like Neel he was given two names, one Burmese and one Indian: they were, respectively, Tun Pe and Dinanath. The latter was quickly shortened to Dinu, and it was by this name that he was known at home.

Soon after Dolly’s delivery Rajkumar had a letter from Saya John: by coincidence Elsa too had just had a baby, her first. The child was a girl and had been named Alison. What was more, Matthew and Elsa had decided to build a house for themselves, on the plantation: the land had already been cleared and a date fixed for the ground-breaking ceremony. Saya John was very keen that Rajkumar and Dolly attend the ceremony, along with their children.

In the years since Saya John’s departure from Rangoon, Rajkumar had spent a great deal of his time travelling between Burma, Malaya and India. As a partner in the plantation he had been responsible for ensuring a steady supply of workers, most of them from the Madras Presidency, in southern India. Rajkumar had kept Dolly abreast of the plantation’s progress, but despite his pleas, she had not accompanied him on any of his trips to Malaya. She was not a good traveller, she had said. It had been hard enough to leave Ratnagiri to come to Burma; she was not in a hurry to go anywhere else. As a result, Dolly had never met Matthew and Elsa.

Rajkumar showed Dolly Saya John’s letter, with the comment: ‘If you’re ever going to go there then this is the time.’

After she’d read the letter Dolly agreed: ‘All right; let us go.’

From Rangoon, it was a three day voyage to the island of Penang in northern Malaya. On their last day at sea, Rajkumar showed Dolly a distant blue blur on the horizon. This grew quickly into a craggy peak that rose like a pyramid out of the sea. It stood alone, with no other landfall in sight.

‘That’s Gunung Jerai,’ Rajkumar said. ‘That’s where the plantation is.’ In years past, he said, when the forest was being cleared, the mountain had seemed to come alive. Travelling to Penang, Rajkumar would see great black plumes of smoke rising skywards from the mountain. ‘But that was a long time ago: the place is quite changed now.’

The steamer docked at Georgetown, the principal port on the island of Penang. From there it was a journey of several hours to the plantation: first they took a ferry to the road-and rail-head of Butterworth, across a narrow channel from Penang. Then they boarded a train that took them northwards through a landscape of lush green paddies and dense coconut groves. Looming ahead, always visible through the windows of the carriage, was the soaring mass of Gunung Jerai, its peak obscured by a cloudy haze. It rose steeply out of the plain, its western slopes descending directly into the sparkling blue waters of the Andaman Sea. Dolly, now habituated to the riverine landscapes of southern Burma, was struck by the lush beauty of the coastal plain. She was reminded of Ratnagiri, and for the first time in many years, she missed her sketchbook.

This leg of their journey ended at Sungei Pattani, a district town on the leeward side of the mountain. The rail-track was newly laid and the station consisted of not much more than a length of beaten earth and a tiled shed. Dolly spotted Saya John as their train was pulling in; he looked older and a little shrunken; he was peering shortsightedly at a newspaper as the train chugged into the station. Standing beside him were a tall, khaki-clothed man and a woman in an ankle-length black skirt. Even before Rajkumar pointed them out, Dolly knew that they were Matthew and Elsa.

Elsa came up to Dolly’s window when the train stopped. The first thing she said was: ‘I’d have known you anywhere; Uma described you perfectly.’

Dolly laughed. ‘And you too — both of you.’

Outside the rudimentary little station, there was a large compound. In its centre stood a thin sapling, not much taller than Dolly herself.

‘Why,’ Dolly said, startled, ‘that’s a padauk tree, isn’t it?’

‘They call them angsana trees here,’ Elsa said. ‘Matthew planted it, soon after Alison was born. He says that in a few years it’s going to grow into a huge umbrella, casting its shade over the whole station.’

Now Dolly’s eyes were drawn to a startling new sight: a motorcar — a gleaming, flat-topped vehicle with a rounded bonnet and glittering, twelve-spoked wheels. It was the only car in the compound and a small crowd had gathered around to marvel at its brass lamps and shining black paint.

The car was Matthew’s. ‘It’s an Oldsmobile Defender,’ he announced. ‘Quite a modest car really, but mint-new, this year’s model, a genuine 1914. It rolled out of the factory in January and was delivered to me six months later.’ He spoke like an American, Dolly noticed, and his voice bore no resemblance to his father’s.

Theirs was a sizeable party: there was an ayah for Dinu and Neel as well as a man to help with the luggage. The car was not large enough for all of them. After Dolly, Elsa and the children had been seated there was room only for the ayah and Matthew, who was driving. The others were left behind to follow in a buggy.

They drove through Sungei Pattani, along wide streets that were lined with tiled ‘shophouses’—storefronts whose facades were joined together to form long, graceful arcades. Then the town fell away and the car began to climb.

‘When was the last time you heard from Uma?’ Dolly said to Elsa.

‘I saw her last year,’ said Elsa. ‘I went to the States for a holiday and we met in New York.’ Uma had moved into an apartment of her own, Elsa said. She’d taken a job, as a publisher’s proof-reader. But she was doing other things too; she seemed to keep herself very busy.

‘What else is she doing exactly?’

‘Political things mainly, I think,’ Elsa said. ‘She talked about meetings and speeches and some magazine that she’s writing for.’

‘Oh?’ Dolly was still thinking about this when Elsa pointed ahead. ‘Look — the estate. That’s where it starts.’

They were climbing steeply, driving along a dirt road that was flanked on both sides by dense forest. Looking ahead, Dolly saw a wide gateway, with a sign that arched across the road. There were three words inscribed on the sign, in enormous gold lettering; Dolly read them out aloud, rolling them over her tongue: ‘Morningside Rubber Estate.’

‘Elsa named it,’ Matthew said.

‘When I was a child,’ Elsa explained, ‘I used to live near a park called Morningside. I always liked the name.’

At the gate, there was a sudden rent in the tangled curtain of greenery that covered the mountainside: ahead, stretching away as far as the eye could see, there were orderly rows of saplings, all of them exactly alike, all of them spaced with precise, geometrical regularity. The car went over a low rise and a valley appeared ahead, a shallow basin, cupped in the palm of a curved ridge. The basin had been cleared of trees and there was an open space in the middle. Grouped around this space were two ramshackle tin-roofed buildings, little more than huts.

‘These were meant to be the estate’s offices,’ Elsa said apologetically. ‘But we’re living in them for the time being. It’s very basic I’m afraid — which is why we need to build ourselves a habitable place.’

They settled in and later in the day, Elsa took Dolly for a walk through the rubber trees. Each tree had a diagonal slash across its trunk, with a halved coconut shell cupped underneath. Elsa swirled her forefinger through one of these cups, and dug out a hardened crescent of latex. ‘They call these cup-lumps,’ Elsa said, handing the latex to Dolly. Dolly raised the spongy grey lump to her nose: the smell was sour and faintly rancid. She dropped it back into the coconut-shell cup.

‘Tappers will come by to collect the lumps in the morning,’ Elsa said. ‘Not a drop of this stuff can be wasted.’

They headed through the rubber trees, walking uphill, facing the cloud-capped peak of Gunung Jerai. The ground underfoot had a soft, cushioned feel, because of the carpet of dead leaves shed by the trees. The slope ahead was scored with the shadows of thousands of trunks, all exactly parallel, like scratches scored by a machine. It was like being in a wilderness, but yet not. Dolly had visited Huay Zedi several times and had come to love the electric stillness of the jungle. But this was like neither city nor farm nor forest: there was something eerie about its uniformity; about the fact that such sameness could be imposed upon a landscape of such natural exuberance. She remembered how startled she’d been when the car crossed from the heady profusion of the jungle into the ordered geometry of the plantation. ‘It’s like stepping into a labyrinth,’ she said to Elsa.

‘Yes.’ said Elsa. ‘And you’d be amazed how easy it is to lose your way.’

They entered a large clearing and Elsa came to a stop. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is where Morningside House is going to be.’

Turning around, Dolly saw that the spot offered spectacular views on every side. To the west the mountain sloped gently into the reddening sunset sea; to the north rose the forested peak of Gunung Jerai, looking directly down on them.

‘It’s a wonderful spot,’ Dolly said. But even as she was saying the words it struck her that she would not have wanted to live there, under the scowling gaze of the mountain, in a house that was marooned in a tree-filled maze.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Elsa said. ‘But you should have seen what it looked like before it was cleared.’

She’d been horrified, she said, when she first came out to Gunung Jerai. The place was beautiful beyond imagining, but it was jungle — dense, towering, tangled, impassable jungle. Matthew had led her a little way in, on foot, and it was like walking up a carpeted nave, with the tops of the trees meeting far above, forming an endless, fan-vaulted ceiling. It was hard, almost impossible, to imagine that these slopes could be laid bare, made habitable.

Once the clearing of the forest started, Matthew had moved out to the land and built himself a small cabin, where the estate office now stood. She had lived away from him in a rented house, in Penang. She would have preferred to be with Matthew, but he wouldn’t let her stay. It was too dangerous, he said, like a battlefield, with the jungle fighting back every inch of the way. For a while Saya John had stayed with Matthew too, but then he’d fallen ill, and had had to move to Penang. Even though the plantation was his own idea, he’d had no conception of what would be involved in laying it out.

Several months went by before Elsa had been allowed to visit the location again and she understood then why Matthew had tried to keep her away. The hillside looked as though it had been racked by a series of disasters: huge stretches of land were covered with ashes and blackened stumps. Matthew was thin and coughed incessantly. She caught a glimpse of the workers’ shacks — tiny hovels, with roofs made of branches and leaves. They were all Indians, from the south: Matthew had learnt to speak their language — Tamil — but she couldn’t understand a word they said. She’d looked into the mud-walled hut where they went to be treated when they fell ill: the squalor was unimaginable, the floors covered with filth. She’d wanted to stay and work as a nurse, but Matthew had refused to let her remain. She’d had to go back to Penang.

But when she next returned, the transformation was again so great as to appear miraculous. The last time around she had felt as though she were entering a plague site; now the sensation was of walking into a freshly laid garden. The ashes had been washed away by the rain, the blackened tree-stumps had been removed and the first saplings of rubber had begun to grow.

For the first time, Matthew had allowed her to stay over, in his cabin. At daybreak she’d looked out of the window and seen the morning pouring down the side of the mountain, lying on their land like a sheet of gold.

‘That was when I told Matthew,’ Elsa said, ‘that there could only ever be one name for this place: Morningside.’

Later, back where they were staying, Elsa showed Dolly her sketches for Morningside House. She wanted it to look like the grand Long Island houses of her memory; it was to have a turret-like tower, steep gables and a veranda that went all the way around, to take advantage of the spectacular views. The one Eastern touch was to be the roof, which would be red, with carved, upcurling eaves.

While the women were poring over the sketches, Saya John was going through the newspaper that he had bought at the railway station: it was the previous day’s edition of the Straits Times, published from Singapore. Suddenly he glanced up and beckoned to Matthew and Rajkumar, from across the room.

‘Look at this,’ he said.

Folding the paper in half, he showed them a report about the assassination of the Grand Duke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Rajkumar and Matthew read through the first couple of paragraphs and then looked at each other and shrugged.

‘ “Sarajevo”?’ said Rajkumar. ‘Where’s that?’

‘A long way away.’ Matthew laughed.

No more than anyone else in the world, did either of them have any inkling that the killing in Sarajevo would spark a world war. Nor did they know that rubber would be a vital strategic material in this conflict: that in Germany the discarding of articles made of rubber would become an offence punishable by law; that submarines would be sent overseas to smuggle rubber; that the commodity would come to be valued more than ever before, increasing their wealth beyond their most extravagant dreams.

sixteen

Even when Neel and Dinu were very young, it was evident that they each took after a single parent. Neel looked very much like Rajkumar: he was big and robust, more Indian than Burmese in build and colouring. Dinu, on the other hand, had his mother’s delicate features as well as her ivory complexion and fine-boned slimness of build.

Every year, around December, Dolly and Rajkumar took the boys to Huay Zedi. Doh Say and Naw Da had returned to their old village some years before. The expansion of their business had made Doh Say a wealthy man, and he owned several houses in and around the village: one of these was earmarked for Dolly and Rajkumar’s annual visits. It seemed to Dolly that the boys enjoyed these trips, especially Neel, who had been befriended by one of Doh Say’s sons, a sturdy thoughtful boy by the name of Raymond. Dolly, too, looked forward to these annual visits: since her trip to Morningside she had begun sketching again, and would spend hours by Huay Zedi’s stream, with her sketchbook open on her lap and Dinu playing nearby.

One year, while they were at Huay Zedi, Dinu fell suddenly ill. Dolly and Rajkumar were not particularly alarmed. Dinu was prone to bouts of sickness and it was a rare week when he was entirely free of colds, coughs and fevers. But Dinu was also gifted with an innate resilience that made him actively combat his ill health, and his fevers rarely lasted for more than a day or two at a time. Knowing how well he fought off his fevers, Dolly and Rajkumar were certain that he would recover quickly. They decided to remain at Huay Zedi.

The house they were staying in was very much like a teak camp’s tai, standing some six feet off the ground on massive timber posts. It was set at a slight remove from the rest of the village, a little distance up the thickly forested slope that served as a backdrop for the village. The jungle rose like a cliff behind the tai, skirting it on three sides. Just visible from the balcony was Huay Zedi’s pebbled stream and the soaring bamboo steeple of its church.

As in all tais, the rooms were arranged in a row, one leading into another. Because of Dinu’s illness, Dolly decided to change their usual sleeping arrangements. She took the child into her bed for the night, and dispatched Rajkumar to one of the inner rooms. With Dinu sleeping beside her, Dolly drifted into a dream. She saw herself lifting up her mosquito net, climbing out of bed and going to sit in a chair on the balcony. The tai was in darkness but the night was alive with cicadas and fireflies. Two doors away she could hear Rajkumar breathing heavily in his sleep. She saw herself sitting awhile in the chair and then, after some time had passed, someone spoke, in a voice that was well known to her: it was Thebaw. He was saying something to her with great urgency. As so often in dreams, she could not tell the words apart, but she understood exactly what he was trying to communicate.

She screamed.

Rajkumar stumbled out with a candle and found her sitting in a chair, on the veranda, rocking back and forth, hugging herself with shaking arms.

‘What’s happened?’

‘We have to leave,’ she said. ‘We have to get Dinu to a hospital in Rangoon.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t ask me now. I’ll tell you later.’

They left Huay Zedi while it was still dark. Doh Say provided them with two ox-carts and escorted them personally to Pyinmana. They arrived in Rangoon late the next night. Dinu was taken immediately to hospital.

After a long examination, the doctors took Dolly and Rajkumar aside. The boy had polio, they said; but for Dolly’s promptness in bringing him to hospital, they might well have lost the child.

‘I knew I had to bring him,’ said Dolly.

‘How did you know?’

‘I was told.’

‘By whom?’

‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we came.’

Dolly stayed the night in hospital and next morning, a nurse brought her breakfast on a tray. ‘Did you hear, ma’am?’ the nurse said. ‘The old King is dead. He died in India.’

The breakfast tray slipped from Dolly’s lap. ‘When did it happen?’ she asked the nurse.

‘Let’s see. .’ The nurse counted off the dates on her fingers. ‘I think it must have happened the night before you came.’

It was Dolly’s old charge, the Second Princess, who took the blame for the King’s death. One bright December day in 1916, she eloped with a Burmese commoner and hid herself in the Residency. This was the beginning of the end.

By this time much had changed in Ratnagiri. The First Princess had had her baby, a girl (this was an event that Dolly had missed by only a few weeks). The child was nicknamed Baisu, Fatty, and to everyone’s surprise, she had quickly become a favourite of the Queen’s.

Soon after the birth of the child, the District Administration had discovered itself to be in possession of monies sufficient to build the King his long promised palace. A mansion had appeared on the hillside that faced the Residency. It came complete with a durbar hall, a gallery, outhouses, running water and a garage to accommodate the two cars that had recently been provided for the King and Queen (one a Ford, the other a De Dion). All of Ratnagiri turned out to celebrate the move. Cheering crowds lined the roads as the Royal Family drove out of Outram House for the last time. But as with all moves, the new place was quickly discovered to possess certain drawbacks. Its upkeep was found to require a small army: twenty-seven gatekeepers, ten peons, six hazurdaars and innumerable other attendants, cleaners, sweepers and ayahs— a total of one hundred and sixty-one in all. In addition, there were now more visitors from Burma and many more hangers-on. How to feed them? How to provide for them? Without Dolly no one knew how to manage.

And then, one morning the Second Princess disappeared. Enquiries revealed she had run away with a young man and taken refuge in the Residency. The King gave Sawant a note to take to his daughter, asking her to return to the palace. Standing at a window, he trained his binoculars on the De Dion as it made its journey across the hill. When the car turned around to come back he saw that his daughter was not in it. The binoculars dropped from his hands. He fell to the floor, clutching his left arm. The doctor arrived within the hour and pronounced him to have suffered a heart attack. Ten days later the King died.

The Queen let it be known that the Second Princess would never again be permitted to enter her presence.

And the funeral, Dolly, the First Princess wrote in the first of several clandestine letters. It was such a sad and miserable affair that Her Majesty flatly refused to attend. The Government was represented by a mere Deputy Collector! You would have wept to see it. No one could believe that this was the funeral of Burma’s last King! We wanted the coffin stored in such a way that we could transport the remains to Burma some day. But when the authorities learnt of this they had the coffin forcibly removed from us. They are afraid that the King’s body might become a rallying point in Burma! They built a monument on his grave, almost overnight, to make it impossible for us ever to take him back! You should have been here with us, Dolly. We all missed you, even Her Majesty, though of course she could not say so, since it was she who forbade us ever to utter your name.

Through the duration of Dinu’s convalescence, Dolly never once left the premises of the hospital. She and Dinu had a room to themselves — large and sunny and filled with flowers. From the window they could see the majestic, shining hti of the Shwe Dagon. Rajkumar did everything in his power to ensure their comfort. U Ba Kyaw drove over at mealtimes, bringing fresh-cooked food in an enormous brass tiffin-carrier. The hospital was prevailed upon to relax its rules. Friends dropped by at all times of day and Rajkumar and Neel stayed late into the evenings, leaving only when it was time for Dinu to go to bed.

Dinu endured his month-long stay in hospital with exemplary stoicism, earning accolades from the staff. Although he had partially lost the use of his right leg, the doctors promised that he would recover to the point where a slight limp would be the only lasting trace of his illness.

On their return home, after Dinu’s discharge, Dolly tried hard to revert to her normal domestic routines. She put Dinu into a room of his own, under the care of an ayah. For the first few days, he made no complaint. Then, late one night, Dolly woke suddenly, at the touch of his breath on her face. Her son was standing beside her, propped up on the edge of the bed. He had left his ayah snoring in his room, and crawled down the corridor, dragging his right leg behind him. Dolly took him into her bed, hugging his bony body to her chest, breathing in the soft, rain-washed smell of his hair. She slept better that night than she had at any time in the last several weeks.

During the day, as Dinu began trying to walk again, Dolly hovered over him, darting to move stools and tables out of his way. Watching him as he struggled to regain his mobility, Dolly began to marvel at her son’s tenacity and resilience — at the strength of will that made him pick himself up, time and time again, until he was able to hobble just a step or two farther than before. But she could see also that this daily struggle was changing him. He was more withdrawn than she remembered, and seemed years older in maturity and self-possession. With his father and brother he was unresponsive and cold, as though he were self-consciously discouraging their attempts to include him in their exuberant games.

Dolly’s absorption in Dinu’s convalescence became so complete as to claim the entirety of her mind. She thought less and less about her circle of friends and the round of activities that had occupied her before — the gatherings, the tea-parties, the picnics. When occasionally a friend or an acquaintance dropped by, there were awkward silences: she would feign interest in their stories, without contributing a word of her own. When they asked what she did with her time, she found it hard to explain. So small was the span by which Dinu’s successes were measured — an extra step or two at a time, a couple more inches — that it was impossible to communicate either the joy or the crestfallen emptiness that attended upon the passing of each day. Her friends would nod politely as they listened to her explanations and when they left she knew that it would be a long time before she saw them again. The odd thing was that far from feeling any regret, she was glad.

One weekend, Rajkumar said: ‘You haven’t been out in months.’ He had a horse running for the Governor’s Cup, at the Rangoon Turf Club: he insisted that she go with him to the races.

She went through the motions of dressing for the races as though she were performing a half-forgotten ritual. When she went down to the driveway, U Ba Kyaw bowed her into their car as though he were welcoming her home after a long absence. The car was a Pic-Pic — a Swiss-manufactured Piccard-Pictet— a commodious, durable machine with a glass pane separating the driver’s seat from the interior cabin.

The Pic-Pic circled around the Royal Lake, driving past the Chinese burial grounds and passing within sight of the Rangoon Club. Now Dolly too began to feel that she’d been away a long time. All the familiar sights seemed new and startling — the reflection of the Shwe Dagon, shimmering on the lake; the long, low-slung building of the Boat Club, perched on the shore. She found herself leaning forward in her seat, with her face half out of the window, as though she were looking at the city for the first time. The roads around the racecourse had been sealed off by the police, but the Pic-Pic was recognised and they were waved through. The stands looked festive with pennants and flags fluttering above the terraces. On the way to Rajkumar’s box, Dolly found herself waving to a great number of people whose names she had forgotten. Once they were seated, dozens of friends and acquaintances stopped by to welcome her back. She noticed, after a while, that Rajkumar was whispering their names to her, under cover of his programme, to remind her who they were—‘U Tha Din Gyi, he’s a Turf Club steward; U Ohn, the handicapper, Mr MacDonald, the totalizator. .’

Everyone was kind. Old Mr Piperno, the bookmaker, sent one of his sons to ask if she wanted to place any bets. She was touched and chose a couple of horses at random, from her programme. The band of the Gloucestershire Regiment came marching out and played a serenade from Friedemann’s Lola. Then they started on another piece, with a great flourish, and Rajkumar gave her arm a sudden tug.

‘It’s “God Save the King”,’ he hissed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rising quickly to her feet. ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

At last, to her relief, the races started. There was a long wait before the next race and another after it was over. Just as everyone around her was becoming more and more excited, Dolly’s mind began to wander. It was weeks since she’d been away from Dinu for this long — but of course he probably hadn’t even noticed that she was gone.

A sudden outburst of applause jolted her back to her surroundings. Sitting next to her was Daw Thi, the wife of Sir Lionel Ba Than, who was one of the stewards of the Turf Club. Daw Thi was wearing her famous ruby necklace, idly fingering the thumbnail-sized stones. Dolly saw that she was looking at her expectantly.

‘What’s happened?’ said Dolly.

‘Lochinvar has won.’

‘Oh?’ said Dolly.

Daw Thi gave her a long look, and burst into laughter.

‘Dolly, you silly thing,’ she said, ‘have you forgotten? Lochinvar is your husband’s horse!’

In the car, on the way back, Rajkumar was unusually quiet. When they were almost home, he leant over to slam shut the window that separated the driver’s seat from the rear. Then he turned to look at her a little unsteadily. He’d been plied with champagne after his visit to the winner’s paddock, and was slightly drunk.

‘Dolly?’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Something’s happened to you.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No. Nothing’s happened.’ ‘You’re changing. . You’re leaving us behind.’

‘Who?’

‘Me. . Neel. .’

She flinched. She knew it was true that she’d neglected her elder son lately. But Neel was filled with energy, boisterousness and loud-voiced goodwill and Rajkumar doted on him. With Dinu on the other hand, he was nervous and tentative; frailty and weakness worried him, puzzled him: he had never expected to encounter these in his own progeny.

‘Neel doesn’t need me,’ Dolly said, ‘in the way that Dinu does.’

He reached for her hand. ‘Dolly, we all need you. You can’t disappear into yourself. You can’t leave us behind.’

‘Of course not.’ She laughed uneasily. ‘Where would I go if I left you behind?’

He dropped her hand and turned away. ‘Sometimes I can’t help feeling that you’ve already gone away — shut yourself behind a glass wall.’

‘What wall?’ she cried. ‘What are you talking about?’ She looked up to see U Ba Kyaw watching her, in the Pic-Pic’s rear-view mirror. She bit her lip and said nothing more.

This exchange came as a shock. She couldn’t make sense of it at first. After a day or two she decided that Rajkumar was right, she ought to go out more, even if it was just to the Scott Market, to look round the shops. Dinu was already more self-sufficient; soon it would be time for him to start school. She would have to get used to being without him, and besides, it wasn’t healthy to be always shut away behind the walls of the house.

She began to schedule little expeditions for herself. One morning she found herself stuck in one of the most crowded parts of the city, near Rangoon’s Town Hall. Just ahead, at the intersection of Dalhousie Street and Sule Pagoda Street there lay a busy roundabout. An ox-cart had collided with a rickshaw; someone was hurt. A crowd had gathered and the air was full of noise and dust.

The Sule Pagoda was at the centre of this roundabout. It had been freshly whitewashed, and it rose above the busy streets like a rock rearing out of the sea. Dolly had driven past the pagoda countless times but had never been inside. She told U Ba Kyaw to wait nearby and stepped out of the car.

She made her way carefully across the crowded roundabout and climbed a flight of stairs. Removing her shoes, she found herself standing on a cool, marble-paved floor. The noise of the street had fallen away and the air seemed clean, free of dust. She spotted a group of saffron-robed monks, chanting in one of the small shrines that ringed the pagoda’s circular nave. She stepped in and knelt behind them, on a mat. In a raised niche, directly ahead, there was a small gilded image of the Buddha, seated in the bhumisparshamudra, with the middle finger of his right hand touching the earth. Flowers lay heaped below — roses, jasmine, pink lotuses — and the air was heady with their scent.

Dolly closed her eyes, trying to listen to the monks, but instead it was Rajkumar’s voice that echoed in her ears: ‘You’re changing. . leaving us behind.’ In the tranquillity of that place, those words had a different ring: she recognised that he was right, that the events of the recent past had changed her no less than they had Dinu.

In hospital, at night, lying in bed with Dinu, she’d found herself listening to voices that were inaudible during the day: the murmurs of anxious relatives; distant screams of pain; women keening in bereavement. It was as though the walls turned porous in the stillness of the night, flooding her room with an unseen tide of defeat and suffering. The more she listened to those voices, the more directly they spoke to her, sometimes in tones that seemed to recall the past, sometimes in notes of warning.

Late one night she’d heard an old woman crying for water. The voice had been feeble — a hoarse, rasping whisper — but it had filled the room. Although Dinu had been fast asleep, Dolly had clapped a hand over his head. For a while she’d lain rigid on her side, clutching her child, using his sleeping body to shut out the sound. Then she’d slipped out of bed and walked quickly down the corridor.

A white-capped Karen nurse had stopped her: ‘What are you doing here?’

‘There was a voice,’ Dolly had said, ‘someone crying for water. .’ She’d made the nurse listen.

‘Oh yes,’ the nurse had said, offhandedly, ‘that’s from the malaria ward below. Someone’s delirious. Go back to your room.’ The moans had stopped soon afterwards but Dolly had stayed up all night, haunted by the sound of the voice.

Another time she had stepped out of the room to find a stretcher in the corridor. A child’s body had been lying on it, covered with a white hospital sheet. Although Dinu had been no more than a few feet away, sleeping peacefully, Dolly had not been able to quell the panic that surged through her at the sight of the shrouded stretcher. Falling to her knees in the corridor, she had torn away the sheet that covered the corpse. The child had been a boy, of Dinu’s age, and not unlike him in build. Dolly had begun to cry, hysterically, overwhelmed as much by guilt as relief. A nurse and an orderly had had to lift her up to take her back to bed.

Again that night, she had not been able to sleep. She’d thought of the child’s body; she’d thought of what her life would be like in Dinu’s absence; she’d thought of the dead boy’s mother. She’d begun to cry — it was as though her voice had merged with that of the unknown woman; as though an invisible link had arisen between all of them — her, Dinu, the dead child, his mother.

Now, kneeling on the floor of the Sule Pagoda, she recalled the voice of King Thebaw, in Ratnagiri. In his later years the King had seemed more and more to dwell on the precepts he had learnt as a novice, in the palace monastery. She remembered a word he’d often used, karuna—one of the Buddha’s words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time will come, he had said to the girls, when you too will discover what this word karuna means, and from that moment on, your lives will never again be the same.

Shortly after King Thebaw’s funeral, the Queen wrote to her gaolers asking for permission to move back to Burma. Her request was denied, on grounds of security, because of the war in Europe: it was felt that her presence might prove inflammatory at a delicate moment for the Empire. It was only after the end of the war that the Queen and her daughters were allowed to return to their homeland.

The First Princess now occasioned a fresh crisis. Was she to leave Ratnagiri to go to Burma with her mother? Or was she to stay with Sawant?

The Princess made a promise to her husband: she told him that she would travel with her mother to Burma and then return once Her Majesty had been safely installed in her new home. Sawant took her at her word and made no objection. But it was with a heavy tread that he walked down to the jetty at Mandvi, on the day of the royal party’s departure. For all he knew this was the last time that he or his children would ever see the Princess.

The Queen’s party made its way slowly across the subcontinent, travelling eastwards from Bombay by rail. In Calcutta the Queen’s entourage stayed at the Grand Hotel. It so happened that the Second Princess was now also living in Calcutta, with her husband: she could scarcely ignore the presence of her mother and sisters. One evening the disowned Princess gathered her resolve and went over to the Grand Hotel to call on her mother.

The Queen flatly refused to receive either her daughter or her son-in-law. The Princess, knowing her mother all too well, retreated in good grace — not so her husband, who summoned the temerity to venture uninvited into Her Majesty’s presence. This assault was quickly repulsed: with a single enraged shout the Queen sent her errant son-in-law fleeing down the Grand’s marble staircase, it was his misfortune to be shod in smooth-soled leather pumps. His feet slipped and sent him flying into the lobby, where a chamber ensemble was serenading an audience of assembled guests. He flopped into their midst like a leaping trout. A cello splintered and a viola twanged. Seated nearby was the Third Princess, whose nerves had been sadly strained by her recent travels. She broke into hysterics and could not be calmed. A doctor had to be sent for.

On April 16, 1919, the Queen and her party boarded the R.M.S. Arankola. They arrived in Rangoon four days later and were spirited quietly off to a bungalow on Churchill Road. A fortnight went by in a flurry of activity. Then the First Princess took everybody aback by announcing that she was ready to go back to Sawant. The family’s advisors wrung their hands. It was suggested that the Princess, as the eldest daughter, had a duty to remain with her mother — promises were, after all, frequently allowed to lapse in the interests of good sense and decency. No one doubted that a means could be found for discreetly closing the door on Sawant.

It was now that the First Princess showed herself to be a true daughter of her dynasty, every inch a Konbaung — her love for her family’s former coachman proved just as unshakable as her mother’s devotion to the late King. Defying her family, she went back to Sawant and never left Ratnagiri again. She lived the rest of her life with her husband and her children in a small house on the outskirts of town. It was there that she died twenty-eight years later.

The Second Princess and her husband lived in Calcutta for several years before moving to the hill-station of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling. There the Princess and her husband opened a dairy business.

So it happened that of the four Princesses, the two who’d been born in Burma both chose to live on in India. Their younger sisters, on the other hand, both born in India, chose to settle in Burma: both married and had children. As for the Queen, she spent her last years in her house on Rangoon’s Churchill Road. Such money as she could extract from the colonial authorities, she spent on religious charities and on feeding monks. She never wore anything but white, the Burmese colour of mourning.

After the Queen’s arrival in Rangoon, Dolly wrote her several letters, entreating to be allowed to call at her residence. None was ever answered. The Queen died in 1925, six years after her return from Ratnagiri. Even though she’d been cloistered for so many years, there was a sudden surge of sentiment in the city and people poured out to mourn. She was buried near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon.

seventeen

In 1929, after a gap of several years, Dolly received a letter from New York. It was from Uma and she was writing to say that she was leaving America. Uma was fifty now and had been away from India for more than twenty years. In her absence her parents had died, leaving her the ground floor of their house, Lankasuka (the upper floor had gone to her brother, who was now married and the father of three children). She had decided to go home, to Calcutta, to settle.

Because of various engagements in Tokyo, Shanghai and Singapore, Uma wrote, she would be sailing across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. One of the advantages of this route was that it would also enable her to visit friends — Matthew and Elsa in Malaya, and of course, Dolly and Rajkumar in Rangoon. She was writing now to propose that she and Dolly meet at Morningside and spend a fortnight there: it would be a pleasant holiday and afterwards they could travel back to Burma together — after so many years, there was a lot of catching up to be done. What would be better still was if Dolly came with Neel and Dinu: it would give her an opportunity to get to know the boys.

Dolly was oddly shaken by this letter. Although happy to hear from her friend, she was more than a little apprehensive. To resume a friendship that had been so long dormant was no easy matter. She could not help admiring Uma for her forthrightness; she knew that she herself had drawn away from the world, become increasingly reclusive, unwilling to travel or even go out. She was content leading the life she did, but it worried her that the boys had seen very little of the world — of India or Malaya or any other country. It wasn’t right that they should never know any place other than Burma: no one could predict what lay ahead. Even through the shuttered windows of her room she could feel an unquietness in the land.

Dolly had not been back to Morningside in fifteen years, ever since her first visit; nor had the boys. It was unlikely, she knew, that Rajkumar would consent to go. He was working harder than ever at his business and there were whole weeks when she hardly saw him. When she mooted the idea to him, he shook his head brusquely, just as she had known he would: no, he was too busy, he couldn’t go.

But for her own part, Dolly found herself increasingly drawn to the idea of meeting Uma at Morningside. It would be interesting to see Matthew and Elsa again: the Martinses had come to stay with them once, in Burma, with their two children — after Alison, they’d had a boy, Timmy. The children were all very young then and had got on well together, even Dinu who was withdrawn by nature and very slow to make friends. But that was a long time ago: Dinu was fourteen now, a student at St James’s School, one of the best-known in Rangoon. Neel was eighteen, brawny and outgoing, reluctantly engaged in pursuing a course of studies at Rangoon’s Judson College: he was eager to get into the timber business but Rajkumar had said that he would not take him into the family firm until his studies were finished.

When Dolly sounded Neel out about going to Morningside, he was immediately enthusiastic, keen to be off. She was not really surprised; she knew that he was always on the lookout for ways of getting out of attending his classes. Dinu proved to be much less keen but said he was willing to strike a bargain: he would go, he said, if she bought him a Brownie camera from Rowe and Co. She agreed; she liked to encourage his interest in photography — partly because she believed it to have grown out of his childhood habit of looking over her shoulder while she sketched; and partly because she felt that she ought to encourage any activity that would draw him out of himself.

The arrangements were quickly set in motion, with letters shooting back and forth between Burma, Malaya and the United States (Rangoon had recently acquired an air mail service, and this made communications much quicker than before). In April the next year, Dolly boarded a Malaya-bound steamer with her two sons. Rajkumar came to see the family off, and after Dolly had boarded, she looked over the side to find that he was waving to her from the jetty, gesticulating wildly, trying to draw her attention to something. She looked at the vessel’s bows and discovered that she was on the Nuwara Eliya, the same vessel that had brought her to Rangoon immediately after her marriage. It was an odd coincidence.

Matthew and his family were waiting at the Georgetown docks when the Nuwara Eliya pulled in. It was Dinu who spotted them first, through the viewfinder of his Brownie. ‘There. . over there. . look.’

Dolly leant over the gunwale, shading her eyes. Matthew looked very distinguished, with a thick frosting of grey around his head. Elsa had grown a little matronly since their last meeting, but in a regal and quite imposing way. Timmy was standing beside her, tall for his age and as thin as a string bean. Alison was there too, wearing a schoolgirl’s frock, her hair braided into long pigtails. She was an unusual-looking girl, Dolly thought, her face an arresting blend of elements taken from both her parents: she had Matthew’s cheekbones and Elsa’s eyes; his silky hair and her upright carriage. It was clear that she would grow into a real beauty one day.

Matthew came on board and escorted them off the ship. They were all to spend the night in Georgetown and he had booked rooms in a hotel. Uma was due to arrive the next day and they were to drive to Morningside together. Matthew had brought two cars and a chauffeur: they were waiting at Butterworth, on the mainland.

The next morning, after breakfast, they walked together to the port, all seven of them. At the pier, they found themselves caught in a noisy throng. A large number of people had already gathered there, most of them Indians. Many were armed with flowers and garlands. At the head of this crowd stood two flamboyant and colourful figures, one a saffron-robed sadhu and the other a Sikh Giani, with a flowing beard and bushy white eyebrows. Neel, burly and assertive beyond his twenty years, pushed his way into the crowd to find out what the fuss was about. He came back looking puzzled.

‘I asked them what they were doing here and they said: we’ve come to greet Uma Dey.’

‘Do you think they mean our own Uma?’ Dolly said incredulously, to Elsa.

‘Yes, of course. There can’t be two Uma Deys on the same ship.’

Then the ship came into view and a cheer erupted from the crowd: ‘Uma Dey zindabad, zindabad—long live, long live, Uma Dey.’ This was followed by other shouts and slogans, all in Hindustani: ‘Inquilab zindabad’ and ‘halla bol, halla bol!’ When the ship docked the crowd’s leaders went swarming up the gangplank, with garlands and marigolds. Then Uma appeared, at the head of the gangplank, and was met by a wild outburst of cheering: ‘Uma Dey zindabad, zindabad!’ For a while there was complete confusion.

Watching from the far end of the pier, Dolly could tell that Uma had been taken by surprise: she was evidently unprepared for the reception that had been accorded her and didn’t quite know how to respond. She was scanning the crowd, as though she were looking for someone in particular. Dolly raised an arm and waved. The gesture caught Uma’s eye and she waved back worriedly, sketching a gesture of helplessness. Dolly made a sign to reassure her — don’t worry, we’ll wait.

Then Uma was ushered down the gangplank and garlanded again. Several people made speeches while everyone stood sweating under the hot sun. Dolly tried hard to concentrate on what was being said, but her eyes kept straying back to her friend. She saw that Uma had grown gaunt and her eyes had retreated into deep hollows, as though in protest against a hectic and uncertain life. But at the same time, there was a new assurance about the way she carried herself. It was clear that she was accustomed to being listened to and when it was her turn to speak, Dolly noticed, with dawning awe, that Uma seemed to know exactly what to say and how to handle the crowd.

Then, abruptly, the speeches were over, and Uma was pushing her way through the crowd. Suddenly, she was standing in front of Dolly, her arms thrown open: such a long time! such a long time! They laughed and hugged and held on to each other while the children looked quizzically on, standing a little apart.

‘How well you look, Elsa! And your daughter — she’s a beauty!’

‘You look well too, Uma.’

Uma laughed. ‘You don’t have to lie to me. I look twice my age. .’

Dolly broke in, jogging her friend’s arm: ‘Who are these people, Uma? We were so surprised. .’

‘They belong to a group I’ve been working with,’ Uma said quickly. ‘A group called the Indian Independence League. I hadn’t told them I was coming here, but I suppose the word got out. .’

‘But what do they want, Uma? Why were they here?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’ Uma took hold of Dolly’s hand and stuck an arm through Elsa’s. ‘There’s so much to talk about and I don’t want to run out of time.’

In the afternoon they took the ferry to Butterworth where Matthew’s cars were waiting at the port, one of them longer than any that Dolly had ever seen, almost the size of a railway carriage. This was a Duesenberg Model J Tourster, Matthew explained. It had a hydraulic braking system and a 6.9 litre, straight-8 engine. It had chain-driven overhead camshafts and could do up to 90 m.p.h. in second gear. In top gear it could cruise at 116.

Matthew was keen to show the Duesenberg off to Neel and Dinu so they rode with him, along with Timmy and Alison. Dolly and Elsa followed more sedately, in the car that Matthew had given Elsa for her fiftieth birthday — a magnificent tan-and-gold Isotta-Fraschini Tipo 8A Berlina Transformabile with power-assisted brakes. The coachwork was by Castagna and the upholstery was of Florentine leather.

The Isotta-Fraschini headed north with the sun dipping low over the Andaman Sea and by the time they reached Sungei Pattani, it was almost dark. They began to climb the slopes of Gunung Jerai with the Isotta-Fraschini’s headlights shining into a fog of dust. Passing under the estate’s arched gateway they went speeding up a red, dirt track. Then the car turned a corner, and a mansion appeared ahead, springing dramatically out of the slope, with lamps blazing through its windows and doorways. A rounded turret formed the fulcrum of the house. Built around this were wide, sweeping verandas and a roof that curved gently upwards, in the Chinese style.

‘Morningside House,’ announced Elsa.

Dolly was dazzled. In the inky darkness, it looked as though an unreal brightness were pouring out of the house; that the light was welling up from some interior source of illumination, spilling out of the mountain on which it stood.

‘It’s magnificent, Elsa,’ Uma said. ‘There’s no other word for it. I think it’s possibly the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. .’

Inside, the house was aglow with the rich warmth of polished wood. On their way down to dinner, both Dolly and Uma went astray in the long corridors, distracted by the many fine details of the interior: the floor was of intricate parquetry, and the walls were panelled with rich, fine-grained woods. Elsa came up to look for them and found them tapping the banister of the great stairway that wound through the centre of the house.

‘How beautiful this is.’

‘Do you like it?’ Elsa’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘When we were building Morningside, Matthew said one day: Everything I have, I owe to trees of one kind or another — teak, rubber. And I thought to myself, why that’s it: Morningside will be a monument to wood! I made Rajkumar send me the best teak from Burma; I sent people to the Celebes and Sumatra. You’ll notice that each room has wood of a different kind. .’

Elsa led them downstairs and ushered them into the dining room, which was very large, with a long, polished hardwood table running down the middle. The walls were lined with knitted bamboo and the lights that hung from the ceiling were set inside glowing nests of rattan. As they stepped in, Saya John rose from the table and came up to Dolly and Uma, walking slowly, with the help of a cane: he seemed smaller than before, and more gnome-like as though his body had shrunk in proportion to his head.

‘Welcome, welcome.’

At dinner, Uma and Dolly sat between Matthew and Saya John. The men worked hard at keeping their plates filled with food.

‘That’s gulai tumis, fish cooked with pink ginger buds, bunga kuntan.’

‘And this?’

‘Prawns roasted in pandanus leaves.’

‘Peanut crumpets.’

‘Nine-layered rice cakes.’

‘Chicken with blue flowers — bunga telang.’

‘Pickled fish with turmeric leaves and lime leaves and leaves of purple mint.’

‘A salad of shredded squid and polygonum and duan kado, a creeper that smells like a spice-garden.’

With every morsel their mouths were filled with new tastes, flavours that were as unfamiliar as they were delicious. Uma cried: ‘What is this food called? I thought I’d eaten everything in New York, but I’ve never tasted anything like this.’

Saya John smiled: ‘So you like Nyonya cooking then?’

‘I’ve never eaten anything so wonderful. Where is it from?’

‘From Malacca and Penang,’ Elsa said smiling. ‘One of the world’s last great secrets.’

Replete at last, Uma pushed her plate away and sat back.

She turned to Dolly who was sitting beside her.

‘So many years.’

‘Twenty-three, almost to the day,’ said Dolly, ‘since I last saw you in Rangoon.’

After dinner Dolly accompanied Uma to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, cross-legged, while Uma combed her hair at the dressing table.

‘Uma,’ Dolly said shyly, ‘you know I’m still wondering. .’

‘About what?’

‘Your reception at the port today — all those people. .’

‘Oh, you mean the League?’ Uma put her comb down and smiled at Dolly, in her mirror.

‘Yes. Tell me about it.’

‘It’s such a long story, Dolly. I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Never mind. Just start.’

It went back to New York, Uma said. That was where she had first joined the League, inducted by friends, other Indians living in the city. The Indians there were few in number but closely connected; some had come to seek shelter from the surveillance of the Empire’s intelligence services; others had been drawn there because of the relative affordability of the education. Almost without exception they were passionately political; it was impossible, in that circumstance of exile, to remain aloof. At Columbia there was the brilliant and intense Dadasaheb Ambedkar; there was Taraknath Das, gentle in manner but stubborn in spirit. Midtown, there was the Ramakrishna Mission, housed in a tiny, loft-like apartment and manned by a single, saffron-robed sant and scores of American sympathisers; downtown, in a tenement south of Houston Street, there was an eccentric Raja who believed himself to be India’s Bolivar. It was not that America was hospitable, either to them or their enterprise: it was merely oblivious, uninterested, but indifference too provided shelter of a certain kind.

Soon Uma’s apartment had become one of the nodes in this small but dense net of Indian connections. She and her compatriots were like explorers or castaways; watching, observing, picking apart the details of what they saw around them, trying to derive lessons for themselves and their country. Witnessing the nascency of the new century in America, they were able to watch at first hand the tides and currents of the new epoch. They went to visit mills and factories and the latest mechanised farms. They saw that new patterns of work were being invented, calling for new patterns of movement, new ways of thought. They saw that in the world ahead literacy would be crucial to survival; they saw that education had become a matter of such urgency as to prompt every modern nation to make it compulsory. From those of their peers who had travelled eastwards they learnt that Japan had moved quickly in this direction; in Siam too education had become a dynastic crusade for the royal family.

In India on the other hand, it was the military that devoured the bulk of public monies: although the army was small in number it consumed more than sixty per cent of the Government’s revenues, more even than was the case in countries that were castigated as ‘militaristic’. Lala Har Dayal, one of Uma’s most brilliant contemporaries, never tired of pointing out that India was, in effect, a vast garrison and that it was the impoverished Indian peasant who paid both for the upkeep of the conquering army and for Britain’s eastern campaigns.

What would become of India’s population when the future they had glimpsed in America had become the world’s present condition? They could see that it was not they themselves, nor even their children who would pay the true price of this Empire: that the conditions being created in their homeland were such as to ensure that their descendants would enter the new epoch as cripples, lacking the most fundamental means of survival; that they would truly become in the future what they had never been in the past, a burden upon the world. They could see too that already time was running out, that it would soon become impossible to change the angle of their country’s entry into the future; that a time was at hand, when even the fall of the Empire and the departure of their rulers would make little difference; that their homeland’s trajectory was being set on an unbudgeable path that would thrust it inexorably in the direction of future catastrophe.

What they saw and thought, seared them, burned them: they were all to some degree mutilated by the knowledge of the evil that was their enemy. Some became a little unhinged, some went mad, others simply gave up. Some turned communist, some took to religion, searching the scriptures for imprecations and formulae, to apply on themselves, like balm.

Among Uma’s Indian contemporaries, in New York there were many who took their direction from a newsletter published from the University of California, in Berkeley, by Indian students. This publication was called Ghadar, after the Hindustani word for the uprising of 1857. The people who were involved with the magazine were known as the Ghadar Party. Much of their support came from the Indians who’d settled on the Pacific coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these immigrants were Sikhs— former soldiers of the British Indian army. The experience of living in America and Canada served to turn many of these former loyalists into revolutionaries. Perceiving a link between their treatment abroad and India’s subject status, they had become dedicated enemies of the Empire they had once served. Some of them concentrated their efforts on trying to convert such of their friends and relatives as were still serving in the British Indian army. Others looked for allies abroad, developing links with the Irish resistance in America.

The Indians were, comparatively, novices in the arts of sedition. It was the Irish who were their mentors and allies, schooling them in their methods of organisation, teaching them the tricks of shopping for arms to send back home; giving them instruction in the techniques of fomenting mutiny among those of their countrymen who served the Empire as soldiers. On St Patrick’s Day in New York a small Indian contingent would sometimes march in the Irish parade, with their own banners, dressed in sherwanis and turbans, dhoties and kurtas, angarkhas and angavastrams.

After the start of the First World War, under pressure from the British intelligence services, the Ghadar Party had gone underground, metamorphosing slowly into a number of different groups. Of these the Indian Independence League was the most important, with thousands of partisans among overseas Indians: it was their offices that Uma had been visiting in eastern Asia.

Here, Dolly, who had been growing increasingly puzzled, broke in. ‘But, Uma,’ she said, ‘if what you’re telling me is true, then why have I never heard of the League? The papers are always full of Mahatma Gandhi, but no one ever speaks of your group.’

‘The reason for that, Dolly,’ said Uma, ‘is that Mr Gandhi heads the loyal opposition. Like many other Indians he’s chosen to deal with the Empire’s velvet glove instead of striking at its iron fist. He cannot see that the Empire will always remain secure while its Indian soldiers remain loyal. The Indian army will always put down opposition wherever it occurs — not just in India, but also in Burma, Malaya, East Africa, no matter where. And of course, the Empire does everything possible to keep these soldiers in hand: only certain castes of men are recruited; they’re completely shut off from politics and the wider society; they’re given land and their children are assured jobs.’

‘What do you hope to do then?’ Dolly asked.

‘To open the soldiers’ eyes. It’s not as difficult as you might think. Many of the League’s leaders are old soldiers. Giani Amreek Singh for instance — do you remember him? He was the distinguished Sikh Giani who came to the pier today, remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll tell you a story about him. I first met him in California, many years ago. He’s an old military man himself: he’d risen to the rank of a junior NCO in the British Indian army before deserting. The first time I heard him speak, he talked about the necessity of opening the eyes of Indian soldiers. After a while I said to him: “But Gianiji, you served in this army yourself; why did it take you so long to understand that you were being used to conquer others like yourself?”’

‘And what did he say?’ Dolly asked.

‘He said: “You don’t understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said — that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.”’

Dolly acknowledged this with a smile and a nod. ‘But what else, Uma? Did you ever meet anyone? A man? Did you never talk of anything but politics with your revolutionaries?’

Uma gave her a wan smile. ‘I met many men, Dolly. But we were always like brothers and sisters — that’s how we spoke to one another, bhai and bahen. As for me, because they knew that I was a widow, I think the men looked to me to be a kind of ideal woman, a symbol of purity — and to tell you the truth, I didn’t much mind. That’s the thing about politics— once you get involved in it, it pushes everything else out of your life.’

eighteen

Uma woke the next morning to find that breakfast had been served on a veranda that looked down the slope of the mountain, towards the brilliant blue of the Andaman Sea. Neel and Timmy were leaning on the balcony’s rail, talking about cars. Alison and Dinu were listening without joining in. Looking at them, it occurred to Uma that even until the day before, she would not have known them if she’d passed them in the street. Yet now, in their faces, she could see inscribed the history of her friendships and the lives of her friends — the stories and trajectories that had brought Elsa’s life into conjuction with Matthew’s, Dolly’s with Rajkumar’s, Malacca with New York, Burma with India.

‘The children’—here they were, standing in front of her: a day had gone by and she had not said a single word to any of them. In San Francisco, before boarding, she’d gone into a shop to buy presents and had ended up wandering off in the direction of the baby clothes and rattles and silver cups. It was with a jolt that she’d recalled that ‘the children’ were almost adults now — that Neel was twenty or thereabouts, that Dinu and Alison were sixteen and Timmy just two years younger. It occurred to her that if she’d had children of her own, they would have been of the same age, they would all have been friends — the canvas of a lifetime’s connections would have acquired the patina of another generation. But that was not to be, and now, listening to her friends’ children as they bantered in the shorthand of their youth, Uma felt oddly shy: trying to think of things to say to them, she realised that she had no idea what they did with their time, the things they thought about, the books they read.

She felt herself slipping into a silence that would become, she knew, irremediable if it were allowed to persist. So, because she was the kind of person she was, she did exactly what she would have done at a political meeting: rising to her feet, she called them to order: ‘I have something to say, so please listen. I feel I must talk to each of you on your own, or I’ll never know what to say to any of you. .’

Their eyes widened as they turned to look at her. She thought to herself: what have I done? I’ve scared them off; I’ve lost them for ever. But then, as the meaning of what she’d said dawned on them, they began to smile; she had the impression that no adult had ever spoken to them like this before; no grown-up had ever thought to seek them out for their company.

‘All right then, Alison, let’s go for a walk.’

From then on, it was easy: they seemed to want to show her round the estate, to go with her for walks. They called her ‘Auntie’ and this was oddly pleasing too. Soon they were not just ‘the children’ any more; each was someone she could recognise: Timmy was the confident one, who knew exactly what he intended to do: he wanted to go to America, to study, just as Matthew had, and then he wanted to go into business, on his own. Neel was a blunter and softer version of Rajkumar: she could see his father in him, quite clearly, but overlaid by a generation of wealth and comfort. Alison was a bit of an enigma, sometimes quiet and moody, but on occasion, wildly exuberant, full of laughter and sharp, intelligent conversation.

Dinu was the only one who left Uma feeling at a complete loss. Every time she tried to talk to him he seemed sullen, dour, and such observations as he occasionally had to offer were usually tart to the point of sourness. When he spoke, it was in odd staccato bursts, swallowing half his words and shooting out the rest: a manner of speech that made her afraid of saying anything, for fear that she might appear to be interrupting him. It was only when Dinu had a camera in his hands that he seemed to relax a little: but of course it was impossible to talk to someone who had no mind for anything but his viewfinder.

One morning, Alison said to Uma, ‘There’s something I want to show you. Can I take you for a drive?’

‘By all means.’

Dinu was well within earshot and the invitation was extended in such a way as clearly to include him. But Alison’s offer seemed to cast the boy into an agony of shyness. He began to back away, making a great show of dragging his right foot behind him.

‘Dinu, won’t you come with us?’ Alison said.

‘I don’t know. .’ He went pale and began to mumble in confusion.

Uma was watching him closely and she knew suddenly that the boy was secretly infatuated with Alison. She was tempted to smile. Nothing would come of it, she could tell: they were as different as could be, he a creature of the shadows, she an animal that craved the spotlight. He would spend his life nurturing unuttered yearnings. Uma was tempted to grip him by the shoulders, to shake him awake.

‘Come on, Dinu,’ she ordered in a sharp, peremptory voice. ‘Don’t be a child.’

‘Yes, do come,’ Alison said brightly. ‘I think you’ll enjoy it.’

‘Can I bring my camera?’

‘Of course.’

They went down the sweeping, mahogany staircase, out into the gravelled driveway where a small, cherry-red roadster stood parked under the porch. The car was a 6-litre Paige Daytona, a three-seater, with a single rear seat that pulled out like a drawer, resting on the running board. Alison pulled the rear seat out for Dinu and then clicked open the passenger door for Uma.

‘Alison!’ Uma’s voice rose in surprise. ‘Does your father let you drive his cars?’

Alison grinned. ‘Only this one,’ she said. ‘He won’t hear of us driving the Duesie or the Isotta.’ She gunned the engine and the car rocketed forward, shooting a shower of pebbles back into the porch.

‘Alison!’ Uma cried, clinging to her door. ‘You’re going far too fast.’

‘This isn’t half as fast as I’d like to go.’ Alison laughed and tossed her head. The wind caught her hair and carried it out behind her, like a sail. Roaring through the gate at the bottom of the garden, they plunged abruptly into the hushed gloom of the plantation, with slender, long-leafed trees arching high above them on either side. The trees were ranged in lines that stretched as far as the eye could follow, dwindling into long, straight tunnels: the effect was giddying as they flashed past, thousands upon thousands of them. It was like staring at stripes on a fast-moving screen: Uma felt herself growing dizzy and had to lower her eyes.

Suddenly the trees ended and a small shantytown appeared, with rows of shacks lining the road — hutches of brick and mortar, sheltered under steepled sheets of tin. The shacks were exactly similar in design and yet each was defiantly distinctive in appearance: some were neat, with little curtains fluttering at their front windows, while others were hovels, with pyramids of filth piled at their doors.

‘The coolie lines,’ said Alison, slowing briefly. In a moment they were past and then the car picked up speed again. Once again, a tunnel of arched tree trunks closed around them, and they disappeared into a tube of kaleidoscopic lines.

The road ended at a stream. A ribbon of water was flowing down the face of a tilted sheet of rock, its surface braided with tiny ripples. On the far side, the mountain climbed steeply upwards, blanketed in a dense tangle of forest. Alison ran the car into a sheltered clearing and snapped her door open.

‘The estate ends here,’ she said. ‘Now we have to walk.’

Taking Uma’s hand, Alison helped her pick her way slowly over the stream. On the other side was a path that led directly into the jungle, heading up the slope of Gunung Jerai. The climb was steep and Uma soon ran out of breath.

‘Do we have a long way to go?’ she called ahead to Alison.

‘No. We’re almost there.’

‘Where?’

Suddenly Dinu came up to stand beside her. ‘Look.’

Following the direction of his pointing finger, Uma glanced up. Through a tangle of vines and bamboo, she caught a glimpse of a line of red masonry. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘it appears to be a ruin of some kind.’

Dinu went ahead, hurrying in excitement after Alison. Uma caught up with them at a spot where the slope levelled out into a flat, rocky ledge. Directly ahead of her were two cenotaph-like structures, placed on square plinths: walled chambers of simple design, each with a doorway that led into a small enclosure. Their stone walls were mossy with age and their roofs had caved in.

‘I was hoping you’d be able to tell us what they are, Auntie Uma.’

‘Why me?’

‘Well your father was an archaeologist, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes but. .’ Uma shook her head slowly. ‘I didn’t learn much from him.’

The sight was as evocative as any she’d ever seen: the crumbling red stone juxtaposed against the tangled greenery of the jungle, with the mountain rising serenely above, a halo of cloud around its peak. Dinu was absorbed in photographing the ruins, moving round the structures as fast as his foot would let him. Uma felt a sudden pang of envy: if I were his age, this would have taken hold of me too, it would have changed my life; I would have come back here again and again; I wouldn’t rest until I’d had my fill of it; I’d want to dig them up and take them with me. .

‘Auntie Uma,’ Dinu called to her, across the clearing, ‘what are they — these ruins?’

She ran the edge of her thumb over the spongy stone. ‘I think these were what my father used to call chandis,’ she said softly. ‘Shrines.’

‘What sort of shrine?’ said Dinu. ‘Who built them?’

‘I’d say they’re either Hindu or Buddhist shrines.’ She threw up her hands, in frustration at her own ignorance. ‘I wish I could tell you more.’

‘Do you think they’re old?’ Dinu said.

‘Yes,’ said Uma. ‘I’m sure of that. Just look how weathered the stone is. I would say these chandis are very old indeed.’

‘I knew they were old,’ Alison said triumphantly. ‘I knew it. Daddy doesn’t believe me. He says nothing here can be old because there was only jungle when he first came.’

Dinu turned to Alison, in his abrupt way: ‘And how did you find this place?’

‘My father sometimes takes us shooting in the jungle,’ Alison said. ‘One day we stumbled upon this place.’ She took Dinu’s hand. ‘Let me show you something,’ she said. ‘Come.’

She led him into the larger of the two structures. Stopping at the plinth, she pointed to an image on a pedestal, a weathered Ganesh, carved in moss-covered stone.

‘We found the image lying on the floor,’ said Alison, ‘and we put it back — it seemed to belong there.’

Uma caught a glimpse of Dinu and Alison, standing framed in the ruined doorway, next to each other. They looked very young, more children than adolescents. ‘Give me your camera,’ she called out to Dinu. ‘I’ll take a picture of the two of you together.’

She took the Brownie from him and stepped back, with her eye to the viewfinder. It gave her a start to see them framed together. Suddenly she understood why people arranged marriages for their children: it was a way of shaping the future to the past, of cementing one’s ties to one’s memories and to one’s friends. Dinu and Alison — if only they were better suited to each other; how wonderful it might be, the bringing together of so many stories. Then she recollected what she was supposed to be doing and was annoyed with herself for thinking about things that were none of her business. She clicked the shutter and handed the camera back to Dinu.

The day began very early at the plantation. Every morning, well before dawn, Uma was woken by Matthew’s footsteps, going down the grand staircase and out to his car. From her window she would see his headlamps streaking down the slope, in the pre-dawn darkness, heading in the direction of the estate office.

One day she said to Matthew: ‘Where do you go, so early in the morning?’

‘To Muster.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We have an assembly ground near the estate office. The tappers come there in the morning and the contractors give them their jobs for the day.’

She was intrigued by the jargon: muster, contractors, tappers. ‘Can I come?’

‘Certainly.’

The next morning Uma drove down to the office with Matthew, along shortcuts that went corkscrewing down the slope. Scores of tappers were converging in front of the plantation’s tin-roofed offices by the light of blazing kerosene lamps: they were all Indians, mainly Tamils; the women were dressed in saris and the men in sarongs.

The ceremony that followed was part military parade and part school assembly. It was presided over by the estate’s manager, Mr Trimble, a portly Eurasian. The tappers fell into straight lines, facing a tall flagpole that stood at the far corner of the assembly ground. Mr Trimble hoisted the Union Jack and then stood at attention beneath the flagpole, saluting stiffly, with two rows of Indian overseers lining up behind him — these were the ‘conductors’.

Mr Trimble kept attentive watch as the conductors took attendance. His manner varied between that of a strict headmaster and a snappish sergeant. Occasionally he would dart into the ranks, with his rattan cane tucked under his arm. For some of the tappers he had a smile and a quick word of encouragement; with others, he made a great show of losing his temper, gesticulating and pouring out obscenities, in Tamil and English, singling out the object of his wrath with the tip of his pointing cane: ‘You dog of a coolie, keep your black face up and look at me when I’m talking to you. .’

Uma was disturbed by this spectacle: she had the feeling of watching something archaic, a manner of life that she had believed to be fortunately extinct. In the car Matthew asked what she had thought of ‘Muster’ and she had difficulty in keeping her voice under control.

‘I don’t know what to say, Matthew. It was like watching something that no longer existed: I was put in mind of the American South before the Civil War, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’

‘Oh, come on, aren’t you exaggerating a bit? Our tappers are well fed and well looked after. And they’re a lot better off than they would be if they were back where they came from.’

‘Isn’t that what masters have always said about slaves?’

Matthew raised his voice. ‘They’re not slaves, Uma.’

‘No, of course not.’ Uma reached out to touch his arm, in apology. ‘No. But did you see the terror on their faces when that man — the manager — shouted at them?’

‘He’s just doing his job, Uma. It’s a very hard job and he does it very well. It’s no easy thing to run a plantation you know. To look at, it’s all very green and beautiful — sort of like a forest. But actually it’s a vast machine, made of wood and flesh. And at every turn, every little piece of this machine is resisting you, fighting you, waiting for you to give in.’

He brought the car to a sudden halt. ‘Let me show you something.’ Opening his door, he led the way into a stand of rubber. ‘Come. Over here.’

It was first light now and dawn was descending on the peak of Gunung Jerai. This was the one time of day when the mountain’s heights were always visible, unclouded by the haze that rose later from the heated plain. On the slopes above them, the jungle was coming slowly to life, with flocks of birds rising from the forest canopy, and unseen troops of monkeys sailing through the treetops, leaving wakes of tossing leaves.

Under the rubber trees, there was a slow dripping of dew. Matthew leant against a tree trunk and pointed up. ‘Look at this tree,’ he said, ‘and look at the others around it. Wouldn’t you say they’re all exactly the same?’

‘Yes,’ Uma nodded, ‘it struck me the other day: even their limbs branch off at the same height, and in exactly the same way.’

‘And so they should. An enormous amount of human ingenuity has been invested in making these trees exactly similar. They’re called clones, you know, and scientists have been working on them for years. Most of our trees are of a clonal variety called Avros — developed by the Dutch in Sumatra in the twenties. We pay a lot of money to make sure that we get reliable clonal seed. But let me show you something.’

He pointed into a coconut-shell cup that was fastened in the tree’s trunk, beneath a long, spiral slash in the bark. ‘See how much latex this tree has produced overnight? The cup is half full, which is about right. If you walked down this row of trees, you’d find that most of them had yielded roughly the same amount of latex. But now look over here.’

He led the way to another tree. ‘Look at this cup.’

Uma looked in and saw that the cup he was pointing to was almost empty. She asked: ‘Is something wrong with this tree then?’

‘Not that I can tell,’ Matthew said. ‘It looks all right — no different from the others. Think of all the human effort that has gone into making it the same as the rest. And yet. .’— he pointed into the almost-empty cup—‘. . there you are.’

‘So what do you think the matter is?’

‘Botanists will tell you one thing and geologists will tell you another and soil specialists will tell you something else again. But if you ask me, the truth is quite simple.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s fighting back.’

Uma gave an astonished laugh. ‘You can’t really believe that.’

‘I planted this tree, Uma. I’ve heard what all the experts say. But the tappers know better. They have a saying, you know—“every rubber tree in Malaya was paid for with an Indian life”. They know that there are trees that won’t do what the others do, and that’s what they say — this one is fighting back.’

Through the surrounding tree trunks, the plantation’s offices were visible in the distance, on the slope below. Matthew pointed to them, making a sweeping gesture with his hand.

‘This is my little empire, Uma. I made it. I took it from the jungle and moulded it into what I wanted it to be. Now that it’s mine I take good care of it. There’s law, there’s order, everything is well run. Looking at it, you would think everything here is tame, domesticated, that all the parts have been fitted carefully together. But it’s when you try to make the whole machine work that you discover that every bit of it is fighting back. It has nothing to do with me or with rights and wrongs: I could make this the best-run little kingdom in the world and it would still fight back.’

‘And what’s the reason for that?’

‘It’s nature: the nature that made these trees and the nature that made us.’

‘So are you saying then. .’ Uma began to laugh, ‘that some of your trees are rebels by instinct?’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘But, Matthew,’ Uma laughed again, ‘what on earth are you going to do if your tappers decide to take a lesson from your trees?’

Now it was Matthew’s turn to laugh. ‘Let’s hope it never comes to that.’

Unable to sleep past daybreak, Uma began to go for long walks in the rubber groves. It was years now since she had risen this early: dawn was a discovery. There were days when teams of rubber tappers would loom suddenly out of the golden early morning mist, with tendrils of fog clinging to their saris and sarongs. They would pass within inches of her, oblivious of her presence, utterly absorbed in keeping pace with each other, their scythe-like knives glinting in the half-light as they peeled slivers of bark from the tree trunks.

On one of these early morning walks, Uma became aware that she was being followed. She looked over her shoulder, and saw a figure slipping out of view: it was either a boy or a man, she couldn’t tell. It was easy to lose sight of things in the rubber groves, especially in the half-light of dawn. The arrangement of the trees was such that things would slip away, from one line of sight into another, and you’d have no idea where they were in relation to yourself.

The next day, hearing the crackle of leaves behind her, it was she who hid herself. This time she was able to catch a glimpse of him in the distance: it was a boy, thin, lanky and dark. He was dressed in a shirt and checked sarong. She took him to be one of the worker’s children.

‘You, there. .’ she called out, her voice echoing through the tunnels of foliage. ‘Who are you? Come here.’ She caught a glimpse of the whites of his eyes, flaring suddenly in the darkness. Then he disappeared.

Back at the house, Uma described the boy to Alison. ‘Do you know who he might be?’

‘Yes.’ Alison nodded. ‘His name is Ilongo. He’s from the coolie lines. Was he following you?’

‘Yes.’

‘He does that sometimes. Don’t worry; he’s completely harmless. We call him Morningside’s village idiot.’

Uma decided to befriend the boy. She set about it carefully, taking little gifts with her each morning, usually fruit, rambutans, mangoes or mangosteens. On catching sight of him she’d stop and call out, ‘Ilongo, Ilongo, come here.’ Then she’d put her offering down on the ground and walk away. Soon, he became confident enough to approach her. The first few times, she made no attempt to talk. She set down her gifts and watched him retrieve them, from a distance. He was about ten, but tall for his age, and very thin. His eyes were large and very expressive: looking into them, she could not believe that he was a simpleton.

‘Ilongo,’ she said to him one day, in English, ‘why do you follow me around?’ When he didn’t answer she switched to Hindustani, asking the same question again.

This produced an immediate effect: spitting out an orange seed, he suddenly began to speak.

‘After my mother leaves for Muster, I don’t like to stay in the house, all by myself.’

‘Are you alone at home then?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about your father?’

‘My father isn’t here.’

‘Why? Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you never met him?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘No. But my mother has a picture of him: he’s an important man, my mother says.’

‘Can I see the picture?’

‘I’ll have to ask my mother.’ Then something startled him and he vanished into the trees.

A couple of days later, walking past a line of rubber tappers, Ilongo pointed to a woman with a strong, square face and a silver nose ring. ‘That’s my mother,’ he said. Uma made as though to approach her and the boy panicked. ‘No. She’s working now. The conductor will fine her.’

‘But I’d like to talk to her.’

‘Later. At our house. Come here at five, and I’ll take you.’

That evening, Uma walked with Ilongo to the line of shacks where he lived. Their dwelling was small but neat and bare. Ilongo’s mother had changed into a bright, peacock-green sari in anticipation of Uma’s visit. She sent the boy out to play and set a pot of water on the fire, for tea.

‘Ilongo said you had a picture of his father.’

‘Yes.’ She handed over a piece of fading newsprint.

Uma recognised the face at first glance. She realised now that she’d known all along, without wanting to acknowledge it to herself. She shut her eyes and turned the picture over so that she wouldn’t have to look at it. It was Rajkumar.

‘Do you know who this man is?’ she said at last.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know that he’s married?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did it happen? Between you and him?’

‘They sent me to him. On the ship, when I was coming over. They called me out of the hold and took me up to his cabin. There was nothing I could do.’

‘That was the only time?’

‘No. For years afterwards, whenever he was here he’d send for me. He wasn’t so bad, better than some others. One time, I saw a picture of his wife and I said to him, she’s so beautiful, like a princess — what do you want with a woman like me?’

‘What did he say?’

‘He told me that his wife had turned away from the world; that she’d lost interest in her home and her family, in him. .’

‘And when was the last time you saw him?’

‘Many years ago. He stopped coming after I told him I was pregnant.’

‘Did he not want to have anything to do with the boy— with Ilongo?’

‘No. But he sends money.’

‘Why haven’t you spoken to his wife? Or to Mr or Mrs Martins? They could do something. What he’s done is very wrong: he can’t be allowed to abandon you like this.’

Ilongo’s mother glanced at her visitor and saw that her face was flushed with indignation on her behalf. Now a note of anxiety entered the matter-of-fact tone of her voice. ‘Madame, you won’t speak of this to anyone?’

‘You can be sure that I will,’ Uma retorted. ‘This is a shameful business. I’ll go to the police if I need to. .’

At this the woman panicked. She came quickly across the room and sank to her knees at Uma’s feet. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘No. No. Please understand. I know you mean to help me but you are an outsider. You do not know how things are here.’

‘What do you want then?’ Uma rose angrily to her feet. ‘Do you want that I should just let this pass? That he should get away with it?’

‘This is my business. You have no right to speak of this to anyone. .’

Uma was breathing heavily, her chest heaving in anger. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘This man should be punished for what he has done to you — to you and to his own wife and family. Why do you want to keep this matter hidden?’

‘Because it will not help me to see him punished: it will only make things worse for everyone. The money will stop; there’ll be trouble. I am not a child: it is not for you to take this decision on my behalf. .’

Tears of frustration welled up in Uma’s eyes. She’d often railed against women who allowed themselves to be trapped within labyrinths of fear — but now, confronted with this circumstance she was helpless, herself a part of the maze.

‘. . Madame, I want you to give me your word that you will not speak of this: I will not let you leave until you have.’

There was nothing Uma could do but produce a forced nod of assent.

nineteen

From that point on, Uma’s journey began to acquire an involuntary, dream-like quality, with impressions and events following scattershot on each other, like hailstones battering against a netted screen.

At Morningside, on the last day of her stay, Uma had a conversation with Dinu that took her completely by surprise. She’d noticed that Dolly spent an inordinate amount of time on her own, staying in her room all morning and rarely making an appearance downstairs before noon.

Succumbing to curiosity, Uma asked Dinu: ‘Why doesn’t Dolly have breakfast with us? Why does she come down so late?’

Dinu gave her a glance of surprise: ‘Don’t you know? She does her te-ya-tai in the morning.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know how to explain. . I suppose you could say she meditates.’

‘Oh.’ Uma paused to digest this. ‘And when did this start?’

‘I don’t know. She’s been doing it ever since I can remember. . Was there a time when she didn’t?’

‘I don’t remember. .’

Uma changed the subject abruptly and didn’t touch on it again.

The next stop on Uma’s itinerary was none other than Rangoon. Her trip had been so planned as to allow her to make the journey over from Malaya in the company of Dolly, Neel and Dinu. She was to stay with Dolly and Rajkumar for one month, before sailing on to Calcutta. While planning the trip, it was this leg of the journey that Uma had most looked forward to: she had imagined herself and Dolly spending hours together during the voyage, talking as they once had. Now, the prospect filled her with dread.

But once they were on board, the constraints of the last few days disappeared almost magically. Gradually, the old intimacy returned, to the point where Uma could even bring herself to comment on Dolly’s daily periods of seclusion.

One morning, when they were both out on deck, Uma said, ‘You know, Dolly, after we talked that first night, at Morningside, I thought it would be just like the old days. Do you remember, Dolly, at Ratnagiri, how we would talk through the night, and then when we woke up, we would start again, as though falling asleep were just an interruption? At Morningside, every morning, I’d say to myself, today I’ll go for a walk with Dolly and we’ll sit under a tree and look at the sea. But you were never there; you were never even down for breakfast. So one morning, I asked Dinu and he told me why you stayed so late in your room. .’

‘I see.’

‘I tried so hard to tell you about my life and you never said a word about yours; nothing about what’s on your mind or what you do with your time.’

‘What could I say, Uma? If I’d been better with words, perhaps I could have. But I didn’t know what to say. And especially to you. .’

‘Why especially me?’

‘With you I feel that I have to account for myself — provide an explanation.’

Uma saw that this was not untrue. ‘Perhaps you’re right, Dolly. Perhaps I would have found it hard to understand. It’s true that I’m not religious myself — but I would have tried to understand, simply because of you. And I’ll still try, Dolly, if you’ll let me.’

Dolly was silent for a moment. ‘It’s hard to know where to start, Uma. You’ll remember that I wrote to you about Dinu’s illness? After it was over, I found that something had changed in me. I couldn’t go back to the life I’d led before. It wasn’t that I was unhappy with Rajkumar, or that I no longer felt anything for him: it was just that the things I did no longer filled my time or occupied my mind. It was the feeling that you get when your day is empty and there’s nothing to do— except that it went on, day after day. Then I heard about an old friend — we used to call her Evelyn. I heard she was at Sagaing, near Mandalay, and that she had become the head of a thi-la-shin-kyaung—what do you call it? — a Buddhist nunnery. I went up to see her, and I knew at once that that was where I wanted to be — that this would be my life.’

‘Your life!’ Uma stared at her, in shock. ‘But what about the boys?’

‘It’s because of them — and Rajkumar — that I haven’t gone yet. I want to see them settled first — in India perhaps, somewhere away from Burma, at any rate. Once they’re safe, I’ll feel free to go to Sagaing. .’

‘Safe? But aren’t they safe where they are?’

‘Things have changed in Burma, Uma. I feel frightened now. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, and much of it is aimed at Indians.’

‘But why?’

‘Money, politics—’ Dolly paused—‘so many different things, who’s to say? Indian moneylenders have taken over all the farmland; Indians run most of the shops; people say that the rich Indians live like colonialists, lording it over the Burmese. I don’t know what the wrongs and rights of it are, but I know that I feel frightened for the boys — even for Rajkumar. Some time ago, Dinu was shouted at, on the streets: they called him Zerbadi—which is a swear word, for people who’re half-Indian, half-Burmese. And the other day in Rangoon, a crowd surrounded the car and shook their fists at me. I said to them:

“Why are you doing this? What have I done to you?” Instead of giving me an answer, they began to chant Amyotha Kwe Ko Mayukya Pa Net. .’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s a political song: the gist of it is that it’s wrong for Burmese to marry foreigners — that women like me, who’re married to Indians, are traitors to their own people.’

‘Did you say anything to them?’

‘Yes I did. I was very angry. I said: “Do you know that I spent twenty years of my life in exile, with Burma’s last king? Over here you forgot all about us. What little joy we had came from Indians.”’

‘And what did they say to that?’

‘They looked sheepish and went away. But another time— who knows what they would do?’

‘Have you told Rajkumar — that you want the family to leave Burma?’

‘Yes. But of course, he won’t listen. He tells me: “You don’t understand. The economy wouldn’t work without Indian businessmen; the country would collapse. These protests about Indians are the work of agitators and troublemakers who’re just trying to incite the public.” I’ve tried to tell him that it’s he who doesn’t understand; that the Burma of today is not the Burma he came to when he was eleven. But of course he pays no attention. .’ She broke off. ‘You’ll see what it’s like when we get there. .’

The next day, they reached Rangoon. The steamer was manoeuvring itself into position beside the floating pavilion of the Barr Street Passenger Jetty, when Uma spotted Rajkumar standing in the shade of the ornamental eaves. He gave her a broad smile and waved. His hair was greying brightly at the temples and he seemed larger and bulkier than ever, with an immense, bellows-like chest. Uma gritted her teeth and forced a smile on to her face.

They drove to Kemendine in Rajkumar’s new car, a grey 1929 Packard saloon. On the way Rajkumar pointed out the changes in their surroundings. The city seemed transformed beyond recognition to Uma. There were stately hotels, enormous banks, fashionable restaurants, arcaded department stores and even nightclubs. The one landmark that seemed to be proof against these changes was the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It was exactly as Uma remembered, its graceful, gilded hti rising above the city like a benediction.

The Kemendine house had changed too: it still had its haphazard improvised look, but it was much larger now, with added-on floors above and sprawling wings at its side. Everywhere Uma looked there were caretakers, gardeners, chowkidars.

‘How much your house has grown!’ Uma said to Dolly. ‘You could have an army in here if you wanted.’

‘Rajkumar wants it to be large enough for the boys to live in,’ Dolly said. ‘They’re each to have a floor of their own. He sees himself ruling over one of those vast joint families, growing larger with every generation. .’

‘It doesn’t look,’ said Uma, ‘as if you’re going to have a very easy time persuading him to leave.’

‘No. It’s going to be very hard. .’

Later in the day, Dinu brought a Burmese school-friend to see her. His name was Maung Thiha Saw and he was a gawky, eager-looking boy with a great mass of shiny black hair and thick, smudged spectacles. He was as talkative as Dinu was reserved, and he peppered Uma with unexpected questions about America and the Depression.

The day was unnaturally still and airless and it was very hot inside the house. ‘Come,’ said Uma, ‘let’s talk outside — it may be a little cooler.’

They went downstairs and stepped out to walk round the compound. A tall electricity pole stood by the front gate and as they were approaching it, Uma noticed that it had begun to tilt. She came abruptly to a stop and ran a hand over her eyes. Then suddenly her feet grew unsteady. She felt as though her legs were going to pitch her forward.

‘Dinu,’ she cried, ‘what’s happening?’

‘Earthquake!’ Dinu put a hand on her shoulders and they huddled together with their arms round each other. It seemed like a very long time before the heaving in the earth came to a stop. Warily they let go of each other and looked around, taking stock. Suddenly Maung Thiha Saw shouted, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

‘No!’

Uma spun round, just in time to see the great golden hti of the Shwe Dagon toppling over.

Soon after this, Uma made arrangements to travel round Burma with fellow-members of the Indian Independence League. From Rangoon she went eastwards to Moulmein and then turned north to go to Taunggyi, Toungoo, Meiktila and Mandalay. Everywhere she went she could see signs of a widening rift between Indians and their Burmese neighbours. Amongst students and nationalists an agitation was under way to separate Burma’s administration from that of British India. Many Indians saw this as a cause for alarm, believing that their safety would be threatened by a separation.

Uma was riven by this controversy: she sympathized with the fears of the Indian minority and yet it troubled her that they believed their safety lay in what she saw as the root cause of the problem — the pattern of imperial rule and its policy of ensuring its necessity through the division of its subjects. On returning to Rangoon, Uma was quick to offer Dolly an apology: ‘Dolly, I hope you’ll forgive me for treating your fears so lightly. I can see now that there’s a lot to worry about. Frankly I feel utterly confused. .’

A few days before her departure for Calcutta, Uma went for an early morning drive with Dolly in the grey Packard. They went first to Rangoon’s Churchill Road, to look at the house where Queen Supayalat had died, a few years before.

‘Did you ever see her again, Dolly?’ Uma asked.

‘No.’ Dolly slowly shook her head. ‘As far as she was concerned, I was in the same boat as the Second Princess: banished for ever from her presence.

On the way back, they drove past the Sule Pagoda and found the streets unusually quiet for that time of day. ‘I wonder why there are no rickshaws, no hawkers. .’ Dolly paused to look around. ‘How odd: I can’t see a single Indian on the street.’

In the distance, at a street corner there was a long line of men. As the Packard rolled past, they saw that the men were queueing to have tattoo-like designs painted on their chests. Dolly’s reaction was instantaneous. She leant over to shake U Ba Kyaw’s shoulder.

‘Dolly — what’s the matter? What’s happening?’

‘We have to turn round. We have to go back — back to the house.’

‘Because of those men? Why? Does it have something to do with those tattoos?’

‘Those weren’t tattoos, Uma. Those designs were for soldiers who’re going to war. .’ Dolly began to drum her fist distractedly on her knees. ‘I think there’s going to be some kind of trouble. We have to find out where the boys are— where Rajkumar is. If we’re quick maybe we’ll be able to stop them leaving the house.’

Some twenty yards ahead of the Packard, a man leapt off a footpath and ran into the street. Uma and Dolly noticed him when he appeared in one corner of the Packard’s wide, curved windscreen. He was an Indian, a rickshaw-puller, dressed in a tattered vest and a longyi. He was running hard and beads of sweat were flying off his arms. One of his hands was clawing the air, and the other was holding up his longyi, keeping it from getting entangled in his legs. His face was dark and his eyes very white and bulbous. Two steps carried him from the edge of their windscreen to its middle; he turned to glance over his shoulder and his eyes started in his head. Now they saw that he was being closely pursued by a man who was just two steps behind him. This man was bare-bodied and a black design was painted over his chest. He was carrying something but they couldn’t see what it was, because it was hidden beneath the edge of their windscreen. Then, all of a sudden, the pursuer swung his shoulders and drew his arms back, in the manner of a tennis player preparing to make a stroke. They saw now that the instrument in his hands was a da, a long, glinting blade with a short handle, part sword, part axe. They sat transfixed in their seats as the da scythed through the air in a circular motion. The rickshaw-puller had almost reached the far end of their windscreen when suddenly his head toppled over like a lopped-off branch, hanging down over his spine, held on by a thin flap of skin. But the body did not fall instantly to the ground: for a fraction of a second the decapitated trunk stayed upright. They saw it advance by one more step before crashing to the pavement.

Uma’s first impulse was to reach for the door handle. ‘What are you doing?’ Dolly screamed. ‘Stop.’

‘We have to help, Dolly. We can’t just leave him on the street. .’

‘Uma, have you gone mad?’ Dolly hissed. ‘If you get out of the car now, you’ll be killed too.’ She gave Uma a push, thrusting her on to the floor of the car. ‘You have to hide, Uma. We can’t run the risk of your being seen.’ She made Uma lie flat and then ripped the cloth covers off the Packard’s back seat. ‘I’m going to cover you with these. Lie still and don’t say a word.’

Uma put her head down on the floor-mat and closed her eyes. The rickshaw-puller’s face appeared in front of her: she saw his head once again, toppling backwards. In that instant when the decapitated body had still been upright, still moving forward, she had caught a glimpse of those white eyes, hanging down over his spine: their gaze had appeared to be directed into the car, right at her. Uma felt her gorge rise and then vomit came pouring of her mouth and her nose, fouling the floor-mat.

‘Dolly.’ Just as she was beginning to raise her head, Dolly gave her a sharp nudge. The car came to a sudden stop and she froze, with her face inches from the vomit-covered mat. Somewhere above Dolly was talking to someone — a group of men — she was explaining something in Burmese. The conversation took just a minute or two, but an eternity seemed to pass before the car moved on again.

The riots lasted several days and the casualties numbered in the hundreds. The toll would have been higher still, if it had not been for the many Burmese who had rescued Indians from the mob and sheltered them in their homes. It was discovered later that the trouble had started with a clash between Indian and Burmese workers at the docks. Many Indian- and Chinese-owned businesses were attacked, among them one of Rajkumar’s timberyards. Three of his workers were killed and dozens were injured.

Rajkumar was at home when the trouble broke out. Neither he nor anyone else in the family suffered any personal injury. Neel happened to be safely out of town when the riots started, and Dinu was taken home from school by his friend, Maung Thiha Saw.

Despite his losses Rajkumar was now more adamant than ever about remaining in Burma: ‘I’ve lived here all my life; everything I have is here. I’m not such a coward as to give up everything I’ve worked for at the first sign of trouble. And anyway, what makes you think that we’ll be any more welcome in India than we are here? There are riots in India all the time — how do you know that the same thing wouldn’t happen to us there?’

Uma saw that Dolly was near collapse and she decided to stay on in Rangoon, to help her cope. A week became a month and then another. Every time she spoke of leaving Dolly asked her to stay on a little longer: ‘It’s not over yet— I can feel something in the air.’

As the weeks passed, there was a deepening of the sense of unease that had settled on the city. There were more strange events. There was talk of trouble at the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum, where several thousand homeless Indians had been accommodated after the riots. In the city gaol a mutiny erupted among the prisoners and was suppressed at the cost of many lives. There were whispers of an even greater upheaval in the offing.

One day a stranger stopped Dolly on the street: ‘Is it true that you worked in the Mandalay palace, in the time of King Thebaw?’ When Dolly answered in the affirmative the stranger gave her a smile. ‘Prepare yourself: there is soon to be another coronation. A prince has been found who will liberate Burma. .’

A few days later they learnt that there had indeed been a coronation of sorts, not far from Rangoon: a healer by the name of Saya San had had himself crowned King of Burma, with all the traditional observances. He’d gathered together a motley band of soldiers and told them to avenge the capture of King Thebaw.

These rumours reminded Uma of the events that preceded the outbreak of the Indian uprising of 1857. Then too, well before the firing of the first shot, signs of trouble had appeared on the north Indian plains. Chapatis — those most unremarkable of everyday foods — had begun to circulate from village to village, as though in warning. No one knew where they came from or who had put them in motion — but somehow people had known that a great convulsion was on its way.

Uma’s premonition was proved right. The uprising started in the interior of Tharawaddy district, where a forest official and two village headmen were killed; the next day rebels stormed a railway station. A company of Indian troops was sent to hunt down the insurgents. But suddenly the rebels were everywhere: in Insein, Yamthin and Pyapon. They appeared like shadows from the forest, with magical designs painted on their bodies. They fought like men possessed, running bare-chested into gunfire, attacking aeroplanes with catapults and spears. Thousands of rural folk declared their allegiance to the King-in-waiting. The colonial authorities fought back by sending more Indian reinforcements to root out the rebellion. Villages were occupied, hundreds of Burmese were killed and thousands wounded.

For Uma, the uprising and the means of its suppression were the culmination of a month-long nightmare: it was as though she were witnessing the realisation of her worst fears; once again. Indian soldiers were being used to fortify the Empire. Nobody in India seemed to know of these events; no one seemed to care. It seemed imperative that someone should take on the task of letting the people of her country know.

It so happened that KLM, the Dutch airline, had recently started a plane service linking a chain of cities between Batavia and Amsterdam. There were now regular flights between Rangoon’s new airstrip at Mingaladon and Calcutta’s Dum Dum. The journey from Rangoon to Calcutta took some six hours — a fraction of the sailing time. Uma was by now too distraught to undertake the four-day steamship voyage: Rajkumar bought her a ticket on KLM.

In the Packard, on the way out to the airstrip at Mingaladon, Uma became tearful. ‘I can’t believe what I’ve seen here — the same old story, Indians being made to kill for the Empire, fighting people who should be their friends. .’

She was interrupted by Rajkumar: ‘Uma, you’re talking nonsense.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Uma, have you for one moment stopped to ask yourself what would happen if these soldiers weren’t used? You were here during the riots: you saw what happened. What do you think these rebels would do to us — to me, to Dolly, to the boys? Don’t you see that it’s not just the Empire those soldiers are protecting, it’s also Dolly and me?’

The anger that Uma had held contained since Morningside came welling up. ‘Rajkumar, you’re in no position to offer opinions. It’s people like you who’re responsible for this tragedy. Did you ever think of the consequences when you were transporting people here? What you and your kind have done is far worse than the worst deeds of the Europeans.’

As a rule Rajkumar never challenged Uma on political matters. But he was on edge too now, and something snapped. ‘You have so many opinions, Uma — about things of which you know nothing. For weeks now I’ve heard you criticising everything you see: the state of Burma, the treatment of women, the condition of India, the atrocities of the Empire. But what have you yourself ever done that qualifies you to hold these opinions? Have you ever built anything? Given a single person a job? Improved anyone’s life in any way? No. All you ever do is stand back, as though you were above all of us, and you criticise and criticise. Your husband was as fine a man as any I’ve ever met, and you hounded him to his death with your self-righteousness.’

‘How dare you?’ Uma cried. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? You — an animal, with your greed, your determination to take whatever you can — at whatever cost. Do you think nobody knows about the things you’ve done to people in your power — to women and children who couldn’t defend themselves? You’re no better than a slaver and a rapist, Rajkumar. You may think that you will never have to answer for the things you’ve done, but you’re wrong.’

Without a further word to Uma, Rajkumar leant over to U Ba Kyaw and told him to stop the car. Then he stepped out on the road and said to Dolly: ‘I’ll find my own way back to the city. You see her off. I don’t want anything to do with her.’

At Mingaladon, Uma and Dolly found the plane waiting on the airstrip. It was a trimotor Fokker F-VIII, with a silver fuselage and wings that were held up by struts. Once they were out of the car, Dolly said in hushed voice: ‘Uma, you’re very angry with Rajkumar and I suspect I know why. But you should not judge him too harshly, you know; you must remember that I too bear some of the guilt. .’

They were at the gates; Uma held Dolly fast.

‘Dolly, will this change everything — for us, you and me?’

‘No. Of course not. I’ll come to see you in Calcutta, whenever I can. It’ll be all right — you’ll see?’