The Glass Palace

twenty-five

Manju and Neel had not been married quite three months when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, declared war on Germany, on behalf of Britain and her Empire. With the start of the war, an Air Raid Precautions scheme was prepared for Rangoon. The city was divided into sections and an ARP committee was formed for each. Medical officers were taught to deal with gas injuries; wardens were shown how to identify incendiary bombs; fire-fighting parties were formed and first-aid centres were set up. Rangoon’s water table was too high to allow the building of underground shelters, but slit trenches were dug at strategic points around the city. Periodically there were ‘blackouts’; trains entered and left the Rangoon railway station with darkened windows; wardens and civic guards stayed on duty through the night.

There was nothing unsatisfactory about the conduct of these exercises: the city’s inhabitants followed their instructions good-humouredly and disturbances were few. But there was no denying the fact that a Rangoon blackout had more the feel of a performance than a drill: the public seemed to be going through the motions without being persuaded either of the imminence of war, or of its possible bearing on their lives. Certainly, in Burma, as in India, public opinion was deeply divided: in both places many important personages had expressed their support of the colonial Government. But many could also be heard to voice bitter condemnation of Britain’s declaration of war on their behalf, without any binding guarantees of eventual independence. The mood among Burma’s student activists was summed up in a slogan coined by a charismatic young student leader, Aung San: Colonialism’s difficulty, he said, was Freedom’s opportunity. One day, Aung San disappeared: a rumour circulated that he was on his way to China to seek the support of the Communists. Later it came to be known that he had gone instead to Japan.

But these concerns were relatively distant from the life of the streets, where people seemed mainly to regard the ARP exercises as a species of entertainment, a mass diversion. Merrymakers strolled blithely through the darkened thoroughfares; young people flirted unseen in the parks; filmgoers flocked to see Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka at the Metro; When Tomorrow Comes had a long run at the Excelsior, and Irene Dunne was enshrined as one of the city’s idols. At the Silver Grill on Fytche Square, cabarets and dancing continued as usual.

Dinu and his friend, Thiha Saw, were among the few who dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to the Air Raid Precautions scheme. At this time, both Dinu and Thiha Saw were deeply involved in student union politics. They were on the far left of the political spectrum and were involved in the publication of an anti-Fascist magazine. Participating in civil defences seemed a natural extension of their political work.

Dinu still lived at the Kemendine compound, in a couple of rooms at the top of the house. But at home, he made no mention of the work he was doing as an ARP warden — partly because he knew that Neel would tell him that he was wasting his time and needed to do some real work, and partly also because experience had led him to assume that his opinions would always be violently at odds with his father’s. This was why he was taken completely by surprise at an ARP warden’s meeting when he found himself suddenly face-to-face with none other than his father.

‘You?’

‘You!’ There was no telling which of them was the more astonished.

After this encounter, there developed — for the first time ever — a brief bond between Rajkumar and Dinu. The outbreak of war had brought them through opposite routes to a shared position: Rajkumar had come to be convinced that in the absence of the British Empire, Burma’s economy would collapse. Dinu’s support for the Allied war effort was rooted in other kinds of soil: in his leftist sympathies; in his support for the resistance movements in China and Spain; in his admiration of Charlie Chaplin and Robert Capa. Unlike his father, he was not a believer in colonialism — indeed his antipathy to British rule was surpassed only by his loathing of European Fascism and Japanese militarism.

Whatever the reasons, this was an instance when father and son were in agreement — a situation that was without precedent in the memories of either. For the first time in their lives, they were working together — attending meetings, discussing such matters as the necessity of importing gas masks and the design of wartime posters. So novel was this experience that they both relished it in silence, speaking of it neither at home nor anywhere else.

One night an ARP blackout was accompanied by a thunderstorm. Despite the rain Rajkumar insisted on accompanying the wardens on their rounds. He was drenched when he got home. The next morning he woke up shivering. A doctor came and diagnosed pneumonia. Rajkumar was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

For the first few days, Rajkumar was barely conscious, unable to recognise Dolly, Dinu or Neel. His condition was judged to be serious enough for the doctors to bar all visitors. For several days he lay in a near-coma.

Then, slowly, the fever began to recede.

In his periods of lucidity Rajkumar took stock of his surroundings. It so happened that chance had brought him to a familiar place: the hospital room that Dolly and Dinu had occupied twenty-four years before. Looking around his bed, Rajkumar recognised the view from the window: the Shwe Dagon was framed exactly as he remembered. The blue and white curtains were slightly faded but still spotless and crisply starched; the tiled floors were, as ever, sparkling clean; and the dark, heavy furniture was recognisably the same, with inventory numbers stencilled on the varnished wood, in white paint.

When at last he was well enough to sit up, Rajkumar saw that the room had two additions. One was a Carrier air conditioner and the other a bedside radio — a 7-valve Paillard, with a ‘magic eye’, a metal cabinet, and chromium-plated mountings. The air conditioner Rajkumar had no use for, but the radio intrigued him. He flipped a switch and found himself listening to a station in Singapore: a newsreader’s voice was recounting the latest developments in the war, describing the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk.

After this, Rajkumar kept the radio on most of the time. Each night the nurse would turn it off when she was extinguishing the lights; Rajkumar would wait for her footsteps to die away before turning it on again. He would lie on his side and spin the knob, coasting from station to station. Twenty-four years before, at the time of Dolly’s stay in that room, Europe had been convulsed by another war. Dolly too had stayed awake in this room, listening to the sounds of the night. But the whispers she’d heard had come from within the hospital: now, the room was filled with voices from around the world — London, New Delhi, Chungking, Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney. The voices spoke with such urgency and insistence that Rajkumar began to feel that he had lost touch with the flow of events; that he had become one of those men who sleepwalk their way to disaster by failing to note the significance of what was happening round them.

For the first time in many years, he allowed himself to think about the way he had been running his businesses. Day after day, month after month, he’d tried to handle every decision, review all the daily accounts, visit each location, every mill, every yard and outlet. He had been running his company as though it were a food-stall in a bazaar, and in the process he had blinded himself to the wider context.

Neel had long been pushing for a bigger role in the running of the business; Rajkumar had responded by trying to shut him out. He’d handed him money and told him to go and put it in films — as though he were buying off a child with packets of sweets. The ploy had worked, if only because Neel was too much in awe of him to challenge his authority. Now, the business was foundering. This was a fact that he’d refused to face. He’d suppressed hints from his accountants and managers, shouted at them when they tried to give him warning. And the stark fact was that he had no one to blame but himself: he had simply lost sight of what he was doing, and why.

As he lay listening to the radio’s crackling voices, remorse settled on Rajkumar like a damp, stilling quilt. The doctors pronounced him to be well on the way to a complete recovery but his family could see no sign of an improvement, in either his manner or his appearance. He was in his mid-sixties at this time, but looked much older: his eyebrows had turned grey and bushy and his cheeks had begun to sag into overlapping dewlaps and jowls. He seemed scarcely to register the presence of the people who came to his room to see him; often when they tried to speak to him, he would silence them by turning up the radio.

One day Dolly unplugged the radio and shut the door. ‘Rajkumar, what’s on your mind? Tell me.’

At first he wouldn’t speak but she prodded him until he answered.

‘I’ve been thinking, Dolly.’

‘What about? Tell me.’

‘Do you remember how you and Dinu were in this room, that time. .?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘That night, at Huay Zedi, when Dinu was ill and you said we had to get him to a hospital — I thought you were hysterical. I went along just for your sake. .’

She smiled: ‘Yes. I know.’

‘But you were right.’

‘It was just luck — a premonition.’

‘That’s what you say. But when I look back now, I can see that you often are right. Even though you live so quietly, shut away in the house, you seem to know more about what’s happening in the world than I do.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve been thinking about what you’ve been saying these many years, Dolly.’

‘What exactly?’

‘That we should leave.’

With a long sigh of relief, Dolly reached for his hand. ‘So you’ve been thinking of that at last?’

‘Yes. But it’s hard, Dolly — it’s hard to think of leaving: Burma has given me everything I have. The boys have grown up here: they’ve never known any other home. When I first came to Mandalay the nakhoda of my boat said: This is a golden land — no one ever starves here. That proved true for me, and despite everything that’s happened recently, I don’t think I could ever love another place in the same way. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my life, Dolly, it is that there is no certainty about these things. My father was from Chittagong and he ended up in the Arakan; I ended up in Rangoon; you went from Mandalay to Ratnagiri and now you’re here too. Why should we expect that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives here? There are people who have the luck to end their lives where they began them. But this is not something that is owed to us. On the contrary, we have to expect that a time will come when we’ll have to move on again. Rather than be swept along by events, we should make plans and take control of our own fate.’

‘What are you trying to say, Rajkumar?’

‘Just that it doesn’t matter whether I think of Burma as home or not. What matters is what people think of us. And it’s plain enough that men like me are now seen as the enemy— on all sides. This is the reality and I have to acknowledge it. My job now is to find a way of making sure that Dinu and Neel are provided for.’

‘Surely they’re provided for already?’

Rajkumar paused before answering. ‘Dolly, I think you’re aware that the business hasn’t been doing well lately. But you probably don’t know the full extent of it.’

‘And how bad is that?’

‘It’s not good, Dolly,’ he said quietly. ‘There are debts— many of them.’

‘But, Rajkumar, if we sold the house, the yards, our share in Morningside — surely something would be left so that the boys could make a start somewhere else?’

Rajkumar began to cough. ‘That wouldn’t work, Dolly. As things stand at this minute, even if we sold everything it still wouldn’t be enough. As for Morningside, Matthew has troubles of his own, you know. Rubber was very badly hit by the Depression. We can’t rush into this, Dolly — that way we’re sure to run into disaster. This has to be done very, very carefully. We have to give it time. .’

‘I don’t know, Rajkumar.’ Dolly began to pick worriedly at the end of her htamein. ‘Things are happening so fast now— people say that the war may spread; that Japan may get into it; that they could even attack Burma.’

Rajkumar smiled. ‘That’s impossible, Dolly. You just have to look at a map. To get here the Japanese would have to come across Singapore and Malaya. Singapore is one of the most heavily defended places in the world. The British have tens of thousands of troops there. There are thirty-six-inch guns all along the shore. We can’t be chasing after smoke, Dolly, we can’t do things in a panic. If this is to work, we have to be realistic, we have to make careful plans.’

Dolly leant over him to fluff up the pillows on his bed. ‘So do you have a plan then?’

‘Not yet, but I’ve been thinking. Whatever we do, it’ll take time — at least a year, maybe more. You have to prepare yourself. I want to make it possible for us to leave Burma with enough so that the boys can settle comfortably somewhere — in India, or wherever they want to go.’

‘And after that?’

‘The two of us will be free.’

‘To do what?’

‘Well, you’ve already decided — you want to live in Sagaing.’ ‘And what about you?’

‘Perhaps I’ll come back too, Dolly. I sometimes think of living quietly in Huay Zedi — I’m sure Doh Say would have a place for me — and it wouldn’t be so far from you.’

Dolly laughed. ‘So you’re going to sell everything, uproot all of us, go through all this, just to come back and live quietly in Huay Zedi?’

‘It’s not for myself that I’m thinking of doing this, Dolly— it’s for the boys.’

Rajkumar smiled and allowed his head to fall back against his pillows. Once before in his life, he had known himself to be at a crossroads — that was when he was trying to get his first contract, for the Chota-Nagpur Railway. He’d thought hard and come up with a plan that had worked, laying the foundations of his future success. This time too he would have to think of something, a plan that would work: this would be his last challenge, the last hill to cross. After that he would rest. There was no shame in growing old and seeking rest.

The first months of the war found Arjun and his battalion on the frontiers of Afghanistan. Arjun was on garrison duty, at a small outpost called Charbagh, near the Khyber Pass. The border was quiet — unusually so, the older officers said — and the conflict in Europe seemed very far away. Charbagh was manned by a single company of soldiers, Arjun being the sole officer. The surroundings were spectacularly beautiful: craggy, ochre mountains, streaked with great slashes of brilliantly coloured rock. There was little to do apart from daily drills, barracks inspections and occasional marches with training columns. Arjun spent long hours reading and soon ran out of books.

At regular fortnightly intervals, the battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bucky’ Buckland, stopped by on tours of inspection. The CO was a tall, professorial-looking man with a ruff of wiry hair clinging to the base of his high-domed, balding head.

‘And what do you do with your time, Lieutenant?’ the CO asked offhandedly on one of his visits. ‘Do you shoot at all? I’ve heard there’s plenty of game to be had here.’

‘Actually, sir,’ Arjun said quietly, ‘I read books. .’

‘Oh?’ The CO turned to look at him with new interest. ‘I didn’t take you for a reader. And may I ask what you read?’

Their tastes proved to be complementary: the CO introduced Arjun to Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. Arjun lent him his copies of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. These exchanges became a pleasurable part of Arjun’s life at Charbagh and he began to look forward to the CO’s visits. In between there were long days when nothing happened. There was little to do apart from talking to the occasional traveller.

Late in the summer, Arjun’s friend Hardy stopped by on his way to his own post, atop the Khyber Pass. Hardy was a quiet, clear-eyed man of medium height and average build. Whether in or out of uniform he was always neatly dressed— with the folds of his turban layered in precise order and his beard combed tight against his chin. Despite his soldiering background, Hardy did not in any way resemble the Sikh warriors of military lore — he was soft-spoken and slow-moving, with an expression of habitual sleepiness. He had a good ear for a tune and was usually the first in the mess to learn the latest Hindi film songs. It was his habit — annoying to some and entertaining to others — to hum these melodies under his breath as he went about his work. These quirks sometimes brought him a little more than his fair share of ‘ragging’—yet his friends knew that there were certain limits beyond which he could not be goaded: although generally slow to take offence, Hardy was inflexible when roused and had a long memory for grudges.

Hardy had just spent a period of leave in his village. On his first night at Charbagh he told Arjun about some odd rumours that he’d heard during his stay. Most of his neighbours had relatives in the army, and some of them had spoken of incidents of unrest: troops were said to be resisting transfer orders abroad. In Bombay, a Sikh unit — a squadron of the Central India Horse — was said to have mutinied. They had lain down their weapons and refused to board the ship that was to take them to North Africa. Two men had been executed. A dozen others had been exiled to the prisons of the Andaman Islands. Some of these men were from Hardy’s own village: there could be no doubt about the reliability of these reports.

Arjun was astonished to hear this. ‘You should tell Bucky,’ he said. ‘He should know.’

‘He must know already,’ Hardy said. ‘And if he hasn’t said anything to us, it must be for a reason. .’ They looked at each other uneasily and dropped the subject: neither of them mentioned these stories to anyone else.

A few months later the 1/1 Jats moved back to their battalion’s base at Saharanpur, near Delhi. With the descent into the plains the rhythms of their life underwent a dramatic change. The army was now expanding at a furious pace: regiments were raising new battalions and headquarters was looking everywhere for experienced personnel. Like every other battalion in the regiment, the 1/1 Jats were milked of several officers and NCOs. Suddenly they found themselves struggling to fill the gaps in their ranks. Newly recruited companies were sent up from the battalion’s training centre and a fresh batch of officers arrived, as replacements for those who’d left. The new officers consisted mainly of expatriate British civilians with Emergency Commissions — men who had until recently held jobs as planters, businessmen and engineers. They had little experience of the Indian army and its intricate customs and procedures.

Arjun and Hardy were both full lieutenants now and they were among the few regular army officers left in the unit. Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland began to depend on them more and more for the day-to-day running of the battalion.

First he saddled them with the job of forming a new administrative platoon. Then, sooner than anyone had expected, the battalion’s motorised transport was brought up to authorised strength. Three dozen fifteen-hundredweight trucks arrived, along with a dozen smaller lorries. It was discovered that the battalion had mule-trainers aplenty, but lacked drivers. Arjun was taken off the administrative platoon and appointed Motor Transport Officer. It fell to him to teach the new drivers the tricks of threading heavyweight trucks through Saharanpur’s narrow alleys and bazaars.

Even as the battalion was adjusting to its new vehicles, a shipment of armaments was sent up from New Delhi: 3-inch mortars, tommy guns and Vickers-Berthier light machine guns. Then came three Bren guns, with their carriers, six medium machine guns and five Boye’s anti-tank rifles, one for each company. Hardy was given the responsibility of running weapons training courses for the men.

Just as Hardy and Arjun were settling cheerfully into their new jobs, the CO turned everything upside down again. He pulled both Arjun and Hardy from their assignments and set them to work on preparing a unit mobilisation scheme.

By this time, most of Arjun and Hardy’s classmates from the Military Academy had already been sent abroad. Some were serving in North Africa, some in Eritrea (where one had won a Victoria Cross), and some in the East — Malaya, Hong Kong and Singapore. Arjun and Hardy assumed that they too would soon be going abroad to join other units of the Indian army. When the CO asked them to draft a mobilisation plan, they took it as a sign that their departure was imminent. But a month went by without any further news, and then another. On New Year’s Eve, they saw 1941 in with a wan celebration. Despite the ban on shop talk at the mess, the conversation kept returning to the question of where they would be sent, east or west — to North Africa or towards Malaya.

Opinion was evenly divided.

Rajkumar was discharged from hospital with strict orders to remain in bed for at least a month. On returning home, he insisted on being moved up to a room at the top of the house. A bed was brought up and placed by a window. Neel bought a radio, a Paillard just like the one in the hospital, and placed it on a table, beside the bed. When everything was exactly as he wanted, Rajkumar lay down, with a wall of pillows against his back, positioning himself so that he’d be able to look across the city, towards the Shwe Dagon.

As the days passed the outlines of a plan began to take shape, very slowly, before his eyes. During the last war the price of timber had soared. The profits he had made then had sustained him for a decade afterwards. It was not too far-fetched to imagine that something similar might happen again. The British and the Dutch were reinforcing their defences throughout the East — in Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Java, Sumatra. It stood to reason that they would need materials. If he could build up a stockpile of timber in his yards, it was possible that he’d be able to sell at a good price next year. The problem was liquidity: he would have to sell or mortgage all his assets to find cash — he would have to get rid of the yards, the mills, the timber concessions, even the Kemendine house. Perhaps he could persuade Matthew to buy him out of Morningside: there might be some cash there.

The more he thought of it, the more plausible the plan seemed. The risks were huge of course, but they always were when anything important was at stake. But the rewards too could be very great; enough to clear his debts and finance a new beginning for Neel and Dinu. And there would be other advantages to arranging things in this way: all his assets would have been disposed of by the time he made his final move. After that he’d be free to leave — nothing to hold him back, nothing more to worry about.

One afternoon, when Dolly brought him his meal, he sketched his plan for her. ‘I think it could work, Dolly,’ he concluded. ‘I think it’s our best chance.’

Dolly had many objections.

‘How is all this to be done, Rajkumar? In your state of health, you can’t be up and about, travelling to Malaya and all that.’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ he said. ‘Neel and Dinu will do the travelling — not me. I’ll tell them what they have to do. One of them can go upcountry; the other can go over to dispose of our part of Morningside.’

Dolly shook her head. ‘Dinu won’t agree. He’s never wanted to have anything to do with the business — you know that.’

‘He doesn’t really have a choice, Dolly. If I were to die today, he would find himself paying off my debts whether he liked it or not. All I’m asking is a few months of his time. After that he’ll be free to follow his own interests.’

Dolly fell silent, and Rajkumar reached out to jog her arm. ‘Say something, Dolly — tell me what you think.’

‘Rajkumar,’ Dolly said quietly, ‘this plan of yours — you do know what they call this kind of thing?’

‘What?’

‘Hoarding — war-profiteering.’

Rajkumar scowled.

‘Hoarding applies to essential commodities, Dolly. That’s not what I’ll be dealing in. There’s nothing illegal about my plan.’

‘I’m not talking about the law. .’

Rajkumar’s tone grew impatient. ‘Dolly, there’s nothing else to be done. We have to take this chance — don’t you see?’

Dolly rose to her feet. ‘Does it really matter what I think, Rajkumar? If this is what you’re set upon, then this is what you’ll do. It is not important what I think.’

Late that night, when the whole house was asleep, the telephone began to ring in a hallway downstairs. Dolly got out of bed and ran to pick it up before it woke Rajkumar. She heard an operator’s voice, crackling down the line, telling her she had a trunk call. The instrument seemed to go dead for a moment, and then she heard Alison’s voice; it was very faint as though she were shouting across a crowded room.

‘Alison?’ She heard a sound that was like a sob. She raised her voice. ‘Alison, is that you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alison — is everything all right?’

‘No. . there’s bad news.’

‘Is it Sayagyi?’

‘No.’ There was a sob again. ‘My parents.’

‘Alison. I’m so sorry. What happened?’

‘They were on holiday. Driving. In the Cameron Highlands.

The car went over an embankment. .’

‘Alison, Alison. .’ Dolly couldn’t think of what she was going to say next. ‘Alison, I’d come myself, if I could, but Rajkumar isn’t well. I can’t leave him. But I’ll send someone— one of the boys, probably Dinu. It may take a few weeks but he’ll be there. I promise you. .’ The line went dead before she could say anything else.

twenty-six

The day before Arjun’s twenty-third birthday he and Hardy borrowed a jeep and drove down to Delhi for the weekend. Walking through the arcades of Connaught Circus, they ran into an acquaintance, Kumar, a debonair and famously fun-loving contemporary of theirs from the academy.

Kumar belonged to the 14th Punjab Regiment and his battalion was currently stationed in Singapore. He was in India only briefly, attending a signals training course. Kumar appeared distracted and preoccupied, very different from his usual high-spirited self. They went out for lunch, and Kumar told them about a very strange incident — something that had caused a lot of unease at headquarters.

At Singapore’s Tyersall Park Camp an Indian soldier had inexplicably shot an officer and then committed suicide. On investigation it was discovered that this was no simple murder-suicide: there were undercurrents of unrest within the battalion. Certain officers of this battalion had been heard to say that Indians should refuse to participate in this war: that this was a competition for supremacy among nations who believed it to be their shared destiny to enslave other peoples — England, France, Germany. There was much concern at headquarters: more than half the troops in Malaya were Indian and it was clear that the colony could become indefensible if unrest were to spread. Despite the incendiary nature of these rumours, the high command had decided on a judicious and measured response. All that was done by way of disciplinary action was to send one of the battalion’s junior officers back to India.

It so happened that the officer who was singled out for censure was a Muslim. When news of his punishment reached his battalion, a company of Muslim soldiers proceeded to lay down their weapons, in a show of sympathy. The next day many of the battalion’s Hindu soldiers also laid down their arms.

At this point the incident assumed a new gravity. For generations, the British Indian army had operated on the principle of maintaining a careful balance between the troops. Every battalion was constituted of companies drawn from different castes and religions — Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jats, Brahmins. Each company had its own mess, run strictly according to the dietary rules of the group from which the troops had been recruited. As an additional safeguard, infantry divisions were so composed that Indian troops were always balanced by a certain number of Australian or British units.

That Hindu and Muslim troops could act together to support an Indian officer came as a shock to the High Command. No one needed to be reminded that nothing of this kind had happened since the Great Mutiny of 1857. At this point half-measures were dispensed with. A platoon of British soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was sent in to surround the mutinous Indians.

Thus far into the story Kumar had told them neither the name of the battalion concerned nor that of the officer who was to be punished. When at last he mentioned these, it became clear that Kumar, like the good raconteur that he was, had been saving his punchline for the last. It turned out that the battalion in question was a brother unit of the 1/1 Jats — a part of a Hyderabad infantry regiment. The officer who was being sent home was someone they had all known well at the academy.

Kumar concluded the story with an offhand observation: ‘Going overseas has disturbing effects on the troops,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘On officers too. You’ll see.’

‘Perhaps it won’t happen to us,’ Hardy said hopefully. ‘There’s no certainty that we’ll be sent abroad. They’ll need forces here too, after all. .’

Arjun was quick to challenge this. ‘And what would that do for us?’ he said. ‘For you and me? We’ll sit out the war and our careers will be dead on their feet. I think I’d rather take my chances abroad.’

They walked away in silence, not knowing what to make of this conversation. There was something about Kumar’s story that defied belief. They both knew the officer who’d been punished — he was a quiet kind of man, from a middle-class family. He needed his job if nothing else. What had made him do what he’d done? It was hard to understand.

And if the story was true — and they were by no means sure of this — then the incident had other implications too. It meant for example that the other ranks were now taking their cues from their Indian officers rather than the High Command. But this was worrying — to them no less than to the High Command — for if the men were to lose faith in the structure of command, then the Indian officers too would eventually be rendered redundant. Only by making common cause with their British counterparts could they hope to prevent this. What would happen if there really were to be a fissure? How would the men respond? There was no telling.

Disquieting as the subject was, Arjun felt oddly exhilarated: it was an uncommon responsibility to be faced with such questions at the age of twenty-three.

That night they changed into kurtas and churidar pyjamas and went to a dancer’s kotha near Ajmeri Gate. The dancer was in her forties and her face was painted white, with eyebrows that were as thin as wires. At first glance she looked stony and unattractive, but when she stood up to dance the hardness in her face melted away: her body was supple and lithe and there was a marvellous lightness in her feet. As the tabla’s tempo increased she began to spin, whirling in time to the beat. Her gauzy knee-length angarkha corkscrewed around her, in tight spirals. The aureoles of her breasts stood outlined against the thin, white cloth. Arjun’s throat went dry. When the tabla sounded its climactic stroke, her index finger came to rest on Arjun’s forehead. She beckoned to him to follow her.

Arjun turned to Hardy in astonishment and his friend smiled and gave him a nudge. ‘Go, yaar, it’s your birthday isn’t it? Jaa.’

Arjun followed the dancer up a flight of narrow stairs. Her room was small, with a low ceiling. She undressed him slowly, picking at the drawstring of his cotton churidar pyjamas with her nails. When he reached for her she pushed his hand away with a laugh.

‘Wait.’

She made him lie face down on the bed and massaged a handful of oil into his back, her fingertips tripping over the knuckles of his spine in imitation of the rhythms of a dancer’s feet. When at last she lay down beside him she was still fully clothed. He reached for her breasts and she pushed his hand away: ‘No, not that.’ She undid her drawstring and guided him into her body, watching with a smile, as he lay on her. When he was done she slipped quickly away, and it was as though nothing at all happened: even her drawstring seemed instantly back in place.

She put a finger under his chin and tipped his head back, puckering her lips as though she were looking at a beautiful child.

‘So young,’ she said. ‘Just a boy.’

‘I’m twenty-three,’ he said proudly.

She laughed. ‘You look sixteen.’

When Alison first broke the news of her parents’ deaths to Saya John, his response had consisted of nothing more than a slight smile. A series of questions had followed, asked almost playfully, as though the situation that was under discussion was at best a remote possibility — an imaginative hypothesis that Alison had propounded in order to explain her parents’ prolonged absence from the dinner table.

Alison had been so afraid of the impact the news might have on her grandfather that she had gone to great lengths to compose herself, caking make-up over the discolourations of her face and tying a scarf over her disarranged hair. Every eventuality that she could think of she had tried to prepare herself for. But the sight of her grandfather’s childlike smile proved beyond her bearing. She got up and ran out of the room.

Saya John was now in his late eighties. His lifelong regimen of early-morning exercise had served him well, and he was in relatively sound health. His hearing had not deteriorated greatly and although his eyesight had never been good, he was still able to see his way round the house and grounds. Before the accident his advancing age had occasionally betrayed itself in a tendency towards confusion. He would often forget things that had been said to him minutes before, while still being able to recall, in minute detail, events that had occurred forty or fifty years before. The accident greatly accelerated this tendency: Alison could see that contrary to his pretence, the news of her parents’ deaths had indeed registered on her grandfather’s mind. But his response was not unlike that of a child’s reaction to unwelcome noise: he had figuratively stopped his ears with his fingers, in order to shut out what he did not wish to know. With each passing day he spoke less and less. He would come down to eat with Alison, but he’d sit at the hardwood table in blank silence. Such sentences as he addressed to Alison, would begin, almost invariably, with observations like: ‘When Matthew comes back. .’, or ‘We must remember to tell Elsa. .’

In the beginning Alison responded to these remarks with undisguised fury, slamming her hands on the polished table, and repeating several times over: ‘Matthew is not coming back. .’ At the time nothing seemed more important than that he should make proper acknowledgement of what had happened. In this she envisaged, if not a lessening of her own grief, then at least a sharing of its burden. But he would smile through her outbursts, and at the end he would carry on where she had interrupted him: ‘. . and when they come back. .’

It seemed somehow indecent, even obscene — a profanation of parenthood — that he should respond so blandly to so great a loss. But she saw that her insistence and her banging of tables made no difference: that short of hitting him, she had no means of forcing a rupture in the protective blanket of confusion that he had drawn around himself. She forced herself to gain control of her anger, but this came at the cost of acknowledging a further loss — that of her grandfather. She and her Baba, as she called him, had always been very close. Now it was as though she were being forced to accept that he was no longer a sentient presence in her life; that the comforts of the companionship they had shared had ceased for ever; that he who had always been an unfailing source of support had now, in the hour of her greatest need, chosen to become a burden. Of all the betrayals he could have perpetrated, this seemed the most terrible — that he should become a child in this moment of her utter abandonment. She could never have imagined it.

These weeks would have been unendurable, but for a single fortuitous circumstance. Some years before, acting on a whim, Saya John had adopted one of the plantation workers’ children—‘that boy who’s always hanging around the house’— Ilongo. The boy had continued to live with his mother, but Saya John had paid for his schooling in the nearby town of Sungei Pattani. Later he had sent him to a technical institution in Penang and Ilongo had qualified as an electrician.

Ilongo was now twenty, a dark, curly-haired youth, slow-moving and soft-spoken, but of imposing height and build. On finishing his electrician’s course, Ilongo had returned to the vicinity of Morningside — his mother now lived in a small, tin-roofed house on the outskirts of the estate.

In the aftermath of the accident, Ilongo came often to see Saya John at Morningside House. Gradually, and without an unduly intrusive display of concern, he took over many of the daily functions of caring for the old man. His was an unobtrusive yet quietly reliable presence, and Alison soon found herself looking to him for help in running the plantation’s offices. Ilongo had grown up on Morningside and knew every worker on the estate. They in turn accorded him an authority unlike that of anyone else on the plantation. He had come of age on the estate, but he’d also stepped outside its boundaries, learnt to speak Malay and English, acquired an education. He had no need to raise his voice or utter threats in order to gain respect: they trusted him as one of their own.

Saya John too found reassurance in his company. Every Sunday Ilongo would borrow a truck from the estate and drive him down to the Church of Christ the King, in Sungei Pattani. On the way they would stop at the shaded arcades of the red-tiled shophouses that lined the town’s main street. Saya John would go into a small restaurant and ask for the proprietor, Ah Fatt, a large man with bright gold incisors. Ah Fatt had political connections in southern China, and Saya John had been a generous contributor ever since Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. Each week he would hand Ah Fatt a sum of money, in an envelope, to be sent on.

On those days when he was at Morningside House, it was Ilongo who answered the telephone. One day he came cycling down from the house to see Alison at the estate office.

‘There was a call. .’

‘From whom?’

‘Mr Dinu Raha.’

‘What?’ Alison was sitting at her desk. She looked up with a frown. ‘Dinu? Are you sure?’

‘Yes. He was calling from Penang. He’s just arrived from Rangoon. He’s coming to Sungei Pattani by train.’

‘Oh?’ Alison thought back to the letters that Dolly had written her in the weeks after her parents’ deaths: she recalled a reference to an impending visit — but the letter had said that it would be Neel who’d be coming, not Dinu.

‘Are you sure it was Dinu?’ she asked Ilongo again.

‘Yes.’

She glanced at her watch. ‘Perhaps I’ll go to the station to meet him.’

‘He said there was no need: he’d find a taxi.’

‘Oh? Well, I’ll see. There’s still time.’ Ilongo left and she sat back in her chair, turning to face a window that looked out over the plantation, towards the distant blue of the Andaman Sea. It was a long time since she’d last had a visitor. Immediately after her parents’ death, the house had been full. Friends and relatives had come from Penang, Malacca, Singapore — there had been piles of telegrams. Timmy had come all the way from New York, flying across the Pacific on PanAm’s China Clipper. In the overwhelming bewilderment of that time, Alison had found herself praying that Morningside would be filled for ever with people: it was inconceivable that she should have to face, on her own, those rooms and corridors — the stairway where every join in the wood was a reminder of her mother. But a week or two had gone by and then the house had emptied just as suddenly as it had filled up. Timmy had left to go back to New York. He had his own business now and couldn’t be too long away. In departing he had as good as handed Morningside over to her — to sell or run as she chose. In time, her sense of abandonment had yielded to the understanding that she could not look to the past to fill the gaps in her present; that she could not hope for the lingering traces of her parents’ lives to serve as a buffer between herself and the aching isolation of Morningside — the crushing monotony, the solitude that resulted from being always surrounded by the same faces, the same orderly rows of trees, the inescapable sight of the same clouds hanging upon the same mountain.

And now here was Dinu, on his way to Morningside— strange old Dinu — so incorrigibly serious, so awkward and unsure of himself. She looked at her watch and at the window. Far in the distance, she could see a train making its way across the plain. She reached for her handbag and found the keys to the Daytona roadster. It would be a relief to get away, even if just for a couple of hours.

twenty-seven

It was because of the war that Dinu’s arrival at Morningside was so long delayed. The threat of submarine activity in the Bay of Bengal had forced steamship companies to cease publishing their schedules. Departures were now announced only hours before the time of sailing. This meant, in effect, that a constant vigil had to be maintained at the companies’ offices. Dinu had considered himself lucky to get a berth at all and had not given any thought to wiring ahead.

The station at Sungei Pattani was as pretty as a toy: there was a single platform shaded by a low red-tiled awning. Dinu spotted Alison as the train was drawing in: she was standing in the shade of the tin awning, wearing sunglasses and a long, black dress. She looked thin, limp, wilted — a candlewick on whom grief burnt like a flame.

The sight of her induced a momentary rush of panic. Emotion of any kind inspired fear in him, but none so much as grief: for several minutes after the train pulled in he was literally unable to rise from his seat. It was not till the station master brandished his green flag that he started for the door.

Stepping out of the train, Dinu tried to recall the phrases of condolence he had rehearsed in preparation for this moment. But now, with Alison approaching across the platform, the idea of consolation seemed like an impossible impertinence. It would be kinder, surely, to behave as though nothing had happened?

‘You shouldn’t have come,’ he said gruffly, dropping his eyes. ‘I would have found a taxi.’

‘I was glad to come,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to have a break from Morningside.’

‘Still.’ Hefting his leather camera cases on his shoulders, he handed his suitcase to a porter.

She smiled. ‘Is your father better?’

‘Yes,’ Dinu said stiffly. ‘He’s fine now. . and Manju and Neel are expecting a baby.’

‘That’s good news.’ She gave him a smile and a nod.

They stepped out of the station into a compound that was shaded by an immense, dome-like tree. Dinu stopped to look up. From the tree’s moss-wrapped branches there hung a colourful array of creepers and wildflowers.

‘Why,’ said Dinu, ‘isn’t that a padauk tree?’

‘We call them angsana trees here,’ Alison said. ‘My father planted this one the year I was born.’ She paused. ‘The year we were born I should have said.’

‘Why yes. . of course. . we were born the same year.’ Dinu smiled, hesitantly, surprised both by the fact that she’d remembered and that she’d chosen to comment on it.

The Daytona was parked nearby, with its hood pulled up. Alison slipped into the driver’s seat, while Dinu saw to the loading of his luggage in the back. They drove out of the station and past the main marketplace with its long arcades of tiled shophouses. On the outskirts of town they passed a field that was ringed with barbed-wire fencing. At the centre of the field there stood several orderly rows of attap huts, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron.

‘What’s this?’ Dinu asked. ‘I don’t remember any of this. .’

‘It’s our new military base,’ said Alison. ‘Sungei Pattani has a big army presence now, because of the war. There’s an airstrip in there and it’s guarded by Indian soldiers.’

The road began to climb and Gunung Jerai reared up ahead, its peak obscured by the usual daytime heat haze. Dinu sank back in his seat, framing the mountain in an imaginary lens. Alison’s voice took him by surprise.

‘Do you know what the hard part is?’

‘No — what is it?’

‘Nothing has any shape.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s something you don’t see until it’s gone — the shapes that things have and the ways in which the people around you mould those shapes. I don’t mean the big things — just the little ones. What you do when you get up in the morning— the hundreds of thoughts that run through your head while you’re brushing your teeth: “I have to tell Mummy about the new flowerbed”—that sort of thing. Over the last few years I’d started to take over a lot of the little things that Daddy and Mummy used to do at Morningside. Now, when I wake up in the morning those things still come back to me in just that way — I have to do this or that, for Mummy or for Daddy. Then I remember, No, I don’t have to do any of those things; there’s no reason to. And in an odd way, what you feel at those moments is not exactly sadness but a kind of disappointment. And that’s awful too, for you say to yourself— is this the best I can do? No: this isn’t good enough. I should cry — everyone says it’s good to cry. But the feeling inside doesn’t have an easy name: it’s not exactly pain or sorrow — not right then. It feels more like the sensation you have when you sit down very heavily in a chair: the breath rushes out of your body and you find yourself gagging. It’s hard to make sense of it — any of it. You want the pain to be simple, straightforward — you don’t want it to ambush you in these roundabout ways, each morning, when you’re getting up to do something else — brush your teeth or eat your breakfast. .’

The car veered suddenly towards the side of the road. Dinu snatched at the wheel to steady it. ‘Alison! Slow down— careful.’

She ran the car on to the grassy verge that flanked the road and stopped under a tree. Raising her hands, she touched her cheeks in a gesture of disbelief. ‘Look,’ she said. I’m crying.’

‘Alison.’ He wanted to reach for her, touch her shoulder, but it was not like him to be demonstrative. She lowered her forehead to the wheel, sobbing, and then suddenly his hesitations evaporated.

‘Alison.’ He drew her head to his shoulder, and felt the warmth of her tears dampening the thin cotton of his shirt. Her hair was silky against his cheek and smelt faintly of grapes. ‘Alison, it’s all right. .’

He was struck by a deep astonishment at what he had done. It was as though someone had reminded him that gestures of this kind did not come naturally to him. The arm that was holding her cradled against his shoulder grew heavy and wooden and he found himself mumbling awkwardly: ‘Alison. . I know it’s been hard. .’

He was cut short by the roar of a fifteen-hundredweight truck, rolling down the road. Alison pulled quickly away and sat upright. Dinu turned as the truck rumbled by. A squad of Indian soldiers was squatting in the back of the truck, dressed in turbans and khaki shorts.

The sound of the truck faded away and the moment passed. Alison wiped her face and cleared her throat. ‘Time to go home,’ she said, turning the ignition key. ‘You must be tired.’

It was mid-February when the long-awaited mobilisation orders finally arrived. Hardy was one of the first to know and he came running to Arjun’s room.

‘Yaar — have you heard?

It was early evening and Hardy didn’t bother to knock. He pushed the door open and looked in: ‘Arjun, where are you?’

Arjun was inside the curtained dressing room that separated his bathroom from the living area. He had just finished washing off the dirt of a football match and his mud-caked shoes and shorts lay heaped on the floor. It was a Thursday — a night when, by tradition, dinner jackets were worn at the mess, this being the day of the week when the news of Queen Victoria’s death had been received in India. Kishan Singh was at work in Arjun’s bedroom, laying out his clothes for the evening— dinner jacket, dress trousers, silk cummerbund.

Hardy crossed the room quickly: ‘Arjun? Did you hear? We’ve got the orders.’

Arjun pulled back the curtain, with a towel fastened around his waist.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. Heard from Adjutant-sah’b.’

They looked at each other without knowing what else to say. Hardy seated himself on the edge of the bed and began to crack his knuckles. Arjun started to button his starched dress shirt, flexing his knees, so that he could see himself in the mirror. He caught a glimpse of Hardy behind him, staring morosely at the floor. Trying to sound jocular, he said: ‘At least we’ll get to see if those damned mobilisation plans that we drew up are any good or not. .’

Hardy made no answer, and Arjun glanced over his shoulder. ‘Aren’t you glad the waiting’s over? Hardy?’

Hardy’s hands were clasped between his knees. He looked up suddenly. ‘I keep thinking. .’

‘Of what?’

‘Do you remember Chetwode Hall? At the Military Academy in Dehra Dun?’

‘Of course.’

‘There was an inscription which said: The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time. The honour, welfare and comfort of the men you command come next. .’

‘. . And your own ease, comfort and safety come last, always and every time.’ Arjun laughed as he finished the quotation for Hardy. ‘Of course I remember. It was inscribed on the podium — stared us in the face every time we entered Chetwode Hall.’

‘Didn’t it ever puzzle you — that inscription?’

‘No. Why should it?’

‘Well, didn’t you ever think: this country whose safety, honour and welfare are to come first, always and every time— what is it? Where is this country? The fact is that you and I don’t have a country — so where is this place whose safety, honour and welfare are to come first, always and every time? And why was it that when we took our oath it wasn’t to a country but to the King Emperor — to defend the Empire?’

Arjun turned to face him. ‘Hardy, what are you trying to get at?’

‘Just this.’ said Hardy. ‘Yaar, if my country really comes first, why am I being sent abroad? There’s no threat to my country right now — and if there were, it would be my duty to stay here and defend it.’

‘Hardy,’ Arjun said lightly, ‘staying here wouldn’t do much for your career. .’

‘Career, career.’ Hardy clicked his tongue, in disgust. ‘Yaar, don’t you ever think of anything else?’

‘Hardy.’ Arjun gave him a look of warning, to remind him of Kishan Singh’s presence.

Hardy shrugged and looked at his watch. ‘All right, I’ll shut up,’ he said, standing up to go. ‘I’d better change too. We’ll talk later.’

Hardy left and Kishan Singh carried Arjun’s trousers into the dressing room. Kneeling on the floor, he held them open, by the waistband. Arjun stepped into them gingerly, taking care not to shatter the fragile sharpness of their glassy creases. Rising to his feet, Kishan Singh began to circle around Arjun, tucking his shirt-tails into his trousers.

Kishan Singh’s hand brushed against the small of Arjun’s back and he stiffened: he was on the verge of snapping at his batman to hurry up, when he stopped himself. It annoyed him to think that after two years as a commissioned officer he had still not succeeded in training himself to be at ease with the enforced intimacies of military life. This was one of the many things, he knew, that set him apart from the real faujis, the born-and-bred army-wallahs like Hardy. He’d once watched Hardy going through this very process of dressing for Guest Night with his batman’s help: he was oblivious of the man’s presence in a way that he, Arjun, never was of Kishan Singh’s.

Suddenly Kishan Singh spoke up, taking Arjun by surprise. ‘Sah’b,’ he said, ‘do you know where the battalion is going?’

‘No. Nobody does. We won’t know till we’re on the ship.’

Kishan Singh started wrapping Arjun’s cummerbund around his waist. ‘Sah’b,’ he said, ‘the NCOs have been saying that we’ll be going east. .’

‘Why?’

‘At first we were training for the desert and everyone said we would be going to North Africa. But the equipment we were sent recently was clearly meant for the rain. .’

‘Who’s been telling you all this?’ Arjun said in surprise.

‘Everyone, sah’b. Even in the villages they know. My mother and my wife came to visit last week. They’d heard a rumour that we were about to leave.’

‘What did they say?’

‘My mother said, “Kishan Singh, when are you going to come back”?’

‘And what did you tell her?’

Kishan Singh was kneeling in front of Arjun now, checking his fly buttons and smoothing down his trousers, pinching the creases to restore their edge. Arjun could see only the top of his head, and the whorled patterns of his close-cropped hair.

Suddenly, Kishan Singh looked up at him. ‘Sah’b, I told her that you would make sure that I came back. .’

Arjun, caught by surprise, felt the blood rushing to his face. There was something inexplicably moving about the sheer guilelessness of this expression of trust. He felt at a loss for words.

Once, during their conversations at Charbagh, Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland had said that the reward of serving in India, for Englishmen of his father’s generation, lay in their bonds with ‘the men’. This relationship, he had said, was of an utterly different kind from that of the regular British army, the mutual loyalties of Indian soldier and English officer being at once so powerful and so inexplicable that they could be understood only as a kind of love.

Arjun recalled how strange this word had sounded on the CO’s reticent lips and how he had been tempted to scoff. It seemed that in these stories ‘the men’ figured only as abstractions, a faceless collectivity imprisoned in a permanent childhood — moody, unpredictable, fantastically brave, desperately loyal, prone to extraordinary excesses of emotion. Yet, he knew it to be true that even for himself there were times when it seemed as though the attributes of that faceless collectivity—‘the men’—had been conjured into reality by a single soldier, Kishan Singh: that the bond that had come into being between them really was a kind of love. It was impossible to know how far this was Kishan Singh’s own doing and how far it was the product of the peculiar intimacy of their circumstances; or was it perhaps something else altogether, that Kishan Singh, in his very individuality, had become more than himself — a village, a country, a history, a mirror for Arjun to see refractions of himself?

For an eerie instant Arjun saw himself in Kishan Singh’s place: as a batman, kneeling before a dinner-jacketed officer, buffing his shoes, reaching into his trousers to tuck in his shirt, checking his fly buttons, looking up from the shelter of his parted feet, asking for protection. He gritted his teeth.

twenty-eight

The morning after his arrival, Dinu borrowed a bicycle and went to look for the ruined chandis of Gunung Jerai. Alison drew him a map and he followed it: the track ran uphill most of the way from Morningside House and he had to mount and dismount several times, wheeling his machine up the steeper inclines. He made a couple of wrong turns but eventually found his way to the very spot where Alison had parked her car the last time. The stream lay below and its surroundings were exactly as he remembered: there was a shallow ford, bridged by flat stones. A little lower down the slope, the stream widened into a pool, ringed by massive boulders. On the far side, a narrow path led into the jungle.

By this time his right leg was sore and aching. He hung his camera bags on a branch and stepped down to the pool. On the bank there was a boulder that was so shaped as to serve perfectly for a seat. Dinu kicked off his shoes, rolled his trousers up to his knees, and plunged his legs into the cool, rushing water.

He’d been hesitant about coming to Malaya, but now that he was here, he was glad to be away from Rangoon, glad to leave behind the tensions of the Kemendine house and all the constant worrying about the business. And it was a relief, too, to put a distance between himself and the political infighting that seemed to be consuming all his friends. He knew his father wanted Alison to sell Morningside — it would be too much for her to manage on her own, he’d said; the estate would lose money. But as far as he could tell Morningside was running smoothly enough and Alison seemed to be very much in control. He couldn’t see that she had any need for his advice, but he was glad to be here anyway. It would give him a chance to think things over for himself: in Rangoon he was always too busy, with politics, with the magazine. He was twenty-eight now and this, if any, was the time to decide whether photography was going to be just a hobby or a career.

He lit a cigarette and smoked it down to the butt, before picking up his camera bag to cross the stream. The path was more overgrown than he remembered, and in places he had to beat down the undergrowth. When he came to the clearing, he was awed by the serene beauty of the place: the colours of the moss-covered chandis were even more vivid than he remembered; the vistas in the background even more sweeping. He wasted no time in setting up his tripod. He exposed two rolls and it was sunset by the time he got back to Morningside House.

He went back the next morning and the morning after that. The ride became a regular routine: he’d set off early, taking along a couple of rotis for lunch. When he got to the stream, he’d daydream for a while, sitting on his favourite rock, with his legs plunged deep in the water. Then he’d make his way to the clearing and set up his equipment. At lunchtime he’d take a long break and afterwards he’d have a nap, lying in the shade in one of the chandis.

One morning, instead of stopping at the chandis, he went a little further than usual. Pushing into the forest he spotted an overgrown mound a short distance ahead. He beat a path through the undergrowth and found himself confronted with yet another ruin, built of the same materials as the two chandis — laterite — but of a different design: this one was roughly octagonal and shaped like a stepped pyramid or ziggurat. Despite the monumental design, the structure was modest in size, not much taller than his head. He climbed gingerly up the mossy blocks and at the apex he found a massive square stone, with a rectangular opening carved in the centre. Looking down, he found a puddle of rainwater trapped inside. The pool had the even shape and metallic glint of an antique mirror. He took a picture — a snapshot — and then sat down to smoke a cigarette. What was the opening for? Had it once been a base for a monumental sculpture — some gigantic, smiling monolith? It didn’t matter: it was just a hole now, colonised by a family of tiny green frogs. When he looked down on his rippling reflection the frogs croaked at him in deep affront.

That evening, back at the house, he said to Alison: ‘Did you know that there was another ruin — a kind of pyramid— a little farther into the jungle?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, and there are others too. You’ll find them if you go deep enough.’

The next day proved her right. Pushing a little further up the slope Dinu stumbled, quite literally, on a ten-foot-square platform made of laterite blocks — apparently the foundation of a small shrine. The plan of the temple was clearly visible on the floor, laid out like an architect’s sketch, with a line of square embrasures indicating the placement of a row of columns. A day or so later he found another, much stranger ruin: a structure that had the appearance of being suspended within an explosion, like a prop in a photographic illusion. A banyan had taken root within the temple, and in growing, had pushed the walls apart, carrying away adjoining blocks of masonry. A doorway had been split in two, as though a bomb had exploded on the threshold. One stone post had been knocked over, while another had been carried off, coiled in a tangle of greenery, to a distance of several feet off the ground.

Sometimes, stepping into the ruins, Dinu would hear a rustle or a prolonged hiss. Occasionally the surrounding treetops would stir as though they’d been hit by a gust of wind. Dinu would look up to see a troop of monkeys examining him warily from the branches. Once he heard a sawing cough that could have been a leopard.

As his intimacy with the ruins deepened, Dinu began to find that his eye would go directly to the place where the temple’s principal image would once have stood: his hands would reach automatically for the niches where offerings of flowers would have been laid; he began to recognise the limits beyond which he could not step without removing his shoes. When he crossed the stream, after bicycling through the estate, it was no longer as though he were tiptoeing into a place that was strange and unfamiliar, where life and order yielded to darkness and shadow. It was when he crossed back into the monochrome orderliness of the plantation that he felt himself to be passing into a territory of ruin, a defilement much more profound than temporal decay.

Late one afternoon, while standing at his tripod, he was alerted to the sound of a car by a commotion among the jungle’s birds. He made his way quickly down the path to a vantage point where a gap in the greenery permitted a view of the stream below. He spotted Alison’s red Daytona approaching on the far side. He left his tripod standing where it was and went hurrying down the path.

Dinu had seen very little of Alison since the day of his arrival. She left the house before dawn, in order to be present at Muster, and when she came back, he was usually out on the mountainside taking pictures. They generally met only at dinnertime, when conversation was inevitably constrained by Saya John’s vacant silences. She seemed not to know how to fit a visitor into the fixed routines of her life on the plantation, and Dinu, for his part, was burdened by the knowledge of the task with which he had been entrusted. He knew that he would have to find a way of telling her that his father wanted to dispose of his share of Morningside and this seemed impossible at a time when she was so preoccupied, both with the grief of her parents’ death, and with the daily anxieties of keeping the plantation afloat.

By the time Dinu reached the end of the path Alison had crossed the stream. Finding himself face to face with her now, he couldn’t think of what to say and began to fumble in his pockets for a cigarette.

‘Going back to the house?’ he said at last, through his teeth, while striking a match.

‘I thought I’d come by and see how you were getting on.’

‘I was just setting up my camera. .’ He walked with her to the clearing, where his tripod was placed in front of one of the chandis.

‘Can I watch you take pictures?’ she asked brightly.

He hesitated, raising the cigarette to his mouth, squinting into the smoke. As though sensing a reluctance, Alison said, ‘Would you mind? Would I be bothering you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not that. . you wouldn’t be bothering me exactly. . It’s just that when I’m shooting I have to concentrate very hard. . or it’s a waste. . It’s like any other kind of work, you know. . it’s not easy to do if you’re being watched.’

‘I see.’ The hollow sound of her voice indicated that she’d read this as a rebuff. ‘Well, I’ll go then.’

‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘please stay. . but then, if you’re going to be here, could I take a few pictures of you. .?’

She was quick to deal out a rebuff of her own. ‘No. I’m not really in the right frame of mind to become a part of your — your work.’ She turned on her heel and headed down the path, towards the stream.

Dinu knew himself to be stranded unwittingly in a quarrel.

‘Alison. . I didn’t mean. .’ He hurried after her, but she was walking fast and his leg put him at a disadvantage. ‘Alison. . please stay.’ He caught up with her at the edge of the stream. ‘Alison. . I was just telling you what it’s like. . when I make a picture. . I didn’t mean to put you off. . won’t you stay?’

‘Not now,’ she glanced at her watch. ‘Not today.’

‘Then you’ll come back?’

She’d already started across the ford. In mid-stream, without turning round, she raised a hand to wave.

Just before the battalion’s departure from Saharanpur, new war equipment tables arrived. This meant that Arjun and Hardy had to stay up all night, revising their carefully prepared Unit Mobilisation Scheme. But in the end all was well: the CO was pleased and the battalion was able to go ahead with its entrainment as planned. The train left for Bombay on schedule.

At Ajmer there was a slight delay. The 1/1 Jats were shunted aside so that a trainload of Italian prisoners of war could pass by. The Italians and Indians stared at each other in silence across the platform, through the barred windows of their respective carriages. This was their first glimpse of the enemy.

Next morning, they arrived at Bombay’s Victoria terminus. They were told that their troop ship, the H.M.T. Nuwara Eliya, was waiting at the harbour. They drove to the Sassoon docks to find that their embarkation orders had already been issued.

The docks proved to be unexpectedly congested. It turned out that a British battalion was boarding another ship at exactly the same time. Soon the two battalions’ baggage and equipment were hopelessly entangled with each other. NCOs began to shout, spreading panic among the dockworkers. Hardy was thrown into the midst of the confusion: he was the baggage officer for the 1/1 Jats and it fell on him to try and restore order.

Looking in Hardy’s roster, Arjun learnt that he had been allotted a cabin to himself. He had never been on a ship before and was barely able to contain his excitement. He went hurrying up the gangplank to look for his cabin, with Kishan Singh following close behind, carrying his luggage.

They were the first to board and the ship was empty, but for its crew. Everything seemed new and startling: the white gunwales and narrow catwalks, the yawning hatches and the rounded frames of the portholes.

As they were stepping on to the upper deck, Kishan Singh happened to glance over the side. ‘Sah’b — look!’ He pointed, drawing Arjun’s attention to an altercation on the docks below. Arjun saw that Hardy had got himself into a shouting match with a hulking British sergeant. They were standing toe to toe, with Hardy shaking a sheaf of papers under the sergeant’s nose.

‘Stay here.’

Arjun went racing down the way he had come. He arrived on the scene just a moment too late. Another officer from their battalion had got there before him — Captain Pearson, the adjutant, a bluff, stocky Englishman, with a booming voice and a quick temper.

Watching from a few paces away, Arjun saw Hardy turning to Captain Pearson. It was clear that Hardy was relieved to see the adjutant, fully confident that his senior would back him up — out of loyalty to a fellow-member of the battalion, if nothing else. But Captain Pearson had never made a secret of his belief that Hardy was ‘difficult’ and ‘overly sensitive’. Instead of supporting him, he let his annoyance show: ‘Lieutenant, have you got yourself into a row again. .?’

Arjun saw the look on Hardy’s face change from relief to seething outrage. It was painful to stand there as a silent witness to his friend’s humiliation. He turned and slipped away.

Later that day, Hardy came to his cabin.

‘We’ve got to teach that bastard Pearson a lesson,’ he said. ‘That bloody sergeant called me a stinking nigger in front of the men. Pearson let him get away with it. Yaar, would you believe it, the bugger blamed me! The only way we can stop this kind of thing is by sticking together.’

‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘I think we should boycott him.’

‘He’s the adjutant, Hardy,’ Arjun said. ‘How can we boycott him? Be reasonable.’

‘There are ways of getting a message across,’ Hardy said angrily. ‘But that can happen only when you know which side you’re on.’ Rising abruptly to his feet, he left Arjun’s cabin.

For two days the Nuwara Eliya waited offshore, while nine other ships assembled in the harbour. There was a rumour that a German submarine was lurking nearby and the ships were assigned an escort of two destroyers, an armed merchantman and a light cruiser. When the convoy finally departed, it was in a westerly direction, heading towards the setting sun. Their destination was still unknown; they had no idea whether they were to go east or west.

In Bombay, the CO had been handed a sealed envelope that was to be opened exactly twenty-four hours after their departure. When the time came, Arjun and the other officers gathered in a dining room on the Nuwara Eliya’s upper deck. The CO opened the envelope in his usual deliberate way, prising the seal off the paper with a knife. The officers waited in expectant silence. Arjun could feel a clammy dampness welling up in the palms of his hands.

Then at last, the CO looked up with a thin smile. He held the sheet of paper in front of him and read out aloud: ‘This ship is headed for Singapore.’

Arjun stepped out on deck and found Hardy already there, leaning over the gunwale, humming softly under his breath. Behind them the white ribbon of the ship’s wake had already begun to describe a curve as the convoy slowly changed direction.

twenty-nine

Manju had never been happier than she was in the first months of her pregnancy. She relished every reminder of her changing condition: the often imaginary twitches and movements; the pangs of hunger that could never be properly satisfied; even the nausea that woke her every morning and the acid tingling of her teeth.

The Kemendine house had changed greatly in the two years she’d been in Rangoon. Dinu was gone of course, and his apartment upstairs lay empty. Neel and Rajkumar were often away, arranging for the disposal of the family’s properties or buying new stocks of teak. For much of the time Manju and Dolly had the house to themselves. The compound had grown unkempt; where there had once been a lawn the grass now stood knee-high. Many rooms and outhouses were locked up; much of the furniture had been sold. The dozens of employees who had once populated the place were gone — the servants, watchmen, gardeners and their families. Even U Ba Kyaw, the chauffeur, had gone back to his village. The Packard was one of the few disposable possessions that Rajkumar had retained, but it was now driven mainly by Neel.

Neither Manju nor Dolly regretted the emptying of the house. On the contrary, it was as though an enormous accumulation of cobwebs had been swept away, allowing them new and unaccustomed freedoms. In the past Dolly had often seemed remote and unapproachable to Manju, but now they became allies, colleagues, team-mates, working together for the family’s renewal. Between the two of them they had little difficulty in managing the house.

On waking in the morning, Manju would find Dolly on her knees, dressed in a frayed old longyi, wiping the floors with tattered shreds of cloth. They would work together, going through a couple of rooms each day, breaking off when the monks came by for their daily visits.

For Manju these mid-morning breaks were the best-loved aspect of daily life in Rangoon. She’d always known that Buddhist monks lived by collecting alms, but it came as a surprise to observe the ways in which this tenet, more or less abstract, came to be translated into the mundane mechanics of everyday life — into the workaday reality of a tired-looking group of young men and boys, walking down a dusty street in saffron robes, with their baskets balanced on their hips. There was something magical about the fact that this interruption came always at a time of day when the tasks of the household were at their most pressing; when there was scarcely room in one’s head but to think about what had to be done next. And in the midst of all that — to open the door and see the monks standing there, waiting patiently, with the sun beating down on their shaven heads: what better way could there be of unbalancing everyday reality?

Calcutta seemed very far away now. The flow of letters from India had suffered disruptions because of the threat of submarines in the Bay of Bengal. Steamer traffic between Calcutta and Rangoon had become so irregular that letters tended to arrive in bunches.

One such bunch brought news both of Arjun’s impending departure and of his arrival in Malaya. Dolly was very glad to hear of this development: ‘Perhaps Arjun could find out what’s become of Dinu,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time since we last heard from him.’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll write. .’

Manju sent a letter to the address her father had provided— via army headquarters in Singapore. Many weeks went by without an answer.

‘Don’t worry,’ Manju said to Dolly. ‘I’m sure Dinu’s fine. We’d have heard if anything was wrong.’

‘You’re probably right.’ But a month passed and then another and Dolly seemed to become resigned to her son’s continuing silence.

The baby was now kicking urgently against the walls of Manju’s stomach and she had no attention to spare for anything other than her own condition. With the approach of the monsoons, the days grew hotter and the effort of carrying the child grew very much greater. Sooner than they had expected, the festival of Waso was upon them. Dolly took Manju on a drive into the countryside in a taxi rented for the day. They stopped in a wooded area off the Pegu road, and collected armloads of fragrant yellow padauk flowers. They were on their way back to Rangoon when Manju had a dizzy spell and fainted on the back seat.

After this episode the doctor confined Manju to bed. Dolly became her nurse, bringing her food, helping with her clothes, occasionally leading her around the compound. The days went by in a kind of trance; Manju would lie dreamily in bed, with a book beside her, open but unread. Hours would pass while she did nothing but listen to the sound of the pouring rain.

They were now well into Thadin — the annual three-month period of reflection and abstinence. Often Dolly would read to Manju, mainly from the scriptures — from such translations as she could find, since Manju knew neither Pali nor Burmese. One day Dolly chose a discourse by the Buddha, addressed to his son, Rahula.

She read: Develop a state of mind like the earth, Rahula, for on the earth all manner of things are thrown, clean and unclean, dung and urine, spittle, pus and blood, and the earth is not troubled or repelled or disgusted..

Manju watched her mother-in-law as she read: Dolly’s long, black hair was slightly flecked with grey and her face was etched with a webbing of lines. Yet, there was a youthfulness in her expression that belied these signs of age: it was hard to believe that this was a woman in her mid-sixties.

. . develop a state of mind like water, for in the water many things are thrown, clean and unclean, and the water is not troubled or repelled or disgusted. And so too with fire, which burns all things, clean and unclean, and with air, which blows upon them all, and with space, which is nowhere established..

Dolly’s lips seemed hardly to move, and yet every word was perfectly enunciated: Manju had never before known anyone who could appear to be in repose when she was actually at her most intently wakeful, her most alert.

When Manju reached the eighth month of her pregnancy Dolly banned Neel from any further travels. He was at home when Manju’s labour started. He helped her into the Packard and drove her to the hospital. They could no longer afford the private suite that Dolly and Rajkumar had taken before, and instead Manju went into the general maternity ward. The next evening she was delivered of her child — a healthy, sharp-voiced girl, who began to suckle the moment she was put to Manju’s breast. The baby was given two names — Jaya was to be her Indian name and Tin May the Burmese.

Exhausted by her labour Manju fell asleep. It was dawn when she woke up. The baby was in her bed again, rooting hungrily for her feed.

Holding her daughter to her breast, Manju remembered a passage that Dolly had read to her just a few days before: it was from the Buddha’s first sermon, delivered at Sarnath, two thousand and five hundred years before:. . birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow; contact with the unpleasant is sorrow, separation from the pleasant is sorrow, every wish unfulfilled is sorrow. .

The words had made a great impression on her at the time, but now, with her newborn daughter beside her, they seemed incomprehensible: the world had never seemed so bright, so replete with promise, so profligate in its rewards, so generous in its joys and fulfilments.

For their first few weeks in Singapore the 1/1 Jats were based at the Tyersall Park camp. This was the very place that Arjun’s friend Kumar had talked about — where a soldier had shot an officer and then committed suicide. In New Delhi the story had sounded unlikely and far-fetched — an extreme situation— like a report of a mother lifting up a car to save her children. But now that they were in Singapore themselves, with India half a continent away, nothing seemed improbable any more— everything appeared to be turned on its head. It was as though they no longer knew who they were, no longer understood their place in the order of things. Whenever they ventured beyond the familiar certainties of the battalion, they seemed to lose themselves in a labyrinth of hidden meanings.

It so happened that Kumar was in Singapore when the 1/1 Jats first arrived. One afternoon he took Arjun and Hardy to an exclusive club, for a swim. The pool was very crowded, filled with European expatriates and their families. It was a hot sticky day and the water looked cool and inviting. Following Kumar’s lead, Arjun and Hardy jumped in. Within a few minutes they found themselves alone: the pool had emptied as soon as they entered the water.

Kumar was the only one who was not taken aback. His battalion had been in Malaya more than a year and he had travelled all round the colony.

‘I should have warned you about this,’ Kumar said, with a mischievous smile. ‘It’s like this everywhere in Malaya. In smaller towns, the clubs actually put up signs on their doors saying, “No Asiatics allowed”. In Singapore they let us use the pool— it’s just that everyone leaves. Right now they’ve had to relax the colour bar a little because there are so many Indian army units here. But you may as well get used to it because you’ll come across it all the time — in restaurants, clubs, beaches, trains.’ He laughed. ‘We’re meant to die for this colony — but we can’t use the pools.’ Ruefully shaking his head he lit a cigarette.

Soon their battalion was sent north. The Malayan countryside was a revelation to the Indian officers. They had never seen such prosperity, such beautiful roads, such tidy, well-laid-out little towns. Often, when they stopped, the local Indian residents would invite them to their houses. These were usually middle-class people with modest jobs — provincial lawyers and doctors, clerks and shopkeepers. But the signs of affluence in their homes were such as to amaze Arjun and his fellow-soldiers. It seemed that in Malaya even ordinary people were able to afford cars and refrigerators: some even had air conditioners and telephones. In India only Europeans and the richest of rich Indians could afford such things.

Driving along rural roads, the officers discovered that in Malaya the only people who lived in abject, grinding poverty were plantation labourers — almost all of whom were Indian in origin. They were astonished at the difference between the plantations’ ordered greenery and the squalor of their coolie lines. Hardy once remarked on the starkness of the contrast and Arjun responded by pointing out that in India, they would have taken such poverty for granted; that the only reason they happened to notice it now was because of its juxtaposition with Malaya’s prosperous towns. This thought made them both cringe in shame. It was as though they were examining their own circumstances for the first time, in retrospect; as though the shock of travel had displaced an indifference that had been inculcated in them since their earliest childhood.

Other shocks awaited. Out of uniform, Arjun and his friends found that they were often mistaken for coolies. In markets and bazaars shopkeepers treated them offhandedly, as though they were of no account. At other times — and this was worse still — they would find themselves being looked upon with something akin to pity. Once, Arjun got into an argument with a shopkeeper and found himself being called Klang—to his puzzlement. Later, enquiring about the meaning of this word, he discovered that it was a derogatory reference to the sound of the chains worn by the earliest Indian workers who were brought to Malaya.

Soon it seemed as though there was not a man in the battalion who had not found himself embroiled in an unsettling encounter of one kind or another. One evening, Kishan Singh was oiling Arjun’s revolver, squatting on the floor, when he looked up suddenly. ‘Sah’b,’ he said to Arjun, ‘can I ask you the meaning of an English word?’

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘Mercenary—what does it mean?’

‘Mercenary?’ Arjun started in surprise. ‘Where did you hear this word?’

Kishan Singh explained that during one of their recent moves, their convoy of trucks had stopped at a roadside tea-stall, near the town of Ipoh. There were some local Indians sitting in the tea-stall. They had announced themselves to be members of a political group — the Indian Independence League. Somehow an argument had started. The civilians had told them that they — the 1/1 Jats — weren’t real soldiers; they were just hired killers, mercenaries. A fight would have broken out, if the convoy hadn’t got under way again. But later, when they were back on the road, they had begun to argue again— with each other this time — about the word mercenary and what it meant.

Arjun’s instinct was to bark an order at Kishan Singh, telling him to shut up and get on with what he was doing. But by now he knew his batman well enough to be aware that an order would not deter him from looking for an answer to his question. Thinking quickly Arjun embarked on an explanation: mercenaries were merely soldiers who were paid for their work, he said. In this sense all soldiers, in all modern armies, were mercenaries. Hundreds of years ago soldiers had fought out of religious belief, or because of allegiance to their tribes, or to defend their kings. But those days were long past: now soldiering was a job, a profession, a career. Every soldier was paid and there was none who was not a mercenary.

This seemed to satisfy Kishan Singh, and he asked no more questions. But it was Arjun himself who now came to be troubled by the answer he had given his batman. If it was true (and it undoubtedly was) that all contemporary soldiers were mercenaries, then why did the word have the sting of an insult? Why did he feel himself smarting at its use? Was it because soldiering was not just a job after all, as he had taught himself to believe? That to kill without conviction violated some deep and unalterable human impulse?

One night he and Hardy stayed up late, discussing this subject over a bottle of brandy. Hardy agreed that it was hard to explain why it was so shameful to be called a mercenary. But it was he who eventually put his finger on it: ‘It’s because a mercenary’s hands obey someone else’s head; those two parts of his body have no connection with each other.’ He paused to smile at Arjun: ‘Because, yaar, in other words, a mercenary is a buddhu, a fool.’

Arjun refused to be drawn into Hardy’s jocularity. He said: ‘So are we mercenaries, do you think?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘All soldiers are mercenaries today,’ he said. ‘In fact, why just stop with soldiers? In one way or another we’re all a little like that woman you went to in Delhi— dancing to someone else’s tune, taking money. There’s not that much difference.’ He tipped back his glass, with a laugh.

Arjun found an opportunity to take his doubts to Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland. He told him about the incident at the tea-stall and recommended that the other ranks’ contacts with the local Indian population be more closely supervised. Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland heard him out patiently, interrupting only to nod assent: ‘Yes, you’re right, Roy, something must be done.’

But Arjun came away from this conversation even more disturbed than before. He had a feeling that the Lieutenant-Colonel could not understand why he was so outraged at being described as a ‘mercenary’; in his voice there had been an undertone of surprise that someone as intelligent as Arjun could take offence at something that was no more than a statement of fact. It was as though the Lieutenant-Colonel knew something about him, that he, Arjun, either did not know or was not willing to recognise. Arjun was embarrassed now to think that he’d allowed himself to go off at the deep end. It was as though he were a child who’d taken umbrage at the discovery that he’d spoken prose all his life.

These experiences were so peculiar, so provocative of awkward emotions, that Arjun and the other officers could rarely bring themselves to speak of them. They had always known their country to be poor, yet they had never imagined themselves to be part of that poverty: they were the privileged, the elite. The discovery that they were poor too came as a revelation. It was as though a grimy curtain of snobbery had prevented them from seeing what was plainly before their eyes — that although they had never been hungry, they too were impoverished by the circumstances of their country; that such impressions as they’d had of their own wellbeing were delusions, compounded out of the unimaginable extremity of their homeland’s poverty.

The strange thing was that even more than Arjun, it was the real faujis — the second- and third-generation army-wallahs— on whom these experiences had the most powerful effect. ‘But your father and grandfather were here,’ Arjun said to Hardy. ‘It was they who helped in the colonisation of these places. They must have seen some of the things that we’ve seen. Did they never speak of all this?’

‘They didn’t see things as we do,’ Hardy said. ‘They were illiterate yaar. You have to remember that we’re the first generation of educated Indian soldiers.’

‘But still, they had eyes, they had ears, they must occasionally have talked to local people?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘The truth is yaar, they weren’t interested; they didn’t care; the only place that was real to them was their village.’

‘How is that even possible. .?’

In the following weeks Arjun thought often of this: it was as though he and his peers had been singled out to pay the price of a monumental inwardness.

With every day that he spent on the mountainside Dinu could feel his pictures changing. It was as though his eyes were adjusting to unaccustomed lines of sight; as though his body were adapting to new temporal rhythms. His earliest pictures of the chandis were angular and densely packed, the frames filled with sweeping vistas. He saw the site as being replete with visual drama — the jungle, the mountain, the ruins, the thrusting vertical lines of the tree trunks juxtaposed against the sweeping horizontals of the distant sea — he laboured to cram all these elements into his frames. But the more time he spent on the mountain, the less the background seemed to matter. The vastness of the landscape had the effect of both shrinking and enlarging the forest-enclosed clearing in which the chandis stood: it became small and intimate, but saturated with a sense of time. Soon he could no longer see either the mountains or the forest or the sea. He found himself moving closer and closer to the chandis, following the grain of the laterite and the pattern of the moss that covered its surface; trying to find a way of framing the curiously voluptuous shapes of the toadstools that grew within the joins of the stone.

The rhythms of his work changed in ways that he could not fully control. Hours would go by before he made a single exposure; he would go back and forth dozens of times, between his camera and his subject; he began to stop his lens further and further down, experimenting with aperture settings that required exposures of several minutes at a time, even as much as half an hour. It was as though he were using his instrument to mimic the pinprick eyes of the lizards that sunned themselves on the chandis’ floors.

Many times each day, inexplicable perturbations would sweep through the surrounding forests. Flocks of birds would rise screaming from the surrounding trees and go boomeranging through the skies, only to settle back in exactly the same spots from which they had risen. To Dinu each of these disturbances now seemed like an augury of Alison’s arrival, and in listening for their causes — sometimes the backfiring of a truck on the estate, sometimes a plane coming in to land at the nearby airstrip — his senses came to achieve an uncannily close attunement to the sounds of the forest. Every time the trees were shaken alive, he would break away from his work, straining to catch the sound of the Daytona. Often he would go running down the path to the gap where he could look down on the ford. As the disappointments mounted, he grew steadily more impatient with himself: it was plain idiocy to imagine that she’d drive out this way again, considering the last time. And in any event, why come all the way here, when she would see him in the house at dinnertime?

But then one day there really was a glimmer of red on the far side of the stream and the Daytona really could be seen to be standing under a tree, half-obscured by a tangle of greenery. Dinu looked once more, incredulously, and spotted Alison. She was dressed in a dark-blue cotton frock, with a wide belt tied around her waist. But instead of making her way to the ford, she was heading downstream, to the very rock where he sat every morning, dangling his legs in the pool. He could tell from the practised way in which she seated herself — swinging her feet up and then pivoting around to plunge them into the water — that this was a familiar place, a spot where she often came to be alone.

As her feet slid beneath the water, her fingers picked at the hem of her skirt and pulled it back. The water rose past her ankles, to her knees, and with it her skirt rose too, slowly climbing the long line of her thigh. Now, to his surprise, he made the discovery that he was no longer looking at her directly, but through the ground glass of his viewfinder, so that the image was partitioned from its surroundings and endowed with a startling clarity and vividness. The lines were clean, pure, beautiful — the curve of her thigh crossing his viewfinder diagonally, describing a gentle ellipsis.

She heard the click and looked up, startled, her fingers instantly loosening their grip on her skirt so that the fabric dropped into the water and ballooned around her, swirling in the current.

‘Dinu?’ she called out. ‘Is that you?’

He had only this one chance now, he knew that, and he was powerless to stop himself. He stepped away from the gap and began to walk down the path, moving with the slow deliberation of a sleepwalker, holding his camera immobile in front of him.

‘Dinu?’

He didn’t try to answer but kept on moving, concentrating on the placing of one foot in front of the other, until he was clear of the greenery. From the far side of the pool, she looked into his eyes and swallowed back the words of greeting she’d been about to utter.

Dinu kept on walking. He dropped his camera on the grass and walked straight down the sandy bank, into the pool, directly across from the spot from where she sat. The water rose to his knees as he waded in, then to his groin, his hips, almost to his chest. The current began to tug at his clothes and his thin canvas shoes filled with sand and grit. He slowed to keep his footing, and then he saw her feet, hanging in the water, rippling in the current. He kept his eyes fixed on the shimmering flow and when his hands made contact with her legs he felt a deep breath rising from his lungs. It was the water that made this possible, he was sure of that; it was the stream that had washed away the barriers of fear and hesitation that had chained his hands before. He began to move his fingers, up the curve of her ankle, along the fine edge of her shin bone. Then his hands began to move on their own, pulling him behind them, between her parted knees, until suddenly her thighs were level with his face. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to follow his hands with his mouth, to move his lips along the elliptical line of her thigh, all the way along its length until the line parted. There he came to a stop, his face buried in her, his arms raised to shoulder height, holding her around her waist.

‘Alison.’

She slid off the rock and stood neck deep in the water beside him. Taking his hand, she led him back through the pool, exactly the way he had come, to the other bank. They walked hand in hand, fully clothed and dripping wet, up the path that led to the ruined chandis. She took him through the clearing, up to a stone floor where a bed of moss lay thick on the laterite.

Then she reached for his hand and pulled him down.

thirty

Neither Arjun nor anyone else in the 1/1 Jats knew quite what to expect when they arrived at Sungei Pattani. Before their departure from Ipoh they had been briefed— sketchily — on the problems they might encounter there. They knew that a mutiny had been narrowly averted just a few months before, but they were still unprepared for the cloud of disquiet that shrouded the base.

The troops at the Sungei Pattani base belonged to the 1st Bahawalpur Regiment. There had been a lot of friction between the battalion’s officers and their English CO. Their CO had taken no pains to disguise his low opinion of his Indian officers: he’d been known to call them ‘coolies’ and to threaten them with his swagger stick. On one infamous occasion he had even kicked an officer. Things had got so bad that the GOC of the 11th Division had had to intervene personally; the CO had been relieved of his command and a number of officers had been sent home to India.

At their briefing the 1/1 Jats had been given to understand that these measures had substantially altered the situation; that the difficulties of the past had been resolved. But within a day of their arrival at Sungei Pattani it was evident that the troubles of the Bahawalpurs were far from over. Through the whole two hours of their first meal at the Bahawalpurs’ mess hardly a word was exchanged between their British and Indian officers. And if the tensions in the Bahawalpurs’ mess were clearly visible to Hardy and Arjun, they were certainly no less so to Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland. Over the next two days the Lieutenant-Colonel made a point of speaking to his officers individually, to let them know that fraternisation with the 1st Bahawalpurs would not be encouraged. In a way Arjun was glad. He knew this to be the right approach under the circumstances, and was more than ever grateful to have a commanding officer of the calibre and good sense of Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland. But the knowledge of this did not ease any of the small difficulties that arose in trying to avoid the Bahawalpurs’ officers — some of whom were acquaintances from the academy.

Arjun had a room to himself, like all the officers of the 1/1 Jats. Their quarters, men and officers alike, consisted of attap huts — wooden barracks with palm-thatched roofs. These structures were mounted on pilings that were designed to keep out termites and damp. Yet, both insects and moisture figured large in the experience of living inside these barracks. The beds were frequently preyed upon by swarms of ants; after nightfall mosquitoes were so numerous that to climb out of bed for even a minute meant having to restring the whole mosquito net; the roofs often dripped and at night the rustling palm thatch seemed to come alive with rats and snakes.

Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland wanted the 1/1 Jats to use their time at Sungei Pattani on combat training, but circumstances conspired to confute all his plans. When they ventured into the surrounding rubber plantations the planters protested. Their attempts to acquaint the men with the terrain had to be called off. Then the medical corps began to complain about rising rates of malaria. As a result their plans for night training had to be cancelled. Frustrated in his more imaginative schemes, the CO set the battalion to a monotonous regimen of constructing fortifications around the base and the airstrip.

The airfield at Sungei Pattani consisted of just a single concrete runway and a few hangars, but it was still one of the few bases in north-western Malaya that boasted an operational air-squadron. The airmen at the base could on occasion be persuaded to provide joy-rides in their heavy-bellied Blenheims and Brewster Buffaloes. Arjun went on several of these rides, circling above the slopes of Gunung Jerai, looking down on the rubber plantations, swooping low over the grand houses and villas. At the summit of the mountain there stood a small lodge that served as a popular destination for holiday-makers. The pilots would often buzz the lodge, passing so close that the joy-riders could wave to the diners sitting at the tables on the veranda.

Through his first few weeks at Sungei Pattani Arjun had no idea that Dinu was living nearby. He was dimly aware that the Rahas owned shares in a rubber estate in Malaya, but he had no idea of where this plantation was. The first he knew of it was when he received a letter from Manju, posted in Rangoon.

Manju was unaware of her twin’s exact location and knew only that he was somewhere in Malaya. She wrote to say that she was well and that her pregnancy was proceeding smoothly enough. But Neel and his parents were worried about Dinu: he’d gone over to Malaya several months before and hadn’t been heard from for a while. They would be glad if Arjun would look him up. He was probably staying at the Morningside Estate with Alison, who had recently lost her parents. She provided a postal address.

Later in the day Arjun borrowed an Alvis staff car and drove into Sungei Pattani. He went to a Chinese restaurant where he and Hardy had eaten a couple of times. He asked for Ah Fatt, the proprietor, and showed him the address.

The proprietor took him outside into the shaded arcade and pointed across the street to a red roadster. That was Alison’s car, he told Arjun, everyone in town knew it by sight. She had gone to her hairdresser’s and would be out in a few minutes.

‘There she is.’

She was wearing a cheongsam of black silk, with a slit that ran from her instep to her knee. Her hair framed her face like a polished helmet, its deep black sheen contrasting brightly with the soft glow of her skin.

It was several weeks since Arjun had spoken to a woman, and a very long time since he had beheld such a strikingly attractive face. He removed his cap and began to turn it over in his hands. He was just about to cross over, to introduce himself, when the red car pulled away from the shop and disappeared down the road.

Now the periodic disturbances of the mountainside did indeed become auguries of Alison’s arrival. The rising of the birds from the canopy was a sure sign for Dinu to go hurrying down to the gap to look below — and often enough it really was Alison, dressed in one of the sombre black dresses that she wore to the office. Knowing that he’d be there, she’d look up and wave, and even as she was crossing the stream she’d begin to unbutton her blouse and unfasten her belt. Her clothes would be gone by the time she stepped into the clearing and he would be waiting, with his shutter primed.

It seemed that the hours he had spent attuning his eye to the mountainside had been an unconscious preparation for this — for Alison. He would spend long stretches of time thinking of where to place her, against which wall, or which part of the plinth; he’d imagine her seated upright, leaning against a lintel, one leg stretched straight in front of her and another bent back at the knee. In the gap between her legs he would glimpse a striation in the pitted surface of the laterite, or a soft mound of moss, as visual echoes of her body’s fissures and curves. But the materiality of her presence would quickly disarrange these carefully imagined schemes. Once her body was placed where he wanted it, something would prove to be not quite right; he would frown into his square canvas of ground glass and go back to kneel beside her, sinking his fingertips softly into the tensile firmness of her thighs, teasing out minute changes in the angles of her limbs. Coaxing her legs further apart — or closer together — he would run a finger through the triangular swell of her pubis, sometimes combing the curls down, sometimes raking them back. Framed within the unnatural clarity of his viewfinder, these details seemed to assume a monumental significance: kneeling between her legs, he would wet his forefinger to draw a thin trail of moisture, a glistening hairline.

She would laugh at the intent seriousness with which he executed these intimate caresses, only to go hurrying back to his camera. When the reel was done, she would stop him before he could load another. ‘No. Enough. Come here now.’

She would tug impatiently at his clothes — the shirt that was tucked carefully into his waistband, the undershirt beneath it. ‘Why don’t you just take these off when you come here — as I do?’

He would turn gruff. ‘I can’t, Alison. . it’s not my way. .’

She would make him sit on the stone plinth and then peel away his shirt. Pushing him back, she would make him lie prone upon the stone. He would shut his eyes and knot his fingers under his head while she knelt between his legs. When his head cleared he would see her smiling at him, like a lioness looking up from a kill, mouth glistening. The lines were as perfect as any that could be imagined, the horizontal planes of her forehead, her eyebrows and her mouth, perfectly balanced by the verticals of her black, straight hair, and the translucent filaments that hung suspended from her lips.

She would see, reflected in his eyes, exactly what he beheld. Laughing out loud, she would say: ‘No. This is a picture you’ll never see anywhere but in your own head.’

Then afterwards, quickly but methodically, he would dress himself again, tucking his shirt carefully into his trousers, fastening his belt, kneeling to tie the laces of his canvas shoes.

‘Why bother?’ she’d challenge him. ‘You’ll just have to take them off again.’

He’d answer seriously, unsmiling: ‘I have to, Alison. . I have to be dressed when I work.’

Sometimes she would grow bored with the length of sitting. Often she would talk to herself while he was adjusting his camera, throwing in words of Malay, Tamil and Chinese, reminiscing about her mother and father, thinking aloud about Timmy.

‘Dinu,’ she cried one day in exasperation, ‘I feel I have more of your attention when you’re looking into your camera than when you’re lying here with me.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’

‘I’m not just a thing, for your camera to focus on. Sometimes it’s as if you have no other interest in me but this.’

He saw that she was upset and he left his tripod to sit with her. ‘I see more of you in this way than I would in any other,’ he said. ‘If I were to talk to you for hours I wouldn’t know you better. I don’t say this is better than talking. . it’s just my way — my way of understanding. . You mustn’t think this is easy for me. . I never do portraits; they frighten me. . the intimacy. . being in someone’s company that long— I’ve never wanted to do them. . nudes even less. These are my first and it’s not easy.’

‘Should I be flattered?’

‘I don’t know. . but I feel my pictures have helped me know you. . I think I know you better than I’ve ever known anyone.’

She laughed. ‘Just because you’ve taken some pictures?’

‘Not just that.’

‘Then?’

‘Because this is the most intimate way that I can know anyone. . or anything.’

‘Are you saying you wouldn’t have known me if it weren’t for your camera?’

He looked down at his hands, frowning. ‘I can tell you this. If I hadn’t spent this time with you, here, taking pictures. . I wouldn’t be able to say, with such certainty. .’

‘What?’

‘That I’m in love with you.’

She sat up, startled, but before she could speak, Dinu continued, ‘. . And I also know. .’

‘What?’

‘That I want you to marry me.’

‘Marry you!’ She rested her chin on her knees. ‘What makes you think I’d want to marry someone who can only talk to me through a camera?’

‘Don’t you then?’

‘I don’t know, Dinu.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘Why marriage? Isn’t this good enough?’

‘Marriage is what I want — not just this.’

‘Why spoil everything, Dinu?’

‘Because I want it. .’

‘You don’t know me, Dinu.’ She smiled at him, running a hand over the back of his head. ‘I’m not like you. I’m wilful, I’m spoilt: Timmy used to call me wayward. You’d hate me in a week if you were married to me.’

‘I think that’s for me to judge.’

‘And what would we be marrying for? Timmy isn’t here and nor are my parents. You’ve seen how unwell my grandfather is.’

‘But what if. .?’ He leant over to place a hand on her belly. ‘What if there’s a child?’

She shrugged. ‘We’ll see then. For now — let’s just be content with what we have.’

Without a single word being said on the subject, Dinu understood, soon after the time of their first meeting, that between himself and Ilongo there existed some sort of connection — a link that was known to Ilongo but of which he himself was unaware. This understanding arose gradually, out of their conversations, nurtured by a pattern of questions and occasional oblique asides — by Ilongo’s curiosity about the Raha house in Rangoon, by his interest in family photographs, by the manner in which his references to ‘Your father’ slowly metamorphosed so that the pronoun disappeared.

Dinu understood that he was being prepared, that when Ilongo judged it right he would let him know about whatever it was that lay between them. This awareness evoked strangely little curiosity in Dinu — and this was not merely because his attention was wholly claimed by Alison. It was also because of Ilongo himself — because there was something about him that was so transparently trustworthy that it caused Dinu no anxiety to concede to him his superior knowledge.

Except for Alison, Dinu saw more of Ilongo than of anyone else at Morningside: he was dependent on him for many small things — posting letters, cashing cheques, borrowing bicycles. When he decided to set up his own dark room, it was Ilongo who helped him find second-hand equipment in Penang.

One Sunday, Dinu accompanied Ilongo on his weekly trip to Sungei Pattani, with Saya John. They visited Ah Fatt’s restaurant, where Saya John handed over an envelope, as always. ‘I do it for my wife,’ he told Dinu. ‘She was Hakka you know, on both sides. She always said that I was Hakka too, except that no one could tell for sure, since I never knew my parents.’

Afterward Dinu and Ilongo drove Saya John to the Church of Christ the King, on the outskirts of town. The church was bright and cheerful-looking with a soaring white-washed steeple and a facade that was ornamented with polished wooden rails. Under the shade of a flowering tree, a colourfully dressed congregation had gathered. A white-robed Irish priest led Saya John away, clapping him on the back: ‘Mr Martins! And how are you today?’

Dinu and Ilongo went to the morning show at the cinema and saw Edward G. Robinson in I am the Law. On the way back, after collecting Saya John, they stopped at Ilongo’s mother’s house, for a bowl of noodles.

Ilongo’s mother was near-sighted and prematurely bent. When Ilongo introduced him, Dinu could tell that she already knew exactly who he was. She asked him to come closer and touched his face with fingers that were cracked and callused. She said, in Hindustani, ‘My Ilongo looks much more like your father than you do.’

In some region of his consciousness Dinu understood exactly what she was saying, but he responded to her words as though to a pleasantry. ‘Yes, that’s true. I can see the resemblance.’

Apart from this one charged moment, the visit went well. Saya John seemed unusually alert, almost his old self. They all ate several helpings of noodles and at the end of the meal, Ilongo’s mother served thick, milky tea in glass tumblers. When they left, they were all aware — in a manner that was not in the least uncomfortable — that a visit that had begun as a meeting between strangers, had somehow changed, in tone and texture, to a family reunion.

On the way back to the house they sat three abreast in the truck, with Ilongo driving and Saya John in the middle. Ilongo looked visibly relieved, as though some sort of hurdle had been crossed. But Dinu found it hard to give shape to the thought that Ilongo might be his half-brother. A brother was what Neel was — a boundary to mark yourself off against. This was not what Ilongo was. If anything, Ilongo was an incarnation of his father — as he’d been in his youth, a far better man than the one whom he, Dinu, had known. There was some consolation in this.

It was on this night that Dinu mentioned his suspicions to Alison for the first time. She’d slipped into his room after dinner, as she sometimes did after settling her grandfather in his bed. At midnight she woke to see Dinu sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. ‘What’s the matter, Dinu? I thought you were asleep.’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’

‘Why not?’

Dinu told her about his visit to Ilongo’s mother and what she had said. Then he looked straight into her eyes and asked: ‘Tell me, Alison. . am I just imagining all this — or is there something to it?’

She shrugged and took a puff of his cigarette, without answering the question. So he asked again, more insistently: ‘Is there any truth to this, Alison? You should tell me if you know. .’

She said: ‘I don’t know, Dinu. There were always rumours.

But nobody’s ever said anything directly — not to me anyway. You know how it is — people don’t talk about these things.’

‘And you? Do you believe these. . these rumours?’

‘I didn’t used to. But then Grandfather said something that made me change my mind.’

‘What?’

‘That your mother had asked him to look after Ilongo.’

‘So she knows — my mother?’

‘I think so.’

He lit another cigarette, in silence. Alison knelt beside him and looked into his face: ‘Are you upset? Angry?’

He smiled, stroking her naked back. ‘No. I’m not upset. . and no angrier than I’ve always been. That’s the strange thing really — knowing the kind of man my father is, it comes as no surprise. It just makes me want never to go back home. .’

A few days later Alison sent up a letter that had just arrived. Dinu was working in his dark room and he broke off to look at the envelope: it was from Rangoon, from his father. Without another thought, he tore it up and went back to work.

That evening, after dinner, Alison asked: ‘Dinu, did you get the letter?’

He nodded.

‘It was from your father, wasn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Didn’t you read it?’

‘No, I tore it up.’

‘Didn’t you want to know what he was writing about?’

‘I know what he was writing about.’

‘What?’

‘He wants to sell his share of Morningside. .’

She paused and pushed her plate away. ‘Is that what you want too, Dinu?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to be here for ever. . I’m going to set up a studio in Sungei Pattani, and make a living from my camera. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do — and this is as good a place as any to do it.’

thirty-one

The night Ilongo brought Arjun to Morningside House, Dinu, Alison and Saya John were in the dining room, sitting at the long mahogany table. On the walls glowed the bamboo-shelled sconces that Elsa had designed. The room was filled with a rich, warm light.

Ilongo was smiling broadly, in anticipation of Dinu’s surprise. ‘Look who I’ve brought with me.’ Then Arjun walked through the door, dressed in uniform, with his cap in his hands. His Sam Browne glistened in the golden glow of the bamboo sconces.

‘Arjun?’

‘Hello.’ Arjun walked around the table and patted Dinu on the shoulder. ‘Nice to see you, old chap.’

‘But, Arjun. .’ Dinu stood up. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ll tell you soon enough,’ Arjun said. ‘But won’t you introduce me first?’

‘Oh yes. Of course,’ Dinu turned to Alison. ‘This is Arjun. Neel’s brother-in-law — Manju’s twin.’

‘I’m so glad you came.’ Alison leant over to Saya John and spoke softly into his ear. ‘Grandfather, this is Dinu’s brother-in-law,’ she said. ‘He’s posted at the army base in Sungei Pattani.’

Now it was Arjun’s turn to be surprised. ‘How did you know I was posted at Sungei Pattani?’

‘I saw you in town the other day.’

‘Really? I’m amazed that you noticed.’

‘Of course I noticed,’ She threw back her head to laugh. ‘In Sungei Pattani a stranger stands out.’

Dinu broke in. ‘You didn’t say anything to me, Alison. .’

‘I just saw a man in a uniform.’ Alison laughed. ‘How was I to know he was your brother-in-law?’

‘I knew,’ Ilongo said. ‘I knew the moment I saw him.’

‘He did.’ Arjun nodded. ‘I walked into the estate office to ask for Dinu. And before I’d even opened my mouth he said: “Aren’t you Mr Neel’s brother-in-law?” You could have knocked me over with a feather. I said: “How did you know?” and he said: “Mr Dinu showed me a picture — from your sister’s wedding.”’

‘So I did.’

Dinu recalled that it was two years since he and Arjun had last met — in Calcutta. Arjun seemed to have grown in the meanwhile — or was it just that he had filled out his uniform? Even though Arjun had always been tall, Dinu could not remember ever feeling dwarfed in his presence as he did now.

‘Well,’ said Alison brightly. ‘You must have something to eat — both you and Ilongo.’

The table was spread with dozens of small, colourful china bowls. Most of them still had their contents intact.

Arjun eyed the food with longing. ‘A real meal, at last. .’

‘Why?’ said Alison. ‘Don’t they feed you at your base?’

‘They do their best I suppose.’

‘There’s plenty here for both of you,’ Alison said. ‘So sit down — Ilongo, you too. The cook’s always complaining that we send the food back untouched.’

Ilongo shook his head. ‘I can’t stay. .’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. My mother will be waiting.’

Ilongo left and another place was laid at the table, next to Alison’s. Arjun seated himself and Alison began to pile his plate with food.

‘We call this ayam limau purut—chicken with lime leaves and tamarind; and here’s some prawn sambal with screwpine leaves; and these are belacan brinjals; and over there is some chinchalok with chillies — shrimps, pickled in lime juice; and this here is fish steamed with ginger buds. .’

‘What a feast! And this was just an everyday dinner?’

‘My mother was always very proud of her table,’ Alison said. ‘And now it’s become a habit of the house.’

Arjun ate with gusto. ‘This food is wonderful!’

‘Your aunt Uma loved it too. Do you remember, Dinu? That time?’

‘Yes I do.’ Dinu nodded. ‘I think I even have pictures.’

‘I’ve never eaten anything like this,’ Arjun said. ‘What is it called?’

‘It’s Nyonya food,’ Alison said. ‘One of the world’s last great secrets, my mother used to say.’

Suddenly Saya John spoke up, catching them all by surprise.

‘It’s the flowers that make the difference.’

‘The flowers, Grandfather?’

Saya John looked at Arjun with eyes that were fleetingly clear. ‘Yes — the flowers in the food. Bunga kentan and bunga telang — ginger flowers and blue flowers. They’re what give the food its taste. That’s what Elsa always says.’

A shadow passed over his face and his eyes grew cloudy again. He turned to Alison. ‘We must remember to send Matthew and Elsa a telegram,’ he said. ‘They should stop in Malacca on the way back.’

Alison rose quickly from her chair. ‘You must excuse us,’ she said to Arjun. ‘My grandfather is tired. I should take him up to bed.’

‘Of course.’ Arjun stood up.

Alison helped Saya John to his feet and led him slowly across the room. At the door, she turned to look back at Arjun. ‘It’s nice to have a visitor who likes our food — the cook’s always saying that Dinu doesn’t eat at all. She’ll be delighted you enjoyed her cooking. You must come again.’

‘I will.’ Arjun grinned. ‘You can be sure of that.’

There was a warmth and lightness in Alison’s voice that Dinu hadn’t heard before. Watching her from his place at the table, he was conscious of a sudden rush of jealousy.

‘Well old chap,’ said Arjun, in a booming, hearty voice, ‘did you know that you’ve got everyone worried at home?’

‘No.’ Dinu flinched. ‘And there’s really no need to shout.’ It was a struggle to muster the self-control to go on talking to Arjun.

‘I’m sorry.’ Arjun laughed. ‘Didn’t mean to put you out. .’

‘I’m sure you didn’t.’

‘I had a letter from Manju, you see — that’s how I knew where to find you.’

‘I see.’

‘She said they hadn’t heard from you in a while.’

‘Oh?’

‘What would you like me to tell them?’

Dinu raised his head with great deliberation. ‘Nothing,’ he said flatly. ‘I’d like you to tell them nothing

Arjun raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I ask why?’

‘It’s not very complicated.’ Dinu shrugged. ‘You see. . my father sent me here because he wants to sell our share of Morningside.’

‘And?’

‘Now that I’m here. . I’ve decided it wouldn’t be a good idea.’

‘You’ve grown to like the place I suppose?’

‘It’s not just that.’ Dinu looked Arjun straight in the eye.

‘It’s Alison really.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’ve met her. .’

‘Yes.’ Arjun nodded.

‘You probably know what I mean.’

‘I think you’re trying to tell me something, Dinu.’ Arjun pushed his chair back from the table. ‘Let me guess: are you saying you’ve fallen for her?’ He laughed.

‘Something like that.’

‘I see. And do you think she’s keen on you too?’

‘I think so.’

‘Hasn’t she told you so?’

‘Not. . in so many words.’

‘Hope you’re right then.’ Arjun laughed again and the light sparkled on his perfect teeth. ‘I have to say I don’t know if she’s right for a chap like you — a woman like that.’

‘It doesn’t really matter, Arjun. .’ Dinu tried to smile. ‘In my case it’s something I have to believe. .’

‘And why is that?’

‘You see — I’m not like you, Arjun. It’s never been easy for me to get on with people — especially women. If something went wrong. . between me and Alison, that is. . I don’t know how I’d cope. .’

‘Dinu, am I right to think that you’re warning me — telling me to stay away?’

‘Perhaps I am.’

‘I see.’ Arjun pushed his plate away. ‘There’s really no need, you know.’

‘Good.’ Dinu felt a smile returning to his face. ‘Well, that’s out of the way then.’

Arjun looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Well, you’ve certainly made yourself clear. So perhaps I should be off. You’ll make my excuses to Alison?’

‘Yes. . of course.’

They went together to the front door. Arjun’s Ford V8 staff car was parked outside, under the porch. Arjun opened the door and held out his hand. ‘It was nice to see you, Dinu,’ he said. ‘Even if briefly.’

Dinu was suddenly ashamed of his lack of generosity. ‘I don’t mean to send you away, Arjun. .’ he said guiltily. ‘Please don’t think that you’re not welcome. You must come back. . Soon. . I’m sure Alison would like that.’

‘And you?’

‘Yes. Me too.’

Arjun appraised this with a frown. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, of course. You must. . you must come back.’

‘I will then, if you don’t mind, Dinu. It would be nice to get away from the base every now and again.’

‘Why? Is something wrong?’

‘Not wrong exactly — but it’s not always as pleasant as it might be. .’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know how to explain, Dinu. Ever since we’ve got to Malaya nothing’s been the same.’

Arjun’s entry into their lives was like a turning of the seasons. He dropped by almost daily, often bringing Hardy or some other friends with him. Sungei Pattani had now become the headquarters of the 11th Division, and Arjun had linked up with many old acquaintances and friends. In the evenings he would gather them together and drive up from the base, in whatever vehicle was at hand — sometimes an Alvis staff car, sometimes a Ford V8, sometimes, even, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Usually they came after nightfall, driving up with their headlights blazing sounding triumphal flurries on their horns.

‘They’re here!’ Alison would run down to the kitchen to warn the cook.

It was evident that she enjoyed these visits; Dinu could tell that it delighted her to see the house filled with people again. She produced clothes that he did not know she possessed: until then he’d seen her only in the plain dresses she wore to the office, and an occasional silk cheongsam. Now richly coloured, beautifully tailored clothes poured out of her closets— elegant hats and gowns that her mother had ordered from Paris, in Morningside’s heyday.

Almost every evening the house echoed to the sound of parade-ground voices and loud laughter. They seemed never to stop laughing, these young officers — the smallest joke would set them roaring, pounding each other on the back. They usually brought bottles of whisky, gin or rum from their mess. Sometimes Kishan Singh came with them to serve them their drinks. They would sit out on the veranda, sipping stengahs and gin slings. As if by magic, vast quantities of food would appear on the dining-room table. Alison would lead them in and then Arjun would take over, showing his friends round the table, explaining the dishes in minute detail: ‘Look over here, this is duck — it’s cooked in sugar-cane juice, you’ve never tasted anything like it. And here, see, these prawns? They’re made with flowers — ginger buds — that’s what gives them that amazing taste. .’

Dinu would look on, like a spectator at a circus: he knew that the part of host should have been his own to play. But with each of these evenings he could feel his presence in the house diminishing, shrinking. It didn’t seem to matter whether Arjun came alone or was accompanied by a troop of his friends. He seemed to have a way of filling the house, even when he was on his own. There was no denying that there was something magnetic about him — a self-confidence, a habit of command, an exuberant abundance of appetites. Dinu knew he could not hope to keep up with him.

At the end of each meal, Arjun would crank up the gramophone and clear the rugs off the hardwood floors. He and his friends would take turns dancing with Alison. It was a revelation to Dinu to discover how well she danced — better than anyone he’d ever known, just as well as dancers in the movies — with flair and rhythm and an energy that seemed inexhaustible. Amongst the men, Arjun was the best dancer by far. At the end of each night, he would put on his favourite record — Tommy Dorsey’s band playing ‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You’. Everyone else would pull back to make space for them, and when the record came scratching to a stop the room would fill with applause. At the end of these evenings Alison seemed scarcely to remember that he, Dinu, still existed.

Once in a while Arjun would announce that he had succeeded in scrounging some extra petrol from the ‘pilot chappies’ at the airstrip. They would set out on an expedition, sometimes just the three of them, sometimes as a part of a much larger crowd. One such foray took them to the lodge that sat atop the summit of Gunung Jerai. A group of pilots had commandeered the place for a party; they were to be Arjun’s guests.

They went in a Ford V8 staff car. To get to the summit they had to circle around the mountain driving past quiet kampongs with palm-shaded mosques. Children waved at them from ricefields, standing on tiptoe to reach above the grain-heavy stalks. It was a cloudy late November day and there was a cool breeze blowing in from the sea.

The road that led to the summit was not much better than a dirt track. It tacked back and forth across the slope, rising steeply. The mountainside was thickly forested and the track wound through dense patches of jungle. It was several degrees cooler than in the plain, and the sun was blocked by a constant, quick-moving blanket of cloud. At the top the vegetation ended abruptly and the lodge appeared — it looked a little like an English cottage, except that it was surrounded by a balcony that provided dramatic views of the coast and the surrounding plains.

The balcony was crowded with servicemen in grey, blue, khaki and bottle-green. Scattered among the uniforms were a few women dressed in brightly printed cottons. Somewhere inside the lodge a band was playing.

Arjun and Alison went off into the lodge to dance and Dinu was left to himself. He walked round the balcony, past tables that were draped in flapping white cloths. The view of the plain was hindered by a mantle of clouds blowing in from the sea. But every so often the wind would tear the cloud-cover apart, providing spectacular glimpses of the plain: he caught sight of Sungei Pattani, at the foot of the mountain, with hundreds of acres of rubber stretching away from it in all directions. In the distance, he spotted the craggy peaks of the island of Penang and the finger-like wharfs of the port of Butterworth. The north — south highway ran like a great stripe across the landscape, approaching from the southern end of the plain and disappearing towards the north, where the border lay. Along the west lay the Andaman Sea, alight with the bright colours of the sunset.

On the next clear day, Dinu promised himself, he would bring his cameras to the lodge. For the first time in his life, he regretted never having learned to drive: for this view alone, the effort would have been worthwhile.

The next day Arjun was back at Morningside again, at an unusual hour — at eleven in the morning. He was driving a motorcycle, a wasp-waisted, pigeon-breasted Harley-Davidson, painted a dull, military green. It had a sidecar attached. Arjun drove up to the house from the plantation office with Alison sitting in the sidecar.

Dinu was in his dark room when Arjun shouted up from the porch: ‘Dinu! Come down here. I’ve got some news.’

Dinu went running downstairs. ‘Well. .?’

Arjun laughed, punching his shoulder. ‘You’re an uncle, Dinu — and so am I, Manju’s had a baby — a girl.’

‘Oh. . I’m glad. .’

‘We’re going to celebrate. Come with us.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Down to the sea,’ said Arjun. ‘Jump on. Behind me.’

Dinu glanced at Alison, who looked away. He felt his feet growing leaden. Over the last many days he had struggled to keep pace with the two of them, but he could not be what he was not. He did not want to be with her just so that his presence would weigh on her as a reminder — anything but that.

‘I don’t think you really want me with you,’ Dinu said quietly.

They sounded a chorus of protests.

‘Oh, Dinu. Rubbish!’

‘Oh, come on, Dinu. Don’t be an ass.’

Dinu turned on his heel. ‘I have work to finish in the dark room. You go ahead. You can tell me about it when you get back.’ He went back into the house and ran upstairs. He heard the coughing sound of the motorcycle’s kick-starter and could not keep himself from looking down, from a window. The Harley-Davidson was speeding down the drive, heading into the estate. He caught a glimpse of Alison’s scarf, fluttering like a pennant.

He went back into his dark room and found that his eyes were smarting. In the past he’d always been able to count on the ambience of the dark room for reassurance; its dim red glow had been an unfailing source of comfort. But now the light seemed too bright, unbearably so. He switched it off and sat crouched on the floor, hugging his knees.

His instincts had been true from the start. He’d known that Arjun could not be trusted — nor Alison, not with him. Yet what could he have done? They were adults, and he had no real claim on either of them.

In a while he touched his face and found that it was wet. He grew angry with himself: if there was any tenet on which he’d wanted to build his life, it was that of never giving in to self-pity — that was a road that would not end, he knew, once he had started down it.

He rose to his feet and walked around the room in the darkness, trying to recall its exact size and layout as well as the placement of every bit of furniture and every object. He counted his paces and every time he touched a wall or bumped against something, he started over again.

He came to a decision. He would leave. It was clear that Alison had lost interest in him and there was nothing to be gained from remaining at Morningside. He would pack his things and spend the night at Ilongo’s mother’s house. Tomorrow he would go to Penang, to wait for a steamer that would take him back to Rangoon.

The motorcycle headed due west, down a road that dwindled into a fraying ribbon of tarmac, fringed by dust and sand. They drove through a small town with a blue-domed mosque and then the sea appeared in front of them, sparkling blue. Waves were climbing gently up a long shelf of sand. The road turned left and they stayed on it, driving parallel to the beach. They came to a small hamlet and the road ended. The marketplace smelt of salt water and drying fish.

Alison asked: ‘Should we leave the motorcycle here?’

‘No.’ Arjun laughed. ‘We don’t have to. We can take it with us. This Harley can go anywhere.’

The villagers gathered to stare as they drove through the marketplace, slipping through the gaps between the shacks. The motorcycle whined as it climbed over the dune that separated the hamlet from the sea. The sand was blindingly white in the noon-day sun. Arjun kept to the edge of the beach, where the ground was held together by a thin carpet of weeds. He drove slowly, dodging between the windblown trunks of coconut palms.

They left the village far behind and came to a cove that was sheltered by screwpines. The beach consisted of a thin, white fingernail of sand. At the mouth of the cove, no more than a hundred yards from the shore, there was a tiny island. It was thickly wooded, with green bushes and dwarf pines.

‘Let’s stop here,’ said Alison.

Arjun wheeled the motorcycle into a patch of shade and pulled it on to its kickstand. They took off their shoes and left them on the sand. Arjun rolled up his trouser cuffs and they ran across the burning sliver of beach, straight into the water. It was low tide and the sea was very calm, with gentle waves lapping at the shore. The water was so clear that it magnified the shifting patterns of the sea floor, giving them the appearance of coloured mosaics.

‘Let’s swim,’ said Arjun.

‘I didn’t bring anything.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Arjun began to unbutton his khaki shirt.

‘There’s no one here.’

Alison was wearing a workaday cotton dress. She’d been holding it up, keeping the hem above the water. Now she let it drop. The water soaked quickly into the cotton, rising towards her waist.

‘Come on, Alison. We have the whole place to ourselves.’ Arjun’s shirt-tails were hanging loose, the buttons undone.

‘No.’ She laughed. ‘It’s December. You have to respect our winter.’

‘It’s not cold. Come on.’ He reached for her hand, his tongue flicking over the sparkling line of his teeth.

She dug her toes into the sand. Through the clear water, she spotted the curved edge of a seashell, buried between her feet. Reaching into the water she dug it out. The shell was unexpectedly heavy, large enough to fill both her hands.

‘What is it?’ said Arjun, looking over her shoulder. His khaki trousers were wet almost to the waist.

‘It’s a nautilus,’ she said.

The shell had an elliptical opening at one end, like a horn: the colour inside was a rich mother of pearl, tinged with silver highlights. Its body was coiled into an almost perfectly circular mound. A spiral line ran along the mound, ending in a tiny protrusion, not unlike a nipple.

‘How do you know what it’s called?’ Arjun asked. She could sense his presence behind her. He was looking over her at the shell, his chin resting lightly on her head.

‘Dinu showed me a photograph of a shell like this one,’ she said. ‘He thinks it’s one of the greatest pictures ever made.’

His arms reached round her shoulders, encircling her body. His hands closed on the shell, his fingers dwarfing hers, his palms wet against the back of her hands. He ran his thumb along the edge of the mother of pearl mouth, over the line that encircled the swelling body, to the tiny nipple-like point that topped the mound.

‘We should. .’ She felt the touch of his breath blowing through her hair. ‘We should take this back for Dinu,’ he said. His voice had gone hoarse.

He let his arms drop and stepped away from her. ‘Let’s go and explore,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the island that lay at the mouth of the cove. ‘I bet we could walk over. The water’s very low.’

‘I don’t want to get my dress wet.’ She laughed.

‘You won’t,’ he promised. ‘If the water gets too high I’ll carry you on my back.’

He took hold of her hand and pulled her deeper into the water. The ground dipped until the water was at waist-level. Then the sandy floor began to rise again, sloping up towards the island. Arjun began to move faster, pulling her with him. They were running when they reached the shore. They raced across the sun-baked fringe of sand, into the shaded interior of the island. Alison fell on her back, on the soft, sandy earth, and looked up at the sky. They were encircled by bushy screwpines, screened from the shore.

Arjun threw himself down beside her, on his stomach. She was still holding the shell and he prised it free of her grip. He laid it on her chest, and ran his finger along the shell’s spiral edge, cupping its body with his palm.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ he said.

She saw how badly he wanted her; there was something irresistible about the insistency of his desire. When his hand slipped off the shell, on to her body, she made no effort to stop him. From that moment on, when it was already too late, everything changed.

It was as though he wasn’t really there and nor was she; as though their bodies had been impelled more by a sense of inevitability than by conscious volition; by an inebriation of images and suggestion — memories of pictures and songs and dances; it was as though they were both absent, two strangers, whose bodies were discharging a function. She thought of what it was like with Dinu; the intensity of his focus on the moment; the sense of time holding still. It was only against the contrast of this cohabiting of absences that she could apprehend the meaning of what it meant to be fully present— eye, mind and touch united in absolute oneness, each beheld by the other, each beholding.

When Arjun rolled off her she began to cry, pulling her dress down over her body, clasping her knees. He sat up, in consternation. ‘Alison — what’s the matter? Why’re you crying?’

She shook her head, her face buried between her knees. He persisted. ‘Alison, I didn’t mean. . I thought you wanted. .’

‘It’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you. Only myself.’ ‘For what, Alison?’

‘For what?’ She looked at him in disbelief. ‘How can you look at me after this and ask me a question like that? What about Dinu?’

‘Alison.’ He laughed, reaching for her arm. ‘Dinu doesn’t need to know. Why tell him about this?’

She pushed his hand away. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please. Don’t touch me.’

Then they heard a voice, calling in the distance, just loud enough to carry over the lapping of the water.

‘Sah’b.’

Arjun pulled on his wet uniform and stood up. He saw Kishan Singh standing on the beach; behind him was a helmeted motorcyclist, on a Harley-Davidson just like the one Arjun had driven up from the base.

Kishan Singh was waving a piece of paper, snapping it urgently through the air.

‘Sah’b.’

‘Alison,’ Arjun said, ‘something’s up. They’ve sent a messenger from the base.’

‘You go ahead,’ Alison said. All she could think of at that moment was of throwing herself into the water, to wash off the feel of his touch. ‘I’ll follow in a minute.’

Arjun walked into the water and waded over to the beach. Kishan Singh was waiting at the water’s edge; his eyes held Arjun’s for an instant. There was something in them that made Arjun check his pace and look again. But now Kishan Singh had snapped to attention, his hand raised in a salute, his eyes fixed in an unseeing gaze.

‘What is it, Kishan Singh?’

Kishan Singh handed him an envelope. ‘Hardy-sah’b sent this.’

Arjun tore the envelope open and unfolded Hardy’s note. He was still frowning at it when Alison stepped out of the water and walked up to him.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘I have to get back,’ Arjun said. ‘Right now. It looks as if something big is under way. We’re leaving Sungei Pattani — my battalion, that is.’

‘You’re going away?’ Alison stared at him, as though she couldn’t believe what she’d heard.

‘Yes.’ He glanced at her. ‘And you’re glad — aren’t you?’

She walked off without answering and he followed her. When they were over the crest of the dune, out of Kishan Singh’s sight, he turned her around with a sudden violence.

‘Alison,’ he said sharply, ‘you didn’t answer me.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t take that tone with me, Arjun. I’m not your batman.’

‘I asked you a question.’

‘What was it?’

‘Are you glad that I’m leaving?’

‘If you really want to know,’ she said flatly, ‘the answer is yes.’

‘Why?’ His voice was halting and confused. ‘You came here because you wanted to. I don’t understand this: why are you so angry with me?’

‘I’m not.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not angry at all — you’re wrong about that. It wouldn’t make sense to be angry with you, Arjun.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Arjun — you’re not in charge of what you do; you’re a toy, a manufactured thing, a weapon in someone else’s hands. Your mind doesn’t inhabit your body.’

‘That’s crap. .’ He cut himself short. ‘The only reason you can get away with that,’ he said, ‘is because you’re a woman. .’

She saw that he was a hair’s-breadth away from hitting her and this had the odd effect of making her suddenly sorry for him. And then she realised that she had always felt sorry for him, a little, and that was why she had come with him that morning to the beach. She saw that despite the largeness and authority of his presence, he was a man without resources, a man whose awareness of himself was very slight and very fragile; she saw that Dinu was much stronger and more resourceful, and she understood that that was why she’d been tempted to be cruel to him; that that was why she had had to take the risk of losing him. The thought of this made her suddenly apprehensive.

She walked quickly to the Harley-Davidson. ‘Come on,’ she said to Arjun. ‘Take me back to Morningside.’