The Glass Palace

forty

Bela was eighteen when Dolly and Rajkumar crossed the mountains. The day when they arrived in Lankasuka was to live in her mind for ever.

This was in 1942, which was as terrible a year as any that Bengal had ever known. At the time, little was known in India about conditions in Burma and Malaya. Because of wartime security, news was sketchy and all the usual channels of communication had broken down. The year before, when the first evacuation ship from Rangoon arrived in Calcutta, Bela and her parents had gone to meet it at the docks. They had hoped to see Manju among the disembarking passengers. Instead they learnt that Rajkumar and his family had decided to stay on in Burma.

Then came the bombing of Rangoon and the great northwards exodus of the Indian population. When the first refugees arrived in Calcutta, Bela sought them out, asking for information, citing names, addresses. She learnt nothing.

It was also in 1942 that Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India movement. Uma was one of the many thousands of Congress workers who were imprisoned. Some were gaoled until the end of the war. Uma’s stay was relatively short; she fell ill with typhoid and was allowed to return home.

Uma had been home a couple of months when, one afternoon, her elderly gatekeeper came to tell her that there were some destitutes outside, asking for her. This was only too common at the time; Bengal was in the throes of a famine, one of the worst in history. The city was full of starving migrants from the countryside; people were stripping the parks of grass and leaves, sifting through the sewers for grains of rice.

At Lankasuka, such spare food as there was was distributed to the poor once a day. On that particular day, the morning’s food distribution was long over. Uma was busy at her desk when the chowkidar walked in to tell her about the destitutes. She said: ‘Tell them to come back tomorrow, at the right time.’

The chowkidar went away, only to return shortly afterwards. ‘They won’t leave.’

Bela happened to be at hand. Uma said: ‘Bela, go and see what the matter is.’

Bela stepped out into the courtyard and began to walk towards the gate. She saw a man and a woman holding the metal bars. Then she heard a voice, saying her name, in a hoarse whisper—‘Bela’—and she looked closely at their faces.

Uma heard a scream and ran out into the courtyard. She snatched the keys from the chowkidar’s hands. She went running to the gate and threw it open.

‘Look.’

Rajkumar was kneeling on the pavement. He held out his arms and they saw that he was holding a child, a baby — Jaya. Suddenly the baby’s face turned a bright, dark red and she began to cry at the top of her voice. At that moment the world held no more beautiful sound than this utterance of rage: this primeval sound of life proclaiming its determination to defend itself.

It was not till the latter months of the next year, 1943, that the first rumours of the Indian National Army began to reach India — but this was not the same force that Arjun had joined, in northern Malaya. The first Indian National Army had not lasted long. About a year after its founding, its leader, Captain Mohun Singh, had disbanded it, fearing that the Japanese were trying to take it over. The army was resurrected by Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist politician, who reached Singapore in 1943 by way of Afghanistan and Germany. Bose reinvigorated the Indian National Army, drawing tens of thousands of new recruits from the Indian populations of South East Asia: Arjun, Hardy, Kishan Singh, Ilongo and many others joined.

At the end of the war thousands of members of the Indian National Army were brought back to India as prisoners of war. To the British they were JIFs — Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists. They were regarded as traitors — both to the Empire, and to the Indian army, the bulk of which had continued to fight for the Allies, in North Africa, southern Europe, and finally in the British counter-invasion of Burma. The Indian public, however, saw the matter quite differently. To them imperialism and Fascism were twin evils, one being a derivative of the other. It was the defeated prisoners of the Indian National Army that they received as heroes — not the returning victors.

In December 1945 the colonial government chose to bring charges against three members of the Indian National Army— the famous ‘Red Fort Three’: Shah Nawaz Khan, Gurbakhsh Singh Dhillon and Prem Sahgal. The country erupted with protests and demonstrations; support committees were formed all over India, despite an official ban. General strikes shut down entire states; students held huge public meetings defying curfew orders. In the southern city of Madurai two people died after the police opened fire on a demonstration. In Calcutta tens of thousands of people poured into the streets. They took over the city for several days. Dozens were shot by the police. In Bombay, naval ratings mutinied. For the Congress Party the trial was a windfall. The party had lost the momentum it had gained in the pre-war years and it badly needed an issue that would serve to mobilise the country. The trial provided just such a cause.

Once the trial got under way, the prosecution quickly ran into problems. It was not able to produce any evidence to link the Indian National Army either with Japanese atrocities in South East Asia, or with the mistreatment of British and Australian prisoners of war. While it did prove that some Indian prisoners had indeed been mistreated, none of these cases had any link with the three defendants.

On December 1, 1945, Bhulabhai Desai, the chief defence lawyer, rose to make his concluding address. ‘What is now on trial before this court,’ he said, ‘is the right to wage war with immunity on the part of a subject race.’

There was essentially only one charge against his clients, he argued, that of waging war against the King. All the other charges, he claimed, were derived from the first. It fell to Desai to demonstrate that international law recognised the right of subject peoples to wage war for their freedom and this he did by citing a series of precedents. He showed that the British Government had itself recognised this right, when expedient, in cases that dated back to the nineteenth century. They had, for example, supported the Greeks and a number of other nationalities in rebellions against the Ottoman Empire; more recently, they had supported the Polish National Army and Czechoslovak rebels; they had similarly insisted on the right of the French maquis to be treated as belligerents even though the Government of Marshal Pétain was at that time the de jure and de facto Government of France. The trial ended with all three defendants being found guilty of ‘waging war against the King’. They were sentenced to transportation for life, but all three had their sentences commuted. They were set free and were received by tumultuous crowds.

Hardy was by this time a national figure (he was later to become an ambassador and a high-ranking official of the Indian Government). He came to see Jaya’s grandparents in Calcutta in 1946. It was from him that they learnt that Arjun had died fighting in one of the INA’s last engagements — fought in central Burma, in the final days of the war.

At this point in the conflict, the Japanese were in retreat and the Allied Fourteenth Army, under the command of General Slim, was advancing rapidly southwards. The Indian units in central Burma were among the last to continue resisting. Their numbers were tiny and they were armed with obsolete weaponry, dating back to the early days of the war. The forces they were fighting against were often mirror-images of what they themselves had been at the start of the war: most were Indians, often from the same regiments, often recruited from the same villages and districts. It was not usual for them to be fighting their younger brothers and nephews.

The Indian National Army’s resistance at this stage was largely symbolic, undertaken in the hope of inspiring a revolt in the Indian army. Although they were never a serious threat to the victorious Fourteenth Army they were more than a minor irritant. Many fought and died with great courage, providing heroes and martyrs for the movement. Arjun was among those who had died a hero, Hardy said. And so had Kishan Singh. That was all they knew about Arjun’s death and they were content that it should be so.

For the next six years Dolly and Rajkumar stayed with Uma, in her flat. The legacy of Rajkumar’s quarrel with Uma was forgotten and the baby, Jaya, became a bond linking every member of the household.

Dolly took a job with an army publications unit, translating wartime pamphlets into Burmese. Rajkumar did occasional supervisory work at sawmills and timberyards. In January 1948 Burma gained her independence. Soon after this Dolly decided that she and Rajkumar would return to Rangoon, at least for a while. In the meantime, Jaya was to be left in Calcutta, with her aunt Bela and her other grandparents.

Dolly’s eagerness to go back to Burma was due largely to the fact that Dinu had not been heard from in seven years. Dolly believed that he was still alive and she was keen to find him. Rajkumar expressed his willingness to go with her and she booked passages for both of them.

But as the day approached, it became clear that Rajkumar was very far from being certain of his own mind. Over the last six years, he had grown very attached to his orphaned grandchild. More than anyone else in the house, it was he who undertook the responsibilities of her everyday care: he sat with her through her meals, walked with her in the park, told her stories at bedtime. Dolly began to wonder whether he would be able to sustain the pain of wrenching himself away from the child.

The question was settled when Rajkumar disappeared, two days before they were due to depart for Burma. He came back after the ship had sailed. He was contrite and full of apologies; he said he had no memory of where he had been or why he’d gone. He urged Dolly to make another booking; he promised it would not happen again. In the meanwhile, Dolly had decided that it would be better to leave Rajkumar where he was — both for his own sake and Jaya’s. Uma for her part made no objection; she was content to have him stay on: he was very little trouble and often made himself useful round the house.

Dolly went back to the steamship company’s office and booked a single, one-way passage to Rangoon. She knew that Rajkumar would feel obliged to accompany her if he learnt of her plans. She decided not to tell him. She went about her daily business as usual. On the morning of her departure she cooked mohingya noodles, Rajkumar’s favourite dish. They went for a walk around the lake and afterwards Rajkumar fell asleep.

It had been arranged that Uma would go with Dolly to the Khidderpore docks. Neither of them said much on the way; there was a finality about this departure that they could not bring themselves to acknowledge. At the end, when Dolly was about to board her ship, she said to Uma: ‘I know Jaya will be fine. There are many of you to care for her. It’s Rajkumar that I’m worried about.’

‘He’ll be all right, Dolly.’

‘Will you look after him, Uma? For my sake?’

‘I will; I promise.’

At Lankasuka, Rajkumar woke to find a note on his pillow: it was written in Dolly’s careful hand. He picked up the note and smoothed it down. It said: Rajkumar — in my heart I know that Dinu is still alive and that I shall find him. After that I shall go to Sagaing as I have so long wanted to do. Know that nothing in this world will be harder to renounce than you and the memory of our love. Dolly.

He never saw her again.

forty-one

As the only child in the house, Jaya had the run of Lankasuka when she was growing up. Her aunt Bela lived upstairs, inheriting the flat after her parents’ death. She never married and the everyday tasks of looking after Jaya fell mainly to her: it was in her flat that Jaya usually slept and ate.

But Rajkumar was never more than one flight of stairs away: after Dolly’s departure, he continued to live on the ground floor, in Uma’s flat. He had a small room of his own, next to the kitchen, furnished sparsely, with a narrow bed and a couple of bookshelves.

The only inessential object in Rajkumar’s room was a radio— an old-fashioned Paillard with a wooden cabinet, and a textile-covered grille. Rajkumar always took his afternoon siesta with the radio on — it was Jaya who usually turned it off, after coming home from school. The silencing of the radio would often rouse Rajkumar from his nap. He would sit up, leaning back against his pillow, settling his granddaughter beside him. When he put his arm around Jaya’s shoulders she would disappear into the crook of his elbow; his hands were huge, the skin very dark, marbled with lighter-coloured veins. The white hairs on his knuckles stood out in startling contrast. He would shut his eyes and the hollows of his face would fill with leathery creases. And then he would begin to talk; stories would come pouring out of him — of places that Jaya had never been to and never seen; of images and scenes that were so vivid as to brim over from the measuring cup of reality into an ocean of dreams. She lived in his stories.

Rajkumar’s favourite haunt was a small Buddhist temple in the centre of the city, a place that Dolly had liked to visit too, in the past. This was where Calcutta’s Burmese community forgathered, and on special occasions Rajkumar would take Jaya there with him. The temple was on the fourth floor of a tumbledown old building, in an area where the streets were clogged with traffic and the air was dense with diesel smoke. They would make their way across town on a bus and get off at the stop for the Eden Hospital. They’d climb up the grimy marble stairs and when they reached the top, they would step into a hall that seemed a world away from its surroundings: full of light, perfumed with the scent of fresh flowers, its floors shining clean. On the floor there would be rush mats, woven in distinctive patterns: different from Indian mats, although at the same time, not dissimilar.

The temple was always at its liveliest during the great Burmese festivals — Thingyan, the water festival that inaugurated the Burmese New Year; Waso, which marked the beginning of Thadin, the annual three-month period of fasting and abstinence; and Thadingyut, the festival of light, which celebrated its end.

Once, when Jaya was ten, Rajkumar took her to the temple for Thadingyut. The temple was filled with people; women were bustling about in their longyis, preparing a feast; the walls glowed with the shimmering light of hundreds of lamps and candles. Suddenly, in the midst of the noise and the bustle, there was a hush. Whispers ran around the room: ‘The Princess. . the Second Princess, she’s coming up the stairs. .’

The Princess stepped in and there was a quickening of breath, a nudging of elbows; those who knew how performed the shiko. The Princess was wearing a scarlet htamein and a kind of sash; she was in her late sixties, with her greying hair tied at the back of her head in a severe little bun. She was tiny, with a kindly face and black, twinkling eyes. She too was living in India then, in the hill-station of Kalimpong. Her circumstances were known to be extremely straitened.

The Princess exchanged a few gracious pleasantries with the people around her. Then her eyes fell on Rajkumar and her face creased into a fond, warm smile. She broke off her conversations; the crowd parted and she made her way slowly across the room. Every eye in the temple was now on Rajkumar. Jaya could feel herself swelling with pride on her grandfather’s behalf.

The Princess greeted Rajkumar warmly, in Burmese; Jaya couldn’t understand a word of their conversation, but she watched both their faces carefully, studying their changing expressions, smiling when they smiled, frowning when they were grave. Then Rajkumar introduced her: ‘And this is my granddaughter. .’

Jaya had never met a princess before and didn’t know what to do. But she was not without a certain resourcefulness; she recalled a movie she had recently seen — was it Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella? — and sketched the beginning of a curtsey, holding the edge of her dress pinched between finger and thumb. She was rewarded with a hug from the Princess.

Later, people gathered around Rajkumar, wondering why she had singled him out. ‘What did Her Highness say?’ they asked. ‘How did she know you?’

‘Oh, I’ve known her most of my life,’ Rajkumar said off-handedly.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. The first time I saw her was in Mandalay and she was just six months old.’

‘Oh? And how did that come about?’

And then Rajkumar would start at the beginning, going back to that day more than sixty years before, when he had heard the sound of English cannon rolling in across the plain to the walls of Mandalay’s fort.

In a quiet corner of Lankasuka, there was a niche that served as a shrine to Jaya’s parents and her uncle, Arjun. Two framed photographs stood in the niche: one of these was a picture of Manju and Neel, taken at their wedding — they’d been caught glancing up from the sacramental fire, in surprise. The hooded veil of Manju’s sari had slipped momentarily from her head. They were smiling, their faces shining and radiant. The photograph of Arjun was taken at Howrah Station: he was in uniform, laughing. A second face was clearly discernible, over his shoulder: Bela told her niece that this was her uncle’s batman, Kishan Singh.

Three times each year, Bela and Jaya would perform a small ceremony at their shrine. They’d garland the photographs and light incense. Bela would hand Jaya flowers, directing her to pay her respects to her mother, her father and Arjun, the uncle she had never known. But when Bela lit the dhoop sticks, there were always four bunches, not three. Without ever being told, Jaya knew that the extra one was for Kishan Singh: he too was among their dead.

It was only when Jaya was ten years old, already conscious of a growing interest in cameras and photographs, that it occurred to her to ask her aunt about the pictures and who had taken them.

Bela was surprised. ‘I thought you knew,’ she said in puzzlement. ‘They were taken by your uncle Dinu.’

‘And who was that?’ said Jaya.

This was how Jaya learnt that she had a second uncle, on her father’s side — an uncle who had not been memorialised because his fate was unknown. In Lankasuka no one ever spoke of Dinu — neither Rajkumar, nor Uma nor Bela. No one knew what had become of him. He was known to have stayed on at Morningside until the last weeks of 1942. At some point after that he’d left for Burma. Nothing had been heard from him since. Privately everyone suspected that he had become yet another casualty of the war, but no one wished to be the first to voice this fear and, as a result, Dinu’s name was never mentioned in the house.

Through the late 1940s, the shadows of the Second World War deepened over Burma. First there were protracted civil conflicts and a large-scale Communist uprising. Then, in 1962, General Ne Win seized power in a coup and the country became subject to the bizarre, maniacal whimsies of its dictator: Burma, ‘the golden’, became synonymous with poverty, tyranny and misgovernment. Dinu was among the many millions who had vanished into the darkness.

Until the day of her marriage Jaya lived in Lankasuka, with Bela, Uma and Rajkumar. She married young, at the age of seventeen. Her husband was a doctor, ten years older. They were very much in love and a year after the wedding, they had a son.

But when the boy was two years old, tragedy struck: his father was killed in a train accident.

Soon after this Jaya moved back to Lankasuka. With her aunt Bela’s support, she enrolled at Calcutta University, took a degree and found a job as a college teacher. She worked hard to give her son a good education. He went to the city’s best schools and colleges and at the age of twenty-two he won a scholarship and went abroad.

Now for the first time in years, Jaya had time on her hands. She resumed work on a long-delayed PhD thesis, on the history of photography in India.

In 1996 Jaya’s college sent her to an art history conference at the University of Goa. On the way, while changing planes at Bombay airport, she was ambushed by one of the worst of all possible airport experiences: on arriving at the check-in counter she was told that her plane had been overbooked. If she wanted to be sure of a seat she would have to wait at least a couple of days; alternatively the airline would pay for a bus or a train.

Jaya went to another counter, brandishing her ticket. She found herself at the end of a long line of angry people; they were all shouting the same refrain at the desk-clerk: ‘But we had reservations. .’

Jaya was slightly built and of medium height. Her hair was wispy and grey and she looked very much what she was — an unassuming and rather withdrawn college professor who often had difficulty keeping order in class. She knew that there was no point in adding her voice to the chorus of indignation at the counter: where the others had been foiled, no one was less likely to prevail than someone such as herself. She decided to take the train.

Bombay was not a city that Jaya knew well. She collected a voucher and went to Shivaji station on a bus provided by the airline. She bought a railway timetable and learnt that the earliest train was not till several hours later. She got her ticket and then decided to go for a walk. She checked her suitcase into the left-luggage facility and stepped out of the station. It was late afternoon, the start of the rush hour; she allowed herself to be swept along by the surging crowds.

After a while she found herself standing beside the tinted doors of an air-conditioned art gallery. Her breath created a misty halo on the chilled green glass. There was a flyer on the door, announcing an exhibit of newly discovered work by a pioneering photographer from the early years of the century, a hitherto unknown Parsee woman. At the top of the flyer there was a small graphic, a computer-shrunken reproduction of one of the photographs in the exhibition — a group portrait of four seated figures. There was something about the picture that caught Jaya’s eye. She pushed the door open. The gallery was very cold and almost empty. There was the usual surly chowkidar perched on a stool, and behind a desk, a bored-looking woman in a silk sari and diamond nose-ring.

‘Could you please show me the picture that’s on this flyer?’ The woman must have heard a note of excitement in Jaya’s voice for she rose quickly to her feet and led her to the far corner of the gallery. ‘That one?’

Jaya nodded. The image was blown up to a great size, larger than a poster, whereas the version she remembered was no bigger than a postcard. She had known the picture all her life, but she was looking at it now as though for the first time. The picture was taken in the garden of the Collector’s residence. Four chairs were placed in a semicircular arrangement on a finely trimmed lawn. Uma and her husband were at the centre of the group, and seated beside them, on either side, were Dolly and Rajkumar.

Behind them was a terraced garden, descending steeply down the side of a hill. A number of people were visible in shadowy outline in the middle distance, in carefully arranged postures— servants, grooms and gardeners, all equipped with the instruments of their various trades: sickles, hoes, whips. In the background, stretched across the top of the frame, was a landscape — so sweeping and dramatic that it looked like a painted backdrop: a river curled round a hill and broadened into an estuary, a line of cliffs jutted out into a frothing sea, a palm-fringed beach slid gently into a sun-washed bay.

The Collector was in the foreground, thin and dapper, dressed in a three-button linen suit. He was sitting perched on the edge of his chair like an alert bird, with his head cocked at a stiff and slightly distrustful angle. Uma, on the other hand, seemed very much at ease. There was a certain poise and self-assurance about her demeanour, about the way her hand rested lightly on her knees. She was wearing a plain, light-coloured sari, with an embroidered border; the end was draped shawl-like over her head. Her eyes were large and long-lashed, her face generous but also strong: Jaya remembered it well from her childhood. It was strange, in retrospect, to think how little Uma’s appearance had changed over the course of her life.

The gallery owner interrupted these reflections. ‘I take it you know this picture?’ she said.

‘Yes. The woman in the middle was my great-aunt. Her name was Uma Dey.’

And then Jaya noticed a detail. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘look how she’s wearing her sari.’

The gallery owner leaned over to examine the print. ‘I don’t see anything unusual in it. That’s how everyone wears it.’

‘Actually,’ said Jaya, ‘Uma Dey was one of the first women in India to wear a sari in this particular way.’

‘Which way?’

‘The way I’m wearing mine, for example — or you yours.’

The woman frowned. ‘This is how saris have always been worn,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Saris are a very ancient garment.’

‘Yes, they are,’ Jaya said quietly, ‘but not the ways of wearing them. The contemporary style of wearing a sari with a blouse and petticoat is not very old at all. It was invented by a man, in the days of the British Raj.’

Suddenly, across the years, she heard Uma’s voice, explaining the evolution of sari-wearing. It gave Jaya a thrill, even after all those years, to recall how astonished she’d been when she’d first heard the story. She’d always imagined saris to be a part of the natural order of the Indian universe, handed down from immemorial antiquity. It had come as a shock to discover that the garment had a history, created by real people, through human volition.

On her way out of the gallery, Jaya stopped to buy a postcard reproduction of the picture. On the back there was a brief explanatory note: it said that Ratnagiri lay between Bombay and Goa. On an impulse, Jaya pulled her railway timetable out of her bag: she saw that her train was scheduled to stop at Ratnagiri on its way to Goa. It occurred to her that she could easily stop there for a night or two: the conference wasn’t due to start until two days later.

Jaya walked out of the gallery and wandered into an Irani restaurant. She ordered some tea and sat down to think. She was suddenly possessed with the idea of going to Ratnagiri: she’d often thought of going and had always found reasons for putting it off. But perhaps the time was now: the photograph in the gallery seemed to be an indication of some kind — almost a sign. Ratnagiri was the place where her own, very particular, history had had its origins — but the thought of going there unsettled her, stirring up forgotten sediments of anxiety and disquiet.

She felt the need to talk to someone. She paid her bill and went outside. Bracing herself against the crowd, she walked up the street to a long-distance telephone booth. Stepping in, she dialled her own Calcutta number. After two rings her aunt answered. ‘Jaya? Where are you?’

‘Bombay. .’ Jaya explained what had happened. As she talked, she pictured her aunt, standing over the chipped black phone in her bedroom, frowning anxiously, her gold-rimmed reading glasses slipping down her long thin nose.

‘I’m thinking of spending a couple of nights in Ratnagiri,’ Jaya said. ‘My train stops there, on the way to Goa.’

There was a silence. Then she heard Bela’s voice, speaking quietly into the phone. ‘Yes — of course you must go; you should have gone years ago. .’

Ratnagiri’s setting was every bit as spectacular as Jaya had imagined. But she quickly discovered that very little remained of the places that she had heard about as a child. The jetty at Mandvi was a crumbling ruin; the Bhagavati temple, once just a spire and a shrine, was now a soaring mass of whitewashed concrete; Outram House, where King Thebaw and his entourage had lived for some twenty-five years, had been torn down and rebuilt. Ratnagiri itself was no longer the small, provincial town of Thebaw’s time. It was a thriving city, with industries clustered thickly around it on all sides.

But the strange thing was that through all of this, the town had somehow succeeded in keeping King Thebaw and his memory vibrantly alive. Thiba-Raja was omnipresent in Ratnagiri: his name was emblazoned on signs and billboards, on street-corners, restaurants, hotels. The King had been dead more than eighty years, but in the bazaars people spoke of him as though they’d known him at first hand. Jaya found this touching at first, and then deeply moving — that a man such as Thebaw, so profoundly untransportable, should be still so richly loved in the land of his exile.

Jaya’s first real find was the site of the Collector’s residence— the place where Uma had lived. It turned out that it was right around the corner from her hotel, on the crest of a hill that overlooked the bay and the town. The compound was government property and it was surrounded by a massive, forbidding wall. The hillside — thickly forested in Uma’s time— had since been cleared, with the result that the view was even more dramatic than before, a vast panorama of river, sea and sky. Ratnagiri lay spread out below, the perfect model of a colonial district town, with an invisible line separating its huddled bazaars from the ‘Cutchery’—the red-brick Victorian compound that housed the district courts and offices.

Impatient for a glimpse of the Collector’s residence, Jaya piled a few bricks against the compound’s walls and climbed up to look inside. She found another disappointment lying in wait: the old bungalow was gone, with its Grecian portico and its sloping lawn and terraced gardens. The grounds had been split up to accommodate several smaller houses.

Jaya was about to jump down when she was accosted by an armed guard. ‘Hey you,’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing? Get down from there.’

He came running up and fired off a volley of questions: Who was she? Where was she from? What was she doing there?

To distract him, she produced the postcard she had bought at the gallery in Bombay. It had exactly the effect she had hoped for. The guard stared at the picture and then led her down the road to a lookout point, on a tongue of land that hung poised above the valley.

‘There’s the Kajali river,’ he said, pointing, ‘and that over there’s the Bhate beach.’

Then he began to ask questions about the people in the photograph — the Collector, Uma. When his finger came to Rajkumar, he laughed.

‘And look at this fellow,’ he said, ‘he looks as though he owns the place.’

Jaya looked more closely at the picture. She saw that there was indeed a jaunty tilt to Rajkumar’s head, although he looked otherwise quite solemn. His face was massive and heavy-jawed, his eyes grave; he appeared gigantic beside the slim, diminutive form of the Collector. He was dressed in dark trousers, a linen jacket and a round-collared shirt. His clothes were neither as elegant nor as finely cut as the Collector’s, but he looked much more at ease; his legs were negligently crossed, and he had a slim silver cigarette case in one hand. He was holding it up as though it were an ace of trumps, pinched between finger and thumb.

‘That was my grandfather,’ Jaya said, by way of explanation.

The guard had already lost interest in Rajkumar. Through all this his eyes had kept straying to Dolly, seated in her corner beside Uma, her body half turned against the camera as though to defend herself from its gaze.

Dolly was dressed in a green silk longyi and a white blouse. Her face was long and slender, with a scaffolding of finely moulded bones standing outlined beneath her skin. Her hair was tied back, but a single strand had escaped, curling down from her temple. She was wearing no jewellery, but she had a spray of flowers, white-petalled frangipani, pinned above one of her ears. In her hands she was holding a garland of white jasmine.

‘She’s very beautiful,’ said the guard.

‘Yes,’ said Jaya. ‘Everybody said so. .’

The next day was Jaya’s last in Ratnagiri. In the late afternoon she hired a scooter-rickshaw and asked the driver to take her to the Bhate beach. The scooter drove through the town, past the red-brick buildings of the high school and college, over the bridge that crossed the estuary, to a beach on the southern side of the bay. In the distance, the sun had swelled to fill the mouth of the bay, growing ever larger as it dipped towards the horizon. The sand was copper-coloured and it slipped beneath the water at a gentle incline. Coconut palms grew thick along the edge of the beach, their trunks leaning thirstily into the wind. Along the line where the sand changed into soil there was a densely tangled accumulation of grass and shells and dried seaweed.

It was there, hidden in the undergrowth, that Jaya found what she was looking for — a small stone memorial to her great-uncle, the Collector. The engraved lettering was worn thin by the combined action of wind, water and sand. There was just enough light to read the inscription. It said: ‘To the memory of Beni Prasad Dey Esq., District Collector, 1905–1906.’ Jaya stood up to look at the windswept beach, sloping gently down to the waves. The red sand had turned grey with the setting of the sun. Uma had told her, long ago, that if she were to walk from the memorial stone to the water, in a straight line, she would cross the very spot where the Collector’s body had been found, along with the wreckage of his capsized boat.

forty-two

On her return to Calcutta, Jaya began to look through the huge collection of documents and papers that Uma had left her, in her will. Jaya had occasionally toyed with the idea of writing a biography of her great-aunt; an important publisher had even offered her a contract once. Jaya knew that there had been a great revival of interest in Uma recently, as a pioneering political figure. There was bound to be a biography soon — she was loath to think that it would appear under someone else’s name.

It took Jaya several days to sort through Uma’s papers, many of which had been eaten into by insects. The strange thing was that the more she read, the more she found herself thinking of Rajkumar. It was as though in this one regard, childhood habits of associative reasoning had remained with her. Through all the years that she’d known him, her grandfather had lived downstairs, in a small anteroom in Uma’s flat. There was no inference of conjugality in these living arrangements: Rajkumar’s status in the household was understood to fall somewhere between that of poor relative and employee. But the geography of the house being what it was, it meant that for Jaya, to think of the one was to think of the other: to go down to see her grandfather meant also seeing her great-aunt.

Recollections came flooding back to Jaya. She remembered the particular tone of voice in which Rajkumar would say, several times each day: ‘Ah, Burma — now Burma was a golden land. .’ She remembered how he’d liked to smoke Burmese-style cheroots — longer and thicker than bidis but not as dark nor as big as cigars. Cheroots of this kind were not easily to be had in India, but there were certain substitutes that Rajkumar deemed acceptable. Not far from Lankasuka there was a paan shop that stocked these cheroots. Jaya would sometimes walk to this shop with her grandfather. She remembered how he’d narrow his eyes when he was lighting a cheroot. Then he would blow out a huge cloud of grey smoke and begin: ‘Ah, Burma — now. .’

The paan-wallah who owned this shop was more irascible than most. She remembered an occasion when she’d heard him snap at Rajkumar: ‘Yes, yes, no need to tell us again. Your Burma is so golden you can pluck nuggets out of people’s farts. .’

She remembered how she’d go with Rajkumar to visit the Burmese temple in north Calcutta. She remembered the people who’d gather there — many of them Indians, people who’d left Burma in 1942, just like Rajkumar. There were Gujaratis, Bengalis, Tamils, Sikhs, Eurasians. In the temple they would all speak Burmese. Some had done well after their departure. They’d built new businesses, made new homes for themselves; others had dedicated themselves to their children and grandchildren — in much the same way that Rajkumar had built his new life around Jaya. Not all the people who came to the temple were Buddhists, by birth or conviction. They came because this was the one place where they could be sure of meeting others like themselves; people to whom they could say, ‘Burma is a golden land’ knowing that their listeners would be able to filter these words through the sieves of exile, sifting through their very specific nuances. She recalled how they had thirsted for news of Burma — longed to hear word of those who had been left behind. She remembered the stir that greeted new arrivals; how they would be besieged with questions: ‘And what about. .?’ ‘. . and did you hear about so-and-so?’ Rajkumar was always the noisiest of the questioners, taking advantage of his booming voice to shout questions — questions about someone with a Burmese name; someone whom she had not known to be her uncle until Bela told her at the age of ten — her uncle Dinu, whom she’d never met.

These memories provoked a new chain of thought. Jaya put away Uma’s papers and pulled out a file of her own — of old clippings that she had compiled over the last nine years. She’d started the file in 1987, on reading about the birth of a democracy movement in Rangoon. These events had rekindled a dormant interest in the land of her birth. She had tracked the emergence of the movement’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and had cut out many magazine and newspaper articles. In August 1988 when the military junta struck back, imprisoning Aung San Suu Kyi and unleashing a savage campaign of repression, Jaya had sat up nights, listening to the BBC. She had bought pamphlets that described the bloodshed that followed: the mass shootings, the imprisonments, the scattering of the activists.

Now, as she looked through the yellowing contents of her file, Jaya’s attention was caught by a magazine photograph: a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi. It struck her that there was something different about the photograph; it had a quality that set it apart from most magazine illustrations. The photographer had caught Aung San Suu Kyi’s fine-boned face in a moment of quiet reflection; there was something in the framing of the picture that reminded her of the silver-framed photographs that stood on Bela’s dresser.

Jaya glanced at the line of fine print on the top edge of the picture. The photograph had been credited to one U Tun Pe. She said the name out loud and something stirred, deep within the settled sediments of her memory. She got up and went to Bela’s room. ‘Do you remember Dinu-kaka’s Burmese name?’

‘Let me see. .’ Bela paused, running her fingers through her short-clipped white hair. ‘It was Tun — something. Of course, in Burma the prefix changes as you grow older. If you’re a woman it goes from Ma to Daw and if you’re a man, you’re Maung and then Ko and then U. So if he were alive today, he would be U Tun. . Something like that anyway.’

Jaya produced the picture and pointed to the credit line. ‘Could it be this?’

Wrinkling her nose, Bela squinted through her gold-rimmed glasses. ‘U Tun Pe? Let me see. .’ She mumbled under her breath: ‘Ko Tun Pe. . U Tun Pe. . Why yes! That sounds right. .’ She turned the cutting over. ‘But when was this picture taken?’

‘Nineteen-eighty-eight.’

Bela pursed her lips. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Jaya.

But don’t get carried away. It could be someone else. In Burma thousands of people have the same name. And in any case, Dinu would have been seventy-four in 1988. That is to say, he’d be eighty-two if he were still alive. And he was never robust, what with his leg. It’s very unlikely. .’

‘You’re probably right,’ Jaya said, taking the picture back. ‘But I still have to find out. I have to know for sure.’

It was Bela who provided Jaya with her next lead. She gave her a name: Ilongo Alagappan. ‘Try to find him — if anyone knows about Dinu it will be him.’

Over the last two years, in order to keep in touch with her son, Jaya had familiarised herself with e-mail and the Internet. She had an account at a commercial computer centre and the next time she went by, she bought herself a half-hour on the Web. First, she keyed in a search under the words: ‘U Tun Pe’. Nothing turned up. She rested her fingers on the keyboard and took a deep breath. Then she typed in the words ‘Ilongo Alagappan’ and hit ‘enter’.

The search engine quivered, like a hound that had sniffed a hot trail. For a long, nerve-racking minute, an icon winked on the monitor. Suddenly the screen quivered again and a message appeared: the list of entries under ‘Ilongo Alagappan’ ran to five hundred and sixty items. Jaya got up from her chair and went to the manager’s desk. ‘I think I’m going to need an extra hour. Maybe two. .’

She went back to her seat and started with item number one. She began to copy paragraphs into a separate file. She discovered that Ilongo was a prominent figure in Malaysian politics; he’d been a minister in the Government and had been honoured with a title—‘Dato’. His career had started after the war, when plantation workers had begun to form trade unions. Many had become active in politics and Ilongo was one such; in a few short years he had become one of the most important trade-unionists in the country — something of a legend in the plantations. He had founded a co-operative and had raised enough money to buy the Morningside plantation. This was at a time when rubber prices had slumped and thousands of workers were losing their jobs. He had been responsible for transforming Morningside into one of the flagship enterprises of the co-operative movement. The plantation workers’ unions had grown into an extraordinary success story: there were health-care systems, pensions, educational programmes, worker-retraining projects.

One of the items on the screen listed a web page for the ‘Morningside Co-operative’. Jaya decided to take a chance. She logged in and left a message for Ilongo. She introduced herself and said that she was gathering material for a book— on her great-aunt Uma and her grandfather, Rajkumar. She very much wanted to interview him, she wrote; she would be grateful for the favour of a response.

The next day she got a phone call from the manager of the computer centre. He was very excited. ‘Good news, didi! Message for you! From Malaysia! We are all so happy! Someone is sending you a plane ticket. .’

So striking was Ilongo’s resemblance to Rajkumar that when Jaya first set eyes on him, at the Sungei Pattani railway station, the hairs rose on the back of her neck. Like Rajkumar, Ilongo was built on a generous scale: he was tall, wide-shouldered, very dark, and he too had a substantial belly, of the kind that is produced not by lethargy but rather by an excess of energy— his stomach was like an extra fuel tank, strapped to the outside of a truck. His hair was white and rumpled and he had a great deal of it, all over him — his arms, his chest, his knuckles: its lightness was a startling contrast to the colour of his skin. His face, like Rajkumar’s, was deeply creased, with heavy dewlaps and jowls; it was enormous, thorny, and it seemed to be constructed mainly of armature, as though nature had equipped it for survival in the deep seas.

Only his speaking voice came as a true surprise. He sounded nothing like Rajkumar, in either English or Hindustani. His English was distinctively Malaysian — soft, peppered with floating interrogatives—la? — a very engaging, congenial manner of speech.

They stepped out of the station and Ilongo led her to a boxy, four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser. The vehicle’s doors bore the logo of the co-operative that owned Morningside. They climbed in and Ilongo took out a flat tin box and lit a cheroot. This added to the eerie resemblance to Rajkumar.

‘So tell me about your book,’ he said. ‘What is it going to be about?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ she said. ‘Maybe after I’ve interviewed you. I’ll have a better idea.’

On the way to Morningside, Ilongo told her a little about his career and about the making of the Morningside co-operative. Timothy Martins, Alison’s brother, had served in the US army during the war, as an interpreter. He’d been in the Pacific Theatre and at the end of the war, he’d come to Sungei Pattani for a brief visit. Ilongo had gone to see him. ‘Aren’t you going to visit Morningside?’ he’d asked. Timothy had answered with a flat ‘No’. He had no wish to return; the estate was a living reminder of everything that he wished to erase from his memory — the death of his parents, his sister, his grandfather; he wanted nothing so much as to be rid of it. Besides he had no interest in running a plantation. It was clear that the future of rubber, as a commodity, was none too bright. The war had stimulated research; substitutes were on their way. ‘I’m going to put Morningside up for sale,’ Timothy had told Ilongo. ‘You should let everyone know.’

The estate was on the market for almost two years. There were no buyers. Timothy was not the only businessman who could see that the demand for rubber had run its course. All over Malaya, thousands of plantation workers were out of work; investors were buying up estates and selling off the land in parcels. In the end Ilongo had decided to take matters into his own hands: it was either that, or seeing everyone thrown out. He’d gone around with a begging bowl — quite literally— and in the end the money had been found.

‘There it is,’ Ilongo said proudly, pointing ahead. ‘Morningside.’

They drove under an arched sign. The legend Morningside Estate was emblazoned across it in fine but faded Gothic characters. Underneath, in brighter, but more simple lettering there appeared the words: A property of the Malaysian Plantation Workers’ Co-operative. Gunung Jerai lay directly ahead, its peak veiled by a dense curtain of cloud.

The road headed uphill, snaking through alternating tracts of rubber and a crop of another kind — a short, stubby palm. These were oil palms, Ilongo explained, currently a more profitable investment than rubber: the plantation was increasing the acreage of the one at the expense of the other.

Jaya was fascinated by the oil palms: clusters of yellowish-orange fruit hung from the stub-like trunks, each as big as a lamb. The air was very still and it seemed to have the texture of grease. Between the palms there were bird-houses elevated on poles. These were for owls, Ilongo explained: the oil-rich fruit attracted great quantities of rodents; the birds helped keep their numbers under control.

Then Morningside House appeared ahead. It was freshly painted and had a bright cheerful look: its roof and shutters were red, while the rest of the house was a pale lime-green. There were trucks and cars parked in front — under the porch and all along the driveway. People were bustling about all over the grounds.

‘The house seems very busy,’ Jaya said.

‘It is,’ said Ilongo. ‘I like to feel that it’s being put to good use. I and my family occupy just one part of it: the rest of it serves as the co-op’s office. I didn’t want the house to become a monument. It’s better this way: it serves a useful function.’

They drove round the house to the rear entrance. Mrs Alagappan, Ilongo’s wife was waiting for them. She was tall and grey-haired, dressed in a green silk sari. The two of them lived alone in their part of the house: their children were grown up, all of them ‘well settled and doing fine’. One of their daughters was in the civil service; another was a doctor; their son was a businessman, based in Singapore.

‘It’s just the two of us now.’

Every year, in the winter, they took a holiday on a cruise ship. The house was filled with mementoes of visits to South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Australia; there was a picture of the two of them dancing in a ship’s ballroom. She was in a silk sari; he in a grey safari suit.

Mrs Alagappan had prepared idlis and dosas in anticipation of Jaya’s arrival. After lunch she was shown up to the guest room. She walked through the door and found herself facing the mountain through an open window. The clouds had cleared from the peak. On a wall beside the window there hung a photograph of the same view.

Jaya came to a dead stop, looking from the picture to the mountain and back. Ilongo was standing behind her. She turned to him. ‘Dato?’ she said. ‘Who took that picture?’

He smiled. ‘Who do you think?’

‘Who?’

‘Your uncle — Dinu.’

‘And do you have other photographs of his?’ ‘Yes — many. He left a huge collection here, with me. That’s why I wanted you to come. I thought he would have wanted you to have them. I’m getting old now, and I don’t want them to be forgotten. I wrote to Dinu to ask what I should do but I never heard back. .’

‘So you’re in touch with him then?’

‘I wouldn’t put it like that — but I had news of him once.’

‘When?’

‘Oh, it was a while ago now. .’

Some five years earlier, Ilongo said, the co-operative had decided to start a programme for migrant workers. Malaysia’s increasing prosperity had begun to draw many migrants from all over the region. Some of these workers were from Burma (or Myanmar as it was now called). It was not very difficult to cross clandestinely from Myanmar to Malaysia: the borders of the two countries were separated only by a few hundred miles of coastline. Among the Myanmarese migrants, there were some who’d been active in the democracy movement. They’d been driven underground after the crackdown of 1988 and had later decided to flee across the border. Quite by chance, Ilongo had met an activist of Indian origin — a young student who’d known Dinu well. He’d said that when he’d last heard of him, Dinu was living alone in Rangoon — Yangon as it was now called.

For over thirty years, Ilongo learnt, Dinu had been married to a well-known Burmese writer. His wife, Daw Thin Thin Aye, had been closely involved with the democracy movement. After the crackdown, both she and Dinu had been gaoled. They’d been let out after serving three years. But Daw Thin Thin Aye had contracted tuberculosis in prison and had died within a year of her release. That was four years ago, in 1992.

‘I asked if there was any way I could contact him,’ Ilongo said. ‘The boy told me it wouldn’t be easy — the junta has barred Dinu from having a phone or a fax. Even letters aren’t safe, but that was the only way, he said. So I wrote, but I never heard back. I suppose someone kept the letter.’

‘But you have an address for him then?’ Jaya said.

‘Yes.’ Ilongo reached into his pocket and took out a sheet of paper. ‘He has a small photo studio. Does portraits, wedding pictures, group photographs. That sort of thing. The address is for his studio: he lives right above it.’

He held the paper out to her and she took it. The sheet was smudged and crumpled. She peered at it closely, deciphering the letters. The first words that met her eyes were: ‘The Glass Palace: Photo Studio.’

forty-three

Afew months later, Jaya found herself walking down a quiet and relatively uncrowded street in one of the older parts of Yangon. The flagstones on the footpaths were buckled and broken and weeds were growing out of the cracks. The houses along the road had plaster walls, most of them patched and discoloured. She caught glimpses of courtyards with trees growing over the doors. It was mid-December, a clear, cool day. There was very little traffic; children were back from school, playing football on the road. Barred windows looked down on the street from either side: it occurred to Jaya that she was the only person in sight who was dressed in anything other than a longyi; women in saris were few, and trousers seemed to be worn almost exclusively by policemen, soldiers and men in uniform. She had the feeling that she was being observed by a great many eyes.

Jaya’s visa allowed her just one week in Myanmar. This seemed a very short time in which to find someone. What if Dinu were away, visiting friends, travelling? She had nightmare visions of waiting in a dingy hotel, in a place where she knew no one.

Earlier, at the airport in Calcutta, she had found herself exchanging glances with her fellow-passengers. They’d all been trying to sum each other up: why was he or she going to Yangon? What sort of business would take a person to Myanmar? All the passengers were Indians, people like herself; she could tell at a glance that they were going for exactly the same reason that she was: to look for relatives and to explore old family connections.

Jaya had gone to some trouble to get a window seat on the plane. She had been looking forward to comparing her experiences of the journey to Yangon with all the accounts she had heard over the years. But once she was seated, a sense of panic set in. If she were to find Dinu, what was the surety that he would be willing to talk to her? The more she thought of it the more the imponderables seemed to mount.

Now here she was, on a street that bore the same name as the one on the address. The numbering of the houses was very confusing. There were numerals and fractions and complicated alphabetical demarcations. Small doorways led into courtyards that proved to be alleys. She stopped to ask directions at a pharmacy. The man behind the counter looked at her piece of paper and pointed her to the adjoining house. She stepped out to find herself looking at a pair of street-level doors that led to the outer room of a large old-style house. Then she noticed a small, hand-painted sign, hanging above the doorway. Most of the lettering was in Burmese, but at the bottom, almost as an afterthought, there were a few words in English: The Glass Palace: Photo Studio.

Clearly she was in the right place, but the door was locked and it was evident that the place was closed. She was about to turn away, in disappointment, when she saw that the man in the pharmacy was gesturing in the direction of an alley, right next to the Glass Palace. She looked round the corner and saw a door that seemed to be fastened from the inside. Beyond lay a courtyard and the threshold of an old warren of a house. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the pharmacist was signalling vigorously, apparently urging her to step through. She knocked and when there was no answer, she banged hard, thumping the wood with the heel of her palm. Suddenly the doors flew apart. She stepped through and found herself in a walled courtyard. A couple of women were squatting in a corner, tending a cooking fire. She went up to them and asked: ‘U Tun Pe?’ They nodded, smiling, and pointed to a spiral staircase that led to the second floor: evidently Dinu lived in an apartment that was situated directly above his studio.

Climbing the stairs, Jaya became aware of a voice speaking in Burmese. It was the voice of an old man, quavering and feeble: the speaker appeared to be delivering some kind of discourse — a lecture or a speech. He was speaking in staccato bursts, the sentences punctuated by coughs and pauses. She came to the landing that led to the apartment: dozens of pairs of slippers and rubber sandals lay on the floor. The doors of the apartment stood open, but the entrance was angled in such a way that she could not see in. It was clear, however, that large numbers of people were gathered inside and it occurred to her that she might have stumbled upon a political meeting, even a clandestine one; she began to wonder whether her presence would constitute an unwelcome intrusion. Then she had a surprise: she heard the speaker uttering some words that were not Burmese; they were names that were familiar to her from the history of photography — Edward Weston, Eugene Atget, Brassai. At this point, curiosity triumphed over discretion. She kicked off her slippers and stepped up to the door.

Beyond lay a large room with a high ceiling: it was crammed full of people. A few were sitting on chairs but most were seated on mats, on the floor. The crowd was larger than the room could comfortably hold and despite the presence of several whirring table fans, the air was hot and close. At the far end of the room there were two tall windows with white shutters. The walls were a dank, patchy blue and parts of the ceiling were blackened with soot.

The speaker was sitting in a rattan armchair that was draped with a green antimacassar. His chair was so positioned that he was facing most of his listeners: she found herself looking at him directly, from across the room. His hair was neatly cropped and parted, grey only at the temples. He was wearing a dark purple longyi and a blue knit T-shirt, with some kind of logo embroidered on the chest. He was rail-thin and his forehead and cheeks were deeply scored, with creases and fissures that seemed to move with the fluidity of ripples on water. It was a very fine face, suffused with the enrichment of age: the mobility of its lines created the impression of a range of perception and feeling that exceeded the ordinary by several extra registers.

It struck Jaya for the first time that she had never seen a picture of her uncle Dinu: he’d always been behind the camera, never in front of it. Could this be he? Jaya saw no resemblance to Rajkumar: to her he looked completely Burmese — but then this was true of many people of Indian, or part-Indian parentage. Either way, she could not be sure.

Jaya noticed now that the speaker was holding something in his hands — a large poster. He appeared to be using it to illustrate his lecture. She saw that the picture was of a shell, closely photographed. Its voluptuously rounded tail curled into a trunk that seemed almost to rise out of the print’s surface. She recognised it as a reproduction of a monumental Weston nautilus.

Jaya had been standing at the door a couple of minutes without being noticed. All of a sudden every eye in the room turned in her direction. There was a silence and the place seemed to fill, almost instantaneously, with a fog of fear. The speaker put away the poster and rose slowly to his feet. He alone seemed calm, unafraid. He reached for a cane and came limping up, dragging his right foot behind him. He looked into her face and said something in Burmese. Jaya shook her head and tried to smile. He saw that she was a foreigner and she could almost hear him breathing a sigh of relief.

‘Yes?’ he said quietly in English. ‘May I help you?’

Jaya was about to ask for U Tun Pe when she changed her mind. She said: ‘I’m looking for Mr Dinanath Raha. .’

The creases of his face seemed to shimmer, as though a gust of wind had blown suddenly across a lake. ‘How did you know that name?’ he said. ‘It’s many, many years since I last heard it used.’

‘I’m your niece,’ she said. ‘Jaya — your brother’s daughter. .’

‘Jaya!’

Jaya realised that they had somehow switched languages and he was now speaking to her in Bengali. Letting his cane drop, he put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her closely, as though searching for a confirmation of her identity. ‘Come and sit beside me,’ he said, his voice falling to a whisper. ‘I’ll just be a few more minutes.’

Jaya helped him back to his chair and sat cross-legged on the floor while he resumed his lecture. She was facing Dinu’s audience now and she saw that it consisted of a motley mix of people, old and young, girls and boys, men and women. They were all Burmese but some looked to be of Indian origin, some Chinese. Some were smartly dressed while others were wearing cast-offs. There was a student in a black cap that said Giorgio Armani, and in one corner there sat a group of three monks in saffron robes. They were all listening to Dinu with intent attention; some were taking notes.

Rows of glass-fronted bookcases ringed the floor. On the walls there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of photographic reproductions that looked as though they had been cut out of books and magazines. Some were in wooden frames; some were pasted on cardboard. She recognised several of them; they were all reproductions of well-known photographs: there was a famous Weston image of a sea-shell; a print of Cartier-Bresson’s veiled women, standing grouped on a Kashmir hilltop; there was a Raghubir Singh picture of an old house in Calcutta.

In one corner of the room there stood a brightly decorated table. A hand-painted banner hung above: it said: ‘Happy Birthday’. On the table there were paper cups, snacks, presents wrapped in paper. .

She wished she knew what was going on.

Dinu’s talk ended in a wild outburst of cheering and laughter. He smiled and turned to her with apologies for keeping her waiting. ‘You found me in the middle of my weekly session. . I call it my glass palace day.’

‘It was not a long wait,’ she said. ‘What were you talking about?’

‘Pictures. . photography. . anything that comes to mind. I just start them off — then it’s everyone else’s turn. Listen.’ He smiled, looking round the room: it was filled with the noise of a dozen different conversations. At the back, a handful of people were blowing up balloons.

‘Is it a class?’ she asked. ‘A lecture course?’

‘No!’ He laughed. ‘They just come. . every week. . some are new, some have been here before. Some are students, some are artists, some have aspirations to becoming photographers. . Of course most of them cannot afford a camera — you know how poor we are in our Myanmar’—he laughed satirically as he said the word ‘—and even if they could, they would not be able to pay for film or printing or developing. . But some of them have money — perhaps their parents are smugglers or contractors or colonels. . I don’t ask. . It’s better not to know. They take pictures and bring them here. . We pass them around and discuss them. . Or else I show them copies of old photographs and we talk about why they are good or why they are not. The Glass Palace is the only place in Yangon where you can see things like this. . works of contemporary art. .’ He lifted his cane and pointed to his bookcases. ‘Books, magazines. . these are very hard, almost impossible to find here, because of the censors. This is one of the few places where they are to be found. People know, so they come. .’

‘How did you acquire these books?’ she asked.

‘It was hard. .’ He laughed. ‘I made friends with ragpickers and the people who sort through refuse. I told them what I wanted and they saved them for me. The foreigners who live in Yangon — the diplomats and aid-workers and so on — they tend to read a lot. . there’s not much else for them to do, you see. . they’re watched all the time. . They bring books and magazines with them and from time to time they throw them away. . Fortunately the military does not have the imagination to control their trash. . These things find their way to us. All these bookcases — their contents were gathered one at a time, by ragpickers. I sometimes think how astonished the original owners would be if they knew. . It took me a long time. . Then word got around and people began to come. . they came, they looked and often they couldn’t understand what they saw, so they would ask me and I would give them my opinion. First it was just a few people, then there were more. . and more. Now they come every week. . Even when I’m away they come. . someone else talks. . they look at pictures. . Those who can afford it make a contribution — for tea, sweets, snacks. Those who can’t don’t. . no one’s ever been turned away. Today it’s someone’s birthday. .’ He pointed across the room to a young man. ‘His friends are having the party here. That happens often. . here they feel free to enjoy themselves. . I encourage them to say whatever they like. . to speak freely, even of simple things — for them this is an adventure, a discovery. .’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that all their lives they’ve been trained to obey. . their parents, their teachers, the military. . this is what their education teaches: the habit of obedience. .’

He laughed, his eyes twinkling. ‘When they come here. . they find that no one will scold them for what they say. . they can criticise even their parents if they wish. . this is a very shocking idea for many of them. . some of them never come back. . but many do, again and again. .’

‘Do they talk about politics too?’

‘Yes. All the time. It is impossible not to, in Myanmar. .’

‘Doesn’t the military do anything? Don’t they try to stop you? Send spies?’

‘Yes, of course. They send spies. . There are probably a few here right now — in Myanmar there are always spies, everywhere. But no one ever discusses organisational matters here; we talk only of ideas and they know, also, that I’m not directly involved in the movement any more. . my body won’t allow me. . They look at me and they see a tired old cripple. . in a way my body protects me. . You have to understand that their brutality is of a strangely medieval ilk. . they are not so advanced as to be able to perceive a threat in what we do in this room. They would never be able to understand the attraction that brings people here, even though some of them are their own children. . nothing that interests them is here — no booze, no drugs, no conspiracy. . that is what protects us. And when we talk of politics it is in such ways that they cannot follow. . we don’t say things they can pin down. . in Myanmar nothing that is worth saying can be spoken in ordinary language. . everyone learns other means of communication, secret languages. Today for example, I was talking about Edward Weston’s theory of pre-visualisation. . that you must see the truth of your subject in your mind. . after that the camera is incidental, unimportant. . If you know the truth of what you see, the rest is mere execution. Nothing can come between you and your imagined desire. . No camera, no lens. .’ He shrugged, smiling. ‘To that list I could have added: No band of criminals like this regime. . But I did not have to tell them that in so many words. . They understood what I was saying. . they knew. . you saw how they laughed and clapped. . Here in the Glass Palace photography too is a secret language.’

At the other end of the room, the birthday party was getting under way. A clamour arose for Dinu’s presence at the table. He got to his feet and went over, leaning heavily on his stick. There were dishes of fried savouries, a cake, and a couple of large plastic bottles of Coca-Cola. A large can of Canadian beer stood at the centre of the table, untouched and immaculate, like an ornamental epergne. Dinu explained that one of the Glass Palace regulars was the son of a top general. He attended in secret, without his family’s knowledge. From time to time he brought along a few items that were otherwise available only to smugglers and the junta’s top brass. The beer can had stood on the table for more than a year.

Someone began to strum a guitar. A chorus started up and the cake was cut. Dinu presided over the celebration with benevolent good humour and there was a great deal of joking and light-heartedness. Jaya remembered one of Rajkumar’s favourite sayings: ‘Nowhere do they have such a gift for laughter as they do in Burma. .’ Yet it was evident that the laughter here had a special edge, honed upon fears that were never quite absent. It was a greedy kind of merriment, as though everyone wanted to have their fill while they could.

In other parts of the room a number of arguments and discussions were under way. Occasionally Dinu would be appealed to by one group or another. After one such intervention he turned to Jaya, in explanation: They’re arguing about the picture that I was talking about — Weston’s nautilus. . some of them see themselves as revolutionaries. . they insist that aesthetic matters have no relevance to our situation. .’

‘And what was your answer?’

‘I quoted Weston. . Weston reflecting on Trotsky. . that new and revolutionary art forms may awaken a people or disturb their complacency or challenge old ideals with constructive prophecies of change. . It doesn’t matter. . every week this comes up. . every week I say the same thing.’

Presently a couple of young men took up a collection and went out to get biryani from a nearby shop. They were back in a few minutes, loaded down with paper packets. Dinu filled a plate and handed it to Jaya: she was surprised by how good the biryani was.

Slowly, as the evening neared its end, everyone grew quieter. A subdued resignation seemed to set in, as though darkness were knocking at the windows, providing a reminder of the constancy of its vigil.

Shortly before nine, Dinu said to Jaya: ‘Where are you staying?’

She told him: it was a small hotel, picked at random.

‘I would ask you to stay here,’ he said. ‘I live alone and you could look after yourself. . It would be easy. . But unfortunately the procedure takes a long time.’

‘Procedure for what?’ She was startled.

‘For guests,’ he said apologetically. ‘Don’t forget that you are in Myanmar. Nothing is simple here. . Every household has a registered list of members. . Nobody else can spend the night there without permission. I know a woman who after three years of marriage has to apply every week to be included in her husband’s family’s “guest list”. .’

‘And where does this permission come from?’

‘The Chairman of the Ward Council. . there’s one in each neighbourhood. . they can make your life hell. . everyone hates them. . mine is especially bad. So, you see, I would ask you to stay, but. . The police make regular checks, especially at night. You never know when they’re coming. .’

Dinu gave Jaya a pat on the back: ‘You’d better go now. . the others will walk you back to your hotel. . you will have been seen coming here, you may be sure of that. . Was there a man in the pharmacy next door? There you are. . If he isn’t there by any chance, wait till he’s seen you going. . If he doesn’t see you leaving you can be sure that there will soon be a knock on my door. Come back tomorrow. . early. . I’ll get some pictures ready. We’ll talk for as long as you want. . We’ll do nothing but talk. . Every day that you’re here. .’

forty-four

Dinu left Malaya shortly after Alison’s death. Following the Japanese occupation, there was turmoil on the rubber estates. Many hundreds of workers left Morningside to join the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army. Ilongo was one of them, and it was through him that Dinu came to know that Arjun had been one of the first to join Captain Mohun Singh’s INA. The movement gathered such force that Dinu was powerless against it. His own views on the war remained unchanged, however, and after the news of Alison’s death reached Morningside, he decided to cross over clandestinely into Burma.

Dinu eventually left Malaya in a fishing boat. Sailing mainly by night, hopping from island to island, he managed to make his way along the Isthmus of Kra. The boat left him on a beach, a few miles short of Mergui, the southernmost town in Burma. Dinu had hoped to make his way to Rangoon by land, but the Japanese invasion of Burma was now fully under way. The routes to the north were cut off.

Accompanying the Japanese ground forces was a small group of Burmese volunteers — the Burma Independence Army. This group was led by an acquaintance of Dinu’s from Rangoon, the student leader, Aung San. As the Japanese army advanced, there were bloody clashes between the student-led group and some of the peoples of the border area — especially the indigenous Christians, many of whom remained loyal to the British. The border region was thrown into turmoil and there was no question of travelling north. Dinu remained in Mergui for several months. By the time Dinu made his way to Rangoon, it was June 1942 and the city was under Japanese occupation. Dinu went to Kemendine and found the house gutted: the compound had suffered a direct hit. Dinu went to look for Thiha Saw, his old friend. He learnt that Thiha Saw, along with many other leftists, had escaped to India; his family had dispersed into the countryside. Only Thiha Saw’s grandmother was still in Rangoon: she was being looked after by a young relative, a girl by the name of Ma Thin Thin Aye. Thiha Saw’s relatives took Dinu in and gave him shelter; it was from them that Dinu learnt of Neel’s death and of his family’s subsequent departure for Huay Zedi.

North of Rangoon there was still fierce fighting between the Japanese forces and the retreating British army. To travel through the countryside at this time was very nearly an impossibility: all road and rail traffic was strictly controlled, through an elaborate regimen of cards and permits. The Japanese had installed a new government in Rangoon, under the leadership of a Burmese politician, Dr Ba Maw. Aung San and many others from the Burma Independence Army were members of this government — among them several former friends and acquaintances of Dinu’s from Rangoon University. One of them helped him procure a pass that allowed him to travel north.

Dinu arrived at Huay Zedi only to find his family gone and the village almost deserted. He discovered that the sympathies of the people of this region were firmly with the Allies: Raymond was one of many men from Huay Zedi who had been recruited into an Allied partisan group — Force 136.

On receiving word of Dinu’s arrival, Raymond materialised suddenly, to welcome him back. Raymond was no longer the sleepy-eyed student of Dinu’s memory: he was wearing a khaki tunic and carrying a gun. He explained that his father, Doh Say, had urged Rajkumar and Dolly to stay on and had promised to do everything he could to ensure their comfort and safety. But after Neel’s death Manju had become increasingly erratic in her behaviour and, in the end, fearing for her sanity, Rajkumar and Dolly had decided to take her back to India. They had left several months before Dinu’s arrival; he had no hope of catching up with them now. Dinu decided to remain with Doh Say and Raymond, in their camp deep inside the jungle.

In 1944, the Allies launched a counter-invasion of Burma, spearheaded by the Fourteenth Army, under the command of General Slim. Within a few months the Japanese were pushed back from the Indian frontier and by early 1945 they were in headlong retreat. They were dealt a final blow by General Aung San who dramatically reversed his allegiances: although the Burma Independence Army had entered the country with the aid of the Japanese, they had never been more than reluctant allies for the occupiers. In 1945 General Aung San issued a secret order to his followers to join the drive to push the Japanese out of Burma. After this it was clear that the Japanese occupation was almost at an end.

But the fighting was not over yet. One day in March 1945, Doh Say sent for Dinu; he explained that he had received some worrying news. There had been a great battle at the town of Meiktila, some hundred miles to the north. The Fourteenth Army had won a decisive victory and the Japanese were in precipitate retreat. But a few last diehards from the Indian National Army were still battling on in central Burma, harassing the advancing Allied army. One of these units had strayed across the Sittang and was believed to be advancing in the direction of their camp. Doh Say was concerned that the soldiers might cause trouble for the villagers; he wanted Dinu to seek them out and intercede with them. His hope was that by virtue of his Indian connections, Dinu would be able to persuade them to stay away from their village.

Dinu set off the next morning. Raymond went with him, as a guide.

After a few days’ wait, a meeting was arranged, through the headman of a village. It was held at an abandoned teak camp, deep in the jungle. The camp was an old one, of the kind that Dinu had heard his father describe — with a teakwood tai standing at the centre of a large clearing. This camp had been abandoned for many years, since long before the war. Much of it had been reclaimed by the jungle; the clearing was covered in four-foot-high grass, and many of the oo-sis’ huts had been blown over by wind and rain.

Only the tai was still standing, though its ladder was entwined with vines and parts of its roof had fallen in.

Dinu’s instructions were to wait alone. Raymond led him to the edge of the clearing and then slipped back into the forest. Dinu stood in front of the tai, in a position where he could be observed from a distance. He was dressed in a brown longyi and a homespun, black-and-white Karen tunic. He had stopped shaving after his arrival at Huay Zedi and his beard had greatly altered his appearance. He had a red-and-white cloth tied around his neck and he was carrying a woven shoulder bag, with some food, water and tobacco.

There was a tree-stump directly in front of the tai, and Dinu seated himself on it. A gentle breeze started up, rustling the tall grass in the camp clearing. Beyond, wisps of mist were rising from the tops of the hundred-foot trees that surrounded the camp. The greenery was a dense, blank wall: Dinu knew that the Indian soldiers were somewhere beyond, watching him.

In his cloth shoulder bag Dinu had some packets of boiled rice, wrapped in banana leaves. He opened one, and began to eat. While eating he listened to the sounds of the forest: a commotion among a flock of parrots told him that the soldiers were approaching. He sat still and went on eating.

Presently, from the corner of his eye, he saw an Indian soldier stepping into the clearing. He rolled his banana leaf into a ball and tossed it away. The soldier’s head was just visible: he was wading through the grass with a high-stepping motion, using his gun to sweep aside the undergrowth.

Dinu watched the man approach. His face was so gaunt that he looked almost wizened — although Dinu guessed, from his carriage and his build, that he was in his early twenties. His uniform was in tatters and his shoes were so badly worn that his toes were visible; the soles were tied to his foot with bits of string. The soldier stopped a couple of feet from Dinu and made a gesture with the tip of his rifle. Dinu stood up.

‘I have no weapons,’ he said in Hindustani.

The soldier ignored him. ‘Show me what’s in your bag,’ he said.

Dinu opened the mouth of his cloth bag.

‘What’s inside?’

Dinu reached in and took out his water-container and a leaf-wrapped packet of boiled rice. There was a look in the soldier’s eyes that gave him pause. He undid the strings of the packet and handed it to him.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. Eat.’

The soldier held the packet to his mouth and wolfed the rice down. Dinu saw that his condition was even worse than he’d first thought: the whites of his eyes had a jaundiced tinge and he looked malnourished, with discolourations on his skin and blisters at the corners of his mouth. After watching him for a minute, it seemed to Dinu that there was something about the soldier that looked familiar. Suddenly he knew who it was. In a disbelieving voice he said, ‘Kishan Singh?’ The soldier looked at him uncomprehendingly, narrowing his yellow-flecked eyes. ‘Kishan Singh — don’t you remember me?’

The soldier nodded, still holding the rice to his mouth. His expression changed hardly at all: it was as though, by this time, he were too fatigued to make the effort of recognition.

‘Kishan Singh,’ Dinu said, ‘is Arjun with you?’

Kishan Singh nodded again. Then he turned on his heel, tossed the leaf wrapper aside and went back into the trees.

Dinu reached into his cloth bag. He took out a cheroot and lit it with a shaking hand. He seated himself again on the tree-stump. In the distance, another figure had stepped into the clearing, followed by a group of some thirty men. Dinu stood up. For some reason he couldn’t understand, his palms had begun to sweat, dampening his cheroot.

Arjun stopped a few paces away. He and Dinu stood facing each other across the tree-stump. Neither of them said a word. At length Arjun gestured at the tai. ‘Let’s go up there.’

Dinu nodded his agreement. Arjun set his men on guard round the tai, and he and Dinu climbed up the ladder, seating themselves on the rotting floor planks. Close up, Arjun looked to be in an even worse way than Kishan Singh. A part of his scalp had been eaten away by a sore; the wound extended from above his right ear, almost as far as his eye. His face was covered in lacerations and insect bites. His cap was gone and so were the buttons of his uniform; his tunic was missing a sleeve.

Dinu would not have come if he’d known that he would be meeting Arjun. It was now more than three years since they had last met and so far as Dinu was concerned Arjun was guilty, by association, for much of the horror and devastation of those years. Yet now that they were face to face, Dinu felt neither anger nor revulsion. It was as though he were looking not at Arjun, but at his pounded remains, the husk of the man that he had once been. Dinu opened his cloth bag and took out his remaining packets of rice.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘You look as if you need something to eat.’ ‘What is it?’

‘Just some rice. .’

Arjun raised the packets to his nose and sniffed them. ‘That’s good of you,’ he said. ‘The men will be grateful. .’

He got up and went to the ladder. Dinu heard him telling his men to distribute the rice among themselves. When he came back, Dinu saw that he had given away all the packets. He understood that pride would not allow Arjun to accept food from him.

‘What about a cheroot?’ Dinu said. ‘Can I give you one of those?’

‘Yes.’

Dinu handed him a cheroot and struck a match. ‘Why are you here?’ Arjun said.

‘I was asked to come,’ Dinu said. ‘I’ve been living in a village. . not far from here. They heard that your men were heading in their direction. . They were worried.’

‘They have nothing to worry about,’ Arjun said. ‘We try to stay away from local people. We have no dispute with them. You can tell them they’re safe — from us at any rate.’

‘They’ll be glad.’

Arjun drew on his cheroot, and blew the smoke out through his nose. ‘I heard about Neel,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry — for you, for Manju. .’

Dinu acknowledged this with a gesture.

‘And what about your family?’ Arjun said. ‘Have you had any news — of Manju? The baby?’

‘I haven’t heard anything for the last three years,’ Dinu said. ‘They were here for a while. . after Neel died. . they were in the same place that I am now. . with old family friends. Then they went to Mawlaik, to try to cross over. . They haven’t been heard from since. . my mother, my father. . None of them. .’

Dinu chewed on his thumbnail and cleared his throat. ‘And did you hear about Alison. . and her grandfather?’

‘No.’ Arjun’s voice was a whisper. ‘What happened?’ ‘They were heading south from Morningside. . the car broke down and they ran into some Japanese soldiers. . they were both killed. . but she fought back. .’

Arjun covered his face with his hands. Dinu could tell from the rhythmic tremor in his shoulders that he was sobbing. Dinu felt only pity for Arjun now. He reached across the floor and put an arm around his shoulders.

‘Arjun. . Stop. . It won’t help. .’

Arjun shook his head, violently, as though he were trying to wake himself from a nightmare. ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’ll ever end.’

‘But, Arjun. .’ Dinu was surprised by the gentleness in his own voice, ‘Arjun. . it was you. . you who joined them. . of your own free will. And you’re still fighting on — now. . even after the Japanese. . Why? What for?’ Arjun looked up, his eyes snapping. ‘You see, Dinu — you don’t understand. Not even now. You think I joined them. I didn’t. I joined an Indian army that was fighting for an Indian cause. The war may be over for the Japanese — it isn’t for us.’

‘But, Arjun. .’ Dinu’s voice was still gentle. ‘You must see that you don’t have a hope. .’

At this, Arjun laughed.

‘Did we ever have a hope?’ he said. ‘We rebelled against an Empire that has shaped everything in our lives; coloured everything in the world as we know it. It is a huge, indelible stain which has tainted all of us. We cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves. And that, I suppose, is where I am. .’

Dinu put his arms round Arjun again. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, yet there was nothing he could say; there was nothing to be said.

This is the greatest danger, he thought, this point at which Arjun has arrived — where, in resisting the powers that form us, we allow them to gain control of all meaning; this is their moment of victory: it is in this way that they inflict their final and most terrible defeat. For Arjun, now, he felt not pity but compassion: what must it be like to visualise defeat so accurately, so completely? There was a sort of triumph in this — a courage — the value of which he did not wish to diminish by arguing.

‘I should go now,’ Dinu said.

‘Yes.’

They climbed down the vine-swathed ladder. At the bottom, they embraced again.

‘Be careful, Arjun. . be careful.’

‘I’ll be all right.’ Arjun smiled. ‘One day we’ll laugh about this.’ He waved and walked away into the shoulder-high grass.

Dinu leant against the tai’s ladder and watched him go. Long after the soldiers were gone, he remained where he was. When Raymond appeared, out of the darkness, Dinu said: ‘Let’s stay here tonight.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t feel well enough to go.’

This encounter with Arjun left Dinu profoundly shaken: now, for the first time, he began to understand the irreducible reality of the decision that Arjun had made; he saw why so many others whom he’d known — men such as Aung San— had made the same choices. He began to doubt his own absolute condemnation of them. How does one judge a person who claims to act on behalf of a subordinated people, a country? On what grounds can the truth of such a claim be established or refuted? Who can judge a person’s patriotism except those in whose name he claims to act — his compatriots? If the people of India chose to regard Arjun as a hero; if Burma saw Aung San as her saviour — was it possible for someone such as him, Dinu, to assume that there was a greater reality, a sweep of history, that could be invoked to refute these beliefs? He could no longer be confident that this was so.

forty-five

Arjun’s unit had initially numbered about fifty men: only twenty-eight now remained. Very few of these had been lost to hostile fire: most of the losses were due to desertion.

At the outset, the unit was evenly split between professional soldiers and volunteers. The professionals were those who’d been recruited in India, men like Kishan Singh, and Arjun himself. When Singapore fell, there were some fifty-five thousand Indian troops on the island. Of these more than half joined the Indian National Army. The volunteers were recruits from the Indian population in Malaya and most of them were Tamil plantation workers.

In the beginning some of Arjun’s fellow-officers had been sceptical about the abilities and endurance of the new recruits. The army that had trained them, the British Indian army, had not recruited Tamils: they were counted as one of the many Indian groups that were racially unfit for soldiering. Being professional soldiers, Arjun’s fellow-officers were steeped in the racial mythologies of the old mercenary army. Even though they knew those theories to be without foundation, they found it hard to rid themselves entirely of the old imperial notions about the kinds of men who made good soldiers and those who didn’t. It was only under fire that they’d come to recognise how false those myths were: experience had demonstrated the plantation recruits to be, if anything, much hardier and more dedicated than the professionals. In his own unit, Arjun found that there was a clear pattern to desertions: the men who’d melted away were almost all professionals; not a single plantation recruit had left. He’d been puzzled by this until Kishan Singh explained the reasons behind it. The professionals knew the men on the other side; the men they were fighting against were their relatives and neighbours; they knew that if they went over, they wouldn’t be badly treated.

Arjun could tell that the plantation workers understood this too. They knew who the professional soldiers were and what class they came from; they knew exactly how their minds worked and why they deserted. Every time a few more ‘professionals’ went missing, Arjun would see a deepening contempt in their eyes; he knew that in private the plantation men laughed about the pampered lives the soldiers had been used to, about the way they’d been fed and fattened by their colonial masters. They — the plantation recruits — seemed to have recognised that in the end, theirs wasn’t the same struggle as that of the professionals; in a way, they weren’t even fighting the same war.

Not all the plantation recruits spoke Hindustani: Arjun often had difficulty in communicating with them. There was only one man with whom Arjun could converse fluently: his name was Rajan. He was a lean, wiry man, all muscle and bone, with red-flecked eyes and a thick moustache. Arjun had recruited him himself, at Sungei Pattani. He’d wondered at the time whether Rajan was suitable material. But after his recruitment, Rajan had become another person altogether: training had transformed him. He seemed to have developed an aptitude for soldiering and had emerged as the most forceful personality among the plantation recruits.

Once, going over a ridge, Rajan had asked Arjun to point in the direction of India. Arjun had shown him: it was to the west. Rajan stood a long time staring into the distance; so did many of the other men.

‘Have you ever been to India?’ Arjun asked. ‘No, sir.’ Rajan shook his head.

‘What do you think you’ll find there?’

Rajan shrugged: he didn’t know and in a way, he didn’t seem to care. It was enough that it was India.

Arjun discovered later that Rajan had been born in Malaya; his knowledge of India came solely from stories told by his parents. The same was true of all the plantation recruits: they were fighting for a country they had never seen; a country that had extruded their parents and cut them off. This made their fervour all the more remarkable. Why? What were their motivations? There was so much about their lives that he, Arjun, didn’t know and could not fathom — the way they talked about ‘slavery’ for instance, always using the English word. At first Arjun had thought that they were using the term loosely, as a kind of metaphor — for after all, it wasn’t true technically that they were slaves; Rajan knew that as well as Arjun did. What did he mean then? What was it to be a slave? When Arjun asked this question Rajan would always answer indirectly. He would begin to talk about the kind of work they’d done, on the plantation — every action constantly policed, watched, supervised; exactly so many ounces of fertiliser, pushed exactly so, in holes that were exactly so many inches wide. It wasn’t that you were made into an animal, Rajan said — no, for even animals had the autonomy of their instincts. It was being made into a machine: having your mind taken away and replaced by a clockwork mechanism. Anything was better than that.

And India — what was India to them? This land whose freedom they were fighting for, this land they’d never seen, but for which they were willing to die? Did they know of the poverty, of the hunger their parents and grandparents had left behind? Did they know about the customs that would prevent them from drinking at high-caste wells? None of that was real to them; they had never experienced it and could not imagine it. India was the shining mountain beyond the horizon, a sacrament of redemption — a metaphor for freedom in the same way that slavery was a metaphor for the plantation. What would they find, Arjun wondered, when they crossed the horizon? And it was in the act of posing this question that Arjun began to see himself through their eyes — a professional, a mercenary, who would never be able to slough off the taint of his past and the cynicism that came with it, the nihilism. He saw why they might think of him with contempt — as an enemy even — for it was true in the end, that he was not fighting their war; that he did not believe as they believed; that he did not dream their dreams.

It was Rajan who brought Kishan Singh back, with his hands tied, stumbling through the undergrowth. Kishan Singh’s condition was such that he hadn’t been able to get very far. Rajan had found him holed up under an overhang, hiding, shivering, praying.

Rajan gave Kishan Singh a push, and he fell on his knees.

‘Get up,’ Arjun said. He couldn’t stand to look at Kishan Singh like this. ‘Utho—get up, Kishan Singh.’

Rajan took hold of Kishan Singh’s collar and pulled him to his feet. Kishan Singh’s frame was so wasted that he was like a stick-figure, a broken puppet.

Rajan had only contempt for Kishan Singh. He spoke to Arjun directly, looking him in the eyes: ‘And what will you do with him now?’

There was no ‘sir’, no ‘sahib’, and the question wasn’t ‘what has to be done?’ but, ‘what will you do?’ Arjun could see the challenge in Rajan’s eyes; he knew what was in Rajan’s mind— that the professionals would stick together, that he would find a way of letting Kishan Singh off. Time. He had to make time.

‘We have to hold a court-martial,’ Arjun said.

‘Here?’

Arjun nodded. ‘Yes. There’s a procedure. We have to try and keep to it.’

‘Procedures? Here?’ The sarcasm was audible in Rajan’s voice.

Arjun could tell that Rajan was trying to show him up in front of the other men. Using the advantage of his height, he went up to him and stared into his eyes,

‘Yes,’ said Arjun. ‘Procedures. And we have to respect them. That’s how armies are run — that’s what make them different from street gangs.’

Rajan shrugged and ran his tongue over his lips. ‘But where?’ he said. ‘Where are you going to find a place for a court-martial?’

‘We’ll go back to that teak camp,’ Arjun said. ‘It’ll be easier there.’

‘The camp? But what if we were followed?’

‘Not yet. We’ll go.’ The camp was an hour away: it would buy a little time.

‘Fall in.’ Arjun took the lead. He didn’t want to watch Kishan Singh being pushed along, with his hands tied behind his back.

It began to rain and they were drenched by the time they got to the camp. Arjun led the way across the clearing, to the tai. The area under the stilts was dry, sheltered from the rain by the structure above. Rajan let Kishan Singh go and he sank to the ground, squatting on his haunches, shivering.

‘Here,’ said Arjun. ‘We’ll hold the hearings here.’

Rajan fetched a chair from the tai and placed it in front of Arjun. ‘For you, sir,’ he said, with a mocking excess of politeness. ‘Since you are the judge.’

Arjun ignored him. ‘Let’s begin.’

Arjun tried to prolong the ritual, asking questions, going over the details. But the facts were clear: there was no disputing them. When he asked Kishan Singh to speak in his own defence, all he could do was beg, clasping his hands together. ‘Sah’b— my wife, my family. .’

Rajan was watching Arjun, smiling. ‘Any other procedures? Sir?’

‘No.’ Arjun saw that Rajan and the other men had formed a circle: he and Kishan Singh were at its centre. Arjun stood up. ‘I’ve made my decision.’ He turned to Rajan. ‘I’m putting you in charge of the firing squad,’ he said. ‘Ask for volunteers. Do it quickly.’

Rajan looked straight back at him, shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘None of us will volunteer. He’s one of yours — one of your men. You will have to deal with him yourself.’

Arjun looked at the circle of men around him. They were all watching him; their faces were expressionless, their eyes unblinking. Arjun turned away; shreds of memory floated through his mind. . this is how mutiny looks from the other end; you’re alone, and the only thing you can fall back on is the authority of a distant chain of command; on threats of the army’s justice, of eventual retribution once victory is won. But what do you do when you know that there will be no victory, when defeat is certain? How do you claim the validation of the future, knowing that it will not be yours?

‘Come, Kishan Singh.’ Arjun helped his former batman to his feet. His body was very light, almost weightless. Arjun could feel his hands growing gentle, as he took hold of Kishan Singh’s arm.

It was strange to be touching him in this way, knowing what lay ahead.

‘Come. Kishan Singh.’

‘Sah’b.’

Kishan Singh stood up and Arjun took hold of his arm, pushing him forward, past the others, out of the tai’s shelter, into the rain. They waded into the tall grass and Kishan Singh stumbled. Arjun put his arm round him and held him up. Kishan Singh was so weak that he could barely walk; he rested his head on Arjun’s shoulder.

‘Keep going, Kishan Singh.’ His voice was soft, as though he were whispering to a lover. ‘Sabar karo, Kishan Singh — it’ll be over soon.’

‘Sah’b.’

When they came to the edge of the clearing, Arjun let him go. Kishan Singh dropped to his knees, holding himself upright by clinging to Arjun’s leg.

‘Sah’b.’

‘Why did you do it, Kishan Singh?’ ‘Sah’b, I was afraid. .’

Arjun unbuttoned his leather holster with one hand and took out his sidearm — the Webley that Kishan Singh had always polished and oiled for him.

‘Why did you do it, Kishan Singh?’

‘Sah’b — I couldn’t go on. .’

He looked down at the welts and jungle sores on Kishan Singh’s head. He thought of another time when Kishan Singh had knelt between his feet, asking for his protection; he thought of his guilelessness and trust and innocence, of how he had been moved by the histories that lay behind them — the goodness and strength he had seen in him; all the qualities that he himself had lost and betrayed — qualities that had never been his to start with, he who had sprung from the potter’s wheel, fully made, deformed. He knew he could not allow Kishan Singh to betray himself, to become something other than he was — to become a creature like himself, grotesque, misshapen. It was this thought that gave him the strength to put his gun to Kishan Singh’s head.

At the touch of the cold metal, Kishan Singh raised his eyes, looking up at him. ‘Sah’b — remember my mother, my home, my child. .’

Arjun took hold of Kishan Singh’s head, curling his fingers through his matted hair. ‘It’s because I remember that I must do this, Kishan Singh. So that you cannot forget all that you are — to protect you from betraying yourself.’

He heard the shot and then he staggered away, towards a clump of trees. He reached for a branch to steady himself, and he saw, suspended in the branches, a dripping shred of flesh and bone. He could not tear his eyes from it: it was a part of Kishan Singh, of the head he’d just held in his hands. He took another step and fell to his knees. When he looked up Rajan and the other men were standing around him, watching. In their eyes there was a kind of pity.

There was rejoicing at the camp when Doh Say decided to move back to Huay Zedi. The march down the slope was a triumphal, joyful parade, complete with drums, flutes and elephants.

Doh Say gave Dinu a small place of his own, at the edge of the village. Dinu was just settling in when Raymond sought him out.

‘Come with me,’ Raymond said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

They went down to the stream, and watched the village children shooting for fish in the shallows of Huay Zedi’s stream, with their crossbows and bamboo darts.

‘I have some news.’

‘What?’

Arjun was dead, Raymond said. He’d been tracked down by a unit from Force 136; they’d caught up with him at the old teak camp.

‘Was it you who led them there?’ Dinu asked.

‘No. A deserter. One of his own men — an old soldier.’ ‘But you were there?’ Dinu said. ‘At the end. .?’ ‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘They’d called me in — the people who were hunting him.

They’d heard that many of his men had left—’

‘So was Arjun alone then?’

‘Yes. Completely alone — he was back at the abandoned teak camp. The rest of his men had left, they were all gone— they’d taken off their uniforms, put on longyis and disappeared into the forest. I tried to track them — but it was impossible. They knew the jungle, those men — they’d vanished.’

‘And Arjun?’

‘There was an Indian colonel there. He tried to get Arjun to surrender, told him that it was over, he would be all right. But Arjun shouted back, calling them slaves and mercenaries. And then he stepped out, on the tai’s veranda, shooting. .’

Raymond stopped to toss a pebble into the stream.

‘It was clear,’ he said, ‘that he did not want to live.’

forty-six

In 1946, when it became apparent that Burma would soon become independent, Doh Say decided to leave Huay Zedi and move eastwards, into the mountainous regions of the Burma — Thailand border. The war had pitted the peripheries of the country against its centre: Doh Say was one of many who had deep misgivings about what the future held for Burma’s minorities.

Most of Huay Zedi’s population took Doh Say’s advice, Dinu among them. The village was abandoned and its inhabitants settled in Loikaw, a small frontier town, deep in the Karenni hills, not far from the border of Thailand. For Dinu, there was one great advantage to being in Loikaw: he was once again able to find photographic materials — many of them smuggled across the Thai border. He set up a studio and became the only professional photographer within hundreds of miles. Even in difficult times, people married, had children— they needed records and were willing to pay, sometimes in cash but more often in kind.

In 1947, in preparation for the British departure, Burma’s first national elections were held. They were won by General Aung San. It was widely believed that he alone would be able to ensure the country’s unity and stability. But on July 19, shortly before he was to assume office, Aung San was assassinated, along with several of his would-be colleagues. Within months of the assassination, a Communist-led insurgency broke out in central Burma. Some of the army’s Karen units mutinied. The Karen were the country’s largest ethnic group after the Burmans; a major Karen organisation took up arms against the Rangoon Government.

Other groups followed suit. In a short time, there were sixteen insurgencies raging in Burma.

One day, in Loikaw, a boy came running to Dinu’s door. ‘Ko Tun Pe — someone come looking for you.’ Another child followed and then another. They stood in his doorway panting, watching in bright-eyed expectation. They all said the same thing. ‘Ko Tun Pe — you have a visitor; she’s walking up from the bus station.’

He ignored them; he stayed inside his studio, doing nothing, trying not to look out of the window. Then he heard more voices approaching — a procession appeared to be making its way towards his shack. He could hear people calling out: ‘Ko Tun Pe — look who’s here!’ He saw a shadow on his threshold and looked up. It was Dolly.

It had taken Dolly several months to track Dinu to Loikaw. She had arrived in Burma late in 1948, just as the insurgencies were getting under way. On coming to Rangoon, she’d discovered that the authority of the elected Government did not extend far beyond the capital’s municipal limits. Even the areas that bordered Mingaladon airport were in rebel hands. Much of Rangoon was in ruins, bombed to ashes by successive air campaigns. With the Kemendine house burnt to the ground, she had nowhere to stay; a friend gave her refuge.

One day Dolly heard that Dinu’s old friend, Thiha Saw, was back in Rangoon, working for a newspaper. She went to see him to ask if he had any news of Dinu. It so happened that U Thiha Saw had recently attended a political conference where Raymond had also been present. U Thiha Saw told Dolly that Dinu was safe, living in Loikaw. Dolly had left Rangoon by boat the next day. After a journey of several weeks she had boarded a rattling old bus that was on its way to Loikaw.

Dolly and Dinu spent days talking. She told him about Neel’s death and Manju’s death; about the march across the mountains and how she and Rajkumar had made the journey from the Indian border, through Assam, to Calcutta; she explained why she had come back to Burma alone.

He took pictures of her. Dolly was very thin and the bones of her face could be seen as clearly as the ridges of a fluted cup. Her hair was tied tightly back at the nape of her neck: it was still dark and glossy, with only a few white streaks at the temple.

She urged him to write to his father: ‘You should go and find him; you would not have the trouble with him that you had before. He is changed, a different man, almost a child. You should go to him; he needs you — he is alone.’

Dinu would make no promises. ‘Maybe. Some day.’

He knew, without her telling him, that she had not come, to stay. He was not surprised when she said: ‘Next week I shall leave for Sagaing.’

He went with her. This was the first time he’d ventured into the plains since the end of the war. He was stupefied by the devastation. They travelled through territories that had been scorched not once but twice by retreating armies. River channels were blocked and railway lines lay mangled on their sleepers. From village to village a different group or party was in charge. Farmers ploughed round bomb-craters; children pointed out the places where mines lay unexploded. They took roundabout routes, skirting round those districts which were said to be particularly dangerous. They walked and hired ox-carts, and took an occasional bus or a river boat. At Mandalay they stopped a night. Much of the fort was in ruins; the palace had been destroyed by artillery fire; the pavilions that Dolly had known had burnt to the ground.

They walked the last few miles to Sagaing and took a ferry across the Irrawaddy. To their intense relief Sagaing was unchanged. The hills were tranquil and beautiful, dotted with thousands of white pagodas. Dolly began to walk faster as they approached the nunnery. At the entrance she held Dinu fast and then Evelyn led her in. The next day, when Dinu went to see her, her head was shaved and she was wearing a saffron robe. She looked radiant.

It was arranged that he would come back to see her again the next year. The time came and he went back, from Loikaw to Sagaing, making the long journey again. At the gates of the nunnery there was a long wait. At length Evelyn came down. She gave him a gentle smile.

‘Your mother passed away a month ago,’ she said. ‘We could not inform you because of the troubles. You’ll be happy to know that it was very quick and she suffered no pain.’

In 1955 Doh Say died, in Loikaw. By this time, he had become a great patriarch and an influential leader. He was mourned by thousands. To Dinu, Doh Say had been almost as much a parent as a mentor: his death was a great blow. Shortly afterwards, Dinu decided to move to Rangoon.

The mid-1950s were a relatively quiet time in Burma. There was a stand-off in the insurgencies and the Government was a functioning democracy. U Thiha Saw had become the editor of one of the country’s leading Burmese-language newspapers and wielded considerable influence in Rangoon.

On arriving in Rangoon, Dinu went to see his old friend: he had grown from a thin, tall boy into a portly, authoritative-looking man. He wore colourful longyis and floppy bush shirts, and almost invariably had a pipe in his hands. He gave Dinu a job as a photographer at his newspaper. Later, when Dinu found a suitable place for a studio, it was U Thiha Saw who loaned him the money to buy it.

Some of the best-known photographers of pre-war Rangoon had been Japanese. After the war many had closed down their studios and disposed cheaply of their equipment. In his years in Loikaw, Dinu had made himself an expert in repairing and restoring old and discarded photographic equipment: he was able to set up his studio at very little cost.

U Thiha Saw was one of the first visitors to Dinu’s studio. He looked round it with approval. ‘Very nice, very nice.’ He stopped to puff on his pipe. ‘But haven’t you forgotten something?’

‘What?’

‘A signboard. Your studio has to have a name, after all.’

‘I haven’t thought of a name. .’ Dinu glanced around.

Everywhere he looked, his eyes met glass: framed photographs, counter-tops, camera lenses.

‘The Glass Palace,’ he said suddenly. ‘That’s what I’ll call it. .’

‘Why?’

‘It was a favourite phrase of my mother’s,’ he said. ‘Just something she used to say. .’

The name stuck and Dinu’s work quickly gained a reputation. The Fourth Princess was now living in Rangoon. Her husband was an artist. They were both regular visitors to the Glass Palace. Soon Dinu had more work than he could handle. He asked around for an assistant and U Thiha Saw recommended a relative, a young woman who was in need of a part-time job. This proved to be none other than Ma Thin Thin Aye— the young girl who’d helped to shelter Dinu when he’d passed through Rangoon in 1942. She was now in her mid-twenties, a student at Rangoon University. She was doing research in Burmese literature, writing a dissertation on The Glass Palace Chronicles—a famous nineteenth-century history, written in the reign of King Bodawpaya, an ancestor of King Thebaw’s. The name of Dinu’s studio struck Ma Thin Thin Aye as a happy coincidence. She took the job.

Ma Thin Thin Aye was slim, petite and neat in her movements. Every day, at four in the afternoon, she walked down the street, past the pharmacy, to the wooden door that led to the Glass Palace. Standing outside, she would sing out Dinu’s name—‘U Tun Pe!’—to let him know that she’d come. At seven-thirty she and Dinu would close the studio: she’d walk away down the street and Dinu would lock up and go round the corner to climb the stairs to his room.

After a few weeks, Dinu discovered that Ma Thin Thin Aye’s mornings were not spent solely on research. She was also a writer. Rangoon had a thriving culture of small literary magazines. One of these had published a couple of her short stories.

Dinu tracked down her stories. They took him by surprise. Her work was innovative and experimental; she was using the Burmese language in new ways, marrying classicism with folk usage. He was astonished by the wealth of allusion, by her use of dialect, by the intensity of her focus on her characters. It seemed to him that she had achieved much that he’d once aspired to himself — ambitions that he’d long abandoned.

Dinu was a little awed, and this made it hard for him to tell Ma Thin Thin Aye of his admiration for her work. Instead, he began to tease her, in his earnest, staccato way. ‘That story of yours,’ he said, ‘the one about the street where you live. . You say the people on the street are from many different places. . from the coasts and the hills. . Yet in your story they all speak Burmese. How is that possible?’

She was not at all put out.

‘Where I live,’ she said softly, ‘every house on the street speaks a different language. I have no choice but to trust my reader to imagine the sound of each house. Or else I would not be able to write at all about my street — and to trust your reader is not a bad thing.’

‘But look at Burma,’ Dinu went on, still teasing. ‘We are a universe on our own. . Look at all our people. . Karen, Kayah, Kachin, Shan, Rakhine, Wa, Pa-O, Chin, Mon. . Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your stories could contain each language, each dialect? If your reader could hear the vastness of the music? the surprise?’

‘But they do,’ she said. ‘Why do you think they don’t? A word on the page is like a string on an instrument. My readers sound the music in their heads, and for each it sounds different.’

At this point in his life, photography was no longer a passion for Dinu. He did only commercial work, making studio portraits and printing other people’s negatives. He bestowed a great deal of care and attention on what he did, but took no particular pleasure in it: mainly he was grateful for possessing a skill that could be parlayed into a livelihood. When people asked him why he no longer photographed outside his studio, he told them that his eyes had lost the habit of looking; his vision had withered for lack of practice.

The photographs that he thought of as his real work, he rarely showed. These pictures were, in any case, very few in number. His early prints and negatives had been destroyed when the Kemendine house went up in flames; the work he’d done in Malaya was still at Morningside. All he possessed of his own work were a few pictures taken in Loikaw — of his mother, of Doh Say and Raymond and their families. Some of these he’d framed and hung on the walls of his apartment. He fought shy of inviting Ma Thin Thin Aye upstairs to see them. She was so young — more than ten years his junior. It mattered very much that she not think badly of him.

A year went by and every day Ma Thin Thin Aye left and entered the studio by the door that led to the street. One day she said: ‘U Tun Pe, do you know what I find hardest in my writing?’

‘What?’

‘The moment when I have to step off the street and go into a house.’

He frowned. ‘Why. .? Why that?’

She wrung her hands together in her lap, looking exactly like the serious student that she was. ‘It is very hard,’ she said. ‘And to you it may seem like a small thing. But I do believe that it is this moment that marks the difference between classical and modern writing.’

‘Of all things. .! How so?’

‘You see, in classical writing, everything happens outside— on streets, in public squares and battlefields, in palaces and gardens — in places that everyone can imagine.’

‘But that is not how you write?’

‘No.’ She laughed. ‘And to this day, even though I do it only in my mind, nothing is more difficult for me than this— going into a house, intruding, violating. Even though it’s only in my head, I feel afraid — I feel a kind of terror — and that’s when I know I must keep going, step in, past the threshold, into the house.’

He nodded but made no comment. He gave himself a little time to think about what she’d said. One afternoon he bought biryani from Mughal Street and invited her up.

A few months later, they were married. The ceremony was a quiet one and they invited very few people. Afterwards, Ma Thin Thin Aye moved into Dinu’s two rooms. She marked off a corner for herself and set up a desk. She began to teach literature at the university. In the afternoons, she still helped at the studio. They were happy, content with the smallness and privacy of their world. Their childlessness did not seem a great lack. Her work began to gain notice, even beyond literary circles. She became one of the select group of Burmese writers whose presence was regularly sought at festivals in the countryside.

One morning, Daw Thin Thin Aye was tutoring a promising young student at the university, when she heard a burst of gunfire close at hand. She went to the window and saw hundreds of young men and women running by, some covered in blood.

Her student pulled her away from the window. They hid under a desk. After a couple of hours they were found by one of Daw Thin Thin Aye’s colleagues. There had been a coup, they learnt. General Ne Win had seized power. Dozens of students had been shot down, right inside the university.

Neither Dinu nor Daw Thin Thin Aye had ever been directly involved in politics. After the coup, they kept to themselves and waited for the winds to change. It was not until many years had passed that they realised that this was a storm that had come to stay.

U Thiha Saw was arrested and his newspaper was shut down. General Ne Win, the new dictator, began to juggle with the currency. Notes of certain denominations were declared to be valueless; overnight, millions of kyats became waste paper. Thousands of the country’s brightest young people fled into the countryside. Rebellions multiplied and flourished. Raymond went underground with several hundred followers. In the east, on the Thai border, the insurgents gave a name to the territories under their control: they became a Karen Free State— Kwathoolei, with its capital at the riverbank town of Manerplaw.

With each year the generals seemed to grow more powerful while the rest of the country grew ever feebler: the military was like an incubus, sucking the life from its host. U Thiha Saw died at Insein gaol, in circumstances that were not explained. His body was brought home bearing marks of torture and the family was not permitted a public funeral. A new censorship regime developed, growing out of the foundations of the system that had been left behind by the old Imperial Government. Every book and magazine had to be presented to the Press Scrutiny Board, for the perusal of a small army of captains and majors.

One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was ordered to report to the Scrutiny Board’s office. The building was plain and functional, like a school, and its long corridors smelt of toilets and disinfectant. She went to an office with a plywood door and sat for several hours on a bench. When at last she was shown in, she found herself facing an officer who looked to be in his late twenties. He was sitting at a desk and the manuscript of one of her stories was lying in front of him. His hands were in his lap and he seemed to be toying with something — she could not tell what it was.

She stood at the desk, fidgeting with the hem of her blouse. He did not ask her to sit. He stared, looking her up and down. Then he jabbed a finger at the manuscript. ‘Why have you sent this here?’

‘I was told,’ she said quietly, ‘that that is the law.’

‘The law is for writers,’ he said. ‘Not for people like you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You do not know how to write Burmese. Look at all these mistakes.’

She glanced at her manuscript and saw that it was covered with red pencil marks, like a badly filled schoolbook.

‘I’ve wasted a lot of time correcting this,’ he said. ‘It’s not my job to teach you people how to write.’

He got up from his chair and she saw that he was holding a golf club in his hands. It struck her now that the room was full of golfing paraphernalia — caps, balls, clubs. He reached for her manuscript and crumpled it into a ball, with one hand. Then he put it on the ground between his feet. He took many little steps, swinging the head of his club back and forth. He swung, and the ball of paper went sailing across the room. He held the pose for a moment, admiring his swing— the bent knee, the flexed leg. He turned to her. ‘Pick it up,’ he said. ‘Take it home and study it. Don’t send anything to this office again until you’ve learnt to write proper Burmese.’

In the bus, on the way home, she smoothed out the pages, one by one. His vocabulary, she realised, was that of a child; he was barely literate. He had run his pencil through everything he hadn’t understood — puns, allusions, archaisms.

She stopped writing. Nothing could be published unless it had undergone the board’s scrutiny. Writing was hard enough, even with nothing to deal with except yourself. The thought of another such encounter made those hours at the desk seem unendurable. The newspapers were full of strident denunciations of imperialism. It was because of the imperialists that Burma had to be shut off from the world; the country had to be defended against neo-colonialism and foreign aggression.

These tirades sickened Dinu. One day he said to his wife: ‘Look at the way in which these thugs use the past to justify the present. And they themselves are much worse than the colonialists; at least in the old days, you could read and write.’

Daw Thin Thin Aye smiled and shook her head in reproof. She said: ‘To use the past to justify the present is bad enough— but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past. And you can be sure that there are plenty of people to do that too: it’s just that we don’t have to put up with them.’

Their lives became very quiet and stunted: they were like plants whose roots had been trimmed to contain them inside tiny pots. They mixed with very few people, and were always careful about what they said, even with friends. They grew gnarled with age, inside and outside: they moved round their rooms with slow deliberation, like people who are afraid of knocking things over.

But all was not quiet around them. There were changes under way that they did not know about. Their lives were so quiet, so shut off that they didn’t feel the first rumbles under the volcano. The eruption, when it came, took them by surprise.

It started with another of the general’s crazed whims— another juggling of the currency. But this time people were not content to see their life’s savings turned into waste paper. There were protests, quiet and hesitant at first. One day, in the university, there was a brawl in a teashop — a small, apparently innocuous event. But suddenly classrooms emptied, students came pouring out into the streets; leaders emerged and with astonishing speed, organisations developed.

One day Daw Thin Thin Aye was taken to a meeting. She went unwillingly, pushed on by her students. Afterwards, she helped write a pamphlet. When she picked up the pen her hand was shaking — she saw herself in the censor’s office again. But as she began to write, a strange thing happened. With every sentence she saw her crumpled pages coming alive, rising off the floor and hitting back at the golf club, knocking it out of the major’s hands.

She began to go to meetings all over town. She tried to get Dinu to come but he resisted. Then one day there was news of a new speaker: she was to address a huge gathering, near the Shwe Dagon — her name was Aung San Suu Kyi and she was the daughter of Dinu’s old acquaintance from the university, General Aung San.

Dinu was seventy-four at the time; with age his right leg had grown stiffer and he walked with difficulty, but this new name had an energising effect on him. He went to the meeting and after that he was not able to stay at home again. He began to take pictures; he travelled with his camera, putting together a pictorial record of the movement in its headiest and most joyful days.

On August 8, 1988 Dinu woke up with a mild fever. Daw Thin Thin Aye made him a meal and told him to stay in bed. There was to be an important march in the city that day: she left early in the morning. Some three or four hours later, Dinu heard repeated volleys of gunfire in the distance. He was too ill to go out; he lay in bed and waited for his wife to come home. In the late afternoon there was a knock on the door. He dragged himself out of bed and threw the door open.

There were three or four uniformed policemen standing on the stairs. Behind them were several longyi-clad plain-clothes men.

‘Yes?’ said Dinu. ‘What do you want?’

They pushed past him without a word. He looked on helplessly as they went through the flat, opening cupboards and closets, rifling through their possessions. Then a plain-clothes man pointed to a framed picture of Raymond. The others gathered around, whispering.

One of the policemen came over to Dinu, with the framed photograph in his hand. ‘Do you know this man?’ he said to Dinu.

‘Yes.’ Dinu nodded.

‘Do you know who he is?’

Dinu picked his words carefully. ‘I know his name.’

‘Do you know that he’s the leader of an insurgency? Did you know that he’s one of the most wanted terrorists in the country?’

‘No.’ Dinu’s answer was non-committal.

‘Anyway — you will have to come with us.’

‘Not right now,’ said Dinu. ‘I can’t. I’m ill and I’m waiting for my wife.’

‘Don’t worry about her,’ said the man in the uniform. ‘She’s already been taken to a place where she will be safe.’

forty-seven

On Jaya’s last day in Yangon, Dinu promised to take her to 38 University Avenue, to attend a public meeting at Aung San Suu Kyi’s house.

The year 1996 marked the sixth anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest. Despite her confinement, Aung San Suu Kyi’s compound was still the centre of the city’s political life. Twice every week, on Saturdays and Sundays, she held a meeting at her house: people gathered outside and she addressed them from the gate. These meetings had become pilgrimages. A hush fell on Rangoon on weekend afternoons and thousands poured into the city from all round the country.

Dinu came to Jaya’s hotel to pick her up. A friend of his had driven him there in a car — a 1954 Czech-built Skoda. The car was making loud coughing noises as it idled on the street. As she was stepping in, Jaya noticed that the car’s doors were all of different colours, all oddly misshapen, as though they’d been banged into shape with sledgehammers.

‘What a strange-looking car,’ she said.

Dinu laughed, ‘Yes. . this is a car that has been put together entirely from bits of other cars. . The bonnet is from an old Japanese Ohta. . one of the doors is from a Volga. . It’s a miracle that it runs at all. .’

The backfiring of the Skoda’s engine echoed through the streets as they drove away. The centre of the city was almost eerily quiet, emptier than Jaya had ever seen it before. But as they went northwards the traffic increased: there were cars, buses, small trucks. They came to a wide, tree-shaded avenue lined with large villas.

They parked a good distance away, and joined the many hundreds of people who were walking down the avenue.

They came to a house with a green and yellow fence. There was a large crowd outside. Not much was visible of the interior of the compound: the house was set well back from the road, surrounded by stands of tall bamboo. The gates were of metal, with spikes along the top. There were some ten thousand people gathered round them, most sitting patiently on the grassy verge that lined the avenue on both sides. The road was kept clear by volunteers and policemen, and traffic was flowing through, right past the gates, at a slow but steady pace.

The volunteers were wearing saffron tunics and green longyis: Jaya learnt that these were the colours of the democracy movement. Dinu was recognised by many of the volunteers. They waved him through to a vantage point that was quite close to the gates. The view was good and Jaya spent a long time looking at the people around her: there were many students and a fair sprinkling of Buddhist nuns and monks, but most of the people there seemed like ordinary folk. There were plenty of women, a large number being accompanied by children. The atmosphere was expectant but not tense; there were many food vendors making their way through the crowd, selling drinks and snacks.

Dinu nudged Jaya’s elbow and pointed to a photographer and a couple of men in wire-rimmed sunglasses. ‘M.I.,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Military intelligence. They will film it all and take it back to their headquarters. Their bosses will watch it tomorrow.’ Jaya noticed that there were many Indians in the crowd. She commented on this to Dinu and he said, ‘Yes, you can be sure this fact hasn’t escaped the regime. . the official papers often describe these meetings as gatherings of evil Indians.’ He laughed.

Suddenly there was a great uproar. ‘There she is,’ Dinu said. ‘Aung San Suu Kyi.’

A slim, fine-featured woman stepped up. Her head was just visible above the gate. Her hair was dark black, and gathered at the neck. She was wearing white flowers above her hair. She was beautiful almost beyond belief.

Aung San Suu Kyi waved at the crowd and began to speak. She was using Burmese and Jaya could not understand what she was saying. But the delivery was completely unlike anything she’d ever heard. She laughed constantly and there was an electric brightness to her manner.

The laughter is her charisma, Jaya thought. She could hear echoes of Aung San Suu Kyi’s laughter everywhere around her, in the crowd. Despite the swarming intelligence agents, the atmosphere was not heavy or fear-filled. There was a good-humouredness that seemed very much at odds with the deadened city beyond. Jaya understood why so many people had pinned their hopes on Aung San Suu Kyi; she knew that she herself would have been willing to do anything that was asked of her at that moment: it was impossible to behold this woman and not be half in love.

Both she and Dinu were silent as they walked back to the old Skoda. They got back inside, and presently Dinu said: ‘It’s strange. . I knew her father. . I knew many others who were in politics. . many men who are regarded as heroes now. . But she is the only leader I’ve ever been able to believe in.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s the only one who seems to understand what the place of politics is. . what it ought to be. . that while misrule and tyranny must be resisted, so too must politics itself. . that it cannot be allowed to cannibalise all of life, all of existence. To me this is the most terrible indignity of our condition — not just in Burma, but in many other places too. . that politics has invaded everything, spared nothing. . religion, art, family. . it has taken over everything. . there is no escape from it. . and yet, what could be more trivial, in the end? She understands this. . only she. . and this is what makes her much greater than a politician. .’

‘But if that’s true,’ Jaya said hesitantly, ‘doesn’t it make it much harder for her to succeed — as a politician?’

Dinu laughed. ‘But she has already succeeded. . don’t you see? She has torn the masks from the generals’ faces. . She has shown them the limits of what she is willing to do. . and these limits have imprisoned them too. . she haunts them unceasingly, every moment. . She has robbed them of words, of discourse. They have no defence against her but to call her an imperialist which is laughable. . when in fact, it is they who invoke the old imperial laws and statutes to keep themselves in power. The truth is that they’ve lost and they know this. . this is what makes them so desperate. . the knowledge that soon they will have nowhere to hide. . that it is just a matter of time before they are made to answer for all that they have done.’

forty-eight

Dinu came to Jaya’s hotel to take her to the airport. On the way, as they were driving through the city in the Skoda, Dinu said: ‘You’ve been here seven days and we’ve never once spoken of my father.’

‘That is true,’ Jaya said guiltily.

‘Tell me about his last days,’ Dinu said. ‘Were you with him?’

‘Yes, I remember it very well. My great-aunt Uma had died just a few days before, you see. They were almost ninety, both of them. .’

They died within a few weeks of each other. Uma was the first to go: she died in her sleep and it was Rajkumar who found her. The news caused a stir: she was given a state funeral and the Governor came. The family was pushed quietly to the background.

Rajkumar died of a heart attack, a month later. His funeral was as modest as Uma’s had been grand. A few of his friends from the Burmese temple carried his body to the crematorium. Afterwards Jaya and Bela took his ashes to the river. Jaya scattered them in the water.

‘I remembered how he’d always said that for him, the Ganges could never be the same as the Irrawaddy.’

Jaya glanced at Dinu and saw that he was crying, tears running down the creases of his face. She reached for his hand.

‘You asked me about his last days,’ she said, ‘and the truth is that what I told you is quite different from what I remember.’

‘What do you remember?’

‘I remember a story my son told me.’

‘Your son? I didn’t know you had a son.’

‘Yes, I do. He’s grown up now. He’s been living in America these last few years.’

‘And what was his story?’

I was very young, maybe four or five. Lankasuka was my home too; I lived upstairs with my mother and my great-aunt, Bela. Rajkumar lived downstairs, in Uma’s flat, in a small room next to the kitchen. In the morning, on waking up, the first thing I would do was to go down to look for him.

That morning I went to Rajkumar’s room and found that his bed had not been slept in. I was alarmed. I went running across the flat to Uma’s bedroom, to tell her that my great-grandfather was missing.

Although Rajkumar had lived in Uma’s flat for some twenty years, there was never any ambiguity about their living arrangements or the nature of their relationship. It was understood by everyone that their connection was one of charity, founded on Uma’s affection for Dolly. Uma was a benevolent benefactress; he a near-destitute refugee. His presence in the household did not in any way compromise Uma’s reputation as a woman of icy self-containment, a widow who had mourned her dead husband for more than half a century.

The geography of Uma’s flat mirrored their relationship. Uma slept in the master-bedroom, overlooking the park; Rajkumar’s room was a converted pantry, near the kitchen. It was only in the afternoons that he was allowed into Uma’s room and he always sat in the same place — a large divan that was ringed with cotton-stuffed bolsters. They had lived thus for twenty years.

But that morning when I ran into Uma’s room, I found, to my surprise, that Rajkumar was in her bed. They were fast asleep, their bodies covered by a thin, cotton sheet. They looked peaceful and very tired, as though they were resting after some great exertion. Their heads were thrown back on a bank of piled pillows and their mouths were open. This was the very pose that we children used in games that required the figuring of death: head bent back, mouth open, tongue protruding between the lips. That I should be confused was only natural.

I shouted: ‘Are you dead?’

They woke up, blinking short-sightedly. They were both extremely short-sighted and there ensued a flurry of bed-slapping and pillow-turning as they fumbled for their eyeglasses. In the process, their covers slipped off and their bodies were revealed to be naked. Uma’s skin looked very soft and was covered with a delicate tracery of tiny cracks; every single hair on Rajkumar’s body had turned white, creating a startlingly elegant effect against his dark complexion.

‘Why,’ I said stupidly, ‘your clothes are off. .’

They found their glasses and snatched the covers back. Uma produced a loud gargling sound, a kind of volcanic mumble. Her mouth was strangely puckered, and on looking more closely I realised that both she and Rajkumar were without their teeth.

I was fascinated by dentures, as all children are, and I knew exactly where Uma put hers when she retired at night: to prevent them from being knocked over, they were placed out of reach of the bed, immersed in water, in a large glass tumbler.

In an effort to be helpful, I approached the tumbler, so that I could spare them the trouble and embarrassment of getting out of bed naked. But when I looked at the tumbler, I discovered that there was not one, but two sets of dentures inside. What was more, they had somehow become entangled, so that their jaws were interlocked, each reaching deep into the mouth of the other, each biting down on the other’s teeth.

In a further effort to be helpful, I tried to pry the dentures apart. But Rajkumar had grown impatient and he snatched the tumbler from me. It was only after he had thrust his teeth into his mouth that he discovered that Uma’s dentures were clamped within his. And then, as he was sitting there, staring in round-eyed befuddlement at the pink jaws that were protruding out of his own, an astonishing thing happened— Uma leant forward and fastened her mouth on her own teeth. Their mouths clung to each other and they shut their eyes.

I had never seen a kiss before. In India, in those days, such things were excised from sight by unseen censors, in real life as in film. Even though I did not know that this embrace had a name, I did realise that to remain in that room would be to violate something that was beyond my understanding. I slipped away.

What I saw that morning in my great-great-aunt Uma’s bedroom remains to this day the most tender, the most moving sight I have ever seen, and from the day when I sat down to write this book — the book my mother never wrote — I knew that it was this that it would end.