The Glass Palace. Amitav Ghosh
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chairs and upsetting tables.
Slowly she learnt a few words of Tamil and Hindustani. It became a little easier to work with them then, but they still seemed strangely clumsy and inept. There were times when she couldn’t help laughing – when she saw them trying out their shikoes, for example, wiggling their elbows and straightening their saris. Or when she watched them lumbering around on their knees, huffing and puffing, or getting themselves tangled in their clothes and falling flat on their faces. Dolly could never understand why they found it so hard to move about on their hands and knees. To her it seemed much easier than having to stand up every time you wanted to do something. It was much more restful this way: when you weren’t doing anything in particular you could relax with your weight on your heels. But the new ayahs seemed to think it impossibly hard. You could never trust them to carry a tray to the Queen. They would either spill everything as they tried to get across the room, or else they would creep along so slowly that it would take them half an hour to get from the door to her bed. The Queen would get very impatient, lying on her side and watching her glass of water move across the room as though it were being carried by a snail. Sometimes she would shout, and that would be worse still. The terrified ayah would fall over, tray and all, and the whole process would have to be resumed from the start.
It would have been much easier of course if the Queen weren’t so insistent on observing all the old Mandalay rules – the shikoes, the crawling – but she wouldn’t hear of any changes. She was the Queen of Burma, she said, and if she didn’t insist on being treated properly how could she expect anyone else to give her her due?
One day U Maung Gyi caused a huge scandal. One of the Queen’s nurses went into the nursery and found him on the floor with another nurse, his longyi pulled up over his waist. Instead of scurrying off in shame he turned on his discoverer and began to beat her. He chased her down the corridor and into the King’s bedroom.
The King was sitting at a table rolling a cheroot. U Maung Gyi lunged at the nurse as she went running in. She tripped and grabbed at the tablecloth. Everything flew into the air: there was tobacco everywhere. The King sneezed and went on sneezing for what seemed like hours. When he finally stopped he was angrier than anyone had ever seen him before. This meant still more departures.
With the head nurse thinking herself to be a squirrel and another gone home to Burma, the Queen now had very few dependable nurses left. She decided to get an English midwife. Mr Cox found one for her, a Mrs Wright. She seemed pleasant and friendly enough, but her arrival led to other problems. She wouldn’t shiko and she wouldn’t go down on her hands and knees while waiting on the Queen. The Queen appealed to Mr Cox but the Englishman came out in support of Mrs Wright. She could bow, he said, from the waist, but she needn’t shiko and she certainly wouldn’t crawl. She was an Englishwoman.
The Queen accepted this ruling but it didn’t endear Mrs Wright to her. She began to rely more and more on a Burmese masseur who had somehow attached himself to the royal entourage. He was very good with his hands and was able to make the Queen’s pains go away. But the English doctor found out and made a huge fuss. He said that what the masseur was doing was an affront to medical science. He said that the man was touching Her Highness in unhealthy places. The Queen decided he was mad and declared that she would not send the masseur away. The doctor retaliated by refusing to treat her any more.
Fortunately the Queen’s labour was very short and the delivery quick and uncomplicated. The child was a girl and she was named Ashin Hteik Su Myat Paya.
Everyone was nervous because they knew how badly the Queen had wanted a boy. But the Queen surprised them. She was glad, she said: a girl would be better able to bear the pain of exile.
For a while Mandalay became a city of ghosts.
After the British invasion, many of the King’s soldiers escaped into the countryside with their weapons. They began to act on their own, staging attacks on the occupiers, sometimes materialising inside the city at night. The invaders responded by tightening their grip. There were round-ups, executions, hangings. The sound of rifle-fire echoed through the streets; people locked themselves into their homes and stayed away from the bazaars. Whole days went by when Ma Cho had no call to light her cooking fire.
One night Ma Cho’s stall was broken into. Between the two of them, Rajkumar and Ma Cho succeeded in driving the intruders away. But considerable damage had already been caused; lighting a lamp, Ma Cho discovered that most of her pots, pans and utensils had been either stolen or destroyed. She let out a stricken wail. ‘What am I to do? Where am I to go?’
Rajkumar squatted beside her. ‘Why don’t you talk to Saya John?’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps he’ll be able to help.’
Ma Cho snorted in tearful disgust. ‘Don’t talk to me about Saya John. What’s the use of a man who’s never there when you need him?’ She began to sob, her hands covering her face.
Tenderness welled up in Rajkumar. ‘Don’t cry, Ma Cho.’ He ran his hands clumsily over her head, combing her curly hair with his nails. ‘Stop, Ma Cho. Stop.’
She blew her nose and straightened up. ‘It’s all right,’ she said gruffly. ‘It’s nothing.’ Fumbling in the darkness, she reached for his longyi, leaning forward to wipe the tears from her face.
Often before, Ma Cho’s bouts of tears had ended in this way, with her wiping her face on his thin cotton garment. But this time, as her fingers drew together the loose cloth, the chafing of the fabric produced a new effect on Rajkumar. He felt the kindling of a glow of heat deep within his body, and then, involuntarily, his pelvis thrust itself forward, towards her fingers, just as she was closing her grip. Unmindful of the intrusion, Ma Cho drew a fistful of cloth languidly across her face, stroking her cheeks, patting the furrows round her mouth and dabbing the damp hollows of her eyes. Standing close beside her, Rajkumar swayed, swivelling his hips to keep pace with her hand. It was only when she was running the tip of the bunched cloth between her parted lips that the fabric betrayed him. Through the layered folds of cloth, now wet and clinging, she felt an unmistakable hardness touching on the soft corners of her mouth. She tightened her grip, suddenly alert, and gave the gathered cloth a probing pinch. Rajkumar gasped, arching his back.
‘Oh?’ she grunted. Then, with a startling deftness, one of her hands flew to the knot of his longyi and tugged it open; the other pushed him down on his knees. Parting her legs she drew him, kneeling, towards her stool. Rajkumar’s forehead was on her cheek now; the tip of his skinned nose thrust deep into the hollow beneath her jaw. He caught the odour of turmeric and onion welling up through the cleft between her breasts. And then a blinding whiteness flashed before his eyes and his head was pulled as far back as it could go, tugged by convulsions in his spine.
Abruptly, she pushed him away, with a yelp of disgust. “What am I doing?’ she cried. ‘What am I doing with this boy, this child, this half-wit kalaa?’ Elbowing him aside, she clambered up her ladder and vanished into her room.
It was a while before Rajkumar summoned the courage to say anything. ‘Ma Cho,’ he called up, in a thin, shaking voice. ‘Are you angry?’
‘No,’ came a bark from above. ‘I’m not angry. I want you to forget Ma Cho and go to sleep. You have your own future to think of.’
They never spoke of what happened that night. Over the next few days, Rajkumar saw very little of Ma Cho: she would disappear early in the morning, returning only late at night. Then, one morning, Rajkumar woke up and knew that she was gone for good. Now, for the first time, he climbed the ladder that led up to her room. The only thing he found was a new, blue longyi, lying folded in the middle of the room. He knew that she’d left it for him.
What was he to do now? Where was he to go? He’d assumed all along that he would eventually return to his sampan, to join his shipmates. But now, thinking of his life on the boat, he knew he would not go back. He had seen too much in Mandalay and acquired too many new ambitions.
During the last few weeks he’d thought often of what Saya John’s son, Matthew had said – about the British invasion being provoked by teak. No detail could have been more precisely calculated to lodge in a