THE GLASS PALACE
AMITAV GHOSH

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2001

Copyright © Amitav Ghosh 2000

The Author asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006514091

Ebook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780007383283

Version: 2018-05-23

Dedication

To my father’s memory

Map

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

PART ONE

Mandalay

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

PART TWO

Ratnagiri

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

PART THREE

The Money Tree

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

PART FOUR

The Wedding

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

PART FIVE

Morningside

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

PART SIX

The Front

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

PART SEVEN

The Glass Palace

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Forty-six

Forty-seven

Forty-eight

Acknowledgments

Author’s Notes

Praise

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE Mandalay

One

There was only one person in the food-stall who knew exactly what that sound was that was rolling in across the plain, along the silver curve of the Irrawaddy, to the western wall of Mandalay’s fort. His name was Rajkumar and he was an Indian, a boy of eleven – not an authority to be relied upon.

The noise was unfamiliar and unsettling, a distant booming followed by low, stuttering growls. At times it was like the snapping of dry twigs, sudden and unexpected. And then, abruptly, it would change to a deep rumble, shaking the food-stall and rattling its steaming pot of soup. The stall had only two benches, and they were both packed with people, sitting pressed up against each other. It was cold, the start of central Burma’s brief but chilly winter, and the sun had not risen high enough yet to burn off the damp mist that had drifted in at dawn from the river. When the first booms reached the stall there was a silence, followed by a flurry of questions and whispered answers. People looked around in bewilderment: What is it? Ba le? What can it be? And then Rajkumar’s sharp, excited voice cut through the buzz of speculation. ‘English cannon,’ he said in his fluent but heavily accented Burmese. ‘They’re shooting somewhere up the river. Heading in this direction.’

Frowns appeared on some customers’ faces as they noted that it was the serving-boy who had spoken and that he was a kalaa from across the sea – an Indian, with teeth as white as his eyes and skin the colour of polished hardwood. He was standing in the centre of the stall, holding a pile of chipped ceramic bowls. He was grinning a little sheepishly, as though embarrassed to parade his precocious knowingness.

His name meant prince, but he was anything but princely in appearance, with his oil-splashed vest, his untidily knotted longyi and his bare feet with their thick slippers of callused skin. When people asked how old he was he said fifteen, or sometimes eighteen or nineteen, for it gave him a sense of strength and power to be able to exaggerate so wildly, to pass himself off as grown and strong, in body and judgement, when he was, in fact, not much more than a child. But he could have said he was twenty and people would still have believed him, for he was a big, burly boy, taller and broader in the shoulder than many men. And because he was very dark it was hard to tell that his chin was as smooth as the palms of his hands, innocent of all but the faintest trace of fuzz.

It was chance alone that was responsible for Rajkumar’s presence in Mandalay that November morning. His boat – the sampan on which he worked as a helper and errand-boy – had been found to need repairs after sailing up the Irrawaddy from the Bay of Bengal. The boatowner had taken fright on being told that the work might take as long as a month, possibly even longer. He couldn’t afford to feed his crew that long, he’d decided: some of them would have to find other jobs. Rajkumar was told to walk to the city, a couple of miles inland. At a bazaar, opposite the west wall of the fort, he was to ask for a woman called Ma Cho. She was half-Indian and she ran a small food-stall; she might have some work for him.

And so it happened that at the age of eleven, walking into the city of Mandalay, Rajkumar saw, for the first time, a straight road. By the sides of the road there were bamboo-walled shacks and palm-thatched shanties, pats of dung and piles of refuse. But the straight course of the road’s journey was unsmudged by the clutter that flanked it: it was like a causeway, cutting across a choppy sea. Its lines led the eye right through the city, past the bright red walls of the fort to the distant pagodas of Mandalay hill, shining like a string of white bells upon the slope.

For his age, Rajkumar was well-travelled. The boat he worked on was a coastal craft that generally kept to open waters, plying the long length of shore that joined Burma to Bengal. Rajkumar had been to Chittagong and Bassein and any number of towns and villages in between. But in all his travels he had never come across thoroughfares like those in Mandalay. He was accustomed to lanes and alleys that curled endlessly around themselves so that you could never see beyond the next curve. Here was something new: a road that followed a straight, unvarying course, bringing the horizon right into the middle of habitation.

When the fort’s full immensity revealed itself, Rajkumar came to a halt in the middle of the road. The citadel was a miracle to behold, with its mile-long walls and its immense moat. The crenellated ramparts were almost three storeys high, but of a soaring lightness, red in colour, and topped by ornamented gateways with seven-tiered roofs. Long straight roads radiated outwards from the walls, forming a neat geometrical grid. So intriguing was the ordered pattern of these streets that Rajkumar wandered far afield, exploring. It was almost dark by the time he remembered why he’d been sent to the city. He made his way back to the the fort’s western wall and asked for Ma Cho.

‘Ma Cho?’

‘She has a stall where she sells food – baya-gyaw and other things. She’s half-Indian.’

‘Ah, Ma Cho.’ It made sense that this ragged-looking Indian boy was looking for Ma Cho: she often had Indian strays working at her stall. ‘There she is, the thin one.’

Ma Cho was small and harried-looking, with spirals of wiry hair hanging over her forehead, like a fringed awning. She was in her mid-thirties, more Burmese than Indian in appearance. She was busy frying vegetables, squinting at the smoking oil from the shelter of an upthrust arm. She glared at Rajkumar suspiciously: ‘What do you want?’

He had just begun to explain about the boat and the repairs and wanting a job for a few weeks, when she interrupted him. She began to shout at the top of her voice, with her eyes closed: ‘What do you think – I have jobs under my armpits, to pluck out and hand to you? Last week a boy ran away with two of my pots. Who’s to tell me you won’t do the same?’ And so on.

Rajkumar understood that this outburst was not aimed directly at him: that it had more to do with the dust, the splattering oil and the price of vegetables than with his own presence or with anything he had said. He lowered his eyes and stood there stoically, kicking the dust until she was done.

She paused, panting, and looked him over. ‘Who are your parents?’ she said at last, wiping her streaming forehead on the sleeve of her sweat-stained aingyi.

‘I don’t have any. They died.’

She thought this over, biting her lip. ‘All right. Get to work, but remember you’re not going to get much more than three meals and a place to sleep.’

He grinned. ‘That’s all I need.’

Ma Cho’s stall consisted of a couple of benches, sheltered beneath the stilts of a bamboo-walled hut. She did her cooking sitting by an open fire, perched on a small stool. Apart from fried baya-gyaw, she also served noodles and soup. It was Rajkumar’s job to carry bowls of soup and noodles to the customers. In his spare moments he cleared away the utensils, tended the fire and shredded vegetables for the soup pot. Ma Cho didn’t trust him with fish or meat and chopped them herself with a grinning short-handled da. In the evenings he did the washing-up, carrying bucketfuls of utensils over to the fort’s moat.

Between Ma Cho’s stall and the moat there lay a wide, dusty roadway that ran all the way around the fort, forming an immense square. Rajkumar had only to cross this apron of open space to get to the moat. Directly across from Ma Cho’s stall lay a bridge that led to one of the fort’s smaller entrances, the funeral gate. He had cleared a pool under the bridge by pushing away the lotus pads that covered the surface of the water. This had become his spot: it was there that he usually did his washing and bathing – under the bridge, with the wooden planks above serving as his ceiling and shelter.

On the far side of the bridge lay the walls of the fort. All that could be seen of its interior was a nine-roofed spire that ended in a glittering gilded umbrella – this was the great golden hti of Burma’s kings. Under the spire lay the throne room of the palace, where Thebaw, King of Burma, held court with his chief consort, Queen Supayalat.

Rajkumar was curious about the fort but he knew that for those such as himself its precincts were forbidden ground. ‘Have you ever been inside?’ he asked Ma Cho one day. ‘The fort, I mean?’

‘Oh yes.’ Ma Cho nodded importantly. ‘Three times, at the very least.’

‘What is it like in there?’

‘It’s very large, much larger than it looks. It’s a city in itself, with long roads and canals and gardens. First you come to the houses of officials and noblemen. And then you find yourself in front of a stockade, made of huge teakwood posts. Beyond lie the apartments of the Royal Family and their servants – hundreds and hundreds of rooms, with gilded pillars and polished floors. And right at the centre there is a vast hall that is like a great shaft of light, with shining crystal walls and mirrored ceilings. People call it the Glass Palace.’

‘Does the King ever leave the fort?’

‘Not in the last seven years. But the Queen and her maids sometimes walk along the walls. People who’ve seen them say that her maids are the most beautiful women in the land.’

‘Who are they, these maids?’

‘Young girls, orphans, many of them just children. They say that the girls are brought to the palace from the far mountains. The Queen adopts them and brings them up and they serve as her handmaids. They say that she will not trust anyone but them to wait on her and her children.’

‘When do these girls visit the gateposts?’ said Rajkumar. ‘How can one catch sight of them?’

His eyes were shining, his face full of eagerness. Ma Cho laughed at him. ‘Why, are you thinking of trying to get in there, you fool of an Indian, you coal-black kalaa? They’ll know you from a mile off and cut off your head.’

That night, lying flat on his mat, Rajkumar looked through the gap between his feet and caught sight of the gilded hti that marked the palace: it glowed like a beacon in the moonlight. No matter what Ma Cho said, he decided, he would cross the moat – before he left Mandalay, he would find a way in.

Ma Cho lived above the stall in a bamboo-walled room that was held up by stilts. A flimsy splinter-studded ladder connected the room to the stall below. Rajkumar’s nights were spent under Ma Cho’s dwelling, between the stilts, in the space that served to seat customers during the day. Ma Cho’s floor was roughly put together, from planks of wood that didn’t quite fit. When Ma Cho lit her lamp to change her clothes, Rajkumar could see her clearly through the cracks in the floor. Lying on his back, with his fingers knotted behind his head, he would look up unblinking, as she untied the aingyi that was knotted loosely round her breasts.

During the day Ma Cho was a harried and frantic termagant, racing from one job to another, shouting shrilly at everyone who came her way. But at night, with the day’s work done, a certain languor entered her movements. She would cup her breasts and air them, fanning herself with her hands; she would run her fingers slowly through the cleft of her chest, past the pout of her belly, down to her legs and thighs. Watching her from below, Rajkumar’s hand would snake slowly past the knot of his longyi, down to his groin.

One night Rajkumar woke suddenly to the sound of a rhythmic creaking in the planks above, along with moans and gasps and urgent drawings of breath. But who could be up there with her? He had seen no one going in.

The next morning, Rajkumar saw a small, bespectacled, owl-like man climbing down the ladder that led to Ma Cho’s room. The stranger was dressed in European clothes: a shirt, trousers, and a pith hat. Subjecting Rajkumar to a grave and prolonged regard, the stranger ceremoniously raised his hat. ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘Kaisa hai? Sub kuchh theek-thaak?’

Rajkumar understood the words perfectly well – they were what he might have expected an Indian to say – but his mouth still dropped open in surprise. Since coming to Mandalay he had encountered many different kinds of people, but this stranger belonged with none of them. His clothes were those of a European and he seemed to know Hindustani – and yet the cast of his face was neither that of a white man nor an Indian. He looked, in fact, to be Chinese.

Smiling at Rajkumar’s astonishment, the man doffed his hat again, before disappearing into the bazaar.

‘Who was that?’ Rajkumar said to Ma Cho when she came down the ladder.

The question evidently annoyed her and she glared at him to make it clear that she would prefer not to answer. But Rajkumar’s curiosity was aroused now, and he persisted. ‘Who was that, Ma Cho? Tell me.’

‘That is …’ Ma Cho began to speak in small, explosive bursts, as though her words were being produced by upheavals in her belly. ‘That is … my teacher … my Sayagyi.’

‘Your teacher?’

‘Yes … He teaches me … He knows about many things …’

‘What things?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Where did he learn to speak Hindustani?’

‘Abroad, but not in India … he’s from somewhere in Malaya. Malacca I think. You should ask him.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You will call him Saya, just as I do.’

‘Just Saya?’

‘Saya John.’ She turned on him in exasperation. ‘That’s what we all call him. If you want to know any more, ask him yourself.’

Reaching into her cold cooking fire, she drew out a handful of ash and threw it at Rajkumar. ‘Who said you could sit here talking all morning, you half-wit kalaa? Now you get busy with your work.’

There was no sign of Saya John that night or the next.

‘Ma Cho,’ said Rajkumar, ‘what’s happened to your teacher? Why hasn’t he come again?’

Ma Cho was sitting at her fire, frying baya-gyaw. Peering into the hot oil, she said shortly, ‘He’s away.’

‘Where?’

‘In the jungle …’

‘The jungle? Why?’

‘He’s a contractor. He delivers supplies to teak camps. He’s away most of the time.’ Suddenly the ladle dropped from her grasp and she buried her face in her hands.

Hesitantly Rajkumar went to her side. ‘Why are you crying, Ma Cho?’ He ran a hand over her head in an awkward gesture of sympathy. ‘Do you want to marry him?’

She reached for the folds of his frayed longyi and dabbed at her tears with the bunched cloth. ‘His wife died a year or two ago. She was Chinese, from Singapore. He has a son, a little boy. He says he’ll never marry again.’

‘Maybe he’ll change his mind.’

She pushed him away with one of her sudden gestures of exasperation. ‘You don’t understand, you thick-headed kalaa. He’s a Christian. Every time he comes to visit me, he has to go to his church next morning to pray and ask forgiveness. Do you think I would want to marry a man like that?’ She snatched her ladle off the ground and shook it at him. ‘Now you get back to work or I’ll fry your black face in hot oil …’

A few days later Saya John was back. Once again he greeted Rajkumar in his broken Hindustani: ‘Kaisa hai? Sub kuchh theek-thaak?’

Rajkumar fetched him a bowl of noodles and stood watching as he ate. ‘Saya,’ he asked at last, in Burmese, ‘how did you learn to speak an Indian language?’

Saya John looked up at him and smiled. ‘I learnt as a child,’ he said, ‘for I am, like you, an orphan, a foundling. I was brought up by Catholic priests, in a town called Malacca. These men were from everywhere – Portugal, Macao, Goa. They gave me my name – John Martins, which was not what it has become. They used to call me João, but I changed this later to John. They spoke many many languages, those priests, and from the Goans I learnt a few Indian words. When I was old enough to work I went to Singapore, where I was for a while an orderly in a military hospital. The soldiers there were mainly Indians and they asked me this very question: how is it that you, who look Chinese and carry a Christian name, can speak our language? When I told them how this had come about, they would laugh and say, you are a dhobi ka kutta – a washerman’s dog – na ghar ka na ghat ka – you don’t belong anywhere, either by the water or on land, and I’d say, yes, that is exactly what I am.’ He laughed, with an infectious hilarity, and Rajkumar joined in.

One day Saya John brought his son to the stall. The boy’s name was Matthew and he was seven, a handsome, bright-eyed child, with an air of precocious self-possession. He had just arrived from Singapore, where he lived with his mother’s family and studied at a well-known missionary school. A couple of times each year, Saya John arranged for him to come over to Burma for a holiday.

It was early evening, usually a busy time at the stall, but in honour of her visitors, Ma Cho decided to close down for the day. Drawing Rajkumar aside, she told him to take Matthew for a walk, just for an hour or so. There was a pwe on at the other end of the fort; the boy would enjoy the fairground bustle.

‘And remember –’ here her gesticulations became fiercely incoherent – ‘not a word about …’

‘Don’t worry,’ Rajkumar gave her an innocent smile. ‘I won’t say anything about your lessons.’

‘Idiot kalaa.’ Bunching her fists, she rained blows upon his back. ‘Get out – out of here.’

Rajkumar changed into his one good longyi and put on a frayed pinni vest that Ma Cho had given him. Saya John pressed a few coins into his palm. ‘Buy something – for the both of you, treat yourselves.’

On the way to the pwe, they were distracted by a peanut-seller. Matthew was hungry and he insisted that Rajkumar buy them both armloads of peanuts. They went to sit by the moat, with their feet dangling in the water, spreading the nuts around them, in their wrappers of dried leaf.

Matthew pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. There was a picture on it – of a cart with three wire-spoked wheels, two large ones at the back and a single small one in front. Rajkumar stared at it, frowning: it appeared to be a light carriage, but there were no shafts for a horse or an ox.

‘What is it?’

‘A motorwagon.’ Matthew pointed out the details – the small internal-combustion engine, the vertical crankshaft, the horizontal flywheel. He explained that the machine could generate almost as much power as a horse, running at speeds of up to eight miles an hour. It had been unveiled that very year, 1885, in Germany, by Karl Benz.

‘One day,’ Matthew said quietly, ‘I am going to own one of these.’ His tone was not boastful and Rajkumar did not doubt him for a minute. He was hugely impressed that a child of that age could know his mind so well on such a strange subject.

Then Matthew said: ‘How did you come to be here, in Mandalay?’

‘I was working on a boat, a sampan, like those you see on the river.’

‘And where are your parents? Your family?’

‘I don’t have any.’ Rajkumar paused. ‘I lost them.’

Matthew cracked a nut between his teeth. ‘How?’

‘There was a fever, a sickness. In our town, Akyab, many people died.’

‘But you lived?’

‘Yes. I was sick, but I lived. In my family I was the only one. I had a father, a sister, brothers …’

‘And a mother?’

‘And a mother.’

Rajkumar’s mother had died on a sampan that was tethered in a mangrove-lined estuary. He remembered the tunnel-like shape of the boat’s galley and its roof of hooped cane and thatch; there was an oil lamp beside his mother’s head, on one of the crosswise planks of the hull. Its flickering yellow flame was dulled by a halo of night-time insects. The night was still and airless, with the mangroves and their dripping roots standing thick against the breeze, cradling the boat between deep banks of mud. Yet there was a kind of restlessness in the moist darkness around the boat. Every now and again, he’d hear the splash of seed pods arrowing into the water, and the slippery sound of fish, stirring in the mud. It was hot in the sampan’s burrow-like galley, but his mother was shivering. Rajkumar had scoured the boat, covering her with every piece of cloth that he could find.

Rajkumar knew the fever well by that time. It had come to their house through his father, who worked every day at a warehouse, near the port. He was a quiet man, who made his living as a dubash and a munshi – a translator and clerk – working for a succession of merchants along the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal. Their family home was in the port of Chittagong, but his father had quarrelled with their relatives and moved the family away, drifting slowly down the coast, peddling his knowledge of figures and languages, settling eventually in Akyab, the principal port of the Arakan – that tidewater stretch of coast where Burma and Bengal collide in a whirlpool of unease. There he’d remained for some dozen years, fathering three children – of these the oldest was Rajkumar. Their home was on an inlet that smelt of drying fish. Their family name was Raha, and when their neighbours asked who they were and where they came from they would say they were Hindus from Chittagong. That was all Rajkumar knew about his family’s past.

Rajkumar was the next to fall sick, after his father. He had returned to consciousness to find himself recovering at sea, with his mother. They were on their way back to their native Chittagong, she told him, and there were just the two of them now – the others were gone.

The sailing had been slow because the currents were against them. The square-sailed sampan and her crew of khalasis had fought their way up the coast, hugging the shore. Rajkumar had recovered quickly, but then it was his mother’s turn to sicken. With Chittagong just a couple of days away she had begun to shiver. The shore was thick with mangrove forests; one evening, the boatowner had pulled the sampan into a creek and settled down to wait.

Rajkumar had covered his mother with all the saris in her cloth bundle, with longyis borrowed from the boatmen, even a folded sail. But he’d no sooner finished than her teeth began to chatter again, softly, like dice. She called him to her side, beckoning with a forefinger. When he lowered his ear to her lips, he could feel her body glowing like hot charcoal against his cheek.

She showed him a knot on the tail end of her sari. There was a gold bangle wrapped in it. She pulled it out and gave it to him to hide in the waist knot of his sarong. The nakhoda, the boat’s owner, was a trustworthy old man, she told him; Rajkumar was to give him the bangle when they reached Chittagong – only then, not before.

She folded his fingers around the bangle: warmed by the fiery heat of her body, the metal seemed to singe its shape into his palm. ‘Stay alive,’ she whispered. ‘Beche thako, Rajkumar. Live, my Prince; hold on to your life.’

When her voice faded away Rajkumar became suddenly aware of the faint flip-flop sound of catfish burrowing in the mud. He looked up to see the boatowner, the nakhoda, squatting in the prow of the sampan, puffing on his coconut-shell hookah, fingering his thin, white beard. His crewmen were sitting clustered round him, watching Rajkumar. They were hugging their sarong-draped knees. The boy could not tell whether it was pity or impatience that lay behind the blankness in their eyes.

He had only the bangle now: his mother had wanted him to use it to pay for his passage back to Chittagong. But his mother was dead and what purpose would it serve to go back to a place that his father had abandoned? No, better instead to strike a bargain with the nakhoda. Rajkumar took the old man aside and asked to join the crew, offering the bangle as a gift of apprenticeship.

The old man looked him over. The boy was strong and willing, and, what was more, he had survived the killer fever that had emptied so many of the towns and villages of the coast. That alone spoke of certain useful qualities of body and spirit. He gave the boy a nod and took the bangle – yes, stay.

At daybreak the sampan stopped at a sand bar and the crew helped Rajkumar build a pyre for his mother’s cremation. Rajkumar’s hands began to shake when he put the fire in her mouth. He, who had been so rich in family, was alone now, with a khalasi’s apprenticeship for his inheritance. But he was not afraid, not for a moment. His was the sadness of regret – that they had left him so soon, so early, without tasting the wealth or the rewards that he knew, with utter certainty, would one day be his.

It was a long time since Rajkumar had spoken about his family. Among his shipmates this was a subject that was rarely discussed. There were many among them who were from families that had fallen victim to the catastrophes that were so often visited upon that stretch of coast. They preferred not to speak of these things.

It was odd that this child, Matthew, with his educated speech and formal manners, should have drawn him out. Rajkumar could not help being touched. On the way back to Ma Cho’s, he put an arm round the boy’s shoulders. ‘So how long are you going to be here?’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? But you’ve just arrived.’

‘I know. I was meant to stay for two weeks, but Father thinks there’s going to be trouble.’

‘Trouble!’ Rajkumar turned to stare at him. ‘What trouble?’

‘The English are preparing to send a fleet up the Irrawaddy. There’s going to be a war. Father says they want all the teak in Burma. The King won’t let them have it so they’re going to do away with him.’

Rajkumar gave a shout of laughter. ‘A war over wood? Who’s ever heard of such a thing?’ He gave Matthew’s head a disbelieving pat: the boy was a child, after all, despite his grown-up ways and his knowledge of unlikely things; he’d probably had a bad dream the night before.

But this proved to be the first of many occasions when Matthew showed himself to be wiser and more prescient than Rajkumar. Two days later the whole city was gripped by rumours of war. A large detachment of troops came marching out of the fort and went off downriver, towards the encampment of Myingan. There was an uproar in the bazaar; fishwives emptied their wares into the refuse heap and went hurrying home. A dishevelled Saya John came running to Ma Cho’s stall. He had a sheet of paper in his hands. ‘A Royal Proclamation,’ he announced, ‘issued under the King’s signature.’

Everybody in the stall fell silent as he began to read:

To all Royal subjects and inhabitants of the Royal Empire: those heretics, the barbarian English kalaas having most harshly made demands calculated to bring about the impairment and destruction of our religion, the violation of our national traditions and customs, and the degradation of our race, are making a show and preparation as if about to wage war with our state. They have been replied to in conformity with the usages of great nations and in words which are just and regular. If, notwithstanding, these heretic foreigners should come, and in any way attempt to molest or disturb the state, His Majesty, who is watchful that the interest of our religion and our state shall not suffer, will himself march forth with his generals, captains and lieutenants with large forces of infantry, artillery, elephanterie and cavalry, by land and by water, and with the might of his army will efface these heretics and conquer and annex their country. To uphold the religion, to uphold the national honour, to uphold the country’s interests will bring about threefold good – good of our religion, good of our master and good of ourselves and will gain for us the important result of placing us on the path to the celestial regions and to Nirvana.

Saya John pulled a face. ‘Brave words,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what happens next.’

After the initial panic, the streets quickly quietened. The bazaar reopened and the fishwives came back to rummage through the refuse heap, looking for their lost goods. Over the next few days people went about their business just as they had before. The one most noticeable change was that foreign faces were no longer to be seen on the streets. The number of foreigners living in Mandalay was not insubstantial – there were envoys and missionaries from Europe; traders and merchants of Greek, Armenian, Chinese and Indian origin; labourers and boatmen from Bengal, Malaya and the Coromandel coast; white-clothed astrologers from Manipur; businessmen from Gujarat – an assortment of people such as Rajkumar had never seen before he came here. But now suddenly the foreigners disappeared. It was rumoured that the Europeans had left and gone downriver while the others had barricaded themselves into their houses.

A few days later the palace issued another proclamation, a joyful one, this time: it was announced that the royal troops had dealt the invaders a signal defeat, near the fortress of Minhla. The English troops had been repulsed and sent fleeing across the border. The royal barge was to be dispatched downriver, bearing decorations for the troops and their officers. There was to be a ceremony of thanksgiving at the palace.

There were shouts of joy on the streets, and the fog of anxiety that had hung over the city for the last few days dissipated quickly. To everyone’s relief things went quickly back to normal: shoppers and shopkeepers came crowding back and Ma Cho’s stall was busier than ever before.

Then, one evening, racing into the bazaar to replenish Ma Cho’s stock of fish, Rajkumar came across the familiar, white-bearded face of his boatowner, the nakhoda.

‘Is our boat going to leave soon now?’ Rajkumar asked. ‘Now that the war is over?’

The old man gave him a secret, tight-lipped smile. ‘The war isn’t over. Not yet.’

‘But we heard …’

‘What we hear on the waterfront is quite different from what’s said in the city.’

‘What have you heard?’ said Rajkumar.

Although they were using their own dialect the nakhoda lowered his voice. ‘The English are going to be here in a day or two,’ he answered. ‘They’ve been seen by boatmen. They are bringing the biggest fleet that’s ever sailed on a river. They have cannon that can blow away the stone walls of a fort; they have boats so fast that they can outrun a tidal bore; their guns can shoot quicker than you can talk. They are coming like the tide: nothing can stand in their way. Today we heard that their ships are taking up positions around Myingan. You’ll probably hear the fireworks tomorrow …’

Sure enough, the next morning, a distant booming sound came rolling across the plain, all the way to Ma Cho’s food-stall, near the western wall of the fort. When the opening salvoes sounded, the market was thronged with people. Farm wives from the outskirts of the city had come in early and set their mats out in rows, arranging their vegetables in neat little bunches. Fishermen had stopped by too, with their night-time catches fresh from the river. In an hour or two the vegetables would wilt and the fish eyes would begin to cloud over. But for the moment everything was crisp and fresh.

The first booms of the guns caused nothing more than a brief interruption in the morning’s shopping. People looked up at the clear blue sky in puzzlement and shopkeepers leant sidewise over their wares to ask each other questions. Ma Cho and Rajkumar had been hard at work since dawn. As always on chilly mornings, many people had stopped off for a little something to eat before making their way home. Now the hungry, mealtime hush was interrupted by a sudden buzz. People looked at each other nervously: what was that noise?

This was when Rajkumar broke in. ‘English cannon,’ he said. ‘They’re heading in this direction.’

Ma Cho gave a yelp of annoyance. ‘How do you know what they are, you fool of a boy?’

‘Boatmen have seen them,’ Rajkumar answered. ‘A whole English fleet is coming this way.’

Ma Cho had a roomful of people to feed and she was in no mood to allow her only helper to be distracted by a distant noise.

‘Enough of that now,’ she said. ‘Get back to work.’

In the distance the firing intensified, rattling the bowls on the benches. The customers began to stir in alarm. In the adjoining marketplace a coolie had dropped a sack of rice and the spilt grain was spreading like a white stain across the dusty path as people pushed past each other to get away. Shopkeepers were clearing their counters, stuffing their goods into bags; farm wives were tipping their baskets into refuse heaps.

Suddenly Ma Cho’s customers started to their feet, knocking over their bowls and pushing the benches apart. In dismay, Ma Cho turned on Rajkumar. ‘Didn’t I tell you to keep quiet, you idiot of a kalaa? Look, you’ve scared my customers away.’

‘It’s not my fault …’

‘Then whose? What am I going to do with all this food? What’s going to become of that fish I bought yesterday?’ Ma Cho collapsed on her stool.

Behind them, in the now-deserted marketplace, dogs were fighting over scraps of discarded meat, circling in packs around the refuse heaps.

Two

At the palace, a little less than a mile from Ma Cho’s stall, the King’s chief consort, Queen Supayalat, was seen mounting a steep flight of stairs to listen more closely to the guns.

The palace lay at the exact centre of Mandalay, deep within the walled city, a sprawling complex of pavilions, gardens and corridors, all grouped around the nine-roofed hti of Burma’s kings. The complex was walled off from the surrounding streets by a stockade of tall, teak posts. At each of the four corners of the stockade was a guard-post, manned by sentries from the King’s personal bodyguard. It was to one of these that Queen Supayalat had decided to climb.

The Queen was a small, fine-boned woman with porcelain skin and tiny hands and feet. Her face was small and angular, the regularity of its features being marred only by a slight blemish in the alignment of the right eye. The Queen’s waist, famously of a wisp-like slimness, was swollen by her third pregnancy, now in its eighth month.

The Queen was not alone: some half-dozen maidservants followed close behind, carrying her two young daughters, the First and Second Princesses, Ashin Hteik Su Myat Phaya Gyi and Ashin Hteik Su Myat Phaya Lat. The advanced condition of her pregnancy had made the Queen anxious about her children’s whereabouts. For the last several days she had been unwilling to allow her two daughters even momentarily out of her sight.

The First Princess was three and bore a striking resemblance to her father, Thebaw, King of Burma. She was a good-natured, obedient girl, with a round face and ready smile. The Second Princess was two years younger, not quite one yet, and she was an altogether different kind of child, very much her mother’s daughter. She’d been born with the colic and would cry for hours at a stretch. Several times a day she would fly into paroxysms of rage. Her body would go rigid and she would clench her little fists; her chest would start pumping, with her mouth wide open but not a sound issuing from her throat. Even experienced nurses quailed when the little Princess was seized by one of her fits.

To deal with the baby, the Queen insisted on having several of her most trusted attendants at hand at all times – Evelyn, Hemau, Augusta, Nan Pau. These girls were very young, mostly in their early teens, and they were almost all orphans. They’d been purchased by the Queen’s agents in small Kachin, Wa and Shan villages along the kingdom’s northern frontiers. Some of them were from Christian families, some from Buddhist – once they came to Mandalay it didn’t matter. They were reared under the tutelage of palace retainers, under the Queen’s personal supervision.

It was the youngest of these maids who had had the most success in dealing with the Second Princess. She was a slender ten-year-old called Dolly, a timid, undemonstrative child, with enormous eyes and a dancer’s pliable body and supple limbs. Dolly had been brought to Mandalay at a very early age from the frontier town of Lashio: she had no memory of her parents or family. She was thought to be of Shan extraction, but this was a matter of conjecture, based on her slender fine-boned appearance and her smooth, silken complexion.

On this particular morning Dolly had had very little success with the Second Princess. The guns had jolted the little girl out of her sleep and she had been crying ever since. Dolly, who was easily startled, had been badly scared herself. When the guns had started up she’d covered her ears and gone into a corner, gritting her teeth and shaking her head. But then the Queen had sent for her and after that Dolly had been so busy trying to distract the little Princess that she’d had no time to be frightened.

Dolly wasn’t strong enough yet to take the Princess up the steep stairs that led to the top of the stockade: Evelyn, who was sixteen and strong for her age, was given the job of carrying her. Dolly followed after the others and she was the last to step into the guard-post – a wooden platform, fenced in with heavy, timber rails.

Four uniformed soldiers were standing grouped in a corner. The Queen was firing questions at them, but none of them would answer nor even meet her eyes. They hung their heads, fingering the long barrels of their flintlocks.

‘How far away is the fighting?’ the Queen asked. ‘And what sort of cannon are they using?’

The soldiers shook their heads; the truth was that they knew no more than she did. When the noise started they’d speculated excitedly about its cause. At first they’d refused to believe that the roar could be of human making. Guns of such power had never before been heard in this part of Burma, nor was it easy to conceive of an order of fire so rapid as to produce an indistinguishable merging of sound.

The Queen saw that there was nothing to be learnt from these hapless men. She turned to rest her weight against the wooden rails of the guard-post. If only her body were less heavy, if only she were not so tired and slow.

The strange thing was that these last ten days, ever since the English crossed the border, she’d heard nothing but good news. A week ago a garrison commander had sent a telegram to say that the foreigners had been stopped at Minhla, two hundred miles downriver. The palace had celebrated the victory, and the King had even sent the general a decoration. How was it possible that the invaders were now close enough to make their guns heard in the capital?

Things had happened so quickly: a few months ago there’d been a dispute with a British timber company – a technical matter concerning some logs of teak. It was clear that the company was in the wrong; they were side-stepping the kingdom’s customs regulations, cutting up logs to avoid paying duties. The royal customs officers had slapped a fine on the company, demanding arrears of payment for some fifty thousand logs. The Englishmen had protested and refused to pay; they’d carried their complaints to the British Governor in Rangoon. Humiliating ultimatums had followed. One of the King’s senior ministers, the Kinwun Mingyi, had suggested discreetly that it might be best to accept the terms; that the British might allow the Royal Family to remain in the palace in Mandalay, on terms similar to those of the Indian princes – like farmyard pigs in other words, to be fed and fattened by their masters; swine, housed in sties that had been tricked out with a few little bits of finery.

The Kings of Burma were not princes, the Queen had told the Kinwun Mingyi; they were kings, sovereigns, they’d defeated the Emperor of China, conquered Thailand, Assam, Manipur. And she herself, Supayalat, she had risked everything to secure the throne for Thebaw, her husband and step-brother. Was it even imaginable that she would consent to give it all away now? And what if the child in her belly were a boy (and this time she was sure it was): how would she explain to him that she had surrendered his patrimony because of a quarrel over some logs of wood? The Queen had prevailed and the Burmese court had refused to yield to the British ultimatum.

Now, gripping the guard-post rail the Queen listened carefully to the distant gunfire. She’d hoped at first that the barrage was an exercise of some kind. The most reliable general in the army, the Hlethin Atwinwun, was stationed at the fort of Myingan, thirty miles away, with a force of eight thousand soldiers.

Just yesterday the King had asked, in passing, how things were going on the war front. She could tell that he thought of the war as a faraway matter, a distant campaign, like the expeditions that had been sent into the Shan highlands in years past, to deal with bandits and dacoits.

Everything was going as it should, she’d told him; there was nothing to worry about. And so far as she knew, this was no less than the truth. She’d met with the seniormost officials every day, the Kinwun Mingyi, the Taingda Mingyi, even the wungyis and wundauks and myowuns. None of them had so much as hinted that anything was amiss. But there was no mistaking the sound of those guns. What was she going to tell the King now?

The courtyard beneath the stockade filled suddenly with voices.

Dolly stole a glance down the staircase. There were soldiers milling around below, dozens of them, wearing the colours of the palace guard. One of them spotted her and began to shout – the Queen? Is the Queen up there?

Dolly stepped quickly back, out of his line of sight. Who were these soldiers? What did they want? She could hear their feet on the stairs now. Somewhere close by, the Princess began to cry, in short, breathless gasps. Augusta thrust the baby into her arms – here, Dolly, here, take her, she won’t stop. The baby was screaming, flailing her fists. Dolly had to turn her face away to keep from being struck.

An officer had stepped into the guard-post; he was holding his sheathed sword in front of him, in both hands, like a sceptre. He was saying something to the Queen, motioning to her to leave the cabin, to go down the stairs into the palace.

‘Are we prisoners then?’ The Queen’s face was twisted with fury. ‘Who has sent you here?’

‘Our orders came from the Taingda Mingyi,’ the officer said. ‘For your safety Mebya.’

‘Our safety?’

The guard-post was full of soldiers and they were herding the girls towards the steps. Dolly glanced down: the flight of stairs was very steep. Her head began to spin.

‘I can’t,’ she cried. ‘I can’t.’ She would fall, she knew it. The Princess was too heavy for her; the stairs were too high; she would need a free hand to hold on, to keep her balance.

‘Move.’

‘I can’t.’ She could hardly hear herself over the child’s cries. She stood still, refusing to budge.

‘Quickly, quickly.’ There was a soldier behind her; he was prodding her with the cold hilt of his sword. She felt her eyes brimming over, tears flooding down her face. Couldn’t they see she would fall, that the Princess would tumble out of her grip? Why would no one help?

‘Quick.’

She turned to look into the soldier’s unsmiling face. ‘I can’t. I have the Princess in my arms and she’s too heavy for me. Can’t you see?’ No one seemed to be able to hear her above the Princess’s wails.

‘What’s the matter with you, girl? Why’re you standing there? Move.’

She shut her eyes and took a step. And then, just as her legs were starting to give way she heard the Queen’s voice. ‘Dolly! Stop!’

‘It’s not my fault.’ She began to sob, her eyes pressed tightly shut. Someone snatched the Princess from her arms. ‘It’s not my fault. I tried to tell them; they wouldn’t listen.’

‘It’s all right.’ The Queen’s voice was sharp but not unkind. ‘Come on down now. Be careful.’

Weeping in relief, Dolly stumbled down the steps and across the courtyard. She felt the other girls’ hands on her back, leading her down a corridor.

Most of the buildings in the palace complex were low, wooden structures, linked by long corridors. The palace was of relatively recent construction, just thirty years old. It was closely modelled on the royal residences of earlier Burmese capitals, at Ava and Amarapura. Parts of the royal apartments had been transported whole after the founding of Mandalay, but many of the smaller outlying buildings were unfinished and still unknown, even to the palace’s inhabitants. Dolly had never before been in the room she was led to now. It was dark, with damp, plastered walls and heavy doors.

‘Bring the Taingda Mingyi to me,’ the Queen was screaming at the guards. ‘I will not be kept prisoner. Bring him to me. Right now.’

An hour or two went slowly by; the girls could tell from the direction of the shadows under the door that morning had changed into afternoon. The little Princess cried herself out and fell asleep across Dolly’s crossed legs.

The doors were thrown open and the Taingda Mingyi came puffing in.

‘Where is the King?’

‘He is safe, Mebya.’

He was a stout man with oily skin. In the past, he’d always been ready with advice but now the Queen could not get a single clear answer out of him.

‘The King is safe. You should not worry.’ The long, drooping hairs that sprouted from his moles shook gently as he smiled and showed his teeth.

He produced a telegram. ‘The Hlethin Atwinwun has won a famous victory at Myingan.’

‘But those were not our guns I heard this morning.’

‘The foreigners have been halted. The King has dispatched a medal, and decorations for the men.’ He handed her a sheet of paper.

She didn’t bother to look at it. She had seen many telegrams over the last ten days, all filled with news of famous victories. But the guns she’d heard that morning were not Burmese, of this she had no doubt. ‘Those were English guns,’ she said. ‘I know they were. Don’t lie to me. How close are they? When do you think they will reach Mandalay?’

He wouldn’t look at her. ‘Mebya’s condition is delicate. She should rest now. I will return later.’

‘Rest?’ The Queen pointed to her maids, sitting on the floor. ‘The girls are exhausted. Look.’ She pointed to Dolly’s red eyes and tear-streaked face. ‘Where are my other servants? Send them to me. I need them.’

The Taingda Mingyi hesitated, and then bowed. ‘Mebya. They will be here.’

The other maids arrived an hour later. Their faces were sombre. The Queen said nothing until the guards had shut the doors. Then everyone clustered tightly around the new arrivals. Dolly had to crane her head to catch what they were saying.

This was what they said: the British had destroyed the fort at Myingan with immaculate precision, using their cannon, without losing a single soldier of their own. The Hlethin Atwinwun had surrendered. The army had disintegrated; the soldiers had fled into the mountains with their guns. The Kinwun Mingyi and the Taingda Mingyi had dispatched emissaries to the British. The two ministers were now competing with one another to keep the Royal Family under guard. They knew the British would be grateful to whoever handed over the royal couple; there would be rich rewards. The foreigners were expected to come to Mandalay very soon to take the King and Queen into captivity.

The invasion proceeded so smoothly as to surprise even its planners. The imperial fleet crossed the border on 14 November, 1885.

Two days later, after a few hours of shelling, British soldiers took possession of the Burmese outposts of Nyaungbinmaw and Singbaungwe. The next day, at Minhla, the fleet came under heavy fire. The Burmese garrison at Minhla was a small one, but it resisted with unexpected tenacity.

The British forces were armed with the latest breech-loading rifles. Their artillery support consisted of twenty-seven rapid-firing machine guns, more than had ever before been assembled on the continent of Asia. The Burmese could not match this firepower. After an exchange of fire that lasted several hours, the British infantry was sent ashore.

There were some ten thousand soldiers in the British invasion force and of these the great majority – about two-thirds – were Indian sepoys. Among the units deployed at Minhla there were three battalions of sepoys. They were from the Hazara Regiment and the 1st Madras Pioneers. The Indians were seasoned, battle-hardened troops. The Hazaras, recruited from the Afghan border, had proved their worth to the British over decades of warfare, in India and abroad. The 1st Madras Pioneers were among the most loyal of Britain’s foot soldiers. They had stood steadfastly by their masters even through the uprising of 1857, when most of northern India had risen against the British. The Burmese defenders of Minhla stood little chance against these sepoys, with their newly manufactured British equipment and their vastly superior numbers. The dogged little defence force dissolved when the redoubt was charged.

The aftershock of the collapse at Minhla was felt a long way upriver. At Pakokku the garrison melted away; at Nyaungu, near the great, pagoda-covered plain of Pagan, Burmese gunners spiked their own cannon after firing a few shots. At Mygingan, which was under the command of the Hlethin Atwinwun, the defenders were forced to abandon their positions after a bombardment that lasted several hours. A few days later, without informing King Thebaw, the Burmese army surrendered.

The war lasted just fourteen days.

Three

For two days after the bombardment of Myingan, Mandalay was strangely, almost eerily quiet. Then the rumours started. One morning a man went running through the marketplace, past Ma Cho’s stall. He was shouting at the top of his voice: foreign ships had anchored off the shore; English soldiers were marching towards the city.

Panic struck the market. People began to run and jostle. Rajkumar managed to push his way through the crowd to the adjoining road. He could not see far: a cloud of dust hung over the road, drummed up by hundreds of racing feet. People were running in every direction, slamming against each other and pushing blindly at anything that came their way. Rajkumar was swept along in the direction of the river. As he ran, he became aware of a ripple in the ground beneath him, a kind of drumbeat in the earth, a rhythmic tremor that travelled up his spine through the soles of his feet.

The people in front of him scattered and parted, pushing up against the sides of the road. Suddenly he was in the front rank of the crowd, looking directly at two English soldiers mounted on brown horses. The cavalrymen were waving people away with drawn swords, clearing the road. The dust had made patterns on their polished boots. Looming behind them was a solid mass of uniforms, advancing like a tidal wave.

Rajkumar darted to the side of the road and pressed himself against a wall. The crowd’s initial nervousness melted as the first squad of soldiers marched past with their shouldered rifles. There was no rancour on the soldiers’ faces, no emotion at all. None of them so much as glanced at the crowd.

‘The English!’ someone said, and the words went quickly from mouth to mouth, growing louder and louder until they became a kind of murmured cheer. But as the vanguard passed and the next squad came into view, an amazed silence descended on the spectators: these soldiers were not English – they were Indians. The people around Rajkumar stirred, as though moved to curiosity by the sight of an Indian in their midst.

‘Who are these soldiers?’ someone said.

‘I don’t know.’

It struck Rajkumar suddenly that he hadn’t seen any of the usual Indian faces in the bazaar all day: none of the coolies and cobblers and shopkeepers who always came there every day. For a moment this seemed odd, but then he forgot about it and was once again absorbed in the spectacle of the marching sepoys.

People began to ask Rajkumar questions. ‘What are these soldiers doing here?’

Rajkumar shrugged. How was he to know? He had no more connection with the soldiers than did they. A group of men gathered around him, crowding in, so that he had to take a few backward steps. ‘Where do the soldiers come from? Why are they here?’

‘I don’t know where they come from. I don’t know who they are.’

Glancing over his shoulder, Rajkumar saw that he had backed himself into a blind alley. There were some seven or eight men around him. They had pulled up their longyis, tucking them purposefully up at the waist. The sepoys were just a short distance away, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. But he was alone in the alley – the only Indian – out of earshot, surrounded by these men who were clearly intent on making him answer for the soldiers’ presence.

A hand flashed out of the shadows. Taking a grip on his hair, a man pulled him off the ground. Rajkumar swung up a leg and dug it back, aiming his heel at his assailant’s groin. The man saw the kick coming and blocked it with one hand. Twisting Rajkumar’s head around, he struck him across the face with the back of his fist. A spurt of blood shot out of Rajkumar’s nose. The shock of the blow slowed the moment to a standstill. The arc of blood seemed to stop in its trajectory, hanging suspended in the air, brilliantly translucent, like a string of garnets. Then the crook of an elbow took Rajkumar in the stomach, pumping the breath out of him and throwing him against a wall. He slid down, clutching his stomach, as though he were trying to push his insides back in.

Then, suddenly, help arrived. A voice rang through the lane. ‘Stop.’ The men turned round, startled.

‘Let him be.’

It was Saya John, advancing towards them with one arm in the air, looking oddly authoritative in a hat and coat. Tucked snugly into the palm of his upraised hand was a small, blunt-nosed pistol. The men backed away slowly and once they’d gone, Saya John slipped the pistol into his coat pocket. ‘You’re lucky I saw you,’ he said to Rajkumar. ‘Didn’t you know better than to be out on the streets today? The other Indians have all barricaded themselves into Hajji Ismail’s compound, at the foot of Mandalay hill.’

He held out a hand and helped Rajkumar to his feet. Rajkumar stood up and wiped the blood off his throbbing face. They walked out of the alley together. On the main road soldiers were still marching past. Rajkumar and Saya John stood side by side and watched the triumphal parade.

Presently Saya John said: ‘I used to know soldiers like these.’

‘Saya?’

‘In Singapore, as a young man I worked for a time as a hospital orderly. The patients were mainly sepoys like these – Indians, back from fighting wars for their English masters. I still remember the smell of gangrenous bandages on amputated limbs; the nighttime screams of twenty-year-old boys, sitting upright in their beds. They were peasants, those men, from small countryside villages: their clothes and turbans still smelt of woodsmoke and dung fires. “What makes you fight,” I would ask them, “when you should be planting your fields at home?” “Money,” they’d say, and yet all they earned was a few annas a day, not much more than a dockyard coolie. For a few coins they would allow their masters to use them as they wished, to destroy every trace of resistance to the power of the English. It always amazed me: Chinese peasants would never do this – allow themselves to be used to fight other people’s wars with so little profit for themselves. I would look into those faces and I would ask myself: what would it be like if I had something to defend – a home, a country, a family – and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger, but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?

‘In English they use a word – it comes from the Bible – evil. I used to think of it when I talked to those soldiers. What other word could you use to describe their willingness to kill for their masters, to follow any command, no matter what it entailed? And yet, in the hospital, these sepoys would give me gifts, tokens of their gratitude – a carved flute, an orange. I would look into their eyes and see also a kind of innocence, a simplicity. These men who would think nothing of setting fire to whole villages if their officers ordered, they too had a certain kind of innocence. An innocent evil. I could think of nothing more dangerous.’

‘Saya,’ Rajkumar shrugged offhandedly, ‘they’re just tools. Without minds of their own. They count for nothing.’

Saya John glanced at him, startled. There was something unusual about the boy – a kind of watchful determination. No excess of gratitude here, no gifts or offerings, no talk of honour, with murder in the heart. There was no simplicity in his face, no innocence: his eyes were filled with worldliness, curiosity, hunger. That was as it should be.

‘If you ever need a job,’ Saya John said, ‘come and talk to me.’

Just before sunset the occupying troops withdrew from the fort. They carried away cartloads of booty from the palace. To the astonishment of the townsfolk, they left without posting pickets around the fort. For the first time that anyone could remember the gateways of the citadel stood open and unguarded.

The soldiers marched back the way they had come but through streets that were now empty. As the tramp of their feet faded away an uneasy quiet descended on the city. Then, with the suddenness of a nighttime eruption in a chicken-coop, a group of women burst out of the fort and came racing over the funeral bridge, their feet pounding a drum roll on its wooden surface.

Ma Cho recognised some of the women. They were palace servants; she had seen them going in and out of the fort for years, stepping haughtily down the road in their slippered feet, their longyis plucked daintily above their ankles. They were running now, stumbling through the dust without a thought for their clothes. They were carrying bundles of cloth, sacks, even furniture-some were bent over like washerwomen on their way to the river. Ma Cho ran out into the street and stopped one of the women. ‘What are you doing? What’s happened?’

‘The soldiers – they’ve been looting the palace. We’re trying to save a few things for ourselves.’ The women disappeared and all was quiet again. Presently the shadows around the fort began to stir. There were ripples of activity in the darkness, like the fluttering of moths in the recesses of a musty cupboard. People crept slowly out of the dwellings that surrounded the citadel. Advancing to the walls they peered distrustfully at the empty guard-posts. There were no soldiers anywhere in sight, nor even any sentries from the palace guard. Was it really possible that the gates had been left unguarded? A few people stepped on the bridges, testing the silence. Slowly, walking on the balls of their feet, they began to advance towards the far bank of the eighty-foot moat. They reached the other side and went creeping to the gates, holding themselves ready to run back at the slightest check.

It was true: the guards and sentries were all gone. The palace was unguarded. The intruders slipped through the gates and vanished into the fort.

Ma Cho had been watching undecided, scratching her chin. Now she picked up her sharp-bladed da. Tucking the wooden handle into her waist she started towards the funeral bridge. The fort’s walls were a blood-red smear in the darkness ahead.

Rajkumar ran after her, reaching the bridge abreast of a charging crowd. This was the flimsiest of the fort’s bridges, too narrow for the mass that was trying to funnel through. A frenzy of jostling broke out. The man beside Rajkumar found himself stepping on air and dropped over the side; a wooden plank flipped up, tipping two women screaming into the moat. Rajkumar was younger than the people around him and lighter on his feet. Slipping through the press of bodies, he went sprinting into the fort.

Rajkumar had imagined the fort to be filled with gardens and palaces, richly painted and sumptuously gilded. But the street he now found himself on was a straight and narrow dirt path, lined with wooden houses, not much different from any other part of the city. Directly ahead lay the palace and its nine-roofed spire – he could see the gilded hti flashing in the darkness. People were pouring down the street now, some carrying flaming torches. Rajkumar caught a glimpse of Ma Cho rounding a corner in the distance. He sprinted after her, his longyi tucked tight around his waist. The palace stockade had several entrances, including doorways reserved for the use of servants and tradespeople. These were set low in the walls, like mouseholes, so that no one could pass through them without bowing. At one of these small doorways Rajkumar caught up again with Ma Cho. The gate was quickly forced. People began to tumble through, like water over the lip of a spout.

Rajkumar stayed close behind Ma Cho as she elbowed her way to the entrance. She heaved him in and then squeezed through herself. Rajkumar had the impression of having fallen upon a perfumed sheet. Then he rolled over and found that he was lying on a bed of soft grass. He was in a garden, within reach of a sparkling canal: the air was suddenly clear and cool, free of dust. The orientation of the palace’s gateways was towards the east: it was from that direction that ceremonial visitors approached, walking down the formal pathway that led to the great glass-tiled pavilion where the King held court. On the western side of the stockade – the side that was closest to the funeral gate – lay the women’s quarters. These were the halls and apartments that now lay ahead of Ma Cho and Rajkumar. Ma Cho picked herself up and hurried, panting, in the direction of a stone archway. The doors of the main chamber of the women’s palace lay just beyond, yawning open. People stopped to run their fingers over the doors’ jade-studded panels. A man fell on his knees and began to pound the slats of wood with a rock, trying to knock out the ornaments. Rajkumar ran past, into the building, a couple of steps behind Ma Cho. The chamber was very large and its walls and columns were tiled with thousands of shards of glass. Oil lamps flared in sconces, and the whole room seemed to be aflame, every surface shimmering with sparks of golden light. The hall was filled with a busy noise, a workmanlike hum of cutting and chopping, of breaking wood and shattering glass. Everywhere people were intently at work, men and women, armed with axes and das; they were hacking at gem-studded Ook offering boxes; digging patterned gemstones from the marble floor; using fish-hooks to pry the ivory inlays from lacquered sadaik chests. Armed with a rock, a girl was knocking the ornamental frets out of a crocodile-shaped zither; a man was using a meat cleaver to scrape the gilt from the neck of a saung-gak harp and a woman was chiselling furiously at the ruby eyes of a bronze chinthe lion. They came to a door that led to a candlelit anteroom. There was a woman inside, standing by the latticed window in the far corner.

Ma Cho gasped. ‘Queen Supayalat!’

The Queen was screaming, shaking her first. ‘Get out of here. Get out.’ Her face was red, mottled with rage, her fury caused as much by her own impotence as by the presence of the mob in the palace. A day before, she could have had a commoner imprisoned for so much as looking her directly in the face. Today all the city’s scum had come surging into the palace and she was powerless to act against them. But the Queen was neither cowed nor afraid, not in the least. Ma Cho fell to the floor, her hands clasped over her head in a reverential shiko.

Rajkumar dropped to his knees, unable to wrench his gaze away. The Queen was dressed in crimson silk, in a loose garment that billowed over her hugely distended stomach. Her hair was piled in lacquered coils on her tiny, delicately shaped head; the ivory mask of her face was scarred by a single dark furrow, carved by a bead of sweat. She was holding her robe plucked above her ankle and Rajkumar noticed that her legs were encased in a garment of pink silk – stockings, an article of clothing he had never seen before. The Queen glared at Ma Cho, lying on the floor in front of her. In one hand, Ma Cho was holding a brass candlestand with a chrysanthemum pedestal.

The Queen lunged at the prostrate woman. ‘Give that to me; where did you get it? Give it back.’ Leaning stiffly over her swollen stomach, the Queen tried to snatch away the candlestand. Ma Cho eluded her hands, pushing herself backwards, crab-like. The Queen hissed at her: ‘Do you know who I am?’ Ma Cho offered her yet another respectful genuflection, but she would not part with her candlestand. It was as though her determination to cling to her loot was in no way at odds with her wish to render due homage to the Queen.

Just one day earlier the crime of entering the palace would have resulted in summary execution. This they all knew – the Queen and everyone who had joined the mob. But yesterday had passed: the Queen had fought and been defeated. What purpose was to be served by giving her back what she had lost? None of those things was hers any more: what was to be gained by leaving them to the foreigners to take away?

Through all the years of the Queen’s reign the townsfolk had hated her for her cruelty, feared her for her ruthlessness and courage. Now through the alchemy of defeat she was transformed in their eyes. It was as though a bond had been conjured into existence that had never existed before. For the first time in her reign she had become what a sovereign should be, the proxy of her people. Everyone who came through the door fell to the floor in a spontaneous act of homage. Now, when she was powerless to chastise them, they were glad to offer her these tokens of respect; they were glad even to hear her rail at them. It was good that they should shiko and she berate them. Were she meekly to accept her defeat none would be so deeply shamed as they. It was as though they were entrusting her with the burden of their own inarticulate defiance.

Rajkumar’s eyes fell on a girl – one of the Queen’s maids. She was slender and long-limbed, of a complexion that was exactly the tint of the fine thanaka powder she was wearing on her face. She had huge dark eyes and her face was long and perfect in its symmetry. She was by far the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld, of a loveliness beyond imagining.

Rajkumar swallowed to clear his throat, which was suddenly swollen and dry. She was in the far corner of the room with a group of other girls. He began to work his way towards her along the wall.

She was an attendant, he guessed, perhaps nine or ten years old. He could tell that the bejewelled little girl beside her was a Princess. In the corner behind them lay a heap of richly coloured cloths and objects of brass and ivory. The girls had evidently been busy salvaging the Queen’s possessions when they were interrupted by the mob.

Rajkumar looked down at the floor and saw a jewelled ivory box lying forgotten in a corner. The box had a gold clasp and on its sides were two small handles, carved in the shape of leaping dolphins. Rajkumar knew exactly what he had to do. Picking the box off the ground, he ran across the room and offered it to the slender little girl.

‘Here.’

She wouldn’t look at him. She turned her head away, her lips moving silently as though in a chant.

‘Take it,’ said one of the other girls. ‘He’s giving it to you.’

‘Here.’ He thrust the box at her again. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

He surprised himself by taking hold of her hand and placing it gently on the box. ‘I brought it back for you.’

She let her hand rest on the lid. It was as light as a leaf. Her lowered eyes went first to the jewelled lid and then travelled slowly from the dark knots of his knuckles to his torn and dirt-spattered vest and up to his face. And then her eyes clouded over with apprehension and she dropped her gaze. He could tell that her world was ringed with fear so that every step she took was a venture into darkness.

‘What’s your name?’ Rajkumar said.

She whispered a couple of inaudible syllables.

‘Doh-lee?’

‘Dolly.’

‘Dolly,’ repeated Rajkumar. ‘Dolly.’ He could think of nothing else to say, or as much worth saying, so he said the name again louder and louder, until he was shouting. ‘Dolly. Dolly.’

He saw a tiny smile creep on to her face and then Ma Cho’s voice was in his ear. ‘Soldiers. Run.’ At the door, he turned to look back. Dolly was standing just as he’d left her, holding the box between her hands, staring at him.

Ma Cho tugged at his arm. ‘For what are you staring at that girl, you half-wit kalaa? Take what you’ve got and run. The soldiers are coming back. Run.’

The mirrored hall was echoing with shouts. At the door, Rajkumar turned back to make a gesture at Dolly, more a sign than a wave. ‘I will see you again.’

Four

The Royal Family spent the night in one of the furthest outbuildings in the palace grounds, the South Garden Palace, a small pavilion surrounded by pools, canals and rustic gardens. The next day, shortly before noon. King Thebaw came out to the balcony and sat down to wait for the British spokesman, Colonel Sladen. The King was wearing his royal sash and a white gaung-baung, the turban of mourning.

King Thebaw was of medium height, with a plump face, a thin moustache and finely shaped eyes. As a youth he had been famous for his good looks: it had once been said of him that he was the handsomest Burman in the land (he was in fact half Shan, his mother having come to Mandalay from a small principality on the eastern border). He’d been crowned at the age of twenty and in the seven years of his reign had never once left the palace compound. This long confinement had worked terrible ravages on his appearance. He was only twenty-seven but looked to be well into middle age.

To sit on the throne of Burma had never been Thebaw’s personal ambition. Nor had anyone in the kingdom ever imagined that the crown would one day be his. As a child he had entered into the Buddhist boy’s customary novitiate in the monkhood with an enthusiasm unusual in one of his birth and lineage. He had spent several years in the palace monastery, leaving it just once, briefly, at the behest of his father, the august King Mindon. The King had enrolled Thebaw and a few of his step-brothers in an English school in Mandalay. Under the tutelage of Anglican missionaries Thebaw had learnt some English and displayed a talent for cricket.

But then King Mindon had changed his mind, withdrawing the princes from the school and eventually expelling the missionary. Thebaw had returned gladly to the monastery on the palace grounds, within sight of the water-clock and the relic house of the Buddha’s tooth. He had proceeded to earn distinction in scriptural study, passing the difficult patama-byan examination at the age of nineteen.

King Mindon was perhaps the wisest, most prudent ruler ever to sit on the throne of Burma. Appreciative though he was of his son’s gifts, he was equally aware of his limitations. ‘If Thebaw ever becomes king,’ he once remarked, ‘the country will pass into the hands of foreigners.’ But of this there seemed to be little possibility. There were forty-six other princes in Mandalay whose claims to the throne were as good as Thebaw’s. Most of them far exceeded him in ambition and political ability.

But fate intervened in the familiar guise of a mother-in-law: Thebaw’s happened to be also his step-mother, the Alenandaw Queen, a senior consort and a wily and ruthless exponent of palace intrigue. She arranged for Thebaw to marry all three of her daughters simultaneously. Then she shouldered him past his forty-six rivals and installed him on the throne. He had no choice but to assent to his accession: to accept was an easier alternative than to refuse, and less potentially lethal. But there was a startling new development, something that threw everybody’s calculations off kilter: Thebaw fell in love with one of his wives, his middle Queen, Supayalat.

Of all the princesses in the palace, Supayalat was by far the fiercest and most wilful, the only one who could match her mother in guile and determination. Of such a woman only indifference could have been expected where it concerned a man of scholarly inclination like Thebaw. Yet she too, in defiance of the protocols of palace intrigue, fell headlong in love with her husband, the King. His ineffectual good nature seemed to inspire a maternal ferocity in her. In order to protect him from her family she stripped her mother of her powers and banished her to a corner of the palace, along with her sisters and co-wives. Then she set about ridding Thebaw of his rivals. She ordered the killing of every member of the Royal Family who might ever be considered a threat to her husband. Seventy-nine princes were slaughtered on her orders, some of them newborn infants, and some too old to walk. To prevent the spillage of royal blood she had had them wrapped in carpets and bludgeoned to death. The corpses were thrown into the nearest river.

The war too was largely of Supayalat’s making: it was she who had roused the great council of the land, the Hluttdaw, when the British began to issue their ultimatums from Rangoon. The King had been of a mind for appeasement; the Kinwun Mingyi, his most trusted minister, had made an impassioned appeal for peace and he was tempted to give in. Then Supayalat had risen from her place and gone slowly to the centre of the council. It was the fifth month of her pregnancy and she moved with great deliberation, with a slow, shuffling gait, moving her tiny feet no more than a few inches at a time, a small, lonely figure in that assembly of turbaned noblemen.

The chamber was lined with mirrors. As she approached its centre, an army of Supayalats seemed to materialise around her; they were everywhere, on every shard of glass, thousands of tiny women with their hands clasped over their swollen waists. She walked up to the stout old Kinwun Mingyi, sitting sprawled on his stool. Thrusting her swollen belly into his face, she said. ‘Why, grandfather, it is you who should wear a skirt and own a stone for grinding face powder.’ Her voice was a whisper but it had filled the room.

And now the war was over, and he, the King, was sitting on the balcony of a garden pavilion, waiting for a visit from Colonel Sladen, the spokesman of the conquering British. The evening before, the colonel had called on the King and informed him, in the politest and most discreet language, that the Royal Family was to be transported from Mandalay the next day; that His Majesty would do well to use the remaining time to make his preparations.

The King had not stepped out of the palace in seven years; he had not left the vicinity of Mandalay in all his life. What were his preparations to be? One might as well try to prepare for a journey to the moon. The King knew the colonel well. Sladen had spent years in Mandalay as a British emissary and had often visited the palace. He was fluent in Burmese and had always shown himself to be correct in his manners, at times affable and even friendly. He needed more time, the King had told Sladen, a week, a few days. What could it matter now? The British had won and he had lost: what difference could a day or two make?

The afternoon was well advanced when Colonel Sladen came walking up the path that led to the South Garden Palace, a pebbled trail that meandered between picturesque pools and goldfish-filled streams. The King stayed seated as Colonel Sladen approached.

‘How much time?’ said the King.

Sladen was in full dress uniform, with a sword hanging at his waist. He bowed regretfully. He had conferred at length with his commanding officer, he explained. The general had expressed his sympathy but he had his orders and was bound by the responsibilities of his position. His Majesty must understand; left to himself he, Sladen, would have been glad to make accommodations, but the matter was not in his hands, nor anyone else’s for that matter …

‘How much time then?’

Sladen reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold watch. ‘About one hour.’

‘One hour! But …’

A guard of honour had already been formed at the palace gates; the King was being waited on.

The news startled the King. ‘Which gate?’ he enquired in alarm. Every part of the palace was charged with portents. The auspicious, ceremonial entrance faced east. It was through these gates that honoured visitors came and departed. For years British envoys to Mandalay had been consigned to the humble west gate. This was a grievance of long standing. Sladen had waged many battles with the palace over such fine points of protocol. Would he now seek to exact revenge by forcing the King to exit the palace by the west gate? The King directed an apprehensive glance at the colonel and Sladen hastened to reassure the King. He was to be allowed to leave by the east gate. In victory the British had decided to be generous.

Sladen looked at his watch again. There was very little time now and a vitally important matter had yet to be settled: the question of the entourage that was to accompany the Royal Family into exile.

While Sladen was conferring with the King, other British officers had been busy organising a gathering in a nearby garden. A large number of palace functionaries had been summoned, including the Queen’s maids and all other servants still remaining on the grounds. King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat looked on as the colonel addressed their servants.

The Royal Family was being sent into exile, the colonel told the assembled notables. They were to go to India, to a location that had yet to be decided on. The British Government wished to provide them with an escort of attendants and advisors. The matter was to be settled by asking for volunteers.

There was a silence when he finished, followed by an outburst of embarrassed coughs, a flurry of awkward throat-clearings. Feet were shuffled, heads lowered, nails examined. Mighty wungyis shot sidelong glances at powerful wundauks; haughty myowuns stared awkwardly at the grass. Many of the assembled courtiers had never had a home other than the palace; never woken to a day whose hours were not ordered by the rising of the King; never known a world that was not centred on the nine-roofed hti of Burma’s monarchs. All their lives they had been trained in the service of their master. But their training bound them to the King only so long as he embodied Burma and the sovereignty of the Burmese. They were neither the King’s friends nor his confidants and it was not in their power to lighten the weight of his crown. The burdens of kingship were Thebaw’s alone, solitude not the least among them.

Sladen’s appeal went unanswered: there were no volunteers. The King’s gaze, that mark of favour once so eagerly sought, passed unchecked over the heads of his courtiers. Thebaw remained impassive as he watched his most trusted servants averting their faces, awkwardly fingering the golden tsaloe sashes that marked their rank.

This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation.

The King said: ‘It does not matter who comes and who does not.’ He turned to Sladen: ‘But you must come with us, Sladen, as you are an old friend.’

‘I regret this is impossible, Your Majesty,’ answered Sladen. ‘My duties will detain me here.’

The Queen, standing behind the King’s chair, directed one of her flinty glances at her husband. It was all very well for him to express fine sentiments, but it was she who was eight months pregnant, and saddled moreover with the care of a colicky and difficult child. How was she to cope without servants and attendants? Who was going to calm the Second Princess when she had one of her raging tantrums? Her eyes scanned the assembly and settled on Dolly, who was sitting on her heels, braiding leaves of grass.

Dolly looked up to see the Queen glaring at her from her place on the pavilion balcony. She gave a cry and dropped the leaves. Had something happened? Was the Princess crying? She jumped to her feet and hurried towards the pavilion, followed by Evelyn, Augusta and several of the others.

Sladen breathed a sigh of relief as the girls came up the steps of the pavilion. Some volunteers at last!

‘So you’re going?’ he said, as the girls hurried past, just to make sure.

The girls stopped to stare; Evelyn smiled and Augusta began to laugh. Of course they were going; they were orphans; they alone of the palace retainers had nowhere else to go, no families, no other means of support. What could they do but go with the King and Queen?

Sladen glanced once again at the assembly of courtiers and palace servants. Was there no one else present who would accompany the King? A single shaky voice answered in the affirmative. It belonged to an official of advanced age, the Padein Wun. He would go if he could bring along his son.

‘How much time left?’

Sladen looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes.’

Just ten more minutes.

The King led Sladen into the pavilion and unlocked a door. A wedge of light fanned into the darkened room, igniting a firefly display of gold. The world’s richest gem mines lay in Burma and many fine stones had passed into the possession of the ruling family. The King paused to run his hand over the jewelled case that held his most prized possession, the Ngamauk ring, set with the greatest, most valuable ruby ever mined in Burma. His ancestors had collected jewellery and gemstones as an afterthought, a kind of amusement. It was with these trinkets that he would have to provide for himself and his family in exile.

‘Colonel Sladen, how is all this to be transported?’

Sladen conferred quickly with his fellow officers. Everything would be taken care of, he reassured the King. The hoard would be transported under guard to the King’s ship. But now it was time to leave; the guard of honour was waiting.

The King walked out of the pavilion, flanked by Queen Supayalat and her mother. Halfway down the meandering path the Queen turned to look back. The Princesses were following a few paces behind with the maids. The girls were carrying their belongings in an assortment of boxes and bundles. Some had flowers in their hair, some were dressed in their brightest clothes. Dolly was walking beside Evelyn, who had the Second Princess on her hip. The two girls were giggling, oblivious, as though they were on their way to a festival.

The procession passed slowly through the long corridors of the palace, and across the mirrored walls of the Hall of Audience, past the shouldered guns of the guard of honour and the snapped-off salutes of the English officers.

Two carriages were waiting by the east gate. They were bullockcarts, yethas, the commonest vehicles on Mandalay’s streets. The first of the carts had been fitted out with a ceremonial canopy. Just as he was about to step in, the King noticed that his canopy had seven tiers, the number allotted to a nobleman, not the nine due to a king.

He paused to draw breath. So the well-spoken English colonels had had their revenge after all, given the knife of victory a final little twist. In his last encounter with his erstwhile subjects he was to be publicly demoted, like an errant schoolchild. Sladen had guessed right: this was, of all the affronts Thebaw could have imagined, the most hurtful, the most egregious.

The ox-carts were small and there was not enough room for the maids. They followed on foot, a ragged little procession of eighteen brightly-dressed orphan girls carrying boxes and bundles.

Several hundred British soldiers fell in beside the ox-carts and the girls. They were heavily armed, prepared for trouble. The people of Mandalay were not expected to sit idly by while their King and Queen were herded into exile. Reports had been heard of planned riots and demonstrations, of desperate attempts to free the Royal Family.

The British high command believed this to be potentially the most dangerous moment of the entire operation. Some of them had served in India and an incident from the recent past weighed heavily on their minds. In the final days of the Indian uprising of 1857, Major Hodson had captured Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last of the Mughals, on the outskirts of Delhi. The blind and infirm old emperor had taken refuge in the tomb of his ancestor, Humayun, with two of his sons. When it came time for the major to escort the emperor and his sons back into the city, people had gathered in large numbers along the roadside. These crowds had grown more and more unruly, increasingly threatening. Finally, to keep the mob under control, the major had ordered the princes’ execution. They had been pushed before the crowd and their brains had been blown out in full public view.

These events were no more than twenty-eight years in the past, their memory freshly preserved in the conversation of messes and clubs. It was to be hoped that no such eventuality would present itself now – but if it did it would not find King Thebaw’s escort unprepared.

Mandalay had few thoroughfares that could accommodate a procession of this size. The ox-carts rumbled slowly along the broader avenues, banking steeply round the right-angled corners. The city’s streets, although straight, were narrow and unpaved.

Their dirt surfaces were rutted with deep furrows, left by the annual tilling of the monsoons. The ox-carts’ wheels were solid, carved from single blocks of wood. Their rigid frames seesawed wildly as they ploughed over the troughs. The Queen had to crouch over her swollen stomach to keep herself from being battered against the sides of the cart.

Neither the soldiers nor their royal captives knew the way to the port. The procession soon lost its way in the geometrical maze of Mandalay’s streets. It strayed off in the direction of the northern hills and by the time the mistake was discovered it was almost dark. The carts wound their way back by the light of oil-soaked torches.

During the daylight hours the townsfolk had been careful to keep away from the streets: they had watched the ox-carts go by from windows and rooftops, at a safe distance from the soldiers and their bayonets. As dusk gathered, they began to trickle out of their homes. Reassured by the darkness, they attached themselves to the procession, in small and scattered groups.

Dolly looked very small when Rajkumar spotted her. She was walking beside a tall soldier, with a small cloth bundle balanced on her head. Her face was grimy and her htamein was caked with dust.

Rajkumar still had a few small things that he had found in the palace the night before. He went hurrying to a shop and exchanged them for a couple of handfuls of palm-sugar sweets. He wrapped the sweets in a banana leaf and tied the packet with string. Sprinting back, he caught up with the procession as it was making its way out of the town.

The British fleet was moored just a mile or so away, but it was dark now and the going was slow along the rough and uneven roads. With nightfall, thousands of Mandalay’s residents came pouring out. They walked alongside the procession, keeping well away from the soldiers and their moving pools of torchlight.

Rajkumar sprinted ahead and climbed into a tamarind tree. When the first ox-cart came into view he caught a glimpse of the King, just visible through the tiny window. He was sitting straight-backed, his eyes fixed ahead of him, his body swaying to the cart’s lurching motion.

Rajkumar worked his way slowly through the crowd until he was within a few feet of Dolly. He kept pace, watching the soldier who was marching beside her. The man turned his eyes away for a moment, to exchange a word with someone behind him. Rajkumar saw his chance: he darted through to Dolly and pressed his banana leaf packet into her hand.

‘Take it,’ he hissed. ‘It’s food.’

She stared at him, in uncomprehending surprise.

‘It’s the kalaa boy from yesterday.’ Evelyn jogged her elbow. ‘Take it.’

Rajkumar raced back into the shadows: he was no more than ten feet from Dolly, walking beside her, shrouded by the night. She picked the packet open and stared at the sweets. Then she held the packet up in her hands, offering it to the soldier who was marching beside her. The man smiled and shook his head, in friendly refusal. Someone said something in English, and he laughed. Several of the girls laughed too, Dolly included.

Rajkumar was astonished, even angry. What was Dolly doing? Why was she giving these hard-won tidbits to the very men who were leading her into captivity and exile? But then, slowly, his initial sense of betrayal turned to relief, even gratitude. Yes, of course, this was what one must do; Dolly was doing exactly what had to be done. What purpose would it serve for these girls to make a futile show of resentment? How could they succeed in defiance when the very army of the realm had succumbed? No, better by far to wait, and in the meanwhile to smile. This way Dolly would live.

Half a mile from the port, the soldiers formed a cordon across the road to hold the crowd back. People began to climb trees and gather on rooftops, looking for vantage points. Unexpectedly Rajkumar came upon Ma Cho sitting on a tree-stump. She was weeping, and between sobs, telling anyone who would listen the story of her encounter with the Queen the night before.

Rajkumar tried to console her by running a hand gently over her head. He had never seen an adult cry like this before. What was she weeping for? He glanced up, as though looking for an answer on the faces around him. It was not till then that he noticed that many others were crying too. He had been so intent on keeping pace with Dolly that he had paid little attention to the people around him. Now, looking on either side, he could see that every face was streaked with tears.

Rajkumar recognised several people from the looting of the night before. He recalled how they had hacked at the furniture and dug up the floors. Now those very men and women were lying prostrate with grief, mourning the loss of their King and sobbing in what looked like inconsolable sorrow.

Rajkumar was at a loss to understand this grief. He was, in a way, a feral creature, unaware that in certain places there exist invisible bonds linking people to one another through personifications of their commonality. In the Bengal of his birth those ties had been sundered by a century of conquest and no longer existed even as memory. Beyond the ties of blood, friendship and immediate reciprocity, Rajkumar recognised no loyalties, no obligations and no limits on the compass of his right to provide for himself. He reserved his trust and affection for those who earned it by concrete example and proven goodwill. Once earned, his loyalty was given wholeheartedly, with none of those unspoken provisions with which people usually guard against betrayal. In this too he was not unlike a creature that had returned to the wild. But that there should exist a universe of loyalties that was unrelated to himself and his own immediate needs – this was very nearly incomprehensible.

An anguished murmur ran through the crowd: the captives were moving, alighting from their ox-carts, entering a ship. Rajkumar jumped quickly into the branches of a nearby tree. The river was far away and all he could see was a steamer and a line of tiny figures filing up a gangplank. It was impossible to tell the figures apart. Then the ship’s lights went out and it disappeared into the darkness.

Many thousands kept vigil through the night. The steamer’s name was Thooriya, the sun. At daybreak, when the skies lightened over the hills, it was gone.

Five

After five days on the Irrawaddy the Thooriya slipped into the Rangoon river in the near-darkness of late evening. It anchored at mid-river, a good distance from the city’s busy dockside.

At first light the next day the King went up on deck, carrying a pair of gilded binoculars. The glasses were of French manufacture, a prized heirloom that had once belonged to King Mindon. The old King had been much attached to the binoculars and had always carried them with him, even into his Audience Hall.

It was a cold morning and an opaque fog had risen off the river. The King waited patiently for the sun to scorch away the mist. When it had thinned a little he raised his glasses. Suddenly, there it was, the sight he had longed to see all his life: the towering mass of the Shwe Dagon pagoda, larger even than he had imagined, its hti thrusting skywards, floating on a bed of mist and fog, shining in the light of the dawn. He had worked on the hti himself, helped with his own hands in the gilding of the spire, layering sheets of gold leaf upon each other. It was King Mindon who had had the hti cast, in Mandalay; it had been sent down to the Shwe Dagon in a royal barge. He, Thebaw, had been a novice in the monastery then, and everybody, even the seniormost monks, had vied with each other for the honour of working on the hti.

The King lowered his binoculars to scan the city’s waterfront. The instrument’s rims welled over with a busy mass of things: walls, columns, carriages and hurrying people. Thebaw had heard about Rangoon from his half-brother, the Thonzai Prince. The town was founded by their ancestor, Alaungpaya, but few members of their dynasty had ever been able to visit it. The British had seized the town before Thebaw’s birth, along with all of Burma’s coastal provinces. It was then that the frontiers of the Burmese kingdom were driven back, almost halfway up the Irrawaddy. Since then the only members of the Royal Family who had been able to visit Rangoon were rebels and exiles, princes who had fallen out with the ruling powers in Mandalay.

The Thonzai Prince was one such: he had quarrelled with old King Mindon and had fled downriver, taking refuge in the British-held city. Later the Prince had been forgiven and had returned to Mandalay. In the palace he was besieged with questions: everyone wanted to know about Rangoon. Thebaw was in his teens then and he had listened spellbound as the Prince described the ships that were to be seen on the Rangoon river: the Chinese junks and Arab dhows and Chittagong sampans and American clippers and British ships-of-the-line. He had heard about the Strand and its great pillared mansions and buildings, its banks and hotels; about Godwin’s wharf and the warehouses and timber mills that lined Pazundaung Creek; the wide streets and the milling crowds and the foreigners who thronged the public places: Englishmen, Cooringhees, Tamils, Americans, Malays, Bengalis, Chinese.

One of the stories the Thonzai Prince used to tell was about Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor. After the suppression of the uprising of 1857 the British had exiled the deposed emperor to Rangoon. He’d lived in a small house not far from the Shwe Dagon. One night the Prince had slipped off with a few of his friends and gone to look at the emperor’s house. They’d found him sitting on his veranda, fingering his beads. He was blind and very old. The Prince and his friends had meant to approach him but at the last minute they had changed their minds. What could you say to such a man?

There was a street in Rangoon, the Prince had said, that was named after the old emperor – Mughal Street. Many Indians lived there: the Prince had claimed that there were more Indians than Burmese in Rangoon. The British had brought them there, to work in the docks and mills, to pull rickshaws and empty the latrines. Apparently they couldn’t find local people to do these jobs. And indeed, why would the Burmese do that kind of work? In Burma no one ever starved, everyone knew how to read and write, and land was to be had for the asking: why should they pull rickshaws and carry nightsoil?

The King raised his glasses to his eyes and spotted several Indian faces, along the waterfront. What vast, what incomprehensible power, to move people in such huge numbers from one place to another – emperors, kings, farmers, dockworkers, soldiers, coolies, policemen. Why? Why this furious movement – people taken from one place to another, to pull rickshaws, to sit blind in exile?

And where would his own people go, now that they were a part of this empire? It wouldn’t suit them, all this moving about. They were not a portable people, the Burmese; he knew this, very well, for himself. He had never wanted to go anywhere. Yet here he was, on his way to India.

He turned to go below deck again: he didn’t like to be away from his cabin too long. Several of his valuables had disappeared, some of them on that very first day, when the English officers were transporting them from the palace to the Thooriya. He had asked about the lost things and the officers had stiffened and looked offended and talked of setting up a committee of inquiry. He had realised that for all their haughty ways and grand uniforms, they were not above some common thievery.

The strange thing was that if only they’d asked he’d gladly have gifted them some of his baubles; they would probably have received better things than those they’d taken – after all, what did they know about gemstones?

Even his ruby ring was gone. The other things he didn’t mind so much – they were just trinkets – but he grieved for the Ngamauk. They should have left him the Ngamauk.

On arriving in Madras, King Thebaw and his entourage were taken to the mansion that had been made over to them for the duration of their stay in the city. The house was large and luxurious but there was something disconcerting about it. Perhaps it was the contingent of fierce-looking British soldiers standing at the gate or perhaps it had something to do with the crowds of curious onlookers who gathered round its walls every day. Whatever it was, none of the girls felt at home there.

Mr Cox often urged the members of the household to step outside, to walk in the spacious, well-kept gardens (Mr Cox was an English policeman who had accompanied them on their journey from Rangoon and he spoke Burmese well). Dolly, Evelyn and Augusta dutifully walked around the house a few times but they were always glad to be back indoors.

Strange things began to happen. There was news from Mandalay that the royal elephant had died. The elephant was white, and so greatly cherished that it was suckled on breast-milk: nursing mothers would stand before it and slip off their blouses. Everyone had known that the elephant would not long survive the fall of the dynasty. But who could have thought that it would die so soon? It seemed like a portent. The house was sunk in gloom.

Unaccountably, the King developed a craving for pork. Soon he was consuming inordinate amounts of bacon and ham. One day he ate too much and fell sick. A doctor arrived with a leather bag and went stomping through the house in his boots. The girls had to follow behind him, swabbing the floor. No one slept that night.

One morning Apodaw Mahta, the elderly woman who supervised the Queen’s nurses, ran outside and climbed into a tree. The Queen sent the other nurses to persuade her to climb down. They spent an hour under the tree. Apodaw Mahta paid no attention.

The Queen called the nurses back and sent Dolly and the other girls to talk to Apodaw Mahta. The tree was a neem and its foliage was very dense. The girls stood round the trunk and looked up. Apodaw Mahta had wedged herself into a fork between two branches.

‘Come down,’ said the girls. ‘It’s going to be dark soon.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I was a squirrel in my last birth. I remember this tree. This is where I want to stay.’

Apodaw Mahta had a pot belly and warts on her face. ‘She looks more like a toad than a squirrel,’ Evelyn whispered. The girls screamed with laughter and ran back inside.

U Maung Gyi, the interpreter, went out and shook his fist at her. The King was going to come down from his room, he said, and he was going to bring a stick to beat her with. At that Apodaw Mahta came scurrying down. She’d lived in the Mandalay palace for a very long time and was terrified of the King.

Anyone could have told her that the last thing in the world the King was likely to do was to run out into the garden and beat her with a stick. He’d never once stepped out of the house in all the time they’d been in Madras. Towards the beginning of their stay he had once asked to visit the Madras Museum. This had taken Mr Cox by surprise and he had said no, quite vehemently. After that, as though in protest, the King had refused to step out of the house.

Sitting in his room, with nothing to do, curious fancies began to enter the King’s mind. He decided to have a huge gold plate made in preparation for the birth of his new child. The plate would weigh several pounds and it would be set with one hundred and fifty of his most valuable rubies. To pay for the plate, he began to sell some of his possessions. The household’s Tamil employees served as his emissaries.

Some of these employees were spies and Mr Cox soon found out about the sales. He was furious. The King was wasting his wealth, he said, and what was more, he was being cheated. The servants were selling his things for a fraction of their value.

This made the King even more secretive in his dealings. He handed Dolly and Evelyn expensive jewellery and asked them to arrange to have it sold. The result was that he got even lower prices. Inevitably the Englishmen found out through their spies. They declared that the King couldn’t be trusted with money and enacted a law appropriating his family’s most valuable properties.

A mutinous quiet descended on the mansion. Dolly began to notice odd little changes in Evelyn and Augusta and her other friends. Their shikoes became perfunctory; they began to complain about sore knees and refused to stay on all fours while waiting on the Queen. Sometimes when she shouted at them they would scowl back at her.

One night the Queen woke up thirsty and found all her maids asleep beside her bed. She was so angry she threw a lamp at the wall and slapped Evelyn and Mary.

Evelyn was very upset. She said to Dolly: ‘They can’t hit us and beat us any more. We don’t have to stay if we don’t want to.’

‘How do you know?’ Dolly said.

‘Mr Cox told me. He said we were slaves in Mandalay but now we’re free.’

‘But we’re prisoners, aren’t we?’

‘Not us,’ said Evelyn. ‘Only Min and Mebya’ – meaning the King and Queen.

Dolly thought about this for a while. ‘And what about the Princesses?’

Now it was Evelyn’s turn to think.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘The Princesses are prisoners too.’

That settled the matter as far as Dolly was concerned. Where the Princesses were, she would be too: she couldn’t imagine what they would do without her.

One morning a man arrived at the gate saying he’d come from Burma to take his wife back home. His wife was Taungzin Minthami, one of the Queen’s favourite nurses. She had left her children behind in Burma and was terribly homesick. She decided to go back with her husband.

This reminded everyone of the one thing they’d been trying to forget, which was that left to themselves they would all rather have gone home – that none of them was there because he or she wanted to be. The Queen began to worry that all her girls were going to leave so she began to hand out gifts to her favourites. Dolly was one of the lucky ones, but neither Evelyn nor Augusta received anything.

The two girls were furious at being passed over and they began to make sarcastic comments within the Queen’s hearing. The Queen spoke to the Padein Wun, and he took them into a locked room and beat them and pulled their hair. But this made the girls even more resentful. Next morning they refused to wait on the Queen.

The Queen decided that the matter had passed beyond resolution. She summoned Mr Cox and told him that she wanted to send seven of the girls back to Burma. She would make do by hiring local servants.

Once the Queen had decided on something there was no question of persuading her to change her mind. The seven girls left the next week: Evelyn, Augusta, Mary, Wahthau, Nan Pau, Minlwin, and even Hemau, who was, of all of them, the closest to Dolly in age. Dolly had always thought of them as her older sisters, her family. She knew she would never see them again. On the morning of their departure she locked herself into a room and wouldn’t come out, even to watch their carriage roll out of the gates. U Maung Gyi, the interpreter, took them to the port. When he came back he said the girls had cried when they’d boarded the ship.

A number of new servants were hired, men and women, all local people. Dolly was now one of last remaining members of the original Mandalay contingent: it fell on her to teach the new staff the ways of the household. The new ayahs and maids came to Dolly when they wanted to know how things were done in the Mandalay palace. It was she who had to teach them how to shiko and how to move about the Queen’s bedroom on their hands and knees. It was very hard at first, for she couldn’t make herself understood. She would explain everything in the politest way but they wouldn’t understand so she would shout louder and louder and they would become more and more frightened. They would start knocking things over, breaking 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 mind like Rajkumar’s, both curious and predatory. If the British were willing to go to war over a stand of trees, it could only be because they knew of some hidden wealth, secreted within the forest. What exactly these riches were he didn’t know but it was clear that he would never find out except by seeing for himself.

Even while pondering this, he was walking quickly, heading away from the bazaar. Now, looking around to take stock of where he was, he discovered that he had come to the whitewashed facade of a church. He decided to linger, walking past the church once, and then again. He circled and waited, and sure enough, within the hour he spotted Saya John approaching the church, hand in hand with his son.

‘Saya.’

‘Rajkumar!’

Now, standing face to face with Saya John, Rajkumar found himself hanging his head in confusion. How was he to tell him about Ma Cho, when it was he himself who was responsible for the Saya’s cuckolding?

It was Saya John who spoke first: ‘Has something happened to Ma Cho?’

Rajkumar nodded.

‘What is it? Has she gone?’

‘Yes, Saya.’

Saya John gave a long sigh, rolling his eyes heavenwards. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a sign that the time has come for this sinner to turn celibate.’

‘Saya?’

‘Never mind. And what will you.do now, Rajkumar? Go back to India in your boat?’

‘No, Saya.’ Rajkumar shook his head. ‘I want to stay here, in Burma.’

‘And what will you do for a living?’

‘You said, Saya, that if I ever wanted a job I was to come to you. Saya?’

One morning the King read in the newspapers that the Viceroy was coming to Madras. In a state of great excitement he sent for Mr Cox.

‘Is the Viceroy going to call on us?’ he asked.

Mr Cox shook his head. ‘Your Highness, I have not been informed of any such plan.’

‘But protocol demands it. The Kings of Burma are the peers of such sovereigns as the kings of Siam and Cambodia and of the emperors of China and Japan.’

‘I regret, Your Highness, that it is probably too late to effect a change in the Viceroy’s itinerary.’

‘But we must see him, Mr Cox.’

‘The Viceroy’s time has already been spoken for. I am sorry.’

‘But we wish to find out what the Government plans to do with us. When we came here, we were told that this was not to be our permanent residence. We are eager to know where we are to live and when we are to go there.’

Mr Cox went away and came back a few days later. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, ‘I am glad to be able to inform you that the matter of a permanent residence for you and your family has finally been resolved.’

‘Oh?’ said the King. ‘And where is it to be?’

‘A place by the name of Ratnagiri.’

‘What?’ The King stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Where is this place?’

‘Some hundred and twenty miles south of Bombay. An excellent place, with fine views of the sea.’

‘Fine views?’

The King sent for a map and asked Mr Cox to show him where Ratnagiri was. Mr Cox indicated a point somewhere between Bombay and Goa. The King was thoroughly alarmed to note that the place was too insignificant to be marked on the map.

‘But we would rather be in a city, Mr Cox. Here in Madras. Or Bombay. Or Calcutta. What will we do in a small village?’

‘Ratnagiri is a district headquarters, Your Highness, not a village by any means.’

‘How long are we to remain there? When will we be allowed to return to Burma?’

Now it was Mr Cox’s turn to be nonplussed. It had not occurred to him that the King still harboured hopes of returning to Burma.

Mr Cox was a kindly man, in his gruff way. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, in a quiet and gentle voice, ‘you must prepare yourself to be in Ratnagiri for some time, a considerable time I fear. Perhaps …’

‘Perhaps for ever?’

‘Those were not my words.’ Mr Cox coughed. ‘Not at all. Those words were not mine. No, I must insist, they were not …’

The King rose to his feet abruptly and went to his room. He did not step out again for several days.

They left Madras a month later on a steamer called the Clive. The voyage was very different this time around. They sailed along the coast with the shore rarely out of sight. They went through the Palk Straits, with the northern tip of Ceylon visible on the left, and the southernmost point in India, Cape Comorin, in view on the right.

Four days after leaving Madras the Clive nosed into a wide and sunlit bay. There were cliffs at either end of the bay, a sweeping beach and a meandering river. The town was on a hill, above the bay; it was so thickly blanketed with coconut palms that very little could be seen of it.

They spent the night on the steamer and went ashore the next morning. The Clive pulled in beside a jetty that reached a long way out into the shallow bay. Carriages were waiting for them at the far end, near a fishing village. The King was greeted with a gun salute and a guard of honour. Then the carriages set off in single file down a narrow, tree-shaded path. There were red-tiled houses on either side, with gardens of mango trees and areca palms. There were policemen everywhere, holding back the people who’d gathered to watch. They passed a bazaar and a grey-walled gaol and a line of police-barracks. The road ended at a large, two-storeyed bungalow set inside a walled garden. It was on a bluff above the town, overlooking the bay. It was called Outram House.

The King went in first and climbed slowly up the stairs. He came to a large bedroom and went inside. The room was furnished with a desk, a bed and three armchairs. It opened on to a small balcony that faced westwards, towards the sea. The King walked very slowly round the room. He toyed with the slatted wooden shutters, scratched at a rosette of candlewax and ran a finger over a half-effaced mark on the wall, crumbling the flaking plaster between finger and thumb. There was a faintly musty smell in the room and a tracing of mildew on the wall. He tried to mark these things in his memory for he knew they would fade in time and a day would come when he would want to remember them – the vividness of his first encounter with the site of his captivity, the sour mildewed smell of it and the roughness of its texture upon the skin.

Downstairs Dolly was running across the garden with the First Princess, chasing a lizard of a bright red colour. This was different from the mansion in Madras, much smaller but more welcoming. Here one could run and play hide-and-seek between the trunks of leaning coconut palms. She came to a mango tree whose branches reached all the way up to a window on the top floor of the bungalow. Perhaps that would be her room, her window, with twigs scratching against the glass.

A bell began to ring in a temple, somewhere in the town below. She stopped to listen, looking down the slope of the garden, across the canopy of coconut fronds, towards the wide sparkling bay. She could smell drying fish and incense. How bright it was, how peaceful. Everything seemed so safe here, behind these high stone walls.

The King heard the bells too. He stepped out on to the balcony of the upstairs bedroom. The whole town lay spread out below, framed by the sweep of the bay and the two steep promontories on either side. The view was magnificent, just as Mr Cox had said. He went back into the bedroom. He sat in one of the armchairs and watched the ghostly shadows of coconut palms swaying on the room’s white plaster walls. In this room the hours would accumulate like grains of sand until they buried him.

PART TWO Ratnagiri

Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sayagyi! Shall I go up …?’

‘Go up where?’

‘To the tai. To show that bastard …’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why, Sayagyi?’

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

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

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

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

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

Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Wait.’

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

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

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

‘Yes?’

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

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

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

The Queen turned back to Dolly. ‘I have decided. Let them build their shelters on the hill. Tell Sawant to let them know that they can go ahead.’

Within days a basti arose around the compound, a settlement of shacks and shanties. In the bathrooms of Outram House, water began to flow; the toilets were clean again. The settlers in the basti daily thanked the Queen. Now it was her turn to be deified: overnight she became a guardian goddess, a protector of the unfortunate, an incarnate devi who had rescued hundreds from the ravages of the plague.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

‘You touched me first,’ he challenged her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I was wondering, and now I know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newly arrived Collectors sometimes talked of razing the basti and moving the servants back to town. The Queen would laugh: how besotted they were, these men, in their arrogance, to imagine that in such a land as India they could hold a family imprisoned in isolation on a hill. Why the very soil would revolt against it!

The rare visitors who were allowed to call were shocked by the sight of the basti, the smell of waste and excrement, by the pall of woodsmoke that hung thick in the air. Often they descended from their carriages with looks of stunned surprise on their faces, unable to believe that the residence of Burma’s last King had become the nucleus of a shantytown.

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

Eight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who is she?’

‘Her name is Dolly.’

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

‘And where does she live?’

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

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

Rajkumar laughed. ‘It’s very far.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What, Saya?’

‘Anthrax.’

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

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

‘More pressing than their friend’s body?’

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

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

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

At this Saya John, usually so equable and even-tempered, turned on him in a sudden fury. ‘Be careful, Rajkumar.’ Saya John’s voice slowed. ‘Anthrax is a plague and it was to punish pride that the Lord sent it down.’

His voice slowed and deepened as it always did when he was quoting the Bible: ‘And the Lord said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Take to you handfuls of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh. And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast, throughout all the land of Egypt.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘“It is the cow, Shwe Doke.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘“Look! Look down at the ground.”

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

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

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

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

Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Uma Debi – but everyone calls me Uma.’

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

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

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

Uma went over to the Queen and lowered her head.

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

‘Your Highness!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘Our coachman is related to yours.’

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Every day?’

‘Just for a bit.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you remember anything of Burma?’

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

‘Why the walls?’

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

‘And Rangoon? Do you remember Rangoon?’

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

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

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

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘But you’ve been away so long.’

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

‘No,’ Uma faltered. ‘No.’

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

‘Do you ever think of going back?’

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

‘Was it very terrible?’

‘I don’t remember much, which is a kind of mercy, I suppose. I see it in patches sometimes. It’s like a scribble on a wall – no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes through, but not enough to put together the whole.’

‘What do you see?’

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

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

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

‘What?’

‘That she had a lot of people killed … in Mandalay.’

Dolly made no answer but Uma persisted. ‘Doesn’t it frighten you,’ she said, ‘to be living in the same house as someone like that?’

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

‘Of Queen Victoria, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

Uma was puzzled. ‘What about it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m not your gaoler.’

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

‘A friend. Surely?’

‘That too, but by accident.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘You promise?’

‘Solemnly. I promise.’

‘It’s about the First Princess.’

‘Yes? Go on.’

‘She’s pregnant.’

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

‘Mohan Sawant.’

‘Your coachman?’

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

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

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

‘But what about his family, his background?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baburao welcomed everyone to the shade of the tree. Once the crowd was thick and deep he began to talk, his voice slowing to a chant in the reverential manner of a reciter of the Ramayana

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.