The Glass Palace (43 page)

‘What?'

‘My father doesn't get along with your aunt.'

‘That doesn't matter,' Manju said. ‘Your mother often comes. I'm sure your father wouldn't mind if you did too.'

‘Maybe not—but I wouldn't want to anyway.'

‘Why not?'

‘Well,' Neel scratched his beard again. ‘It wouldn't be right.' ‘What wouldn't be right?'

‘I don't know if I can explain.' He gave her a bemused glance and she saw that he was struggling to find words for a thought that he'd never articulated before, even to himself.

‘Go on.'

‘You see,' he said, almost apologetically, ‘it's just that I'm the only one who's on his side.'

Manju was startled. ‘What do you mean?'

‘That's just how I feel,' Neel said. ‘That I'm the only one on his side. Take my brother Dinu, for example—I sometimes think he really hates Apé.'

‘Why?'

‘Maybe—because they're opposites.'

‘And you're alike?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘At least, that's what I would like to think.'

He turned his eyes away from the road to grin at her.

‘I don't know why I'm telling you all this,' he said. ‘I feel like an idiot.'

‘You're not—I know what you're trying to say . . .'

They went on driving, more or less at random, down one street and another, backing out of blind alleys, and making U-turns on the wider avenues. It was almost dark by the time he dropped her off. They agreed that it would be better if he didn't come in.

They met again the next day and the day after that. He extended his stay and after a month had gone by he sent a telegram to Burma.

One day Dolly presented herself at Uma's office door.

‘Dolly? You here?'

‘Yes. And you'll never believe why . . .'

twenty-two

T
he wedding was like a force of nature, changing everything it touched. In a matter of days Lankasuka was transformed into a huge, noisy fairground. Up on the roof a team of
pandal-
makers was at work, erecting an immense awning of coloured cloth and bamboo. In the tree-shaded yard at the back, a small army of hired cooks had pitched tents and dug pits for cooking fires. It was as though a carnival had moved in.

Bela was the youngest in the house: at fifteen, she was a thin, gawky girl, blossoming into a late and awkward adolescence. She was alternately apprehensive and exhilarated, unsure of whether to throw herself into the festivities or to hide in her bed.

As the wedding approached a whirlwind of telegrams— until then so rare and so dreaded—blew through Lankasuka, rattling its shuttered doors and windows. Not a day went by without Bela spotting a postman, running up the stairs with a pink envelope. Arjun was to arrive by rail, accompanied by his batman, Kishan Singh. Dolly, Dinu and Rajkumar were flying in two days before, on one of KLM's brand-new DC3s.

The excitement reached its pitch the day the Rangoon party was to arrive. Providentially, the family had just that year decided to buy a car, with the expenses shared equally between Uma and her brother. The car was delivered just as the
arrangements were getting under way, a brand new 1939 model, a modest, 8 horse-power Jowett, with a long bonnet and beautiful oval grille. In addition to this, the wedding party also had the use of the Delage Drophead, which Neel had once again succeeded in borrowing from the dealer.

They arrived at Dum Dum airport to find it completely changed since the time of Uma's return to India. The old airstrip was now a fully-fledged airport, with customs facilities of its own. A hundred and fifty acres of land had been cleared and three new runways built. There was a fine three-storeyed administration building with a glass-paned control tower and radio room. The visitors' area had changed too: they found themselves entering a large, brightly lit gallery with fans whirring energetically overhead. At one end of the gallery there was a radio tuned in to the news; at the other there was a counter selling tea and snacks.

‘Look!' Bela went running to the windows and pointed to a plane that was circling above. They watched the DC3 as it came in to land. The first to come out was Dinu. He was wearing a longyi and a loose shirt, and his clothes flapped against his lean, compact frame as he stood on the tarmac, waiting for his parents.

Dolly and Rajkumar were among the last to emerge. Dolly was wearing a striped green longyi and as always there was a white flower in her hair. Rajkumar was walking very slowly, leaning on Dolly a little. His hair was covered with a thick frosting of white and the lines of his face had sagged into tired, drooping curves.

Rajkumar was now in his mid-sixties. He had recently suffered a minor stroke and had left his bed against his doctor's wishes. His business, wounded by the Depression, was no longer as profitable as it had once been. The teak industry had changed over the last decade, and old-fashioned timbermen like Rajkumar had become anachronisms. Rajkumar was saddled with huge debts and had been forced to sell off many of his properties.

But so far as the arrangements for Neel's wedding were
concerned, Rajkumar was determined to put aside his financial difficulties. Everything that everybody else did he wanted to do on a larger and grander scale. Neel was his favourite and he was determined to make his boy's wedding an occasion to compensate for all the missed celebrations of his own life.

Dinu was a favourite of Bela's: she liked the way he looked, with his thin, bony cheeks and his wide forehead; she liked his seriousness and his manner of listening to people with an attentive frown, as though he were worrying about what they'd said; she even liked the way he talked, in explosive little bursts, as though his thoughts were spurting out of him in jets.

The day they went to Howrah station to get Arjun, Bela made sure that she was sitting next to Dinu. She noticed that he had a leather bag in his lap.

‘What have you got in there?' she asked.

He opened the bag and showed her. It was a new camera, a kind she'd never seen before.

‘It's a Rolleiflex,' he said. ‘A twin-lens reflex . . .' He took it out of the bag and showed her how it worked; it opened like a hinged box, with its hood flipping back so that you had to look down on it from above.

‘I've got a tripod for it,' he said. ‘You can look through it . . . when I set it up . . .'

‘Why're you taking it to the station?' she asked.

He shrugged vaguely. ‘I saw some pictures recently,' he said. ‘Railyard shots by Alfred Stieglitz . . . they made me wonder . . .'

The camera caused a stir when Dinu set it up at Howrah. The station was crowded and many people gathered round to stare. Dinu adjusted the tripod's height to suit Bela. ‘Here, come . . . look.'

The platform was a long one, and it was topped with a steepled roof of corrugated steel. The late afternoon sunlight was filtering in from under the roof's scalloped skirt, creating
a stark, back-lit effect. In the foreground there were great numbers of people: red-jacketed porters, hurrying tea-boys, and waiting passengers with mountains of luggage.

Dinu pointed out the details to Bela. ‘I think this is even better than the pictures I had in mind,' he said, ‘because of all the people . . . and the movement . . .'

Bela looked in again, and suddenly, as if by magic, Arjun appeared in the frame. He was hanging out of a carriage, holding on to the steel bar of the open doorway. He jumped off when he spotted them and the momentum of the still-moving train gave him a running start. He came racing out of the opaque white fog that was pouring from the engine's steaming smoke-stack, laughing as he dodged the vendors and porters who were swarming across the platform. The tunic of his khaki uniform was drawn tight around his waist and his cap was tilted back on his head. He swept down on them with his arms outspread, laughing, and lifted Manju off her feet and swung her round and round.

Bela stepped away from the camera, hoping to conceal herself until the first flush of Arjun's homecoming exuberance was spent. But just then he spotted her. ‘Bela!' He swooped down to fling her up, over his head, ignoring her cries of protest. As she flew upwards, with the tumult of the station whirling around her head, her eyes fastened on a soldier who had approached unseen and was standing just a step behind Arjun. He looked younger than Arjun and was smaller in build; she noticed that he was carrying Arjun's luggage.

‘Who is that?' she whispered into Arjun's ear.

He threw a glance over his shoulder, to see whom she was looking at. ‘That's Kishan Singh,' he said, ‘my batman.'

He put her down and went on ahead, with the others, talking excitedly. Bela followed behind, keeping pace with Kishan Singh. She stole a glance: he was nice-looking, she thought; his skin had a sheen like dark velvet, and although his hair was very short she could tell that it was fine and straight; she liked the way it made a pattern along the edges of his forehead. His eyes were fixed ahead of him, as though he were a moving statue.

It was only when they were about to get into the car that she knew without a doubt that he was aware of her presence. His eyes met hers for an instant and there was a fleeting change in his expression, a slight smile. Bela's head reeled: she had never known that a smile could have a physical impact— like a blow from a flying object.

As she was about to step into the car Bela heard Dinu say to Arjun: ‘Have you heard? Hitler's signed a pact with Mussolini . . . there could be another war.'

But her brother's answer was lost to her. All the way home, she didn't hear a word that anybody said.

twenty-three

A
lthough Dinu and Arjun had known each other a long time they had never been friends. Dinu tended to think of Arjun on the analogy of a friendly and bumbling pet—a large dog perhaps, or a well-trained mule—a creature of unfailing, tail-wagging goodwill, but incurably indolent and barely capable of coherent utterance. But Dinu was not so arrogant as to be unwilling to correct himself. At Howrah station, on the day when he photographed Arjun running across the platform, he saw immediately that this was a significantly changed person from the boy he had known. Arjun had lost his somnolence, and his patterns of speech were no longer so garbled and indistinct as they had once been. This itself was an interesting paradox, for Arjun's vocabulary seemed now to consist mainly of jargon intermixed with assorted bits of English and Punjabi slang—everyone was now either a ‘chap' or a ‘
yaar
'
.

But on the way home from the station Arjun did something that astonished Dinu. In reminiscing about a tactical exercise, he launched into a description of a feature of topography— a hill. He listed its ridges and outcrops, the exact nature of its vegetation and the cover it afforded, he quoted the angle of the slope's incline and laughed about how his friend Hardy had got it wrong so that his results ‘wouldn't play'.

Dinu understood words and images and the bridge of
metaphor that linked the two—these were not languages with which he had ever thought to associate Arjun. Yet, by the end of Arjun's description, Dinu felt that he could see the hill, in his head. Of those who listened to Arjun's account, he alone was perhaps fully aware of the extreme difficulty of achieving such minuteness of recall and such vividness of description: he was awed, both by the precision of Arjun's narrative and by the off-handed lack of self-consciousness with which it was presented.