The Glass Palace

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