The Glass Palace Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜And remember—’ here her gesticulations became fiercely incoherent—‘not a word about . . .’
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ Rajkumar gave her an innocent smile. ‘I won’t say anything about your lessons.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What is it?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜I was working on a boat, a sampan, like those you see on the river.’
    â€˜And where are your parents? Your family?’
    â€˜I don’t have any.’ Rajkumar paused. ‘I lost them.’
    Matthew cracked a nut between his teeth. ‘How?’
    â€˜There was a fever, a sickness. In our town, Akyab, many people died.’
    â€˜But you lived?’
    â€˜Yes. I was sick, but I lived. In my family I was the only one. I had a father, a sister, brothers . . .’
    â€˜And a mother?’
    â€˜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.