Free The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh Page A

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 atree. 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.
    â€˜Come down,’ said the girls. ‘It’s going to be dark soon.’ ‘No.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜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