Free The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh Page B

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    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.’
    â€˜How do you know?’ Dolly said.
    â€˜Mr Cox told me. He said we were slaves in Mandalay but now we’re free.’
    â€˜But we’re prisoners, aren’t we?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 the 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 andmaids 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