He was grinning a little sheepishly, as though embarrassed to parade his precocious knowingness. He was standing in the center of the stall, holding a pile of chipped ceramic bowls. Heading in this direction.”įrowns 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 color of polished hardwood. “They’re shooting somewhere up the river. “English cannon,” he said in his fluent but heavily accented Burmese. 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. When the first booms reached the stall there was a silence, followed by a flurry of questions and whispered answers. 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. The stall had only two benches, and they were both packed with people, sitting pressed up against each other. And then, abruptly, it would change to a deep rumble, shaking the food-stall and rattling its steaming pot of soup.

At times it was like the snapping of dry twigs, sudden and unexpected. The noise was unfamiliar and unsettling, a distant booming followed by low, stuttering growls. His name was Rajkumar and he was an Indian, a boy of eleven – not an authority to be relied upon. 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.

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh