After the fashion of epic legends and contemporary Bollywood films, they are separated but not before he promises to see her again. It is during the desecration of the Glass Palace that Rajkumar spies Dolly, a royal household maid who becomes his lifelong love.
King Thebaw and his family are captured and exiled to India. Not long after the explosions, British soldiers – mostly Indian sepoys – force the surrender of the Burmese army and march up to the Glass Palace at the center of the King’s complex, “a vast hall that is like a great shaft of light, with crystal walls and mirrored ceilings.” This great hall is looted by British forces, then by Mandalay residents who had until this day held the palace grounds in awe. The boy’s words presage the momentous downfall of the Burmese sovereign King Thebaw and the start of an epic tale. So begins Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace.
Rajkumar, however, a poor eleven-year-old Indian boy, recognized it right away: “‘English cannon,’ he said in his fluent but heavily accented Burmese.” Such jarring noise was unfamiliar and bewildering to the people of the royal capital in the interior of Burma in the 1880s.
Booming sounds break into the lives of people at a food stall in Mandalay.
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