NOTES FROM THE GLASS PALACE, by Amitav Ghosh

This thought made them both cringe in shame.  It was as though they were examining their own circumstances for the first time, in retrospect, as though the shock of travel had displaced an indifference in them since their earliest childhood.

 Soon it seemed as though there was not a man in the battalion who had not found himself embroiled in an unsettling encounter of one kind or another.

 Holding her daughter to her breast, Manju remembered a passage Dolly had read to her a few days before.  It was from Buddha's first sermon, delivered at Sarnath, two thousand and five hundred years before .... birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow, contact with the unpleasant is sorrow, separation from the pleasant is sorrow, every wish unfulfilled is sorrow ......

 Of immigrants:  In the temple they would all speak Burmesee.  Some had done well after their departure. They' built new businesses, made new homes for themselves, others had dedicated themselves to their children and grandchildren - in much the same way that Rajkumar had built his life around Jaya.  Not all the people who came to the temple were Buddhists, by birth or conviction.  They came because this was the one place where they could be sure of meeting others like themselves, people to whom they could say "Burma is a golden land'  knowing that their listeners would be able to filter these words through the sieves of exile, shifting through their very specific nuances.   She recalled how they had thirsted for news of Burma - longed to hear word of those left behind.  She remembered the stir that greeted new arrivals;  how they would be besieged with questions: "And what about .....? and did you hear about so-and-so?"

 Rajkumar was always the noisiest o the questioners, taking advantage of his booming voice to shout questions - questions about someone with a Burmese name .....

 Like Rajkumar, Ilongo was built on a generous scale:  he was tall, wide-shouldered, very dark, and he too had a substantial belly, of the kind that is produced not by lethargy but rather by an excess of energy - his stomach was like an extra fuel tank, strapped to the outside of a truck.  His hair was white and rumpled and he had a great deal of it, all over him - his arms, his chest, his knuckles:  its lightness  was a startling contrast to the colour of his skin.  HIs face, like Rajkumar's, was deeply creased, with heavy dewlaps and jowls:  it was enormous, thorny, and it seemed to be constructed mainly of armature, as though nature had equipped it for survival in the open sea.

 In the end my greatest debt is to my father, Lieutenant-Colonel Shailendar Chandra Ghosh.   He fought ......       He died in February 1998 and never saw any part of my mauscript.  Only in his absence did I come to understand how deeply my book was rooted in his experience, his reflections of the war and his self-questioning:  it is to his memory that I dedicate The Glass Palace.

 What I saw that morning in my great-great-aunt Uma's bedroom remains to this day the most tender, the most moving sight I have ever seen, and from the day I sat down to write this book - the book my mother never wrote - I knew that it was with this that it would end.