by Amitav Ghosh
Later that evening they were paid a visit by an eminent member of the Indian community in Rangoon—a lawyer by the name of Sahibzada Badruddin Khan. It so happened that the whole family was at home when the visitor dropped by.
Mr Khan was worried and he had come to give them some news. He had attended a meeting of some of the city’s most prominent Indians. They had decided to form a Refugee Evacuation Committee. It was felt that in the event of a Japanese advance into Burma the Indian population would be vulnerable on two fronts—they would be defenceless against hostile sections of the Burmese public and, what was more, as subjects of the British Empire, they would be treated as enemy aliens by the Japanese. Many members of the community had expressed fears of a coming catastrophe: the committee’s intentions were to get as many Indians out of Burma as possible.
Rajkumar was amazed to learn of these measures. He was in an optimistic mood, despite the recent news. He had just discovered that a friend of his had secured a contract for a long stretch of the Burma–China road. He was now absolutely confident that he would be able to sell his stocks of timber at exactly the kind of price he had been hoping for.
‘What?’ Rajkumar broke into a disbelieving laugh. ‘You mean you people are going to run away from Burma—because the Japanese have invaded Malaya?’
‘Well, yes. People feel . . .’
‘Nonsense, Khan.’ Rajkumar slapped his friend on the back.
‘You shouldn’t be taken in by these scaremongers. Malaya’s a long way from here.’
‘Still,’ said Mr Khan, ‘there’s nothing wrong with being prepared—especially where there are women and children involved . . .’
Rajkumar shrugged. ‘Well, Khan, you must do what you think best. But as for myself I think this is a great opportunity.’
‘Opportunity!’ Mr Khan raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’
‘There’s no mystery to it, Khan. With America in the war, there’ll be more money for defence preparations. Burma is crucial to the survival of the Chinese Government in Chungking: the north–south road will be their main supply line. I’m willing to bet that the road is going to be built faster than anyone ever expected.’
‘And if there’s an attack?’
Rajkumar shrugged. ‘It’s a question of nerve, Khan. I can understand why you’d want to leave. But for us it would be too soon. I’ve spent a long time preparing for this and I am not going to leave now.’
Manju was hugely reassured by Rajkumar’s words. It was a great comfort to know that she did not have to think about going anywhere right now. Coping with Jaya was hard enough at home: she could not begin to imagine what it would be like in less favourable circumstances.
In the morning, a runner brought a message to Arjun’s trench. It was from battalion headquarters: they were to fall back on the Asoon line—a string of defensive fortifications along a river, a few miles down the road. When Arjun gave the order to move there was a muted cheer. He felt like joining in himself—anything would be better than staying pinned in that trench.
They made their way through the plantation in good order but when they reached the road it became clear that the withdrawal was turning quickly into a headlong retreat. The men began to show signs of apprehension as truck after truck passed them by, packed with troops from other units. Arjun stayed with them long enough to see them into a truck and then he jumped into a jeep with Hardy.
‘Yaar, did you hear?’ Hardy said under his breath.
‘What?’
‘The Japs have sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.’
‘Impossible.’ Arjun looked at him in disbelief. These were two of the most powerful battleships ever made, the pride of the British navy. ‘It can’t be true.’
‘It is true—I ran into Kumar; he told me.’ Suddenly a gleeful grin lit up his face. ‘I can’t wait to tell Pearson: I want to see the look on that bastard’s face . . .’
‘Hardy,’ Arjun shouted, ‘have you gone mad?’
‘Why?’
‘Have you forgotten that those ships were here to defend us? We’re all on the same side, Hardy. A Jap bullet can’t pick between you and Pearson.’
Hardy gave him a startled glance, and for a moment they looked at each other in mutual bewilderment. ‘You’re right,’ said Hardy. ‘Of course. But you know . . .’
‘Let’s drop it,’ Arjun said quickly.
When they reached the Asoon river, the Japanese artillery fell unaccountably silent. Grateful for the respite, the 1/1 Jats took up positions beside the road, with their backs to the river. At this point, the north–south highway ran along a raised embankment, with thick stands of rubber on either side, leading as far as the eye could see. The whole battalion was now concentrated in one place, positioned to defend the approaches to the river. Their vehicles were lined up off the road, along the slopes of the embankment.
Arjun saw Hardy stepping out on the road and went to join him. Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland was just a few paces away, at the battalion’s temporary command post. He was with Captain Pearson, who was fumbling with a map case.
Arjun stopped in the middle of the road to confer with Hardy. ‘Why do you think they’ve stopped shelling?’ he said.
‘They seem to hold back at times,’ Hardy said. ‘It’s hard to say why.’
‘You don’t think it’s because their own armour is moving up, do you?’
Hardy scoffed at this. ‘What armour? None of us has any tanks—neither them nor us. This isn’t tank country.’
‘That’s what we were told. But . . .’ Somewhere in the distance there was a rumbling sound. They both spun about on their heels to look down the road. It was now almost sunset. The clouds had cleared briefly and the sky had turned bright scarlet. The highway ran straight for a couple of hundred yards before disappearing around a bend: rubber trees rose above it on either side, almost coming together at the top to form an arch. The road was empty: there was nothing ahead.
Hardy breathed a sigh of relief. ‘That gave me a fright . . .’ He raised his sleeve to his forehead. ‘I told you—this isn’t tank country: that’s the one thing we can be sure of, thank God.’
A moment later, with a great grinding of its metal treads, a tank turned the corner. On top of the turret, silhouetted against the sky, was a gunner’s helmeted head. The turret swivelled in their direction until its gun became a single circular eye. Then the tank shuddered and its hollow eye turned a blazing red. At the bottom of the embankment, a petrol tank exploded and a half-ton truck did a little hop and burst into flames.
For an instant Arjun stood his ground. Nothing in his training had prepared him for this. A dim recollection of unfinished business urged him to turn and run back down the road, to his company, to rally them into throwing up the wall of fire that the CO had talked about at the last briefing. But the CO had said categorically that there would be no tanks— and anyway, the CO was gone now, rolling down the side of the embankment, along with Captain Pearson. On both sides of the highway, men were scattering into the plantation, running for cover.
‘Run, Arjun!’ The voice was Hardy’s, and it jolted him awake. ‘Run, run.’
He was stranded in the middle of the road, like a startled deer, and the first tank was almost upon him, so close that he could see the eyes of the man in the turret, darkened by a thick pair of goggles. He jumped, throwing himself over the side of the embankment, lunging sidewise to clear the CO’s burning jeep. Then he picked himself up and ran for the trees: suddenly he was inside a long tunnel of greenery, his feet cushioned by a carpet of fallen leaves.
The lucidity that had possessed him momentarily as he was standing in the middle of the road had vanished now. Its place was taken by a blind, unseeing urgency. It was quite possible that he was heading straight towards a nest of Japanese guns. But even if he had known that to be so he would not have been able to stop himself. It was as though his breath and his blood had fused together to pound at his brain in unison, urging him on, pushing him to r
un in this direction.
He ran several yards without stopping. Then, leaning against a tree trunk, he turned, panting, to look back: the trees fell into a sightline at the end of which a small stretch of road was clearly visible, enclosed in a circular frame, as though he were looking through a telescope. He saw tank after tank rolling down the highway. By the sides of the embankment lay the vehicles of the 1/1 Jats. Some were upturned and some were on fire.
The sight was beyond comprehension. He could find no way of explaining what had happened, even to himself. Was this what was meant by the phrase ‘put to rout’—this welter of fear and urgency and shame; this chaotic sensation of collapse in one’s head, as though the scaffolding of responses implanted by years of training had buckled and fallen in?
Arjun had a sudden aching vision of their battalion’s headquarters in Saharanpur: he recalled the building they called ‘the Nursery’—the long, low bungalow in which the officers’ mess was housed. He thought of the heavy, gilt-framed paintings that hung on its walls, along with the mounted heads of buffalo and nilgai; the assegais, scimitars and feathered spears that his predecessors had brought back as trophies from Africa, Mesopotamia and Burma. He had learnt to think of this as home, and the battalion as his extended family—a clan that tied a thousand men together in a pyramid of platoons and companies. How was it possible that this centuries-old structure could break like an egg-shell, at one sharp blow—and that too, in this unlikeliest of battlefields, a forest planted by businessmen? Was the fault his own? Was it true then, what the older Englishmen said, that Indians would destroy the army if they became officers? This at least was beyond doubt: as a fighting unit the 1/1 Jats no longer existed. Every man in the battalion would now have to fend for himself.
He’d left his pack in the jeep, on the river: it hadn’t occurred to him that he’d be running for his life within minutes of climbing out. All he had on him now was his .45 Webley, his water bottle and his belt with its small pack of odds and ends.
He looked around. Where was Hardy? Where were the CO and Captain Pearson? He’d caught glimpses of them earlier, as he was running into the plantation. But now in the gathering gloom it was hard to tell what lay ahead.
The Japanese infantry would almost certainly be mopping up behind their tanks, combing the plantations. It was possible that he was being watched even as he stood there, through any one of the hundreds of sightlines that converged on the precise spot on which he was standing.
What was he to do now?
thirty-four
To drive to Gunung Jerai was Alison’s idea. She and Dinu left the house well before sunset, in the Daytona, taking the road that circled around the mountain. The kampongs seemed deserted now, the daytime panic having yielded to a watchful quiet. In the markets there were hardly any people in sight. Alison was able to drive through at high speed.
They made good time and turned on to the summit road while there was still plenty of light. When they began to climb, the sound of the car rose to a shrill, steady whine. It was twilight on the slopes, because of the thick forest cover. Alison had to switch on her headlamps.
The turns on the road were very sharp. They came to a bend that switched back on itself, rising upwards at a steep angle. Alison had to stop and reverse the car in order to make the turn. As they were coming out of the corner, they both looked up at the same time. The sky above the northern horizon seemed to be darkened by a stain—a cloud of tiny, horizontal brushstrokes. Alison stopped dead, and they stared— several moments passed before they realised that they were looking at a flight of planes, heading directly towards them, from the north. They were facing the aircraft head-on and in profile the planes seemed stationary, their advance signalled only by a gradual thickening of their outlines.
Alison started the car again, and they went speeding up the road. The lodge loomed ahead, in the gathering darkness. It was empty, deserted. They parked under the porch and walked up to the veranda that ran around the building. Tables were placed along its length, draped in white cloth, weighted down with heavy ashtrays. Plates had been laid out, as though in expectation of a crowd of diners.
They could feel the roar of the approaching bombers under their feet, in the vibrating planks of the wood floor. The planes were very close now, flying at low altitudes. As they stood watching, the flight suddenly separated into two, parting round the mountain, like a stream flowing past a boulder. Banking steeply one wing veered off towards the seaward slope of the mountain, on a flight path set for Butterworth and Penang. The other wing headed for Sungei Pattani, on the landward side.
Alison reached for Dinu’s hand and they began to walk along the balcony, making their way between the dining tables. The tablecloths were flapping in the breeze and the plates were covered with a thin film of dust.
There were no clouds today. Far below, in the dimming twilight, the island of Penang appeared as a dark shoal afloat on the sea; to the south-east lay Sungei Pattani, a small raft of habitation, marooned in an ocean of rubber trees. They could see roads and rail-lines, glimmering in the last flicker of daylight. The landscape was like a map, lying unfurled at their feet.
The planes were losing height in preparation for their bombing runs. Sungei Pattani was the nearest of the targets and it was the first to be hit. Bursts of flame appeared on the dark landscape, strung closely together in straight lines, like rows of bright stitches on an inky fabric.
They went around the veranda, picking at the tablecloths and running their fingers over the dust-filmed plates. They saw yet another cloud of planes approaching; on the seaward side, the bombers were diving low over the port of Fort Butterworth. Suddenly a great tower of orange flame shot up from the coast reaching hundreds of feet into the sky; the blast that followed was of such magnitude as to make itself felt all the way up the mountain.
‘Oh my God!’ Alison threw herself on Dinu. ‘They’ve hit the oil-tanks at Butterworth.’
She buried her face in Dinu’s chest, snatching at his shirt, bunching up the cloth in her fists. ‘I drove past them, just that day.’
Dinu held her fast. ‘Alison, you still haven’t told me why you went . . .’
She wiped her face on his shirt and pulled away from him. ‘Give me a cigarette.’
Dinu lit a cigarette and put it between her lips. ‘Well?’
‘I went to see a doctor, Dinu—a doctor who doesn’t know me.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought I might be pregnant.’
‘And?’
‘I’m not.’
‘And what if you had been pregnant, Alison,’ Dinu said quietly. ‘Would you have wanted the child to be Arjun’s?’
‘No.’ She threw her arms round him, and he could feel her sobbing into his shirt.
‘Dinu, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘About what?’
‘About everything, Dinu. About going away that day— with Arjun. It was a mistake—a terrible, terrible mistake. If you only knew, Dinu . . .’
He silenced her by putting a finger over her lips. ‘I don’t want to know . . . Whatever happened . . . I don’t want to know. It’ll be better that way . . . for both of us. We don’t need to talk about Arjun again.’
He was cut short by a flash of light, an explosion that illuminated the whole town of Sungei Pattani. A series of lesser explosions followed, one after the other, like a string of fireworks.
‘The armoury,’ Alison said. She lowered herself to her knees and stuck her head into a gap between the veranda’s rails, holding on to the wooden bars with her fists. ‘They must have hit the armoury.’
Dinu knelt beside her. ‘Alison,’ he said urgently, gripping her shoulders. ‘One thing’s for sure . . . You have to go away. With Japan and America at war, you’re in danger here. Your mother was American . . . Your brother still lives there . . . There’s no telling what would happen if the Japanese managed to push through. You’ve got to get away.’
‘But where to?’
‘To Singapore; you’ll be safe there. It’s very well defended. We’re too close to the border here . . . and you have to take your grandfather with you. You’ve got to leave.’
She shook her head, violently. ‘I don’t want to. I don’t want to go.’
‘Alison, you can’t just think about yourself.’
‘You don’t understand, Dinu—I’m a territorial animal. I’d rather take a few of them with me than give up what’s mine.’
‘Alison, listen to me.’ Dinu gripped her hands and shook them. ‘You have to do it . . . For your grandfather’s sake, if not your own.’
‘And what about the estate?’
‘Ilongo will run it while you’re away . . . You’ll see . . . You can trust him, you know that.’
‘And you—you’ll come with us, of course. Won’t you?’ ‘Alison, I should go back, to Burma . . . My family . . . They might need me now.’
‘But you could come to Singapore with us first; you could probably get a ship there. It might even be easier.’
Dinu paused to think. ‘You may be right. Yes . . . I’ll come.’
She reached for his hands. ‘I don’t think I could bear to go without you. Especially now.’
‘Why now?’
She dug into his chest with her forehead. ‘Because I think I’m in love with you, Dinu—or something like that at any rate. I didn’t know it before, but I know it now.’
He pulled her closer. He did not care what had happened between her and Arjun; nothing mattered but this—that she loved him and he loved her. Nothing else was of any account, not the planes, not the bombs, nothing but this. This was what happiness was—he’d never known it before; this melting away, this exaltation, your guts spilling into your head, filling your eyes—your mind transformed into your body, your body instinct with the joy in your mind; this sensation of reality having met its end.
