Lieutenant and Madame Alphonse Darreau took a spacious apartment near the military building where he worked in the legal section. At long last Song was content, surrendering all of her notions to be an independent woman of business. Instead she embraced domesticity. On the walls she hung pictures of the Catholic saints, and she studied French diligently so that she could converse intelligently and grammatically when Alphonse invited his fellow officers home for dinner. On these nights she had to shut up Gurmukh in his room, for the child was a hellion. Once he tore the brass buttons from his stepfather’s uniform. He would not accept his mother’s attempted persuasion that they were fortunate to have the French officer around. Gurmukh chattered incessantly about his real father, conjuring fantasies that the tailor would one day swoop into the house and rescue him from a foreign stepfather. The truth was something else. Sobhraj the Tailor never even called Song to inquire about the boy. He seemed less interested in him than in the price of sewing machine bobbins.
Problems with the child grew alarmingly. Gurmukh rebelled against toilet training, promising Song that he would try to do better but waking up each morning on soaked sheets. It would continue until he was well into his teens, a cry for attention that was not understood by the mother. Her response at such infantile behavior was a whip.
When the police brought Gurmukh home one day in custody and said he was suspected of stealing a bicycle, Song crossed herself, promised the officers she would deal strictly with the boy, and then locked him in his room. For a time, she heard her son’s wails of repentance from behind the door. Then silence. When Song unlocked the door to check, a switch quivering in her hand should it be needed, the room was empty. Gurmukh had vanished, the curtain fluttering in the breeze from an open window. For several days the little boy was gone, and although Song was modestly worried, summoning an occasional moist eye, she rebuked herself for not feeling more distraught. The house was pleasingly quiet without Gurmukh’s mischief and tantrums.
Then came a call from Sobhraj the Tailor. He was annoyed. Did Song realize that her son had made his way across the city of Saigon, broken into the shop, and hidden for two days behind bolts of cloth, peeping through a crack and silently watching his father sew? When Sobhraj heard a noise and pushed the bolts apart, he discovered the son he had not seen—probably had not even thought of—for a long time. Upon his discovery, Gurmukh embraced his father hungrily. He begged permission to stay. He hated his mother. She whipped him. He hated his stepfather. “Please,” cried the child, “please let me live with you.”
Unmoved, Sobhraj scooped up his son and delivered him to Song, depositing him at the door with the warning not to try that again. Not only was such a prank dangerous—Saigon’s streets were perilous—but its goal was out of the question. The tailor had other responsibilities now, a new woman, a child on the way. Gurmukh must accept what life had dished out to him, and the conditions in Song’s house were certainly better than most anywhere else in Saigon. The French knew how to live well.
As punishment, Song tied the runaway to his bed, his arms and legs lashed to the bedposts, freeing him only when he swore tearfully never to flee the house again.
In 1949, Lieutenant Darreau received abrupt orders of transfer back to France. A military transport ship was leaving Saigon in two weeks, and he had to be on it, with his family. The news was ecstasy to Song. Her French was workable now, and in the urgent days of packing and telling friends and family goodbye, Song found time to study fashion magazines from Paris. She imagined herself in full skirts with petticoats and small hats clamped on the back of her head with artificial fruits and flowers growing profusely on the brim.
The initial reaction from her son was grief. Upon learning that he would be moving halfway around the world to a country whose language he could not speak, Gurmukh cried for days, sobbing that he would never leave Saigon. Song tried reasoning, but, when the tantrums continued, turned deaf ears and coldly informed the child that, like it or not, he was going, and if necessary he would be tied up and put in the ship’s cargo with the luggage.
Then Lieutenant Darreau came home with troublesome news. A serious problem of legality had arisen with Gurmukh, who had no passport and no identifying documents. His birth certificate, if one existed, could not be found, and as he was illegitimate, Gurmukh was not allowed to travel on his mother’s passport. Lieutenant Darreau had investigated the possibility of accepting legal guardianship of the youngster, but this required hiring lawyers, possibly a court hearing, and certainly many weeks if not months.
“The sad truth is that this boy does not legally exist,” said Lieutenant Darreau, “nor can he leave the country.”
In despair, Song studied the problem. Her own family, still in the wetlands, was poor and unable to accept another mouth to feed. The government orphanage was notorious for abuse of children. The only alternative short of abandoning Gurmukh to the streets was to leave the boy with his natural father. But how could she persuade Sobhraj the Tailor to accept such responsibility? Song dressed modestly, made her face distraught, and humbly knocked on the tailor’s door. Beside her, very happy, was Gurmukh, scrubbed and well dressed.
In the years since they had lived together, Sobhraj had prospered. The tailor now had quarters thrice the size of the old room, and there were several customers waiting for fittings. Two seamstresses worked efficiently at new electric sewing machines. Sobhraj came forward and greeted Song warily. On his hand was a diamond ring.
Like a supplicant, Song pleaded. The situation was critical. The only fair and just solution, she ventured, was for the child’s natural father, the man who conceived him, to offer shelter for a few short months. It would take no longer than that for Lieutenant Darreau’s lawyer to cut through the bureaucracy and establish a legal identity for the child. When that was accomplished, then money would be sent for Gurmukh’s passage to France.
The tailor was not receptive to the plan. Not at all. He threw up an array of reasons why the notion was impossible. To begin, the boy would cost money. Food. Clothes. Song nodded in agreement. Naturally she would contribute financially to the child’s upkeep. Money was not the only problem, continued the tailor. Gurmukh was troublesome, impossible to discipline.
The reason, suggested Song, was that he loved his father more than anything in the world. The tailor was the center of his son’s universe. Why else would he run away so often and try to live hidden amid bolts of cloth?
While the tailor summoned strength to refute Song’s petition, Gurmukh ran as if cued into the room and locked his arms about his father’s waist, sobbing like a man condemned. After a time the tailor nodded, reluctantly, muttering that perhaps it was time the lad learned a trade. Quickly Song hurried out of the shop and ran for the French lieutenant, fearful that the tailor would change his mind.
CHAPTER TWO
When Mao Tse-tung swept into Nanking in 1949 with his People’s Liberation Army and conquered China, spreading Communism over the world’s most populous country, an immediate beneficiary was Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary movement in nearby Indochina. Within a few months, arms began pouring in from China’s new government—and the French were suddenly on the defensive. The Viet Minh devastated French positions along the Chinese border and pushed toward Hanoi in 1950.
In Paris, the stunned Quai d’Orsay ordered new troops to Indochina to deal with the Viet Minh nuisance. Thus did Lieutenant Alphonse Darreau find himself once again posted to Saigon. It was 1952. More than three years had passed since Song left her firstborn son behind with the tailor. The legal papers necessary to establish the child’s identity had fallen into a bureaucratic crack somewhere, and after a time Song had abandoned her never too enthusiastic promise to import the child to France. A letter or two had crossed the world between Song and Sobhraj the Tailor, but there had been little news concerning Gurmukh other than that he was healthy, intelligent, and mischievous.
Song must have been relieved not to have another child at her feet, for there
were now three others—the daughter by the tailor whom Lieutenant Darreau had legally adopted, and two new ones, a boy and a girl. From the day she married the Frenchman, Song had been pregnant almost continuously. And still another child, her fifth, was moving within her when she returned to the land of her birth.
Nonetheless, when Song established a new family household in Saigon at the French officers’ enclave, she felt sufficient maternal stirrings to investigate the growth and development of Gurmukh. The boy was almost nine by now, and Song anticipated a joyful reunion with a son who surely had changed into an obedient, hardworking, and disciplined youngster under the direction of his real father.
Considerable change had indeed taken place in the household of Sobhraj the Tailor. He had taken a new lover, a sharp-tongued Vietnamese woman named Sao, and their union had been fertile. Three new babies had appeared in three years, and a fourth was on the way. Sao was a severe woman who disliked Gurmukh from the first day she laid eyes on him. The youngster was a constant live-in reminder of the tailor’s love affair with Song—and consequently a threat to Sao’s security. To compensate, she treated the stepson cruelly—scolding, whipping, criticizing, usually behind the tailor’s back. Like any child, Gurmukh had responded with even more rebellion, particularly since he was beginning to understand that as far as the official world was concerned he did not legally exist. And rather than bend under Sao’s switches, the boy ran wild, refusing to work, plotting schemes against his stepmother, usually out on the streets, running with a gang of older boys, sometimes missing—but not being missed—for weeks at a time.
When Song, piously dressed but with a calculated Parisian flair, knocked on the door of Sobhraj the Tailor, Sao opened the door and studied her contemptuously. No, she did not know where Gurmukh was on this day. Perhaps in jail. Maybe he had run away for good. Whatever, the boy was nothing but trouble. He did not take after his father, said Sao, insinuating that the genes of wildness came from another source. Gurmukh was a liar, a thief, and dangerous to the younger children of the house. Once Sao had caught him carrying a knife, and he had also fashioned some sort of handmade gun that fired pebbles with speed and accuracy. With that, Sao slammed the door and did not open it when Song knocked again in annoyance.
Her face streaked with tears and anger, Song hurried home and told Lieutenant Darreau the disturbing news. “Then we must find him,” said the Frenchman. Immediately he and Song descended on the streets of Saigon, dispensing coins like candy to buy information as to Gurmukh’s whereabouts. The child was eventually discovered living in the ruins of a building bombed by the Viet Minh. He was the leader of a pack of Dickensian urchins who lived by their wits, hustling tourists and foreign soldiers, stealing food to eat and to sell. They all carried gleaming knives and none was over twelve.
Lieutenant Darreau took pity on the skinny, dirty youngster and told Song that they could probably find room at the table for one more mouth. And, suggested Darreau, the only thing that could alter Gurmukh’s behavior was to give him his identity, those government documents that make a person’s place on earth somehow more permanent.
After months of slogging through the courts, of bribing lawyers, of obtaining Sobhraj the Tailor’s enthusiastic signature on a court order that (1) acknowledged the tailor’s paternity of the boy Gurmukh, and (2) permitted him to relinquish parental responsibility for his upbringing to Lieutenant Alphonse Darreau, a tribunal in Saigon on January 10, 1953, decreed that this child was the legal custody of the French officer and his wife. Only one loose string remained uncut: Darreau refused at the last minute to award his name to the boy, even though he had routinely done so for the daughter conceived by the tailor and now living in the Frenchman’s household. At this point, a clerk in the tribunal held up his hands in bewilderment. Something, somebody’s name had to be written down on the transfer of guardianship. Another hurried meeting was arranged with the tailor. Finally an accommodation was reached. The child was to be officially named Hotchand Bhawnani Gurmukh Sobhraj.
Lieutenant Darreau would not tell Song why he withheld his surname from Gurmukh, and she did not press him. Perhaps even then he felt an omen.
France’s position in Indochina worsened, and soldiers who normally filed papers and typed reports were thrown into combat. Lieutenant Darreau volunteered for front line duty and, as Song lighted candles in the cathedral for his safe return, fought to retain territory near Saigon that was threatened by the Viet Minh. The first few excursions were inconsequential, but then came the day when the lieutenant was brought home on a stretcher. His injury was not physical, but mental. He was in severe shell shock and his face was white and blank, save for enormous pain in eyes that had always been gentle. When Song found his hospital bed, he stared at her as if she was a stranger, unable to speak, his only gestures a continual throwing of his hands against his ears to blot out the screaming assaults of bombs that exploded inside his head. Some fragile piece of the lieutenant’s psyche was devastated by war, and he would be tortured for the next three decades. The decent, caring young officer who had taken pity on Gurmukh and rescued him from the streets was from this day on a withdrawn, silent man whose landscape was silence and who had little or no further interest in anything save the pains that clamped his head in a vise that would never loosen. “I am in continuing pain,” he would tell Gurmukh years later. “There are days when the pain has subsided enough so that I can function, but most of the time the slightest noise is cymbals crashing at my ears.”
Orders came for Lieutenant Darreau to return to France for recuperation. He would be permitted to take his family, indicating that there was little likelihood of ever being posted to Saigon again. This time, Gurmukh could go. When Song told the now ten-year-old youngster, Gurmukh was at first ecstatic, bragging to his friends about the good fortune. But as the time neared for departure, the child began to balk. He did not want to leave his native country. In the last weeks of packing, Gurmukh often ran away, and Song always knew where she could find him—at the tailor’s shop, hiding, some need being filled within the boy by just being close to his real father. Usually the tailor was not aware that a child was hiding and watching him, for he had forbidden the boy from ever coming near. Years later, Gurmukh wrote a letter to a friend and recalled this time in his life:
“I look back and I can’t explain it,” he said. “My stepfather was a kind man who was good to me, even after his injury, but I did not want him. All I wanted was to be with my real father. My own flesh! I felt an emptiness without him, something that I missed … Even when my mother would find me after I had run away, and tied me up with ropes, I didn’t mind her prison for I felt I was suffering on behalf of my father.
“On the day we were supposed to leave for France, I was confused. I had not slept the night before. I kept telling myself that when the morning came, I would run away and hide until the boat left. But just before dawn, I dozed off, and it was in a half-sleep that my mother took me away from my country and my father. I never really forgave her …”
Mother France soothed the pains in Lieutenant Darreau’s head sufficiently for the military to award him a comfortable assignment—a post in Dakar, capital of French West Africa and a torrid city so Francophile that it was known as “South Paris.” French was the language, the cuisine, the life style. And Lieutenant Darreau was given a villa so enormous that the rooms were never counted. Outside spread a lime and ocher garden, where an occasional wild root hog could be found dozing under the acacia tree, or a brilliantly colored serpent curled in the sun. Lieutenant Darreau needed a large home, for Song delivered herself of two more children. By 1956, there were seven youngsters at the table, Gurmukh being the oldest, the shrewdest, but, always, the outsider. He was the stepchild, the one with the name that sounded like a bullfrog belching.
Song, who adjusted to the lush life quickly and spent languid afternoons resting under mosquito netting and sipping vin blanc, or evenings playing poker, reminded her son constantly of how lucky he w
as, plucked off the streets of Saigon and whisked across the oceans to this great mansion in Dakar. Lieutenant Darreau, rarely able to work a full day because the pains had returned, often threw tantrums at the dinner table, shrieking that seven children were noisier than seven platoons, not to mention the cost of filling so many stomachs, his eye often stopping in mid-lecture on Gurmukh, as if to say, “And this one is not even my own blood.” On an occasional day, the lieutenant was a martinet, dispensing military orders to his household, posting schedules on the kitchen wall of chores to be performed by the children, inspecting their rooms like a commander. And when something went awry, the one on whose shoulders usually fell the blame was Gurmukh. “You are the oldest,” preached Lieutenant Darreau, “and you should set the example for the other children. But you are more trouble than all of the others combined.”
Gurmukh did not mind the scoldings; they rained off his back like water on oil. But he hated and feared the more frequent days when his stepfather would suffer a renewal of the head pains and a blanket of silence had to fall over the villa. Children walked on tiptoes and spoke in whispers, the servants disappeared, dogs stopped barking. Song stayed in bed trying out new cosmetics on her face. And all worried that some tiny noise would rouse the lieutenant and cause him to stagger from his room like a senile grandfather, shouting curses and threats. Into the vacuum of parental leadership stepped Gurmukh, who found from the other children the attention and devotion that he could not obtain from his mother and stepfather. He set up headquarters in a cave near the villa, and deep in the recesses Gurmukh kept his treasures—candles, toys, and clothes for masquerades. Dressing up as somebody else, and putting a mask over his face, these were Gurmukh’s pleasures. “We are in Ali Baba’s cave,” he told his half-brothers and sisters. There were not forty thieves, only one. Gurmukh had brought to Africa the street knowledge of Saigon, and by the time he was twelve, the boy was well known to the police of Dakar as one of the city’s more accomplished shoplifters. Each Christmas, Gurmukh conducted a private party in the cave, commanding all to dress with glitter and imagination, then handing out expensive—and carefully chosen—gifts. They were all stolen. “It’s as easy as catching butterflies,” Gurmukh told his favorite half-brother, André, eight years younger but already a startling carbon copy. “Someday I will teach you.”
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