The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  I will not dwell on my early life as it was not controversial, and so I am confident the true facts regarding the years up to the Japanese time will not be distorted. Suffice to say that my father, Henk De Brujn, came to Malaya as a young cadet with a Dutch trading company, but when he married my mother ten years later his firm frowned on the union and let him know in no uncertain terms that his prospects were now limited. This was in spite of the fact that he had abided by all the terms of his employment, including remaining single for two tours of duty. His sin, of course, was that he ‘went native’. My mother, Amrita Ray, was a schoolteacher from a prominent Penang Bengali family, but that counted for nothing. The French were not so narrow-minded and he found employment as the manager of a new oil palm estate near Ipoh owned by Socfin. I was born and raised on that estate, which is primarily why I can now speak Cantonese, Tamil and Malay, as well as Dutch and English, and even a smattering of my mother’s tongue.

  I attended school at the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Ipoh, at which my mother taught, although I was still in primary school when she succumbed to the rigours of childbirth. My father made sure I received the best education possible, attending medical schools in both Singapore and the Netherlands. I returned to Ipoh when war broke out in Europe. My father, who had come to Leiden for my convocation, stayed on in Paris for business reasons, and was caught in the German blitzkrieg of 1940. I am still unsure of the circumstances of his death.

  Before I received news of my father’s apparent loss I had taken up a residency at the Batu Gajah District Hospital. It was there I met Kanthasammy Thumboo, a teacher in the nearby government English school. There had been a case of food poisoning at the school involving more than a dozen children, and Sammy was in attendance at the hospital for two distressful weeks. He was a resourceful and compassionate man, as I witnessed at the time, and reminded me a great deal of my father. I imagine it was that loss that opened my heart to him.

  His own parents were first generation Tamil rubber tappers who came to this country during the early rubber boom. While attending morning school on the estate where he lived near Papan, Sammy worked as a bullock cart driver carrying latex in the afternoons. In this way he earned sufficient to afford himself an education that resulted in him becoming a teacher on the estate before transferring eventually to the government school.

  Sammy and I were married in October 1941, just two months before the Japanese arrived in Perak. At that time I was a resident in the ‘European ward’ of Batu Gajah Hospital, which was a separate (and privileged) building altogether from the rest of the hospital serving the local Asian community. Even before the Japanese made my future at the hospital untenable, I had become disillusioned with my work there. The discrimination in treatment favouring the European ward was difficult for me to accept, as were the overcrowding and lack of facilities in the Asian wards. I witnessed so many Asian patients laid out on the floor between beds, and others becoming seriously ill, even fatally in some cases, from ailments that were no more than minor disruptions to the successful treatment of European patients in my own care. It became only worse under the Japanese. They turned it into a military hospital, with Japanese doctors and staff in army uniform, and all local patients excluded. The only avenue left for me to serve my own people was to open a clinic in the town, which I did in Market Street.

  At the same time, Sammy’s school also fell under Japanese administration. The only lessons approved for teaching were Nippon-Go, the Japanese language, and Nippon Seishin, which means the Japanese ‘spirit’ but really boiled down to undying loyalty to the Emperor. To us barbarians every Japanese was to be revered as a symbol of the Emperor. Sammy wanted nothing to do with this and left to assist me in the running of my clinic. Our patients were almost exclusively poor Chinese, men and women who, as the occupation deprived them of livelihood, often found it difficult to pay. We made the decision early on not to press the issue with any of our patients. Money became useless, anyway, and when we were paid it was usually in the form of barter. The entire economy ran on a black market system for most of the occupation, and our services were no different.

  We existed without particular incident for the first eighteen months. Obviously we all had episodes with the Japanese, however we attempted to have as little to do with them as possible (as did most sensible people) and generally they left us alone. The fact that I was half-Dutch I am sure made me a suspicious person in their eyes, but with the other half of my ancestry being Indian (a race they were intent on cultivating as an ally), and my services being necessary in the town, I suspect they decided to turn a blind eye to my ‘Eurasianness’. Not all Eurasians were so fortunate. The Japanese were suspicious of our loyalties and insisted we wear red armbands, supposedly to distinguish us from Europeans who might escape from their internment camps. In effect it made us easy targets for their random brutality.

  I became pregnant with Paris late in 1943. It was around the time we received that good news that the trouble began. It started with a visit to the clinic by members of the Indian National Army. I saw them only briefly, but Sammy said they were recruiting for the INA, which was a force the Japanese had put together from captured British Indian regiments with the promise to assist them in their struggle to win independence for their homeland from Britain. Naturally Sammy declined, and while I am sure he did not say it to them, I know he regarded them as traitors. We were born in Malaya and our loyalties were to the British Empire.

  The INA had established a military base in Ipoh and everybody knew there were thousands of men in training there, although for what was less certain. Why they wanted my Sammy as a recruit when he had no military training puzzled us at first, but we had established some prominence in the town through our work at the clinic and we suspected that they needed him to set an example to the general Indian population. We also thought that perhaps they were after my recruitment as a medical officer. It was only my delicate condition at the time that discouraged them, I am certain. They did not press their demands and left the clinic without incident.

  They returned a number of times over subsequent months, their demands becoming more insistent each time. They insisted we should make a ‘donation’ to the fund the Indian community was contributing to the Japanese war effort. Apparently the Chinese community of Malaya had raised fifty million dollars for just such a treason, and now the Indian community was expected to follow suit. They seemed to have the impression that, as I was a doctor and my husband also a professional man, we must be better off than we looked. We were not, we assured them. All my father’s funds – his estate – were tied up under the Germans in Paris and Amsterdam, and that of my mother’s family in Penang had long since been appropriated by the Japanese.

  On one visit they came with a Japanese officer and they did not leave until they had relieved us of every dollar we possessed. By July 1944 their demands became overpowering.

  The Japanese had been using the INA in their war against the British in Burma, and in that month had been roundly defeated at Imphal, a defeat that meant the British had saved their Indian colony. The Japanese suppressed all news that did not reflect well on their progress in the war, and this was certainly no different, but short-wave radios that could pick up the BBC were obviously hidden all over Malaya. To be caught with one, even to be caught listening to one, meant certain death, but the way bad news for the Japanese spread, it was obvious that people thought it worth the risk. When the bad news about Imphal got around, Indians in Malaya loyal to the aims of the INA took it even worse than the Japanese. A gang stormed into our clinic early one evening and dragged my Sammy away into the night. I never saw him again, never heard of his fate. I was eight months pregnant.

  In Malaya under the Japanese there was no time for grieving, survival a day to day proposition for too many of us. So many had been lost to their brutal regime, so many without graves or an explanation. With no one to share my grief, the fate of both my parents now weighed so heavily I thought
I would be crushed. My father disappeared and my mother died in childbirth. As my husband had suffered a fate similar to my father, was I soon to follow my mother? Was destiny as cruel as that?

  I was alone with my grief and my fear, shunned by Indians, mistrusted by Japanese. The few friends I had were among the Chinese, who were suffering similar grief, fear and mistrust. Somehow I had to find the strength to endure all this – if only for the sake of my unborn child. I decided it would be best for both of us to leave Batu Gajah as soon as my baby was born.

  Sammy had grown up near the town of Papan, and I had been there with him on occasion. It was an old tin mining town to the west at the foot of the mountains, and long neglected. There were no Japanese there, no police loyal to them, no interest by any authority whatsoever, as far as I could tell. Here we could endure, unobserved and, with any luck, untormented. It was a Chinese town, so I hoped I would be among, if not friends, then at least people who understood.

  There was no money to afford such a move. Fortunately, one of my appreciative Chinese patients offered me the use of a house in Papan, an old Chinese shophouse that was in bad repair, as were most of the houses in the town, but electricity and running water were both connected. It was in the main street, which was more or less the only street, and it backed on to thick jungle. As I had hoped, the townsfolk welcomed the arrival of a doctor, and quickly made the building liveable. I was able to open my clinic on the bottom floor within a week of our arrival, working with the assistance of one of the local women, Mrs Tay, who, although untrained, quickly demonstrated a surprising level of competence.

  The house was separate from others in the street, with vacant lots on either side. This proved to be fortunate later as neighbours never became an issue. I immediately colonised the spare blocks for a vegetable garden to supplement our diet, planting onions, brinjals, beans and cucumbers. We lived upstairs, which was a single rather large room. One of the town’s girls, a reliable fifteen-year-old named Ah Ming, moved in with us to take care of baby Paris while I attended to patients downstairs.

  I assumed the jungle behind was impenetrable, so thick did it appear to the casual eye, but I soon discovered that no jungle is impenetrable. The way I discovered this was the night, only a couple of months after settling in, that I went out the back to the jamban, the lavatory, and received a terrible shock. Standing against the back wall in the pale moonlight was a dishevelled man, a sorry sight of a man, short and squat and so dark I thought I must be seeing a ghost. I was going to scream, I am certain, although the fear must have constricted my throat, and when he prodded the muzzle of his rifle right into my midsection I could not produce so much as a whimper. In such a chilling and ominous way did I make the first of my countless acquaintances with a guerrilla.

  6

  SU-LIN

  Dr Anna Thumboo – the notorious Dr Anna Thumboo – had attended the same school as I! Even though I had known the woman when I was a child, it was a somehow unsettling discovery. Perhaps, I thought, it was due to that very notoriety.

  There were no contact details on Professor Thumboo’s note. I telephoned the college but they were reluctant to assist. I sent them an email stating who I was and as much of the circumstances of my association with the professor as I considered prudent. I had no idea where else to contact him. All he had told me was that he was conducting some research. That could be anything, and anywhere. There were no particulars on the envelope, no record with the clerk that might offer a clue as to its origins. I had so often given strict instructions downstairs to record the provenance of every parcel, package or envelope delivered to me, but the system was a charade. All I could do was wait for a favourable response from the college, or for Professor Thumboo himself to follow up his initial rather mysterious contact. In the meantime, I had his mother’s testimony to read, and my own memories to summon up.

  I can recall the moment I first laid eyes on the professor. He was seven years old and lived in a ghost town. It was the fact that he lived in such a town that kept the memory vivid after all those years. I was so alert to the perils I was sure haunted the place, isolated as it was, and particularly with the Emergency engulfing the country, that even small details left a lasting impression. A small detail like a boy who said nothing but his own name to me, even after an hour spent together, and with a name that made absolutely no sense, left an abiding impression.

  When I climbed into my father’s car that Saturday morning I thought it would be like any other, that I would be accompanying him to his office, but that day I was told we would be going to a place I had never even heard of before. My father had just the one day off a week, and because Ipoh was a Chinese town that day was always Sunday. That was not because the Chinese were especially Christian – Pa used to say that the Chinese had enough gods without Jesus, which I was told never to repeat at my convent – it was apparently because the English were the government and that was the way things were done in England. At school we also had Saturday off, and on those Saturdays when my mother was busy with her mahjong friends, I went with my father to his office.

  That was the way of much in Ipoh in those days: essentially, half English and half Chinese. The half that was English was the large buildings, the tidy parks and the order, and the half that was Chinese was virtually everything else, including the disorder. The large buildings were mostly banks and shops, and I always looked forward to going to such places as I got to ride in the wire cage that creaked past stairs consequently avoided. Only ‘English’ buildings had lifts. The largest of all the shops was Whiteaways, the department store where my mother could spend a long afternoon buying anything from anywhere in the world before having her hair done by a Dutch man, and then meeting her friends in an English tearoom. Most of the Chinese shops were small and certainly did not run to hairdressers or tearooms, and what you could buy in them came strictly from China.

  There was one Chinese shop that was almost as big as Whiteaways, and that was the Lam Looking Bazaar. I always thought it a curious name for a shop if they were encouraging you to buy and not just to waste their good time looking, but my father explained to me that it was actually owned by Mr Lam Look King. He said that Mr Lam had ‘anglicised’ the name of his shop, which took quite a bit of explaining and led him to tell me about an ancient people called the Angles. He said the whole of Malaya had been anglicised, just like the Lam Looking Bazaar, because most things in it were Asian but there was enough that was English about it to confuse people.

  One of the most confusing anglicised things of all for me was the law. I was not the only one to find it so, of course. After all, my father was required to go all the way to England to study it, or ‘read’ it, as they said. It took him five years to complete that reading, and every time I looked at all the shelves lined with law books in his office I thought I understood why. English law was apparently a mystery so confusing it required someone who wore a wig and could expound arcane concepts in Latin, and even I knew Latin was a language hardly anyone else in the world had the first idea about.

  As we left home that Saturday morning Pa said he had to settle some confusion about the law for the Indian lady, the same one I had seen earlier in his office. She lived in Papan, which he said had once been the biggest town in Perak. I found that hard to believe when we arrived, as this was the ghost town, like a local version of something from an American cowboy film.

  The main street had the same Chinese shophouses as those that lined the trunk road in towns we passed through on the way to Penang, although those towns also had other streets that went in other directions. In Papan the main street was the only street and it led nowhere, just came to a stop at the foot of the hills on the edge of the town. The end of the road, my father said about Papan when he pulled up in front of one of the shophouses.

  Many of them were ruins, with gaping windows and doorways and collapsed roofs. Trees grew inside them, pushing out through the gaps where windows had once been, creepers climbed the walls, and
I could see the jungle was already well on the way to reclaiming Papan. The house where we stopped had a solid enough white facade to it, but the creeper-covered sides were bare bricks and the mortar extruded between each row, giving it the appearance of being unfinished, waiting in anticipation of neighbours being built, neighbours that never came.

  The wooden door was open and Pa knocked, releasing tiny flakes of paint that floated down before my eyes and caught the sunlight. From behind a screen came the Indian lady, and I could see now how tall and dignified she was, with piercing green eyes and skin much lighter than Indians I knew, such as Uncle Raja, who was my father’s law partner. He liked to show me his hand, first the dark back of it and then the light palm. Am I black or am I white, he used to say with a grin. I could see that this lady’s face was lighter than the back of Uncle Raja’s hand, but darker than his palm. Inside her house the walls were lined with shelves and glass cabinets filled with bottles. There was a table covered with papers and a high leather couch and a smell that reminded me of painful injections. I followed my father inside, but not without trepidation.

  The lady must have sensed my unease, for she took a sweet from a jar on the table and gave it to me. ‘Would you like to make a new friend?’ she asked. I didn’t say anything, but she called out, ‘Paris, come and meet someone.’

  A chubby-cheeked little boy emerged from a back room. He was darker than his mother and although this was his house, he was very shy. He had in his hands a large book, and we were led to a corner where I was left with this boy while our parents sat down at the table covered with papers. He squatted on the floor and opened his book and I squatted next to him. It was an atlas, and I watched him turn the pages without saying one word to me. Not surprisingly, the maps with lands of few words fascinated him most – lands with vast empty spaces, like Mongolia, Australia, Canada. But words fascinated me, and I cocked an ear to listen to the conversation at the table.