Spit and Polish

by Carl Muller

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Fourteen days number ten.’

  This was, in the book, one of a numbered scale of punishments. Number ten, any Navy will tell you, is the pits. A number ten offender rises half an hour earlier than the others to be set to work; always eats half an hour later than the others; has to sign a punishment book every hour and is made to labour on, one hour after the final ‘lights out, pipes down’. Also, depending on the choler of the Platoon Commander, the offender could be kept on very hard labour or be given arms drill. It was usually arms drill, and quite vicious at that.

  Todwell was briefed. ‘Fall in outside your hut at oh-nine hours. Number eights with pack.’

  Todwell grimaced. Besides the blue number eight work uniform, he had to be togged in boots, puttees, webbing, backpack and carry his rifle. It has always been said, ‘The .303 rifle weighs only nine pounds . . . but when one has to carry it over one’s head and run, it becomes ninety pounds in next to no time.’

  The backpack was stuffed with nice-sized rocks. The Platoon Commander eyed Todwell sourly. ‘Okay? You’re ready? Don’t try to pretend you’re going to faint or anything. No bloody nonsense with me. High port arms! Double quick—march!’

  And Todwell ran and ran, and the rocks at his back made his shoulders scream and his wrists groaned and the nerves at his elbows knotted as he held up his rifle and ran and ran and ran. Behind him came the PC. Hup, hup, hup, hup. But he took it, and Nugawira said, ‘They must be thinking they can drop us. We’ll show these buggers.’

  Todwell was a hero. He would come into the hut, the nerves on his neck swelling, face flushed red. His mates rallied round. He found that his boots had been polished, his bunk tidied. There was even a tin plate of food, smuggled out of the galley, in his locker. The days passed quickly enough and Stores Assistant Stembo was the next to wear the laurels when he crowned AB Jayasena with a bucket, and took up punishment where Todwell left off.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Todwell said, ‘only ten days. I got fourteen.’

  Stembo glowered. ‘Never mind that, wait, will you, next time I catch that bugger . . .’

  ‘But what, men, hit with a bucket! Lucky you didn’t kill him or something.’

  ‘And half full of caustic soda, the bucket,’ Carloboy said.

  Winnie cackled. ‘Should have seen, men. Clouds of caustic in the corridor. Jayasena put a scream and fell. Lucky he got it on the top of the head. That bugger’s head is like a coconut.’

  ‘I told the CO the things he said,’ Stembo gritted. ‘I was sweeping outside the store. Bugger is coming, looking and saying, “Your sister taught you to sweep?” I said, “No, but even at home I won’t sweep like this. This is for women to do.” Then he’s telling, “So tell your sister to come and sweep. You have only one sister?” and I said, “That’s not your business.” What does he care if I have a sister or not? Bloody vul1 bastard. Then telling he likes to fuck my sister!’

  Stembo had been beside the bucket of soda when Jayasena had stated this preference. Hence, he said, it seemed the only thing to do. He hurled the bucket.

  ‘Relax, men, once we pass out, none of these buggers will try their nonsense. Hey, today’s Wednesday. Van Dort will come.’

  Van Dort, the seediest of the characters who came aboard the good ship Rangalla, was the civilian fruitseller. Dutch by name, a Sinhalese at heart, he revelled in telling his recruit customers of how he got his name. The boys would listen to his account of the many detours he had to take when descending the family beanstalk with chuckles. Van Dort spared no one, least of all himself.

  It appeared that his father was a British sailor from HMS Highflyer2 who had come to Diyatalawa for two weeks rest at the Royal Naval Rest Camp, HMS Ella. Van Dort’s mother had been quite pleased. She had brought forth a fair, mousey-haired baby that was much commented on in the village she lived.

  ‘Years and years my mother to me name did not give,’ said Van Dort expressively, ‘I knowing not what to me calling. Everyone telling basket, basket and telling my mother no shame. In town when I walking, women finger pointing and asking, you also white one like your father have? My father who, I am asking. I also don’t know, no? My mother, when I’m asking, father went saying. Where went? Fine thing, no? Father just going like that. To me even not telling.’

  ‘No, men, your father put a jump and went,’ Carloboy said, ‘went before you were born, even.’

  ‘That’s a fine thing, no? Then father don’t know I am who?’

  The boys nodded. ‘Daft’ Fernando stuffed his pockets with the man’s peaches.

  ‘Here, here, how many took? Count and see. Ten cents each.’

  ‘So, Van Dort, you didn’t go to school?’

  ‘What school? Birth certificate without, to school to go how? Mother said never mind, go and work in a bangalawa3. Gentleman’s name Van Dort. Lansiya4. Nine years worked. One day I’m sixteen almost, Van Dort gentleman telling you buggeroff. I don’t know this buggeroff is what. Afterwards to me someone telling buggeroff is palayalla5. I asking what is this buggeroff you’re telling and then saying now his daughter is big and I to stay can’t . . .’

  ‘How, nice daughter?’

  Van Dort creased his forehead. ‘Nice I think. Now married and Bandarawela living. Children have four. When I Bandarawela go to ali pera6 bring, I go to see.’

  ‘So never mind all that, how you got the name Van Dort?’

  The man chuckled. ‘So I’m to my mother going. I said now for Van Dort master working can’t. Money to me gave and buggeroff said. Ammo7 mother very angry got. Shouted and saying you are man now, you earning how? So I this selling fruit started. Then I thought my name also Van Dort to say. How? I also white, no? Like Van Dort gentleman. Ammo! Van Dort master very much angry got, but now to me every one Van Dort saying.’

  Ordinary Telegraphist ‘Bijja’ Fernando considered the man seriously. ‘Adai, Von Bloss, how if cut his hair and put him in full suit? Real Burgher, no?’

  Carloboy nodded slowly. Here he was, in the mountains of an island that, for one hundred and fifty years, was under the British Raj. Around him as far as his eyes swept, were encircling peaks, their slopes upholstered with tea. The sun glinted on the silvered roofs of tea factories and blushed on the red-painted galvanized iron of planters’ bungalows.

  Beyond Rangalla was HMS Ella, where British seamen came to rest after their stints at sea. Yes, there were many such as Van Dort. This was the region everyone called ‘Little England’. In it lived the damnedest racial concoctions—a monument to that all-important ‘Service to the White Sahib’.

  It may be just as well to dwell on these mountains for a while, considering the large tea estate populations and how Sri Lanka in the years past and to this day came to be stuck with what are considered ‘people of recent Indian origin’.

  The Dutch brought in slaves from South India, each bearing the VOC8 brand, to work the fields of Jaffna. The British, too, found that the only way they could make this new colony pay, was to open up the mid-country forests and later, the montane jungles, first for coffee, and later, tea. They set out on a massive land-grab.

  The native Sinhalese retreated, muttering darkly. Their lands were compulsorily acquired at the absurd price of a shilling an acre and that, they were told, was the law!

  This meant, of course, two canny bits of legislation: one was the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1840 whereupon every square inch of unsettled land became the property of the Crown, to be parcelled out to white settlers and planters. Then came the Waste Lands Ordinance, which was worse. A white sahib could look over a Sinhalese aristocrat’s ancestral property and sniff.

  ‘You call all this your land? Rhubarb, man. This is waste land. What have you got here? Some coconut and a couple of jak trees and betel vine and what is this? Runner beans? And these things? Edible leaves! Good grief! These fellows will eat anything!’

  It was hard for the avaricious British to understand the Sinhalese, who had always maintained that a
man who had a jak tree and a cow was a happy man. Soon, the ancestral property was acquired. It is waste land, the British maintained, and allowed to be so, it was land going to waste!

  The Sinhalese were most annoyed, and more so when they were told that they could come back as labourers and work their own lands—their lands—which were now white plantations. Those who did return to-work, out of sheer economic necessity, remained ill-disposed to the white masters anyway, and it was generally opined that Something Had To Be Done.

  Letters found among old estate records told of this white man’s burden. The British expected docile, tractable, submissive ‘coolies’. They found the Sinhalese a bunch of lotus-eaters, and belligerent to boot.

  This has not changed much, and there is the favourite story of the seventies of how an UN Agency, full of pep and fizz, introduced hand-tractors to Sinhalese rice farmers. The experts demonstrated the ease with which a field could be ploughed.

  ‘See, with this you can plough your entire field in one morning. How long does it take you with those mangy buffaloes?’

  The farmer spat a stream of betel juice, examined the sky, and said, ‘Two days . . . but if that Joro drinking too much toddy in the morning, sometimes three days even.’

  ‘So there you are. Now you just hold here by the handles, and go! No more Joro, no more buffaloes and by afternoon all the work is done. Good, no?’

  The farmer bobbed. ‘You tell and give how to do?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Now this is the tiller . . .’

  The next afternoon the UN Agency fellow rolls up. He rubs his hands. An acre field, beautifully, near-artistically ploughed. The hand-tiller, all red and silver and knee- daubed in mud, idles beneath an Indian almond tree. And under another tree sits the farmer. Joro is with him and between them are large clay pots of foaming toddy.

  They wave.

  ‘But why aren’t you working? What about the other field, and that section over there?’

  ‘Ah, that can wait. Tomorrow—no—day after can do.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Oi, Joro, why, he’s asking, hee hee hee.’

  ‘Hee hee hee,’ Joro agrees.

  ‘Now two day’s work finished, no? So after two days can do summore.’

  ‘But—but I thought you can finish the ploughing and then do something else.’

  ‘What else? Ammo, if go to work like that everything get upset. Now see, if I go and tell the woman work finished and so came home, another kollappang9. Coming home early, she will scold, not enough children we are having?’

  (Exit UN Agency man, muttering brokenly.)

  No, the British did not like Sinhalese labour. But over there, in India, there was an abundance of human resource. It was the simplest thing of the times to organize a system of slavery that masqueraded under the guise of ‘indentured labour’.

  In the mid 1800’s, living conditions in south India were God-awful. And the Scots, who were predominant in the tea gardens of Ceylon, had no scruples about dragging in anybody who could do their dirty work. For the South Indians, Ceylon was ‘El Dorado’. So, when the British sent agents to India to conscript labour, there were hordes of takers. The British were happy. They had cheap, very docile ‘coolies’. No thank you, they told the Sinhalese, we don’t want you any more. We have South Indian Tamils, and we can bring them in their thousands. Shucks to you!

  It is not a pretty story. Records have it how the South Indians poured in. Little armies would trek to the south Indian coast, bearing all their earthly possessions. They were dumped into frail boats—vallams or dhonies10—and ferried across the Palk Strait. Many were sick, all half-starved. Those who died were fed to the sharks; arid then, from Ceylon’s north-north-west, the long march. An agony for flute in A minor.

  Jungle footpaths, elephants, snakes, leeches, diarrhoea, malaria, foul water ... It is said that packs of jackals followed them, waiting for the sick, the dying, who were left behind to be devoured. Many days it took: days of bleeding feet, retching, griping, dazed with fever and weariness that bored into their very bones, and then they would fall and lie, half-dead, to be borne in open railway trucks into the biting wind and the cold of the hills. The ragged disembarkation . . . the mountain trails, the ravening attacks of leopards and the blood of many in the tall grasses of the slopes.

  Carloboy eyed Van Dort bleakly, and he thought, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ With an excellent pass in the senior school certificate, qualified for university entrance, what the hell was he doing in this uniform, receiving a monthly pittance of fifty-two and a half rupees? And what the hell was Van Dort all about? A British father, a Sinhalese mother, a borrowed Burgher name ... a fruit-selling bastard. . .

  He shrugged. At eighteen, he had a lot to learn about life. He gave Van Dort a rupee. ‘I’ll take some guavas, those big yellow ones.’ At least, he thought, I’m not an estate coolie.

  Coolie is, the writer suspects, a word of Anglo-Chinese origin. It’s a dirty word now, but the British called their labourers coolies and the word was adopted by the remnant Burghers as well. Rickshaw men were rickshaw coolies. The shit-cart men were latrine coolies. Dora Herft would accompany her husband to the Manning Market and make her month’s purchases of sundry provender. ‘See, child, and tell a coolie to carry all this to the buggy,’ she would tell husband Rodney, who would snap his fingers and say ‘Oy!’ to the human packbulls who, like the latter-day DHL, carried anything anywhere.

  Yes, indentured labour was the greatest evil sown by the British in Ceylon. But they had no qualms. They housed their sick, starving, shivering coolies in leaky, thatched huts and then in grimy ‘coolie lines’—rows of eight-foot square rooms with corrugated roofs, where twelve were crammed into each room, huddled for warmth, and still they were content that there loomed before them a secure future.

  They were each given a ‘ticket’ to this future—a registration slip, virtually a passport. Also, with stern reminder that the white sahib was God, a discharge ticket too. Any peralikaren11 was simply given his DT.

  Absolute power led to many evils. Pretty daughters were fair game. They were not forced. They were simply told, ‘Come on, my girl, just raise that cloth and lie still ... or do you want me to give your father his DT?’

  Young bucks who vowed vengeance when they learned that the girls they wished to marry had already been raped by the white periya dorais and sinna dorais12 were singled out for horsewhipping. The stables usually had thick iron rings fitted into the wall. Coolies were chained, wrists and ankles, and lashed, then ‘sent to the coast’ for a term. This meant being banished to South India, forced to leave everything behind, until bid to return. He would come back, a much changed man who would sit and watch and raise not a murmur, even as the sinna dorai fucked his wife and daughters.

  Yes, Little England had much evidence of this Service to the White Sahib. Strange racial potpourri. Chocolate skins and grey-blue eyes; gold tints in dark-brown hair crowning swarthy faces; fair-skinned women with lustrous opalescent eyes; dusky, green-eyed girls with long black hair. They were different and paraded their difference—hundreds of women, faithful to tradition, plying the world’s oldest trade, schooling their daughters in this art of give and take.

  Later, commercialism crept in to make it take and give, and many panting males were told to pay first and then indulge. Scots blood, let it be said, is most careful blood.

  6

  History—The Japanese-INA War Machine

  Subhas Chandra Bose had much in mind for the functioning of the Ceylon Department and the Lanka Unit of the Indian National Army. He addressed many letters to Gladwin Kotelawala, especially on the Spy Training Unit in Penang, and wished the Ceylonese to be wholly involved.

  Bose did not need to spell it out as far as his plans for Lanka were concerned. He made it clear that the independence of Ceylon was a logical sequel to the independence of India. India came first.

  As such, there is no mention in any of the literature of the IIL or the INA on
the independence of Ceylon. The primary goal was freedom of India. The Ceylonese would be required, if necessary, to fight in India for India. Every Ceylonese who enlisted had to sign a pledge. He had to solemnly swear and sincerely dedicate himself to India; pledge his life for India’s freedom and promise to serve India and the Indian Independence Movement to his fullest capacity, even at the risk of his life.

  The Ceylon Department was housed in Singapore’s Bukit Timah road. It’s aims were to (a) enlist as many Ceylonese as possible as members of the Independence League, (b) look after the interests of all who enlisted, (c) collect funds from the Ceylonese in Malaya on behalf of the IIL, (d) impose property taxes on Ceylonese in Malaya (this was determined in consultation with the Singapore Rear Headquarters of the IIL and the Kuala Lumpur branch), and (e) select a team of Ceylonese youths for sabotage and infiltration work in Ceylon.

  This latter was what many of the younger Ceylonese recruits found to be a tangible demonstration of what lay ahead. They would actually go up against the British. They were first trained by the INA and then transferred to Penang where the Japanese gave them further instructions. They were told that they would be taken to Ceylon in Japanese submarines.

  The Ceylonese of Malaya were now part of the Japanese-INA war machine. The young volunteers were first trained at the Non-Commissioned Officers’ Training Unit of the INA, by an Indian Tamil officer of the Madras Sappers of the British Army. This officer had stayed to join the INA when his unit had withdrawn from Malaya during the Japanese invasion.

  The recruits went through it all: marching, arms drill, use of pistols, .303 rifles, sub-machine guns, Lewis guns, LMG’s, anti-tank guns, grenades and explosives that were manufactured in Hindustan as well as in Japan. They also had lessons in geography and map reading. They were deemed ready and were passed out on March 22, 1944.

  The Japanese also took some of the Ceylonese into their own units, the Hikari Kikan and the Iwakuro Kikan. The former served as a spy-liaison unit between the IIL, the INA and the Japanese Army. The latter was a sabotage unit on Penang island . . . and from these units did trained Ceylonese go to the east coast of Ceylon, put ashore from Japanese submarines. They went to their deaths, betrayed to the British in Ceylon by some Ceylonese in Malaya, but for a short, sharp hour, they did do what they had pledged—fired perhaps the first real shots in their island’s struggle for independence!