Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  Gunodhar Samonto, who was living by a canal in Kalikakundu at the time of the cyclone, named the men he knew who died during the famine: Behari Das, Gobindo Das, Bhuson Jit, Hori Jit, Pawnchom Jit, Haradhon Khan, Madhob Khetua, Nityanando Pramanik, Pawnchom Pramanik, and Madhob Rai. Among the female fatalities he recalled Poribala Acharjo, Saroda Acharjo, Surobala Acharjo, and Sagori Giri. Almost all the able-bodied of Kalikakundu had left their homes and trekked to Calcutta to look for employment, he said. Saroda Acharjo’s three sons found jobs in the city’s wartime factories, and Moni Giri’s sisters Gyanoda and Kulobala also got work, in the brothels.

  Gourhori Majhi of Kalikakundu was eight at the time of the cyclone and living in another village. The family’s hut had fallen, but they had forded the floodwaters to reach a higher house. The starvation started right away, for there was no rice to be had. “Everyone was crazed with hunger,” he said in 2005. Whatever you found, you’d tear it off and eat it right there. My family had ten people; my own stomach was wailing. Who is your brother, who is your sister—no one thought of such things then. Everyone is wondering, how will I live?” For months the boy fed on boiled patalawta (leaves and vines), kochudata (yam stems), and seeds of durbo ghas (lawn grass). “There was not a blade of grass in the field,” he said, because everyone was searching them out for their tiny grains. While Gourhori’s body grew skeletal his stomach had ballooned, a marker of approaching death.

  He would eat at the gruel kitchen, where “the food was like water.” The family had sold its utensils and would accept the soup in cupped leaves, but others would snatch even these out of their hands. The child was fortunate, though, in that his swollen belly caught the eye of a gentleman with the relief operation, who called him aside. “He gave me a few grains of rice and watched me eat them.” Day after day for months the man had fed him, in secret and a little at a time, so that the boy slowly recovered. Tears coursed down the cheeks of the seventy-one-year-old Majhi as he remembered this unknown savior.

  Mani Bhaumik lived in a village near Tamluk. His father, Bhaumik would write in an autobiography, was a former schoolteacher who had become a nationalist and therefore rarely dared to come home. Sometimes the police would show up instead, to search for the fugitive and to ransack the house. Once an officer smelling of sweat and cologne called Mani a “wog” and hit him in the face. But the eleven-year-old was fortified by the love of two remarkable old women.

  One of them was Matongini Hazra, who lived alone in a nearby village. Married at twelve to an old man and widowed at eighteen, she used to eke out a precarious living by husking rice. Many years earlier, when Mani was only a year old, his father had led a procession that had wound by Hazra’s hut, and she had run out to join it. Since that day she had been a freedom fighter and a friend of the family, and would sometimes bring the boy some pithe, or crepes with sweet fillings, that she had made.

  One evening in September 1942 Hazra arrived with a plateful of pithe and, seating the boy on the doorstep, fed them to him by her own hand. Her eyes had a strange fire in them. She told him not to worry about his father, to trust in God, and to always do what he most fervently believed in. When he grew up he would live in a land that was free, even if there would still be a lot of struggle, because “nothing comes just because you want it . . . you have to fight for it. And you have to stay on the right path.” She blessed him and walked into the night. The next day, September 29, she died in a hail of bullets.

  The other woman who profoundly affected Mani was his grandmother, Saroda Devi. After the famine began, the family started receiving mysterious bundles of food—millets, yas, kolai lentils. His father must be sending these, Mani presumed. Still the provisions were not enough for him, so his grandmother began to give him her portions. Each evening she would lie down, enervated, and stare “listlessly at the light coming through the cracks in the door,” wrote Bhaumik. “I knelt by her side and clasped her bony hand, sharing in her secret plot to make one life from two.” Someone must have told Mani’s father that the old woman was doing badly, for he managed to visit just before she died. Bhaumik went on to finish school and college, get a doctorate in physics, migrate to the United States, co-invent a laser used for corrective eye surgery, and live as a millionaire in Malibu, California.5

  “AFTER THE FLOOD we started a vegetable garden,” said Chitto Samonto. His family owned less than a half-acre of land, but because many of the local people had died or wandered away, fields all around now lay fallow. There the brothers sowed pumpkins, squash, and watermelons. In three months they started to get fruit, which they boiled and ate, long before it could ripen. “Otherwise we had coconuts and some boiled kolai,” he said. These lentils, which when freshly picked resemble tiny green peas, are a valuable source of protein but contain few calories. “We would gulp everything down with water,” Samonto remembered. They also boiled and ate stems of yam, fleshy stems of vine, leaves and seeds of tamarind and other trees, seeds of grass, and stringy whole kolai plants, which were normally fed to cows. Occasionally they drank palm sugar mixed with water. Finding and processing food often took more energy than one could get out of eating it.

  For much of that time the family had an extra mouth to feed. Chitto’s elder sister was married to a postal officer in Calcutta. But after her ten-year-old daughter had died of some illness, her husband had taken to abusing her, so her father had brought her back to Kalikakundu. Many of the poor were selling their land jawler damey—as cheap as water—in order to buy rice, so the husband then bought almost twenty acres in a village not far away. He carried a badge that kept him safe from the police, and he would sometimes visit his estranged wife. “He praised the British all the time, said they were civilized,” recalled Samonto. “One time he was coming along the fields to our house, cursing Gandhi loudly. Our boys from the underground government”—here Samonto grinned—“caught him and took away his watch, ring, and bicycle.” Chitto’s father recovered the valuables and sent them back to his son-in-law, who never ventured that way again. Near the end of the famine the sister was fortunate to get a nurse’s job in a faraway town.

  “My mother wouldn’t eat—she would feed us,” Samonto recalled. “Still, we were like skeletons. Sometimes I would just sit around and cry.” About five months after the flood a gruel kitchen opened in a neighboring village, but its soup “wouldn’t fill your belly.” Later some relief materials were distributed at Geokhali, eight miles away, and Chitto and his brother trekked there to collect it. “Some days it would take me two and a half hours to get there, I was so weak. They gave us rice, half rotted and with worms inside—it had been sitting around in a storehouse. The two of us brothers would come back with five kilograms for a week. But there were four of us in the house, it wasn’t enough.” In normal times a youth such as Chitto, who worked in the fields, would eat a kilogram of rice a day.

  One night in the rainy season, the police surrounded their house. Chitto and his brother were not involved in politics at the time, but they had been in a crowd who watched while the Tamluk militia had taken away a local bandit, Kalo Khan, alleged to be one of the violent criminals who had been released from jail when the Quit India movement began. Many of these ex-convicts informed the police about fugitive nationalists, which may have been why Kalo Khan had been targeted—Samonto did not know. But the police investigation into the death named forty-four perpetrators, including the two brothers.

  The first time the police came it was daylight, and the brothers had seen them and hidden in the fields. The second time it was night, and the police were suddenly at the front door and also at the back: they could not run. In any case, Chitto’s brother was in bed with inflamed tonsils, and something in his throat had burst, filling his mouth with blood. Fortunately, in place of the dreaded Nolini Raha were two gentlemanly police officers, and Chitto’s parents had pleaded their sons’ innocence. “My father had been a well-known teacher, everyone respected him,” said Samonto. So the policemen removed Chitto’s nam
e from the charge-sheet, but said that his brother should surrender when he recovered.

  Later that year Chitto trekked with other village youths to Geokhali to excavate canals for a food-for-work program that gave them wheat and a little money. On the way he would pass many bodies dumped by the canal, with dogs and jackals feasting on them, a grim reminder of what awaited him should he falter. Sometimes the beasts attacked the living, and not everyone had the strength to fend them off. In November 1943 a journalist took a boat seven miles down a canal in coastal Midnapore and counted on its banks at least five hundred skulls and skeletons, most picked clean by dogs and jackals. “The entire place looked like an abandoned battlefield,” he wrote.6

  “My father was old—he stayed at home,” Samonto said. “My mother would work in the fields, in pouring rain or blinding sun, tending to the vegetables or planting the rice she had saved. It was extremely hard labor.” Somehow she found the resolve to refrain from delving into the seed grain while her son sat around sobbing with hunger: she would have been able to plant it only after the monsoon arrived in the middle of 1943. “A mother’s love is unstinting,” Samonto concluded. “Her care is what allowed me to grow up.”

  IF IT TOOK love to save a boy, it often took sex to save a girl. Innumerable families in Bengal survived by means of what one social worker, speaking at a meeting in Calcutta in January 1944, described as “mass prostitution among village women.” Some mothers, wives, and daughters remained in their homes, feeding their families on rice they exchanged for sex with anyone who had access to the grain. Others went, or were trafficked, to brothels in the cities or near military encampments, where they serviced war profiteers or soldiers waiting to be sent to the front. As Clive Branson noted with disgust, army cantonments featured officially sanctioned brothels. A 1944 survey found that 90 percent of the 30,000 women serving in the military labor corps at Chittagong in eastern Bengal, ostensibly digging ditches and building runways for the war, were suffering from venereal disease.7

  Saday Maity and his wife, three daughters, and two sons were Chitto Samonto’s neighbors on the west side. They possessed very little land. The storm had broken their small hut, after which the family had built a shack on a nearby mound. “One day a well-dressed city man came by—he was looking for the Maitys’ house,” Samonto said. “I pointed it out, and asked who he was. He replied that he was their relative, come for a visit.” The man was in fact a pimp, and he bought one of the daughters. Not seeing her around, the neighbors later asked Maity what became of her. “He said he couldn’t get anything to eat and had sold her.” What the neighbor had obtained for his daughter Samonto did not know. “She was very pretty,” he said quietly.

  During the famine of 1943 Pawnchanon Das was living in the same hut where he had been born, some 150 yards from Samonto’s. His father had died in the spring of 1935, soon after selling the family’s one-and-a-third acres of land, and his sister had perished soon after, leaving only him, his mother, and a younger brother. On the night of the flood, when the waters rushed in to collapse their hut, the family had fled to their cowshed—but one wall of that structure also fell down. Two of their six cows were washed away, as well as a big earthen pot in which the family stored salt. Times were hard, Das said: “My mother was begging around.”

  Pawnchanon, sixteen at the time, patched up the hut with bamboo. An influential local man arranged for the family to get relief materials from a Hindu mission: some rice and wheat, pots and pans, a metal spatula for cooking, and matches. Even better, his mother secured all the half-rotted rice salvaged after the flood from a small plot belonging to a landowner. “My mother would husk rice at a zamindar’s home five miles away,” Das explained. “One of the landlord’s sons said, ‘See if you can get anything out of this wasted rice, take it, and go.’ We got the rice stalks crushed under cows’ hooves to release the grain, and swept up six sacks. Me and my brother carried it away before the old man got home. He might have objected.” They stretched the rice out through the famine year, while his mother continued to husk rice in better-off homes and bring back her small portion.

  “In this village forty or fifty people died of hunger,” Das remembered, qualifying that he knew only of what had happened in the southern and western regions of Kalikakundu, not in the northern or eastern ones. “My relative Bhim Das died. He had some illness, the ‘doctor’ here said he needed a hundred grams of rice daily. Of course there wasn’t any. I had a large pumpkin ripening on my roof. One morning I saw part of it was gone. He’d eaten it.” Bhim Das had left a wife and young children; what became of them Das did not know.

  Their neighbor Saday Maity had indeed sold his daughter, Das said, and not just one daughter but two. He had three to begin with, Das added. The eldest he had married off to an old man sometime before the flood; but the two other girls, of perhaps fifteen and ten, he sold during the famine. The agent was a poor local, Gokul Jana, who had a sister in Calcutta’s red-light district. According to Das, Jana brokered the sale of eight or ten girls from Kalikakundu.

  One of Maity’s daughters subsequently visited her parents, accompanied by a well-dressed man she said was her husband. “She had jewelry on, and a fine sari,” Das remembered. The couple stayed for two or three days. The trafficked girls were likely the only members of the family to have made it through the famine, because sometime after that visit the Maitys left and never returned.

  OTHER LOCAL GIRLS survived because they were adept at housework and childcare, and so had several uses in the desperate village economy.

  At the time of the famine Giribala Malakar was teenaged and married, living in a nearby village. “I was innocent when they married me off, unknowing,” she said. Her husband was a chowkidar (watchman) and helped carry sacks of grain for the relief operation, but even then he earned next to nothing. “We sold everything to buy food,” including their utensils, she recalled. The couple would eat boiled spinach, when they could, off plates made of baked clay. After her husband died, Giribala fled home to her original village of Bilaspur, only to find that her father, too, had perished of hunger.

  Giribala’s mother managed to marry her off again—“so I would live”—to a man in Kalikakundu. There were no gifts: only the bride changed hands. The groom’s first wife had just died, leaving two small daughters, and it was Giribala’s task to look after them while her husband searched for work. Soon the new husband also died; and back home in Bilaspur, her mother and elder brother succumbed to starvation. “It saved my life, getting married,” Malakar said. “If I’d stayed at home I wouldn’t have survived. Things were worse there than here—all the neighbors were suffering and dying.” Of the family she had left behind, only a younger brother made it through the famine. Malakar herself survived by living in people’s homes to work as a maid and even managed to save her two stepdaughters.

  She was only eleven or twelve at the time of the flood, said Tukibala Das Odhikari, who lived in a Vaishnav hamlet of Kalikakundu. Although her sect worshipped Krishna and rejected the dehumanizing barriers of caste, it was evidently subject to other perversions of the time. For Tukibala was then already married, to a man she described as “having grown old.” That was how things were in those days, explained her neighbor in 2005: once a girl turned ten, she had to be married to whoever would take her, or villagers would ostracize the family.

  At the time of the flood Tukibala was with her husband, in a village not far away. The two lived alone, for he had no relatives. Water poured in through their window that night but failed to bring down the hut; nor did it spoil their grain, because they had none. The hut was built on land owned by a wealthy family: the husband and wife were therefore proja, she said, using the word for king’s subjects. They were required to work for the family as servants. Sometimes they got rice in return, stretching out a kilogram to last two or three days. At other times, when her husband was gone, either working or looking for work, Tuki would be alone at home. Then the girl would breakfast on boiled spinach,
gulped down with water—“even spinach I couldn’t find on some days”—and trek to a gruel kitchen for a mugful of soup, bringing it home for a late lunch. At least she found food often enough to stay alive. Her sister, she later learned, also managed to survive, by trekking with her baby to Calcutta.

  A family with the surname Bera, which lived to the east of Chitto, had sheltered with the Samontos on the night of the flood. Their hut destroyed, Haradhon Bera decided to move, with his mistress, his two grown sons, and their wives and children, to the immense mangrove forest south of Calcutta known as the Sunderbans. Some zamindars were trying to reclaim the land and were inviting migrants to chop down forests and settle down. But a cholera epidemic had broken out. Doctors were in demand and, boasting some knowledge of medicine, Haradhon Bera hoped to find employment there.

  Virtually all the Beras died of cholera in the Sunderbans. Only the old mistress and one of the sons’ wives returned one day in the middle of the famine. “They arrived with their pots and buckets tied up in rags, back to their old home, and started wailing,” recalled Samonto. “Everyone gathered to hear what had happened.” The younger woman had lost her husband and daughter but was pregnant; she soon gave birth to a boy she named Kangal, meaning destitute. (The word may derive from kankal, for skeleton.)