A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  Just to see the old man’s writing spread across the page, was to touch a friend. But the contents appeared as remote as news of another planet. The sense of distance from those very issues that had sustained and directed his life, filled Tilik now with a new consternation. He was no more than a piece of driftwood pitching about on an ocean, without a shore in sight. India was far away. He got up and paced the room.

  Michiko had returned to Japan, and was living in Tokyo with her family. She was about to give birth to their child. Her letters were also with him. He pulled her last one from a pile, glad to know that someone missed him. But her news seemed trivial after Rash Bihari’s and distant from the reality of things as he knew them.

  We wait every day for the fall of Nanking. Each district has everything ready. There are to be special noodles to eat called Nanking Noodles. At night each district will hold lantern processions in celebration. All the children will carry lanterns. In the dark they will form a great swelling river of light. It will be beautiful. Imagine, all over Japan and its colonies, the same processions will take place to celebrate the fall of Nanking. How happy the people of China will be, to be free and under benevolent Japanese rule at last. It is all so exciting, and to think that you are there!

  Tilik put away the letter. Michiko knew nothing but what the newspapers told her. Even if the true facts were known, who would dare speak out against authority? He felt even more depressed. Here in Nanking everything appeared surreal. He was safe in his tiny room while outside his window people died, shot at like clay pigeons. He remembered Colonel Kato’s face only hours ago at Military Headquarters. He remembered Prince Asaka’s flinty eyes and felt a new deepening of fear. He focused on the window again.

  A distance away stood an open truck. He saw now what all the commotion had been about. Twenty women or more were crushed in the back of the vehicle. Soldiers stood about, bayonets at the ready, flashing them at the terrified women. Suddenly, Tilik stiffened. Before the truck, in the road, women were already being raped. Soldiers had set upon the hysterical women like a band of rutting hobgoblins. Tilik stared at the gross tangle of limbs and the crazed screaming women. He turned, his heart beating in shock.

  He ran from the room and down the stairs, but before the door he halted. If he went out, would they stop? Perhaps the soldiers would shoot him. Then he heard the grate of gears. The truck was already driving off, its captive cargo huddled in the back. Already the incident was over. He went back upstairs and returned to the window. In the street two women lay bleeding from bayonet wounds; another ran off in escape round the corner. Slowly, people crept out of their houses to help. Tilik found he was shaking and sat down on the bed. He had done nothing to stop the terror. He had been as helpless as that day in Amritsar.

  Then he had been nineteen and living with his parents in Delhi. His father had been called to Amritsar to advise an old friend on a law suit. Tilik had accompanied him, for he had never been to Amritsar. They arrived to find a city of smouldering emotions. Two famous Nationalists had been arrested; the town was mad with anger.

  ‘The British opened fire and killed many people. Now General Dyer has arrived to take charge of things. He has a bad reputation,’ their host explained.

  Tilik remembered the question of college had been the bone of contention between his father and himself the following day as they made their way to Jallianwala Bagh, to a meeting the elder Dayal wished to attend. Tilik wanted to study in England like his father, either accountancy or law but, in thrall of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas, his father refused to consider study abroad, or even a Western-style university in Delhi. A Hindu university was all he would allow.

  ‘These British institutions are citadels of slavery. There the white men begin our training for slavery. Do you want to push a pen in an office, to be the victim of business and industry, to be an unwitting tool to further build their imperial, degenerate civilisation?’

  ‘Many men who have received Western education still serve India well. Are the Nehrus slaves to the British? Are you? Is Gandhiji?’ Tilik raged.

  ‘We have survived it. I am saving you the struggle,’ his father announced. ‘The British Empire today represents Satanism, and they who love God can afford to have no love of Satan.’ People clogged the narrow road behind them. They were pushed forward until they reached Jallianwala Bagh, as if entering the great body of an octopus through a narrow tentacle.

  Jallianwala Bagh was an irregularly shaped wasteland. The crowd was immense in the hot afternoon. Under a peeple tree was a well and near the centre a shrine. Peasant families, in Amritsar for the festival of Baisakhi, with no interest in politics, had camped in Jallianwala Bagh during their stay. Tilik and his father settled near some old men throwing dice. They were a distance from the speakers’ platform, but had a good view of the rising ground at the end of the enclosure.

  The meeting started with a condemnation of the firings on innocent people. As poems to the dead were read, men played cards or gossiped. A monkey in a pink satin skirt turned somersaults at the end of a chain before a group of children. The short swords the Sikhs wore flashed in the sun. A hermaphrodite quarrelled with a beggar. The arch of the sun approached the horizon, and shadows stretched longer under the trees. The peasants waited, hoping for some entertainment after the politics.

  ‘Now someone else has arrived,’ Tilik’s father announced, observing the stir about the entrance.

  It began without warning. Soldiers appeared. They marched into Jallianwala Bagh and were deployed by their commander along the length of the rising ground. They were Gurkhas and Baluchis with long rifles. Before them strutted an Englishman, stiff in his uniform, barking orders. His hue was deep as a pomegranate; the sun sparked on his many brass buttons.

  The Gurkhas and Baluchis raised their rifles and at a command began to fire into the crowd. Bullets sprayed out like a shower after a crack of thunder. The crows in the trees rose up at the shock, squawking and flapping. The children about the dancing monkey lay dead, the hermaphrodite fell by the beggar. Buffalo stumbled, bleeding. Men ran towards the entrances blocked already with trampled bodies. They scaled the walls of the garden, clambering one upon another, and were picked off like clay ducks on a fairground stall by the marksmen. Children ran screaming across the ground, women rushed to the well and jumped into the darkness. Bodies were heaped one upon another, suffocating those still living. The Englishman marched behind his soldiers, directing them to fire where the crowds were thickest. From the windows of houses overlooking the gardens, people watched helplessly.

  ‘Why is the Englishman not stopping them?’ his father gasped. He gripped Tilik’s arm.

  ‘Because it is he who is giving the orders,’ Tilik screamed above the chaos.

  His father had suddenly thrown himself down, pulling Tilik with him. Stretched out beside him Tilik prayed to survive. The echo of guns rattled through the earth, ricocheting in his head. Above Jallianwala Bagh the crows circled, their cawing drowned by the fire. He opened his eyes and saw blood in a pool about his father. A man fell upon Tilik, then another. The weight of the bodies crushed his chest, the stench of their blood filled his nostrils. The firing went on and on.

  At last it stopped abruptly, as if ammunition had been exhausted. The soldiers turned and marched back into the alley behind them. There was silence in Jallianwala Bagh. Tilik struggled from under a pile of bodies and pulled his father free. The crows returned to the trees, settling back with loud grumbles. The wailing of children and the cries of the wounded filled the silence. He did not know his father was dead. All about him lay bodies, like the pictures he had seen in history lessons of the battlegrounds of wars.

  ‘Why is there no doctor? Why can nobody help?’ Tilik yelled.

  A man stepped forward from the shadows, his turban askew, his teeth chattered in shock. ‘He has given orders that nothing be done for the wounded.’

  ‘Who has given orders?’

  ‘The Englishman. General Dyer.’


  ‘But the wounded will die.’

  ‘That must be the intention.’

  ‘Why has he done this?’ Tilik sobbed.

  ‘That we do not know.’

  Tilik raised his head. For a moment he was unsure of where he was, until he looked out of the window at a group of people carrying the wounded girls off the street. The memory of Amritsar still absorbed him powerfully. He knew suddenly what he must do.

  The next morning he went searching for the Russian woman. He walked quickly to keep warm. A cold wind cut about his neck. Ash on the roads covered his shoes, and settled like black sawdust between his lips. If it snowed, he thought, even the snowflakes would be black. He remembered the recent vibrancy of the town as if in an old photograph. Now bodies lay at every corner. There was an order to let them lie, as an example to others. An example of what? Stiff, bloated heaps of discoloured rag, poxed by bullets, slashed by bayonets. Tilik could not relate them to life. He kept his head down. The smell of death impregnated the town. It grew steadily riper each day, making him retch. It blew in through windows, pervading his dreams. He burned sandalwood incense in his room, but nothing held back the abominable odour. If they did not clear the bodies, disease would soon begin.

  He looked up and found he stood before the hospital. He pushed open the door and breathed in with relief the smart of disinfectant. Immediately, he felt safe. Before him the corridors were lined with people. They stared about vacantly, faces wiped clear of all expression. Nurses hurried about, white uniformed, like small pertinent birds on a seashore of driftwood.

  ‘Where is the Russian woman?’ Tilik asked. He was directed up flights of stairs, along more corridors, until he stood before Nadya. After a brief glance, she made no further effort to acknowledge him. Tilik shifted his weight apprehensively from one foot to another, observing the curve of her back as she bent over a patient.

  ‘They think you are a spy.’ He blurted it out at last, like a stone that was stuck in his gullet.

  She shrugged, not raising her eyes from the young woman whose wound she dressed. ‘To all people, all Russians these days are spies.’

  The ward was crowded with people and beds. And yet there was a calm and cleanliness unknown beyond these walls. He had been returned to the order of a recognisable world. Nadya made no conversation but proceeded with her work. Tilik hung about awkwardly, unwilling to leave. The sun shone into the ward and set aflame Nadya’s hair. Tilik stared anew at the incredible sight.

  ‘What happened to your windows?’ he asked, looking at all the broken panes patched with old newspaper, trying to find a way to make her talk.

  ‘Soldiers came in,’ Nadya answered. ‘Why do you not go? You are with them.’

  ‘What is wrong with her?’ he asked, staring at the woman she tended, taking no notice of Nadya’s remark.

  ‘She was pregnant. She was raped. She went into premature labour. The baby is well, but she is hysterical. She has bayonet wounds. Is there anything else you wish to know?’ Nadya turned upon him angrily.

  ‘I came only to warn you.’ He sought some way to appeal to her.

  ‘I don’t need your warnings.’ She walked off down the ward. Tilik gazed after her, wringing his hands in agitation. Eventually he turned back into the corridor. It was lined with pallets upon which lay the wounded, groups of relatives squatting beside them. He made his way towards the stairs, pushing his way through the crush of people and then stopped. He did not want to leave this place, nor return to Military Headquarters and Colonel Kato’s face. In this orderly world, in spite of the distress it ministered to, his thoughts linked together in a way that had defied him for weeks.

  Until the closing of Nanking’s gates his purpose had not flagged. What happened about him seemed of scant importance so long as it led to the freeing of India from British rule. Why suddenly now did so much crowd up before him? For the first time he saw that Indian Independence was the decision of time and destiny. The immediate judgement of history was here and now in Nanking. He remembered the women in the truck again, driven off to torture and death. He turned and walked back up the corridor. The Russian woman was still in the ward.

  ‘Give me something to do to help,’ he demanded, his voice rising. ‘I cannot work for them any longer.’ He remembered her laughter as she threw him out of the barn, prodding him with the pitchfork.

  ‘There is nothing for you here.’ She turned determinedly to another bed. ‘Have they sent you to spy upon us?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  She looked up at him then, hearing the crack in his voice. He shifted about still wringing his hands. His face had a worn, compressed look. He was not the man she had travelled with to Nanking. She remembered his arrogance in the car, his audacity in the barn.

  ‘All this,’ he waved his arm in the direction of the town. ‘It has changed everything for me.’ Nadya steeled herself not to feel sorry. It was possible the Japanese had put him up to this play-acting.

  ‘You are in their pay,’ she reminded him, crossing her arms.

  ‘Japan supports the Indian cause. And yes, they have asked me to report on you all, I don’t mind telling you. But I cannot sit here while they wipe out this town. I have lost faith in their ideals. The reality of their regime is here about us now. I just want you to know these are my feelings.’ His face was a knot of emotion.

  Perhaps he spoke the truth. These were special times. She tried to detect duplicity. Instead, she saw nothing but the same weight of horror that filled them all.

  ‘I can see it might not have been easy for you.’ She sighed and he appeared to brighten at her acceptance.

  At last he turned away and she watched him hurry down the corridor like a frightened animal. He was not a bad man, however much he might irritate her. Some fragmentation in his life had driven him into exile. Further desperation to survive had perhaps thrust him into places never contemplated. Was it not the same for her, for Martha, and for Donald? Were they not all in exile from themselves? Something similar must afflict the Indian. Why else was he here, fighting for his cause in a foreign land, and not safely in his country?

  15

  Escape

  ‘You went there? Alone?’ Kenjiro asked. A weak sun escaped the clouds and filtered through the office window.

  ‘I told Commander Kato he was an old friend of yours,’ Nadya replied. Kenjiro looked at her in dismay. She had gone by herself to Military Headquarters to plead for Teng. He was thankful he was alone in the room, that the others were not at their desks to hear her.

  ‘And I told you I would see to the matter. Why did you interfere? I received information Teng was not shot with the other prisoners. I know where he is.’ Kenjiro fidgeted with a pencil, his voice grim. Nadya looked at him in surprise. She had expected him to be pleased. Instead Kenjiro continued to frown.

  She had come here, to the Embassy with her information, asking to see him. Fukutake had shown her in and raised his eyebrows in question to Kenjiro. At her news an abyss had opened before him. He saw himself tumbling into blackness.

  ‘I could have gone there like that myself, but it was not the right way,’ Kenjiro replied at last. He could not yet take in the damage she had done.

  ‘It worked,’ she shrugged, unaware of the reality of the situation for him. ‘They did not shoot him. I know he is still being held but, we have time now to find a way to get him out. You got your information about Teng only after I spoke to that commander, didn’t you?’

  He did not bother to reply, staring at her, still fiddling with the pencil. His mind refused to work. ‘Tell me exactly what happened there,’ he demanded, leaning forward over his desk towards her.

  At first they would not let her in. The sentries at the entrance to Military Headquarters had barked incomprehensibly at her. She reiterated the name of the Safety Committee. When that did little she showed them Donald’s press pass stamped by an influential commander, that she had carried with her from Shanghai. It had served her well
on that journey. It appeared to help her again. They had let her through the door.

  The huge building had echoed, its stone corridors freezing. It reminded her of the burial chambers of old tombs. Uniformed men filled its corridors, striding like automatons up or down stairs. She had entered the very machine of death, she realised in a moment of terror; the orders for killing went out from here. Perhaps, she would never leave the place alive. She was escorted up great flights of stairs to a large, well-furnished room.

  An officer entered who spoke fluent English. He introduced himself as Colonel Kato. He seemed a different type from the soldiers in the street. He called for some coffee and listened to her story, nodding in a reassuring way. Lighting up a cigarette, he offered her one, almost as an afterthought. She took it, inclining her head in thanks. Leaning forward to light it, he scanned her face in a familiar way, then dropped his eyes to her breast. Instinctively, she pulled her jacket about herself, but returned his insistent gaze. If some harmless flirtation helped, she was prepared to humour him.

  ‘There should be more men in your army like yourself,’ she told him, daring to be coquettish. ‘Your soldiers are not making a good impression in the town.’ She felt sick to speak with such flippancy of all that was occurring.

  He shrugged. ‘The ranks of any army in times of stress are mostly conscripted men: farmers, fishermen, people of the soil. Command is with career soldiers. You are sure you are not French? I spent some years in France. French women are popular with Japanese men.’

  ‘Why should I lie, you can easily check.’ She felt she had established a rapport with him. Leaning back in the chair she crossed her legs and noticed the red velvet curtains at the windows were covered with dust.