Glorious Boy, page 15
“Calcutta knows the port’s been taken,” Shep says.
Baird nods toward North Point. “Lutty. Before he blew up the station.”
March 24, 1942
Next morning after tenko—roll call with the ritual bow to the glory of the Emperor of Japan—the three prisoners are herded back on the ferry to Aberdeen, then marched through blistering heat to stand at attenion in front of the clock tower.
A few minutes later Shimura and a shorter, bulkier man wearing army insignia arrive in Wilkerson’s Standard saloon, a red sun now fluttering at the prow of its yellow hood. A ring of Japanese soldiers surrounds the prisoners, but at a signal from Shimura their ranks part to reveal the residents of Port Blair, quiet and unfettered and gathered lower down the hill. They include the last of the inmates from the Cellular Jail.
Shep scans for the darkest faces, skipping over the oldest and youngest, just barely registering the grinning fervor of the boys who press closest. He drops his chin to make his search less obvious, but he saw no sign of his would-be guide yesterday during the surrender, and if the tracker is here now among the spectators, he’s making himself invisible.
Just as well, Shep warns himself.
Standing on the saloon’s running board and speaking through a local interpreter, Shimura introduces himself as the Commanding Officer of Japanese Naval landing forces and his companion, Colonel Buco, as Port Blair’s new Civil Governor.
Shep stares at the translator: Nabi Bux is the one-eyed durzi from Ross Bazaar who used to set up his sewing machine on their veranda and, at Claire’s direction, stitch sunsuits for Ty. The very shirt he’s wearing was sewn by the man now translating the Japanese order to bow.
Then, looking away, Shep finds himself in the familiar crosshairs of Abraham’s scowl. The former cook is positioned just to the left of Nabi Bux—suspiciously close to their new Japanese overlords. Ingratiatingly close.
Buco pumps his fist in a violent gesture at the three “Ingrish.” He has a raw, wide, belligerent voice. If the restrained Shimura’s task is to cool the crowd, the Civil Governor’s must be to whip it up. He wears a sword and draws it with a jab toward Wilkerson, whose old blue eyes wither in reply.
Buco seems to consider last night’s air raid a personal affront. He announces with relish that the Chief Commissioner, as highest ranking British military officer, will be leaving Port Blair on the next outgoing vessel for a prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore.
Wilkerson doesn’t move, and Buco makes no mention of the other British captives. Instead, he waves his arm toward the bottom of the square, and his troops push the townspeople to make way for the four hundred Indian soldiers and police who were to have been evacuated, with Wilkerson and Baird, on the doomed S.S. Norilla.
Now Buco speaks in English for the benefit of all British India: “Today is liberation for our Asian brothers.”
Abraham trips forward in his haste to seize the moment. Buco lifts his chin, and Shep’s erstwhile servant raises a small red flag adorned with the leaping tiger of the All India Forward Bloc. Triumph burns in Abraham’s eyes as he leads the chant. “Inquilab Zindabad! Asia for Asians!”
Buco signals the Indian service members to join in shouting the slogans. All eyes are on their Commissioner as the troops comply, hesitant at first but then with more vigor as local youths and former convicts add their voices. Like a conductor with a baton, Buco waves his sword for more, and soon the cries blur into a victory roar.
“Inquilab Zindabad! Free India! Inquilab Zindabad! Azad Hind! Inquilab Zindabad! Asia for Asians!”
Only when the noise has reached a pitch that verges on hysteria, and Wilkerson’s expression has emptied of its last vestige of pride, does Buco slice his blade to the ground, silencing the breathless celebrants.
The local community now regard the Japanese with ardor. Their bodies sway forward, palms pressed in reverence, and tears streak the most aged faces. Children are hoisted on shoulders. The Indian forces have capitulated. Buco and Shimura gravely return their bows. It is a staggering performance.
Lt. Shimura steps up and, without acknowledging the slightest irony, addresses the troops in English—now Port Blair’s only common language.
“Japan is friend of India. All Asian brothers fight together. We are brotherly people. European rule no more! Indian brothers, welcome. Together, we build co-prosperity.”
He salutes, and a garbled rumor snakes through the ranks, but before anyone can move, Shimura lapses back into Japanese, signaling his own soldiers to form cordons. Nabi Bux relays the instruction for Asians to move to one side, Eurasians to the other.
The lieutenant offers a benevolent wave as the uniformed Asians fall back among the convicts and their families. Nabi Bux translates that those whose parents were Bengali, Tamil, Agri, Burmese, Malay, Sikh, Muslim, Parsi, Hindu, or aboriginal will be free to live in peace as citizens of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. “Asia for the Asians!” he concludes, and the happy majority cheer on cue.
Then Shimura points for the Eurasians to line up in front of Wilkerson and Baird. His command reminds Shep, standing behind the two officers, of a typhus quarantine when he was a boy at school. Three of his classmates who seemed perfectly well were made to line up and go off with the sick children. None of them returned. His memory of the boys’ stunned faces fuses with those of the two dozen men now shuffling reluctantly toward him. Many could pass for Asians if looks were the only criteria, but the occupiers doubtless have gathered as much information about the soldiers as his school doctor had on the boys.
The thought reminds Shep of Baird’s remark last night about Tom Lutty. Tom was not one who could pass, and between his pedigreed lineage and his signal skills, he’d be a prize catch for the enemy. As Shimura drones on, Shep scans the downcast segregants and tries to view his friend’s absence with hope.
He comes back to attenion as Nabi Bux announces that anyone with English, French, Danish, Dutch, or Portuguese paternity will be punished as an infidel. Yet another set of sons, Shep thinks, to be cursed for the blight of their fathers.
The clouds let loose as they’re ferried back to Ross, rain cascading off the Benbow’s tin roof. Shep relishes the downpour. At least this will stop them probing the jungle.
Across the harbor, invisible through the storm, Wilkerson is being taken onto one of the cruisers. His only goodbye was a slight inclination of the head and a mournful glance at Baird, who’s served him ever since his arrival in Port Blair nearly a decade ago.
Shep never had much use for the Commissioner, Claire even less, as he defended the right, might, and presumed invincibility of British rule. Still, arrogance ordinarily dies hard, and Shep would not have anticipated that, of the two, Baird’s the one with backbone.
False promise, the tempest ends as capriciously as it began, and sunshine gashes the clouds as the men trudge back to the house. Upstairs, the room Wilkerson vacated offers a view of the mainland, where Aberdeen glitters with fresh activity.
Shep curls his hands into binoculars. It’s like trying to read the current through waves, but he can make out bulges of khaki moving store to store, clustering around toddy shops. More brightly colored knots of locals—presumably many of the same who this morning hailed their “liberators”—now hang back or surge at those looting their homes and businesses.
A barely audible murmur draws him from the window. At first, he thinks Baird must be talking with one of the guards, but the tone is all wrong. And the location.
He moves cautiously along the upper balustrade. The door to the rear bedroom is closed. The whispering comes from inside. He inches the door open.
A small man in a red-checkered shirt and white sarong squats on the floor, closely facing the kneeling Baird. At the Burman’s stricken expression, Shep pats the air and steps in.
The major sits back on his heels. “This is Pati. My boy.” The diminutive is spoken with such affection that it transcends servitude. Pati, a wiry man of middle age, watches Baird as if to memorize him.
“How did he get in?”
“While everyone was in town. He says the Japanese have posted sentries down the coast as far as Rangachang.”
“Your house is down there, isn’t it?”
Baird shrugs. “The other servants fled. I told him last week to go north to one of the settler villages.” His voice dips, and Pati looks down at his clasped hands. A bundle, unopened, lies on the charpoy behind him.
“He’s not thinking to stay here?” Shep is aware that the man doubtless understands everything they whisper, yet it seems less intrusive to speak as if he didn’t.
“He’ll have to, for the moment.”
Shep weighs his options. Barely a week ago he drove to Rangachang and asked everyone he met along the way for information about Naila and Ty. He conspicuously “found” one of Ty’s sandals on the point below Baird’s bungalow, but he didn’t see Pati there.
“Are there other landing sites?” he asks. “Are they moving to the interior?”
Baird and Pati confer. Shep lacks the major’s fluency in Burmese, but he gathers that the invasion, for now, is focused on the Lambaline airstrip.
Baird unpacks the provisions Pati has brought him: pork jerky; cellophaned candy; soap; toothpaste; one toothbrush; a neatly folded pair of striped pajamas, and one small blue towel. Shep winces at the intimacy of these last items and averts his eyes.
“Mind if I take the front room?”
The major’s arm grazes his boy’s shoulder as he gestures. “Take some of this with you. There’s a loose plank in the floor of the closet.”
Alone, Shep gnaws a sliver of jerky. Out front the rickshaw buggies are back in use, laboring up the crosswalk with Japanese officers as passengers. Behind them follows a train of porters lugging crates, jars, bottles, and trunks. It looks as if the Chief Commissioner’s residence is about to be reopened—for Buco’s occupation.
Shep leans on the shadowed wall back from the windows. With luck Pati could still slip away tonight after dark. He probably has a canoe tucked in one of the ocean-facing coves.
He risked his life for Baird, but he won’t come again. Baird won’t allow it.
Naila wakes to the low patter of talk while Ty is still asleep. Impossible to make sense of the Biya language, but after a minute she recognizes the rasping voice of the elder, Kuli, and then the low, swaying chords of a second speaker. She leans out the flap of the tent that Doctor saab sent for her and Ty to share.
She must be mistaken. What would the town layabout be doing here?
In Port Blair, Porubi often sings as he stumbles down the alley behind the Browning Club or urinates on the clock tower. Sometimes his garbled songs sound dirty and he’ll waggle his tongue at passing schoolgirls. From across the street you can smell the filth of his clothes, the fumes of toddy on his breath. What could this fool have to say to Kuli?
As soon as I’m sure when the next ship will be here, I’ll bring you back . . . A thousand times in these last days she has pictured Doctor Shep striding into camp and swinging Ty Babu onto his hip. But how would he get here? It never occurred to her that, with Leyo here, Ty’s father might need another guide to lead him, or to come as his messenger. Of all people, Porubi—and yet, who else?
She can hear the headman grunting softly in response to whatever Porubi is telling him. Then a third voice joins in. Leyo.
“Come,” she rouses Ty, pulls him yawning into her arms, then steers him outside and across the clearing.
Leyo’s attention is fixed so intently on Porubi that he hardly seems to notice as Naila enters Kuli’s lean-to and slides down with Ty beside him. Her boy lays his head in her lap, watching Mam Golat stoke the fire. The others are just emerging from their huts and pay scant attention to the conference at Kuli’s. No one else seems surprised by Porubi’s presence, but Naila cannot get over how changed this man is.
His body is still and sober, none of the loose-limbed flailings he displays in town. And although she can’t decipher the conversation, she can see that Porubi’s message is grave. He talks steadily for several minutes, and Leyo and Kuli do not interrupt.
At last he falls silent. Kuli nods, and Leyo turns to place his hand on Ty Babu’s chest. But his words are meant for her.
Leyo says, “We must leave here.”
March 25–30, 1942
And almost in the next breath, it seemed, they were marching north—all of them—away from Behalla to a place called Buruin, the Biya’s monsoon camp, where Kuli said they must go to be safe. They packed up everything but the huts, and the women, under their burdens of pots and baskets hanging from forehead straps, grumbled at Naila and scowled as if it were her fault they were making this trek in such haste, in the worst heat, before the early rains arrived to cool the journey.
Leyo and Kuli both insisted that she and Ty were now in danger if they remained in the south. But how did they know this? They had only crazy Porubi’s word.
She staggers along, head swarming with questions, protests, complaints. Doctor Shep, a prisoner? If the Japanese come and find the boy here, they will take us all prisoner. Of course, Leyo said this, but that did not make it possible. The Japanese won’t take Asians prisoner. Asia for Asians, Abraham said. But how to make sense of this, when her own ma told her, The English will never leave.
If Ty’s father truly was taken prisoner, then he had not left. And prisoners could escape. So many freedom fighters fled into the forest. Surely Doctor Shep, too, would escape and come to find his son. And when he reached Behalla now he would find only rubbish. Then what?
“Why are we trekking to a place where Doctor Shep cannot find us?” she asks Leyo when they stop to rest.
“Porubi will guide him.”
“Porubi! He is a nothing. A no one! What does Porubi know? And where has that crazy man gone, anyway?” He had left Behalla even before the rest of them.
Leyo folds his arms and turns away from the girl Ekko, who is stretching her nakedness, fingertips to toes, directly in front of him. He says to Naila, “Porubi has gone back. He will see what the Japanese do. He can find Doctor Shep and if he will escape, Porubi can bring him to Buruin.”
This does little to calm Naila. Ty is no help, either. He seems to enjoy this misery.
He is changed. Gone is her Ty Babu, his white ways shed like the skin of a snake—quickly and utterly. He rides Leyo’s back as Artam rides her father’s, and as they ride, these little ones send each other signals the way she herself and Ty used to. Spotting owls and butterflies, orchids and spiderwebs. Dancing with their arms. Ty, the boy who would seize upon a single pebble and not budge for an hour seems now eager to look here, there, everywhere, as if his habit of concentration also has been shed.
But no. The longer Naila studies this new Ty—which she does as much to keep her mind off her blistering toes and choking lungs and looming fears as to make sense of her boy’s cruel contentment—the more she realizes that he has not lost his concentration but only trained it on his new friend.
Artam is his fascination now. And his personal guide and companion. When Artam smacks her lips over a snack of dried grubs, Ty does the same. When Artam lets her mother inspect her for ticks and leeches, Ty waits his turn, and when Imulu removes the blood suckers—with the same glass blades that she uses to cut hair, both children hold as still at the resulting streams of blood as if watching a moving picture. Repulsive as Naila finds all of this, she tells herself she had better do at least as well—unless she is willing to leave him to these people.
At that, with darkness falling and no end in sight to their journey, she lets her thoughts sink into quicksand. Asia for the Asians! Why not? If the boy is so happy, let him stay in the forest, but nothing keeps her here. Doctor Shep said that danger from the Japanese is only to Ty and himself, not to local-borns. Not to fellow Asians. She doesn’t really know what this means—“fellow Asians.” She doesn’t even know why the Japanese are at war with the British and Americans. She once had a tooth pulled by the Japanese dentist in Aberdeen, and all she can remember of him is the smell of ether and the white cap his attendant wore, like an island floating in darkness, and the way their eyes stretched, long and narrow, so that she wondered if they saw the world differently than she did, but no matter, because they cured her of her pain. Her ma said they had taken good care of her, so maybe she could go back and ask the dentist and his assistant to take care of her again. She could find her way back to the ocean, then follow the coast to town. She doesn’t know if the dentist is still there, but at least in Port Blair she would find normal food and air she could breathe and people who spoke her—
Leyo, at her back, touches her shoulder and says they are stopping for the night. Around them the forest closes like a seething black storm. She looks up into this cauldron of darkness and snaps back to her senses. She could no more find her way to the ocean than she could find the moon tonight.
She meets Leyo’s troubled gaze and nods to let him know that she understands. She has no choice. She will not run. She will not leave Ty Babu or pretend that anyone else in the world would choose to save her.
“Ty Babu is ours now,” Leyo says as he sinks beside her, “and we are Biya.” He smiles as the boy joins Artam and Sempe in digging a fire pit. Camp consists of mats beneath a giant elephant plant and a pit to contain the flame that Kuli carries with them in a clay pot. Artam helps Mam Golat mash the taro root with honey for their meal.
Leyo adds, “The neem oil makes him anyway dark as you.”
It is true. But for the green of his eyes, Ty could almost pass for an Indian boy. She fingers the globe and the star at her throat.
“But what about Mem? She is not taken prisoner, and Mem visited many times to Behalla. She will come looking.”
“No.” Leyo motions for her to drink from the canteen that Ty has passed back to them. “Only British soldiers maybe will come.”
“So, the British fight Japanese, then the Japanese will go and Doctor and Mem can come.”
