Glorious Boy, page 16
Naila finds a stone and kills a yellow centipede that’s making for Ty’s foot. Leyo says, “You want now, Mem to come for Ty.”
The way he says this makes her feel for that centipede. She leans forward, chin to knees, tightening her body into a ball. Poisonous, in plain sight.
Leyo’s hand touches her spine. “Soon we reach Buruin. It is beautiful. You will see.”
The next day they skirt two deserted rubber plantations, and the even rows of upright trunks remind Naila of drilling soldiers. There is something ghostly about such careful planting deep in the forest, with no human presence. Where are the laborers? Their villages?
These questions make her think of the maps in Teacher Sen’s classroom. Master the map and you master the world. That is how the British did it. But where are Teacher Sen and his masterful British now? The farther she travels with the Biya, the less use she sees for anything she learned in school.
Her weakness shames her. Whenever she asks to rest, Ekko rolls her eyes. Whenever she or Ty gestures for water, Obeyo speeds up and the little skull bouncing on her back seems to taunt them. Even Kuli and Mam Golat, who are old and wizened, far outpace her.
It isn’t only a matter of strength. The Biya seem also to possess second sight. The men especially can spot a monitor lizard dozens of feet away and spear it almost as soon as they see it. Obeyo and Ekko know exactly which dead tree trunks hold black honeycombs, which thorn bushes hide ripe clusters of edible berries. All of them seem able to sleep in places and positions that leave Naila crippled, yet they wake from deep sleep at the first hint of danger, as the boy Tika did the third night out when he plunged his knife through a giant python that Naila didn’t see until she woke, hours later.
Just get us through this march alive, she pleads to her parents’ spirits.
Finally, on the fifth day, Leyo pauses and says, “There.”
But he seems to be pointing at a wall of stone. “Do we climb it?” Naila asks.
He just smiles and motions her and Ty closer. The rock has a flat face, with diagonal stripes of red and black. Now, here is something Teacher Sen did teach her: geological stripes like these show the age of stone, millions of years thrusting up from the earth. The thought makes her feel so insignificant that it is almost a comfort.
Ty runs around a corner at the base and disappears behind a stripe that juts in front of the others. When Naila catches up she sees that time has etched a hidden corridor to the top. Generations of Biya must have carved the rough steps inside. They are layered with leaves and mud, but Kuli uses his walking stick to stab out a path.
The climb leaves Naila breathless. At the top she bends forward, unable to focus. The others stream past her to a tall protective overhang, a stockade of trees, and Leyo peels Ty off his back so the boy can run after Artam.
“Look.” He takes Naila’s hand and pulls her to the front of the ledge.
As they face south, a slim blue lip of sea appears beneath the eastern clouds. Below the sea, however, another kind of ocean rolls, its green swells rooted to the earth. Here and there, golden threads mark rivers snaking through it, and the sky above them seems alive with a pure, sweet light.
Leyo places his palms on Naila’s shoulders. “Here,” he says, “we are safe.”
For the first three days Shep and Baird were left more or less to themselves, with water from the tap, a meager supply of rice, some scraps of coal in the kitchen stove. Apart from tenko morning and night, their captors seemed to have no further plans for them.
Now, on day four, Shep wakes to a fragrance wafting up from the kitchen. Toast . . . and coffee?
The reflexive wave of pleasure quickly turns to concern when he hears Baird’s voice below. Someone has come.
He eases down the stairs and peers through the interior dusk.
“But you say no one was hurt.” Alfred leans a hand against the dining room wall and talks into the kitchen where a male figure wearing local garb—far too broad-shouldered to be Pati—stands with his back to them. Beyond, a normally shut door yawns into the little valet’s room off the kitchen.
The man in the kitchen turns and limps forward, hands Baird a cup, and looks past him to Shep.
“Doctor saab.” Abraham slaps his palms and heels together in a caricature of respect.
“Our hosts have taken pity on us.” Baird gestures with his cup, which drips from a hairline crack. “Abraham has come with provisions. And news. Apparently, there was quite a kerfuffle in Aberdeen yesterday afternoon.”
Abraham’s hangdog eyes regard his former employer. Without the old white jacket, his striped blue shirt belongs to no uniform but still smacks vaguely of a convict’s. He watches Shep with unnerving calm.
“However did you draw this duty, Abraham?”
The scruffy chin slides left, right.
“Is there by chance a saucer in there?” Baird indicates the drip, and Abraham shambles back into the kitchen. Baird drops his voice. “Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we? I’m sure it wasn’t too difficult for Buco to locate your bearer.”
Or, by extension, Baird’s own. Pati has gotten away, then.
The dining room’s furnishings consist of two straight-backed chairs missing cane in the seats. They pull these together and perch on the frames. Abraham reappears with a mismatched cup for Shep, two slices of burnt toast on one tin plate and another for Baird to use as a saucer. The pretense strikes Shep as ludicrous, but their eating, it seems, is to be conditional on Abraham’s presence.
“Go on with your story, then,” Baird says, too lightly. “Some Japanese soldiers cut loose and ruffled young Sunny Ali’s feathers.”
“The sawmill clerk’s son?”
Abraham snorts. “Ruffled his feathers! Funny one, Saar.”
“Didn’t mean to steal your thunder, Abraham. Go ahead.”
The man stands with his fists on his hips as if experimenting with a new pose. “They were some mad caps, these soldiers. Very naughty boys, they are catching chickens, entering houses. Some are being very dirty with the ladies, you know, and Sunny has three unwed sisters. When the soldiers come to his father’s house, Sunny tells to those soldiers, go away from here! But the soldiers, they laugh and cut nasty jokes. The women folk are hiding in the back of the house. Poor Sunny, he was most perturbed. He got a gun.”
Baird groans. Abraham nods emphatically. “He is shooting this gun up into the air to make the soldiers go away.” He tugs on his mustache. “But in no time those soldiers are returning with many more. Then Sunny can see the errors of his ways. Out the back of the house he is going.”
Shep wouldn’t have thought Abraham capable of such a volume of English spoken with such energy. But surely this story has nowhere good to go. Sunny Ali is still just a boy, a good batsman, a loyal brother whose disposition lives up to his name. After Shep took his appendix out two years back, the family made him a thank-you gift of a rare albino Malleola, with blooms like ladders of pearls.
“The soldiers are bringing hand grenades. To Akbar Ali they say, ‘Give us your son, or we destroy everything.’ Ay, the womenfolk are shrieking, and other soldiers are setting fire to the house where they think Sunny Ali is hiding, and soon this fire is spreading to other houses. All the town is in danger.”
“That poor boy,” Baird murmurs.
“Poor boy!” Abraham raises his voice so suddenly that the back-door swings open. He sucks his teeth and raises his hands. “Sorry. Sorry.”
The soldiers glare at the two frozen prisoners, the abject servant. One uses the tip of his bayonet to fling Baird’s empty cup against the wall, but eventually they withdraw.
“Fortunately,” Abraham murmurs, “Narayan Rao has a good head.”
“The police deputy.”
“Ha. Before, and again, I think so. He is going to the authorities, and he is persuading them to give time for the people to douse the fires. Then he is coming back to say to Akbar Ali, ‘Sunny has gotten us into this mess. Sunny must surrender himself for the greater good.’ And he will, I think, yes he will.”
“How old is this Sunny?” Baird asks.
“Just twenty.” Shep’s reply surprises the other two. “I treated him a couple of years ago. He’s a good boy.”
That afternoon, they are taken back across the harbor, back with the rest of the town to the clock tower square, only this time their wrists are cuffed, and a numbness threatens, like sleeping sickness. The heat makes the air taste of tar.
Two soldiers bring Sunny Ali through the silent crowd. Colonel Buco is in charge, no sign of Shimura. The prisoner is tied to one of the hitching posts that encircle the clock tower.
The tower is a tribute to the million-plus Indians who died fighting for the British in the “war to end war.” Shep catches Baird looking down at the commemorative plaque and suspects he’s thinking the same thing.
Sunny has the same round, trusting face that Shep reassured before delivering him to ether. The boy smiles now at his father, who stands wringing his hands, and at his weeping mother. He wiggles his ears at his mates from school, who grin at his defiance. Even here and now, for Sunny the occupation is an abstraction. Asia for the Asians.
“Treason!” Buco thunders without preliminaries. The Japanese soldiers tighten ranks. An outer ring stands shoulder to shoulder to prevent any interference from the locals. Between the khaki shoulders and booted feet, Shep can see the inner ring closing. “Jujutsu!” Buco cries.
The boy trapped inside lets out a scream as the huddle yelps forward. Then come the audible snaps of tendons, the slam of boots into bone.
The bindings cut into Shep’s wrists as he strains against them. Across the square the jewel merchant Farzand Ali crouches with his palms together, eyes wide and pleading. Dr. Durant.
The title, the training, a travesty.
Sunny’s mother collapses as the boy’s screams turn into the squeals of a dying animal, then cease abruptly.
“Look you!” Buco points.
The heaving, bloodied attackers draw away from their victim, now folded around the post. One arm hangs dislocated from its socket. The boy’s skin, underneath a slick of red, has turned the blue of Waterman ink. His eyes have swollen shut, his nose collapsed, and one side of his skull sinks into a concavity the size of an orange. His head lies at an unnatural angle, and when his chest lifts, the sound that issues forth is a shattering.
One of the soldiers throws a bucket of water, and the puddled torso jerks. Buco barks an order, and three unsullied recruits from the outer ring move into position around Sunny’s quivering body.
After the rifles fire, the crowd does not make a sound.
VI
April 1942
Claire has been training in Barrackpore for a week when Roger summons her back to Calcutta “for a chat.” She prays this means that he and Viv have turned up more useful information than she has. Maybe they were right. The pulsing constancy of Ty and Shep’s absence, combined with the sudden intermittent blindingness of their spectral appearances, wrenches her out of sleep and hounds her with guilt. She longs to lose herself in concentrated purpose. To do what one can. God knows she tries. But the futility of the effort comes at her from all sides.
Despite the impressive sound of Eastern Wireless Signal Centre Intelligence School “C,” her induction into the Temporary Women Assistants has effectively buried her in the arcane rules of cipher and call signs and operational codes. Practice and policy. School. On the plus side, the Signal Corps’s functional hieroglyphics tend to blunt memory almost as effectively as they do imagination, but she’s starting to despair of ever being allowed to do more than collate data. And even if she were assigned to an intercept room, she’d as likely be sorting through messages from Burma or Malaya as from Port Blair.
During the eighteen-mile gharry ride, as the rig clops and creaks along the river, the apparitions taunt her. Shep stands hand in hand with Ty and paces along the embankment. Naila wades into the water. Who does Claire think she is? All three of them ignore her. She failed her family, then left them to die. Now, in Barrackpore she’s even removed her wedding ring. No one here knows about Shep and Ty. She can’t bear to speak of them. Her four roommates in the Nissen hut have husbands and fathers in the Navy, and more than a few of her fellow trainees have husbands fighting in Burma, but she has no common ground with any of them when it comes to Ty. At the very thought of admitting to strangers that she left her child in enemy territory, her throat turns to stone.
“Shukriya.” She pays the driver and steps down into the bustle of Dalhousie Square. She’s never been to Roger’s office before. Aside from his having some sort of bureaucratic authority, she really has no idea what he does. Welcome to the war effort, she thinks.
Roger’s secretary, a well-starched blonde, takes one look at Claire’s road grime and asks if she doesn’t want to “freshen up.” Of all the pointless things to want, Claire thinks.
“If you don’t mind—” She motions toward the inner office.
“But, they . . .”
Only then does Claire notice the flush behind the secretary’s freckles, the lightness of her primped curls, her nervous glance at the mahogany door, behind which conversation mutters. Someone else is in there with Roger and Vivian.
Though she knows better, hope propels her. She thrusts open the door. And all conversation inside stops as Claire finds herself face to face with Port Blair’s Police Chief.
Denis Ward. Sunburned, in tropical mufti, perched in an overstuffed club chair.
Claire’s gaze races around the room: Vivian to Ward’s left, then three empty seats, and Roger, advancing. No one. No one else.
The drawn white curtains behind Ward move like liquid air.
Roger comes, puts an arm around her and steers her to a seat across from Ward. “You know each other . . .”
It really is him. Only him. “You escaped,” Claire manages.
“By the skin of our teeth.”
Closer now, Ward looks diseased. And that chair is much too big for him. Beneath the peeling boiled-shrimp skin lurks the frame of a cadaver. The ghoulish grin of one, too.
“They d-didn’t even have a proper compass,” Roger says. “Had to navigate with a hydrographic sextant. Nobody’s ever made it across before in a boat that size. Sharks, mines, squalls, G-G-God knows what—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Viv jumps in. “What you need to know, Claire, is that Major Ward left Port Blair with three others in a small fishing boat four days before the invasion. And he saw Shep just as they were leaving. Right, Major?”
Ward nods slowly, his opaque eyes trained on Claire’s.
Roger hands her a glass of lukewarm lemon water, which she empties without tasting.
An electric fan alternately purrs and hiccups in the corner. Traffic dins outside. The dulled light trembles.
“Go on,” she says.
Ward reaches to the low copper table between them and dislodges a small envelope from beneath the lacquer box that was securing it from the fan’s slipstream. “Shep gave this to me on the jetty.”
“He really didn’t think they’d m-make it,” Roger says.
“Frankly,” Ward agrees, “no one did. But then they were all still betting on another ship.”
Claire receives the envelope. She stares at its grimy vellum, the water stains and wrinkles. She pictures Shep on the Phoenix Bay jetty, thrusting this paper at Ward, of all people. She watches him reach with his other palm to cradle Ty’s dark crown and prevent his wandering off. She imagines the bustle on the landing around them, the blaze of sun on stone, the eyes of all those left behind, watching and wondering, still expecting safe passage.
“Tell me what you know,” she says. “That day. My son, how did he look?”
Ward sets down his empty glass. “Your son?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“I’m sorry. I assumed . . . With everything else going on, it was every man for himself, but word still got round.”
Vivian leans forward. “What word?”
“Far’s I was concerned it was only a rumor, but . . .” Ward presses the heels of his hands into his knees. “I heard Shep spent days searching all the way down to Rangachang. They said he found a sandal on the beach there, but that was it. I’m sorry, Claire.”
Her thoughts accordion, pressing and pulling what passes for facts and information. Even if she could trust Ward, even he admits this is nothing but hearsay. Shep’s wire came through that very first night: Ty and Naila both safe.
He must have been searching for something else. A way out.
But then, why wasn’t Ty with him at the dock? Surely, once Shep found him, he’d never let their boy out of his sight.
Then the bellows stop. Ward got out before the Japanese landed. Shep and Ty did not.
“Read,” Vivian urges.
The envelope lies in the pleat of her skirt. She turns it over, and the sight of her name in Shep’s hurried scrawl nearly blacks her out. She lowers her head, gets her bearings, and starts again.
The unfolded note consists of just four blurry pencil lines:
My darling, if this reaches you, know that I love you.
Eria —
And here a grease stain obscures a couple of letters. Then:
— Kurzii
God save us all,
Shep
“What do you make of it?”
She looks up to find her sister-in-law staring expectantly.
“It’s some kind of code, no?” Roger says. “Latin, surely, but nothing that seems to make sense.”
Of course, they’ve already read it. Now they’re treating it as a game—an occupational hazard she’s become familiar with at Barrackpore. The codebreakers celebrate their breakthroughs with cheers that echo through the plaster walls. Claire never knows precisely what constitutes a victory in the enemy tracking rooms, but she marvels at the capacity for pleasure among people who, presumably, have just divined the coordinates of a bombing raid or a new aerial target.
