Glorious Boy, page 33
The Japanese must have used this compound for their officers. The once rose-colored walls have been whitewashed, patched, and the garden let go, but the open corridors receive them just as they did after the earthquake four years ago. A few of the club’s original servants are still on hand. They salaam as Claire and Ty enter.
Ty stares at them. Then, without warning, he yells. “Naila! Naila! NAILA!”
The cry fills the courtyards, soars through the rain. Eyes wide and expectant, body taut with anticipation, he peers down the corridor, into the dining room, off toward the stairs.
Claire sees his misunderstanding. This house represents reunion. He remembers staying here with Naila. He thinks his voice can hasten his wish. Before she can console him, however, he reads her face.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I hope with Leyo and Kuli. Remember, Ty, she’s no idea we’ve come back to find her.”
“In the forest?”
“I don’t know. We’ll go there to look for her as soon as it’s safe. But first we need to ask if anyone’s seen her here in town.” She thinks. “It’s like a puzzle, Ty. We have to gather clues before we can find her.”
“Like Kim and his lama.”
She speaks over the knot in her throat. “Yes, Ty. Like Kim’s search for his Holy One. Exactly.”
He accepts the rules of this game then, as he always accepted the rules of the games that Naila laid out for him, and they follow the others into the room that used to be the club library.
The shelves have been denuded, the comfortably overstuffed furniture and teak armoire that once graced it replaced by splintering camp chairs on which they are urged to sit. Roger has invited a group of local citizens in to tell their stories, and they squeeze tightly, creating a steam of warm wet bodies, everyone talking so urgently that Roger holds up his palm. “Speak slowly, one at a time.”
They are men and women and a few older children, harrowed but also lit with fury. Claire searches their faces, recognizing none.
So many horrors, so many deaths, but the worst, they say, came just months ago. Had anyone known, it was only days before the Japanese defeat.
Everyone in Port Blair was starving. Men had been set on fire for stealing a teaspoon of sugar or rice. Fishing—even setting foot on the beach—was forbidden, except in the company of armed guards who confiscated all catch. All the bullocks and water buffaloes, even elephants had been slaughtered for food. Hindus were made to kill the last cows, and cultivation ceased. So, when an offer was made to resettle families and let them fend for themselves on Havelock Island, more than seven hundred men, women, and children volunteered.
They filled three ships and sailed at night, but before they reached shore the guards set upon the passengers with lathis and dhas and flung them into the sea. Then they opened fire. Those who couldn’t swim drowned. Those who could swim were shot or mangled by the ships’ propellers. The returning Japanese sailors swaggered back to their quarters, boasting that no one had survived.
The excitement of outrage heats the room as rain shellacks the windows. No one knew when the war ended! The Japanese admitted nothing! The voices again rise out of control.
Roger promises that General Salomons will dispatch a search party to Havelock tomorrow. Then he asks for names of the missing.
Cacophony.
Ty shouldn’t hear this, Claire thinks, and yet she can’t move. The other children in the room have lived through these nightmares. Naila might well have succumbed to them. How else to explain to him? What are the rules?
Ty, for his part, ignores the hysteria. In his own focused fashion, he is approaching each of the strangers individually for clues. But no one here knows or has heard of Naila.
About an hour of daylight remains when the rain lets up. The air has turned soft, a pale melon color, its human stench rinsed by the downpour. Food distribution is proceeding in a godown near the main jetty, so they have this side of the ridge pretty much to themselves, except for the new guard of Indian MPs, stationed at every major intersection.
The captain of the first mercy ship told Roger that Shep and Alfred Baird had been cremated, their ashes buried in the Gymkhana Cemetery. It will take just a few minutes to walk there. The decision to go is made without discussion, the destination a foregone conclusion, and yet Claire can’t seem to pull herself together. Her hat. Her shoes. Her notebook. Does she need her notebook to visit her husband’s grave? And what does she tell her son?
She tells him, “We’re going to see where your daddy’s buried.”
And Ty, being the child he is, says, “Yes, I know. Let’s go, Mum.”
Roger strides ahead with Ty, leaving Viv and Claire to their own pace. Banyans and mangosteens grow thick along the upper reaches of the Gymkhana grounds, and the uncut grass seems more alive than anything Claire has seen since they landed. A bank of crepe ginger tilts its many red heads beneath white petals like parasols. The Biya used the rhizomes of this plant to treat fever, rash, asthma, and snakebite, but Shep’s early researches found that the Kama Sutra also recommended it as an eyelash enhancer. One night while Claire was still pregnant, he brought a bunch of these glowing flowers up to the bedroom on Ross and daubed a bit of the sap on his forefinger, then gently, gently painted it onto her lashes. She feels the sensation now and watches him leaning back, naked in the moonlight to study his handiwork. Ravishing. She guffawed at his heartthrob delivery, but then he did. Beach ball belly and all. Ravish her.
“You all right?” Vivian asks. “We could do this tomorrow.”
“No. I’m fine.” She pats Viv’s hand on her shoulder, gives it a squeeze. “I couldn’t live with myself if we waited.” “Me neither.”
Up ahead Roger and Ty have found the gate, where a boy just a little older than Ty and an old man sit in attendance. They wear shredded gray sarongs and look hollowed out by the questions Ty asks. Claire reads their answers in their dipping chins and wavering hands. Maybe they remember long ago seeing two who matched Naila’s and Leyo’s descriptions, but not since the Japanese. So many have disappeared.
Ty seems to take their responses in stride and makes his next request. The watchman’s boy has a lazy eye that keeps drifting toward the setting sun, but he grins obligingly.
When Claire and Viv catch up, Ty’s made his portrait and is lowering his camera. The boy helps his grandfather up, and both bow their heads to Claire.
“Doctor Memsaab.”
She salaams and searches for words. These two have survived. Gravediggers? Watchmen? What did they do—or not do—to still be here?
Easy, old girl. Shep’s caution brings her up. Since when is survival a crime?
Since you died, she thinks savagely.
And what does that make Ty?
He has her. He always will.
The old man’s face is pitted from smallpox, his body beaten by more than age, but he straightens with authority as he leads their procession into the cemetery, which one way or another has become his pride. They pass the prewar gravestones and arrive at a patchwork of mud and grass beneath a large banyan tree. Each plot here is marked with a rudimentary wooden stake, carved initials and dates. No crosses. No stones. No epitaphs.
The boy translates his grandfather’s apology, explaining that the Japanese allowed no funerals or reverence for the Christian dead. Burial alone required much baksheesh and had to be kept secret.
They stand before two stakes that read, SD 5-5-1942 and AB 5-5-1942.
Claire wonders what she’d expected. Her husband’s ashes lie in the ground in front of her. Shep and Alfred suffered together an experience that, even before it killed them, would have taken them to a realm beyond her imagination. Like all the victims of this war, they have disappeared, and she feels no closer to them standing here than she did looking out from Make Believe at Ty’s upside-down ocean.
And yet, there is a kindness about this darkening place that makes her grateful.
Ty and Viv are struggling with the light settings on Ty’s camera. Vivian weeps as she works, making Roger kneel as a human tripod, so Ty can steady the Leica on his head and lengthen the exposure. The lazy-eyed boy watches, enthralled.
Claire turns to the old man and asks in Urdu, “Who brought my husband’s ashes here?”
Leaning on his stick, he starts visibly at the sound of his language in her voice, but it doesn’t take him long to remember. “Abraham Chakraborty.”
“Abraham!” The last man she expected. “Are you certain?”
The grizzled beard sways right and left.
Freed from his tripod duties, Roger comes over, brushing off his knees. “What is it?”
“We owe Shep’s burial to our cook, Abraham. The thing is, he was an ardent INA supporter. I always suspected he hated us. And this wouldn’t have curried him any favor with the Japanese.”
She switches back to Urdu. “Do you know if Abraham is still alive?”
The man’s eyes drop, and he points to a row of mounds so recent, the earth is still raw.
Early the next day they join the entire town on the Gymkhana maidan for the ceremony of surrender. In the clear morning light, people look less sad and a little livelier. Many of the women wear bright yellow and green saris, and some of the men sport crisp white shirts and blue sarongs, orange turbans—all newly supplied. They still have sunken cheeks and rickety legs, and there are no trappings of celebration other than the insistent playing of the Dilawara’s bugler and the Union Jack snapping in the breeze, but the air smells fresh, and the palm fronds glitter.
A long wooden table has been erected on the pitted lawn. Viv is busy filling her notebook, and the newsreel crews have their cameras in a row. Claire, Roger, and Ty are ushered to a set of chairs for special guests.
Ty hasn’t spoken all morning. Now, using his camera like a telescope, he’s surveying the crowd when two familiar vehicles round the bend of the foreshore road. One is a mottled yellow with a big nose and a tattered gray top, the other more compact, shaped like a knob in a dull pinkish color, faded from red. On the hood of each automobile waves a small British flag.
“Narinder!” Claire speaks the name fervently, like a prayer, but both cars turn out to be driven by uniformed Indian soldiers.
General Salomons steps out of Wilkerson’s old saloon. The two white-uniformed Japanese emerge from the back of Shep’s Morris.
The reporters and photographers surge, and within moments the official surrender is underway. General Salomons reads the proclamation that formally ends the Japanese occupation and reclaims authority of the islands under the Government of India. The Japanese commanders sit immobile and expressionless, white gloves pressed to their thighs.
When the reading of terms is concluded, each in turn signs the document. Then the Japanese surrender their swords, salute, and are marched, to the hoots and catcalls of onlookers, back to the old faded coupe. They are driven away.
The ceremony takes just fifteen minutes, but the General’s aide de camp now signals the cameramen to keep rolling. Then he motions for the throng at the far end of the parade ground to make way.
“No.” Claire stands. She raises a hand to shade her eyes.
“I can’t believe—Ty, look. There—” She points across the field to some coral trees beyond the crowd, where a cluster of small dark figures has gathered.
Ty lets out a trill and leaps from his seat. Fortunately, the General’s guard is at ease, or he might have gotten himself shot. Instead his outburst is rightly chalked up to the joy of the moment.
He runs at full tilt, dodging adults and pushing children, Claire dashing behind him.
It’s Leyo. Leyo! Grinning, ebullient, their beloved friend raises both his arms as he spots Ty tearing through the crowd. Beside him Kuli leans on his staff, and Porubi squats there, too, cheeks still round as a bullfrog’s.
Now Claire makes out Imulu and Sempe, Mam Golat, Ekko and even the brooding Obeyo. But where, where is Naila?
She’s slow to notice the official commotion, as General Salomons himself summons Kuli forward. When Claire does glance back at the signing table, she registers startled chatter and suspicious mutterings among the locals, but the General waits with respect. It dawns on her only then that the Biya are going to be recognized for their service.
As well they should be. Kuli and Porubi became indispensible through the successive Balderdash missions. If only one of these missions had yielded intelligence about the person who mattered most to Claire and Ty.
But then Leyo scoops Ty into his arms. He cups the boy’s face in his hands, and Ty wraps himself around those shoulders. The two of them touch their foreheads together, laughing and warbling, swaying with emotion. For several seconds they remain inseparable.
Then Leyo turns. He reaches toward the shade behind him.
Claire stops short, as a child toddles into view. For a split second she mistakes the tiny girl for Artam, but no, this child is barely old enough to walk.
Leyo kneels to receive her and lifts his face to take Claire in. “Anya, our daughter.”
“Where’s Naila?” Ty demands, all but batting away the child.
Again the bugle sounds. Leyo looks past Claire, as if to the clouds, but his face is beaming. She feels a hand at her elbow.
Mem. Please. She senses the words without hearing them. No see-ums. She opens her arms and turns.
And there, at last, is Naila. The same bright dark eyes. The same broad nose and cheeks but with tears gilding them in the sun.
Naila has grown into a woman. A mother and wife in her own right. She wears Leyo’s old coral sarong and her hair sheared close to the scalp. A star composed of tiny pale scars blooms on her left shoulder.
Claire crosses her arms over her aching chest, but before Naila can return the gesture, Ty comes barreling back between them, his whole being electric.
As Naila falls with him into mid-air, his shouts soar in exultation.
EPILOGUE
1967
The clock tower has shrunk. At least that’s how it seems. I remember craning my head back to puzzle out those two black needles inside the white circle. I don’t think I learned to tell time before the war, and when we came back, the clock had stopped. It’s still stopped, and the plaster around it is cracked and bleached.
The trees around the tower, though, they have continued to grow. Twenty-two years taller, and Aberdeen Bazaar, too, has swelled, closing in on old landmarks like the Browning Club. The tower square now is crowded with newcomers, mostly Bengali refugees fleeing East Pakistan. With them have come full-color posters for Fanta, Titan watches, Kwality ice cream, and Dalda cooking oil. Bollywood music whines and wiggles through the din of two-stroke motorbikes zipping around the memorial.
Little boys cry, “Uncle!” and come at me with open hands. When I ask to take their picture, they pile onto each other like puppies. The result is as winning as photographs in India always seem to be, but it is today’s India that catches my lens, not the birthplace I recall—the birthplace that I’ve come to recover, if I can.
It may be an impossible mission. How can I expect to recapture the past of this place when I myself am so changed? I mind the insect welts that cover my elbows and knees as I never did when I was these boys’ age. I recoil from the ammoniac fumes of urine, the pervasive petrol haze, and I stoop to meet the eyes of adults who should be looking down on me. The disorientation only grows when I try to find someone, anyone, who remembers my parents.
It takes an hour or more for me to be passed around the square from elder to elder until at last a matron selling crisps from one of the stalls tells me that Dr. Durant cured her son of the typhus in 1940. That boy now is a doctor himself in Nairobi.
“Africa,” she stresses, as if her son lived on Mars.
When I tell her that Dr. Durant was my father, she salaams and mumbles a prayer. When she looks up, the creases of her wide face glisten. “I was there, Saar. I saw, that horrible terrible day.” She points at a bullock cart piled with yellow jackfruit, parked at the foot of the tower. She lowers her head.
I take a step back and raise the Leica, the one my mother gave me all those years ago, preserved and refurbished especially for this trip. I photograph not the spot she’s indicated but the woman herself, her pity and horror thrown into relief by the banana yellow and cherry red images of the adverts that adorn her stall. Such contradictions.
I’m still debating whether and how to ask for details about my father’s execution when the woman’s memory computes.
“You are the boy! I am remembering. They called you Jungle Boy.” She squeezes her eyes and taps the scarlet bindi between them. “You came back, and we all saw your picture in the newspaper.”
“That’s right.” I talk while continuing to shoot the changing planes of her face. “When the Japanese surrendered. We stayed for several weeks to find our friends and help with the relief efforts.”
“And your ma. She was not like the other memsaabs.”
I laugh and lower the camera. “No, indeed she was not. What do you remember about her?”
“They say she also stayed with the naked people. By her own self . . . even before the war?” Her slow question says, fine for a boy to run naked through the wild, but an American memsaab?
“Both she and my father studied and loved the forest.” I want to ease her embarrassment. Forestry has a long and respected history in the Andamans. Orchid conservancy and botanical medicine, too, have gained currency in recent years. Respect for the “naked people” apparently has not.
My explanation allows her to sidestep my question with one of her own. “Is she living?”
“Very much so.” I picture Mum and Maikel striding through the autumn light of Central Park the morning I left. “In New York City.”
“Accha!” Now that thought definitely brightens her, and I expect the usual drill about Times Square and the Empire State Building.
Instead, she scolds me. Hands up, fingers dancing, her voice still musical with the tones of her youth. “Why you do not bring her with you?”
