by Meira Chand
Praise for Meira Chand’s novel, A Different Sky
“Chand proves herself a master of the modern Asian epic in this tale…she endows her characters with humanity and complexity, …grounding…their histories in solid research, and she offers a credible, compelling panorama of the tragedy and resilience, culture and individuality, political evolution, dissolution, and renaissance of 20th-century Singapore.”
Publishers Weekly
“…a panoramic page-turner…This meticulously researched book is alive with engrossing detail, whether on the odour of Chinatown, the privations of a guerilla camp or the appalling rituals of foot binding.”
The Guardian
“Historical fiction at its most complex and engaging…balances the communist groupings, Japanese occupation and emerging nationalism with skill… As history, A Different Sky is engrossing; as fiction, highly enjoyable.”
Literary Review
“…the protagonists are richly and deeply drawn, the sights, sounds, and smells of Singapore are gorgeously rendered, and the principal characters’ interwoven stories combine to form a compelling narrative.”
Booklist
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© 2018 Meira Chand
Cover design by Cover Kitchen
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Chand, Meira.
Title: Sacred waters / Meira Chand.
Description: Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, [2017]
Identifiers: OCN 999398171 | e-ISBN: 978 981 4794 23 7
Subjects: LCSH: East Indians--Fiction. | Women--Fiction.
Classification: DDC 823.914--dc23
Printed in Singapore by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd
To Cynthia vanden Dreisen, with thanks
PROLOGUE
Some memories have the power to shape a life forever. Dim as shadows behind a curtain, shifting and uncertain, they are all the more menacing for that. When later in her life she remembered that day Sita was unsure of the details, she was only certain of the outcome. She still recalled the muddy skin of the water reflecting the sky above, hiding the darkness below.
She had been five or maybe six years old. She remembered walking with her mother beside the river, gathering wild herbs to make a poultice for grandmother’s aching knee. That day, as she ran about the riverbank, her mother stopped and began to groan, low at first and then louder. Stumbling into the long grass they usually avoided because of snakes, she squatted down, partly hidden by the scrub, pulling up her sari as all the women did when answering the call of nature out in the fields. As her mother’s cries grew intense, Sita ran forward. The vegetation screened but did not completely obscure a view of her mother, who was now moaning and panting like an animal. As Sita watched, she reached down and lifted up a bloodied mass from between her legs. Sita shrank back in shock; her mother’s insides appeared to be pushing out unstoppably from her body.
‘Amma!’ Sita shouted, distress leaping through her.
Then, something moved and twisted and began to scream, and she saw that her mother held in her hands a creature with life and voice. Pulling a handful of soft leaves from a nearby bush, her mother wiped the child and, lifting the small curved knife she carried at her waist when they collected herbs, cut the cord that tied the baby to her. Eventually, holding the child in the crook of her arm, her mother stood up and walked towards the river.
‘Where are you going?’ Sita yelled, filled by new confusion.
‘I must wash her clean,’ her mother replied.
Wading knee deep into the water, she lowered the child into the soft lapping swell, holding her there, caressing her tenderly all the while with her one free hand. For a moment Sita saw the child in her mother’s arms and the next she was gone, the tide lifting her free. Sita watched her float away, held briefly upon the rippling surface of the river before she sank slowly from sight, eyes open, a startled expression on her small face, uttering no cry of protest.
‘Amma!’ Sita screamed.
Her mother continued to stand in the water, her back towards Sita, unmoving. At last she turned, and Sita remembered her body, slack and flat beneath the old sari, emptied of its burden. She turned to look up at the sky and the sinking sun, and Sita saw the anguish in her face.
‘Amma!’
She called out again, unable to understand what was happening. Then her mother was beside her, taking her hand, pulling her homewards.
‘She was just a girl.’ Her mother spoke softly, her voice thick and strange.
‘The current is strong, it lifted her from my arms,’ her mother explained in a more normal tone as they began the walk back to the village.
Sita stared at the river, awash with the light of the sky, the soft lap of waves cuffing the bank. The murky water had closed over her sister as if she had never been. It was a swift flowing river with a treacherous current, used by those too poor to properly cremate their dead. The fish in the river were large and plump from an excess of pickings on half-burned bodies.
‘The devi will protect her,’ her mother whispered.
In the house, they kept a picture of the goddess Durga, riding upon a tiger. Sita liked this picture, as much for the tawny tiger as the radiant goddess. The creature’s amber eyes held her own, as if something special passed between them. Although Sita’s heart beat fast from all she had just witnessed, it was comforting to think the goddess and her tiger protected her sister.
Releasing Sita’s hand, her mother walked ahead, not once looking back at the river. In the distance the sky cracked open upon the dying sun, gold and crimson and purple. Near the village, the silhouette of a dead tree, struck by lightning long before, stood against the burning sky like a gnarled hand pushing up from the earth. Sita paused for a moment before the image, seeing it anew, then hurried after her mother.
1
SINGAPORE, 2000
There was the click of the door as Parvati left, and then the rap of her heels fading away outside the apartment. Soon the whirr of a descending lift was heard, carrying her down to where she had parked her car in the forecourt of the building. Amita turned to her mother, no longer able to control her irritation.
‘Why won’t you talk to her?’
She bent to wipe away a biscuit crumb clinging to Sita’s mouth, awar
e of the unnecessary roughness with which she did this. As always, her mother’s behaviour was unfathomable. Even the usually patient Parvati had given a sigh, packing away her notepad and checking her watch in a way that made it clear she thought the visit had been a waste of precious time.
The late afternoon sun streamed into the room and fell cruelly upon Sita’s dark hair, illuminating a bed of white roots. Amita noted resignedly that soon she would have to help her mother cover this new growth, painting thick dye onto the brittle strands of hair, wrapping plastic sheets around them both, taking care to cover the floor with newspaper. Already, at the thought of these procedures her impatience grew. It seemed bizarre that, in her late seventies, her mother kept her hair resolutely black, while Amita in her early fifties rejected such artifice and welcomed the streaks of grey.
‘You should let your hair stay white,’ Amita reprimanded, still full of resentment.
Shifting her weight in an aged rattan chair, aware of Amita’s tight-lipped frustration, Sita stared out of the window of her daughter’s Clementi apartment, twelve storeys up from the ground, and wished she were a bird. She would not let her hair go white. It was nothing to do with revealing her age, as Amita thought. She could not tell her daughter that the colour white must be resisted in every way, no white blouse — no white nightdress, no white hair. She remembered the day she had made that vow.
Staring silently out of the window at the banks of trees and tall apartment blocks, Sita continued to ignore her daughter’s agitation and imagined the elation a bird must feel, soaring free above the earth. Far across the town and beyond the nearby university where Amita taught, were the red-roofed shophouses and narrow lanes of Little India. Buried amongst them was the home she had lived in all her adult life and to which she could no longer return. Several months ago Sita had had a bad fall and, resisting all argument, Amita arrived to briskly pack up her mother’s few possessions and move her into the Clementi flat.
‘You can no longer look after yourself properly, or climb safely up and down those stairs,’ Amita had announced, pointing to the twisting metal staircase that rose from the courtyard to Sita’s front door.
A sudden low grinding announced the ancient clock on the wall was preparing to strike, and Amita allowed it four afternoon chimes before she trusted herself to speak again. Her mother had brought the clock with her from her old home when she moved in with her. Now, its crotchety clangs once again measured out her life as they had through her childhood. She hated the thing. As the last rusty reverberation died away she turned to her mother, hands on hips, annoyance rising within her.
‘If you will not talk to Parvati, then you and all those other women in that army of yours will be forgotten. Is that what you want?’ Amita reached to gather up dirty teacups from the table.
The cane chair creaked as Sita shifted her weight apprehensively. Parvati was writing a book about the Indian National Army in which Sita had been a recruit during the war. She had never spoken much to anyone about her time in the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, but now because of Parvati’s book she was being questioned about things she had been careful to keep to herself. Memories rose up within her, painful as the hot dry earth beneath her bare feet when, as a child in India, she had walked to the village well.
Long ago, on the riverbank near that village home, Sita had seen a clam pried open and the soft flesh of its body scraped clean of the shell. That was how she felt about Parvati and the interviews. Soon, she would be forced apart, and bit-by-bit, memories would be extracted from her. Soon she feared she would be like those people whose minds were wiped clean by dementia, who no longer knew who they were. Her memories were a bundle of kindling she carried within her, to light for warmth whenever the need arose; she had no wish to share them with a stranger, disturbing the many things that lay comfortably buried. Once a memory was voiced it would no longer belong only to her. It had become a battle to keep things back.
In spite of her reluctance to be interviewed, Amita noted the trouble Sita had taken for Parvati’s visit, wearing a sari instead of the usual slacks, putting on a pair of small gold earrings. She envied her mother her elegance and, when she could admit it, the much lighter complexion of her skin. When Amita was younger and people remarked on the dissimilarity between them, she took comfort in the fact that she had inherited the darker genes of the father she had never known. With an exasperated clatter, she piled the last teacup onto the tray. Her mother’s stubbornness defeated her. Other women who had been part of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment were only too happy to talk about their experiences, many even called it the best time of their lives. Her mother, as always, had to be different, had to be difficult. When Parvati first told Amita about her proposed book, and heard that Sita had been a recruit in the Indian National Army, she could not contain her excitement.
‘Your mother was a Rani in the Jhansi Regiment? That’s incredible! History has neglected the INA women, just because they were women.’
During the Occupation, the Japanese military had formed a special force, the Indian National Army, from Indian POWs taken from the British Army. It was intended these men would spearhead an eventual Japanese invasion of India. Later, the legendary Indian freedom fighter, Subhas Chandra Bose, arrived in Singapore to take command of the INA, and formed a women’s regiment.
‘Any women of the regiment still alive are now getting really old. I must speak to your mother,’ Parvati insisted.
Amita could still hear Parvati’s words in her head as she picked up the tray and stalked off to the kitchen.
Sita continued to stare silently out of the window, as if unaware of her daughter’s disappointment. Holding her face up to the sun she closed her eyes, feeling the warmth seeping through her bones. How the sun had burned them on the retreat from Burma, and in the jungle leeches had clung to their limbs! She remembered again the constant hunger, the fear of crocodiles as they forded a river. To speak about those long ago things was no problem for her; it was the fear of unwrapping experience that held her back. Layer by layer she would be forced to divest herself of memory, digging down through time to exhume each detail, and eventually they would reach the thing she had so carefully buried, the one thing she wished no one to know. If she began that unravelling, there would be no way to stop until she reached the end, and then her daughter would know the truth.
Soon, she heard Amita returning with a fresh pot of tea, her tread light but determined. Glancing up, Sita observed Amita’s single-minded expression, and knew her ordeal was not yet over. Her daughter was as intellectually strong as any man, Sita thought, and she could not suppress her pride at Amita’s fierce independence.
‘It won’t make any difference to the world if no one hears your story. But your life and everything you did will then be as nothing. Is that what you want?’ Amita deposited a cup of fresh tea and a plate of her mother’s favourite jam-centred biscuits on the table.
Sita shrank from the impatience in her daughter’s voice, agitatedly smoothing the folds of her sari over her knee. Nothing. Her life had been shaped by that word. You are nothing, her mother-in-law had told her. We are nothing, Billi had insisted as they begged for alms in the street. You women are nothing, the Japanese had laughed. You were nothing until I married you, Shiva had told her. Anger rolled through her as it always did when these thoughts took hold of her. Nothing. The word remained alive within her when everything else was forgotten. Sita was suddenly aware that her daughter was waiting for a reply to her query.
The sun was now hidden behind banks of cloud. In the distance, the sea darkened beneath a sky suddenly leaden with approaching rain. Across that black water was the country from which she had journeyed, and to which she would now never return.
‘Maybe you will learn things you don’t want to know.’ Sita heard the rogue words escaping her and was surprised. Amita paused, cup in hand.
‘Talk to Parvati,’ she urged, kinder now she felt a weakening in her mother, placing a hand on Sita’s shou
lder.
‘Your life is my history, it’s part of me. I have a right to know.’ Amita’s voice was soft with persuasion.
In the mirror above a worn sideboard Sita caught a glimpse of herself, an old woman, bent and cadaverous, her face unrecognisable even to herself, the skin drawn tightly over bones it should pad, loose where once it was tight. Her eyes moved to the thickset, middle-aged woman who stood by her side, remembering the baby she had once cradled and nursed. The colour of Amita’s coarse grey hair, cut bluntly to swing about the base of her neck, contrasted strikingly against the deeper shade of her skin. Beauty was not a word ever wasted on Amita, but her strong square face with its darkly candid eyes was arresting. Energy sparked through her, lighting her up when her mood was good, drawing people to her. She had never married, and Sita found no reason to encourage matrimony when she looked back over her own experiences. It was better if a woman could be more like a man, self sufficient, one-in-herself, relying on no one, and able to look after an old mother, just as a son would have done.
‘Soon I will be dead,’ Sita admitted, seeing in a flash of clarity all the damage she might have done Amita by her persistent silence.
Old age was already upon her, but for decades she had lived a lie, and pulled Amita along behind her. The girl had a right to know the truth, whatever the consequences. She looked down at her hands, twisting a ring on her finger. The breath trembled through her as she tried to speak, and Amita bent low to catch her words.
‘Tell Parvati to come again tomorrow,’ Sita whispered, a sense of relief filling her as she spoke.
The next day Sita noticed Amita’s pleasure when she made an effort to smile at Parvati on her arrival. In an attempt to set Sita at ease, Parvati waived her use of a digital recorder. She was some years younger than Amita, and her colleague in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. Until recently Amita had thought of Parvati in the same way she regarded everyone in the department, with professional camaraderie. Then, a newly initiated course in Gender Studies required them to work closely together, deepening their association. They learned more about each other’s families, confided minor personal details, and sought each other’s advice on various topics.