Sacred Waters

by Meira Chand

  ‘How long will it take?’ Muni whispered.

  The night was full of sounds. From behind the dense wall of the jungle, strange whooping cries were heard, as was the sawing of crickets, a flap of wings, and frequent movements in the undergrowth. Muni whimpered and edged nearer Sita.

  ‘These are the places where pontianak live,’ Muni whispered, shivering in fear of this ghostly apparition.

  ‘That is an owl or some other night bird. I am here with you and we have our torches,’ Sita reassured her, flashing the beam of light about the empty road.

  ‘See, there is nothing here, no ghost, no pontianak,’ Sita insisted, the need to reassure the frightened Muni giving her a courage she knew she might not otherwise feel.

  ‘If you have your eyes open when a pontianak is near, they say she will suck them out of your head,’ Muni whispered.

  ‘They live in banana trees,’ she added, looking into the darkness trying to discern if any of the offending trees grew nearby.

  ‘No banana trees here,’ Sita told her firmly, swinging the torch beam about.

  Soft cries came again from the impenetrable undergrowth, and Muni clutched at Sita, who replied calmly.

  ‘On your plantation, just like in my village, the night is full of sounds. There is no pontianak here, and we will keep one torch on all the time to keep any animals away.’

  ‘In darkness like this on my plantation, the trees grow so thickly together that men have been killed, and nobody knows who murdered them. My father was killed like that. He quarrelled with another labourer, who stabbed him one night in the dark, but because of so many trees nobody saw anything. They found his body in the morning. It had rained in the night and he was wet and cold. Already ants filled his nose and ears and crawled under his eyelids. I remember it still.’

  In the torchlight, Muni’s face was a mask of craggy shadows, and she nervously fingered the thin gold chain she always wore around her neck, its tiny pendant, no bigger than a teardrop, set with a sliver of ruby. They were not allowed to wear jewellery in the regiment, but Muni refused to give up the chain, and in the end Prema told her to keep it hidden beneath her shirt.

  ‘This chain was my mother’s, and before that my grandmother’s. My mother put it on me before she died. It is my good luck charm; I am never without it. It keeps me safe. It will keep me safe now from the pontianak,’ Muni confided. The darkness seemed to give her the courage to talk.

  ‘When my mother died of malaria after my father was murdered, the English Manager Sahib of the estate told one of the workers’ families to take me in. I had a brother. He was sent to one family and I to another.”

  ‘My brother came to work in Singapore and when my grandmother died he called me here,’ Sita admitted, simplifying her story but feeling the need to share a confidence in return. Muni nodded in the darkness.

  The perfume of night flowers carried to them, a bird shrieked in the trees, and in the sky the moon pushed free of thin clouds, its silver light spilling onto the road. Muni continued to talk, her voice rushing on.

  ‘My adopted family did not like me; they wanted a boy, they wanted to have my brother, not me. I was thin and weak, but from a small age I was doing all the cleaning work in that house, and then weeding work also on the estate. Weeding is children’s work, but it is hard; your back hurts so much.’ Muni pulled out a handkerchief, wiped the sweat from her brow and rubbed the cloth over the back of her bare neck.

  ‘I cannot get used to being without my hair; it was the best thing about me. Everyone said my hair was beautiful, but when I washed it I had to be careful no White Sahib or Indian Manager Sahib on the estate was near when I dried it in the sun. If I saw a sahib I ran and hid myself immediately.’ Muni’s voice dropped.

  Under the torch the tiny ruby on her pendant glowed. When she began whispering again Sita leaned forward to catch her words, at first not understanding what the girl was trying to tell her.

  ‘You cannot refuse to go to the English Manager Sahib, or to the other white Sahibs who work for him, or even our own Indian Supervisor Sahibs. If any of them is wanting you, you must go.’

  Muni’s voice was almost inaudible, and as she spoke she rolled the gold chain between her fingers. Sita sensed they were crossing a line into buried territory and sat silent, waiting. In the darkness the cries of a night bird came again, there was a stirring through the undergrowth as a creature made its way about its nocturnal world. Sita had propped up the lighted torch on a stone, and the safety of this pool of light was comforting.

  ‘One of the Indian Manager sahibs called for my family’s oldest daughter. Her father owed the Sahib money and could not pay it. They did not want her to go to him and so they sent me instead. They said in the dark the sahib would not know or care which girl it was. He was old and fat and his face was so black. I hated to go but they made me. I was so young, I had not yet begun my bleeding.’ Muni spoke in a rush as if afraid the words would get stuck inside her if she stopped, and Sita listened in distress.

  ‘How did you become a Rani?’ Sita asked, not wanting to hear any more about Muni’s life on the plantation.

  ‘When the war started, all the White English Sahibs ran away. The Japanese came but they did not know how to run a plantation. Soon everyone was going to Singapore, trying to find work. Some women came to the estate to find recruits.

  They said if you join the Indian National Army you will be safe from the Japanese and you will get food and a better life. Already, everyone knew about Gandhiji and his fight against the British; we had his picture in our home. Like Gandhiji, Netaji is fighting for India and I am happy to die for him.’ The words rushed from Muni, tears filling her eyes.

  ‘I have never told anyone these things before. Now you will hate me,’ Muni added in a whisper.

  ‘There are also many things I have never told anyone.’ Sita put an arm around Muni’s shoulders, drawing her close.

  They sat in silence, Sita absorbing the revelations Muni had made, wanting to reassure her that these secrets were safe with her. She searched for another confidence of equal weight to offer as proof of this.

  ‘I had a baby once. It was a girl, and born too early. They say there is no soul until seven months, but I felt her turn, I felt the beat of her heart. And then she was gone; I could not keep her safe inside me. After that my husband was different towards me.’ She had not realised until she spoke that the grief of that time was alive in her still.

  Muni reached out and grasped Sita’s hand and held it tightly in her own. At last in the darkness, a car was heard approaching.

  Eventually, their months of training were over. Shiva was there at the Passing Out Parade, but Netaji did come to take the salute, as they had all hoped. Later Sita walked with Shiva out of the camp onto Waterloo Street, and remembered the rain on the day she had arrived, remembered her apprehension and his resentment. Shiva’s regiment was preparing to leave for Burma some days before Sita’s, and they had been given leave to spend one day together before they both left for the front. She walked beside him, the smart jodhpurs and shirt of her uniform showing off her hardened body, and knew he was assessing her out of the corner of his eye. Without realising it, she no longer aligned her steps a pace or two behind, but strode forward beside him.

  During the months in the camp she had not been home, and was relieved to find nothing had changed. The Ramakrishna Mission stood as before, its ornate rooftop divorced from the busy comings and goings of the Japanese language school below. Vishwanathan and Savitri still sat behind the stall at the corner and greeted them, piling coconuts into their arms. The alley was quiet and the courtyard of the house deserted as they climbed the spiral stair to their room. Shiva produced his key and removed the hefty padlock from the front door. The plant in the oil drum was now a mass of shrivelled dead leaves.

  A pungent odour of rot and mould surrounded them as they stepped inside the room. In a basket in the kitchen Sita discovered two decayed potatoes she had forgotten to
throw out before she left. She hurried to open the window and to wind up the clock that had stopped on a distant day at eight minutes to three, some months back. Everything was familiar, and yet everything was strange, as if she were seeing it for the first time. The room had shrunk, and she seemed to no longer fit it as before. The towers of books and periodicals padding the walls weighed her down, fettering her to the place once again.

  Shiva immediately sat down at his desk and called for tea, making it clear he expected everything to be as before, even though they had yet to bring up water from the tap in the courtyard. In their absence, roaches, rats and geckoes had moved into the room, and their droppings were everywhere. Sita picked up a brush and pan and began clearing the dirt, then hurried down to bring up water, hearing again the familiar metallic ring of her feet on the spiral stair. Setting the water to boil, she remembered the first time she had tried to make tea for Shiva, and the sense of shame at her failure, even though it was his fault that there was neither milk nor kerosene. Everywhere she turned she saw her earlier self, and realised the extent to which she had changed.

  In an effort to please Shiva, she changed out of her uniform, pulling a sari out of the old tin trunk in which she stored her things. Shiva made no comment as she tied it about herself. The long skirt brushed about her ankles again, and the freedom her jodhpurs gave her, a freedom she had grown so used to, appeared irretrievably lost. She stared at the folded uniform on top of the trunk, and it seemed to belong to another person, from whom she was temporarily estranged. It frightened her then that in this room the old self reached out, trying to reclaim her, and possess her as before. She kept her eyes firmly upon the folded khaki jodhpurs and willed herself to be patient until the next morning, when she could again be the person she had become.

  Later, Shiva went to buy them a meal from the food hawkers on Serangoon Road. When he returned with the usual warm banana leaf packet, she was careful to give him all the old deference, laying out the food before him, serving him first, and bringing him, as always, a bowl of water in which to wash his hands. Yet, something about her seemed to upset him, and he stared sullenly ahead.

  As night came upon them, she lit the oil lamp, and laid out the sleeping mats. The thin wadding of the bed and the pillows were damp and musty, and she breathed in the unpleasant smell and coughed. In the dark the scuttle of rats was heard. He lay down beside her and she tensed, knowing what he would ask of her now. The light rasp of his breath touched her face, and she smelled garlic in his mouth, felt the movement of his hand upon her thigh, and prepared for his embrace. Lying on the damp mat she felt separate from her husband, conscious only of herself. Although she wished not to displease him, something within her was intent now on controlling what she gave or did not give to him.

  ‘Even this now you do not want? I am your husband; this is my right. Why are you angry?’ His resentment alarmed her, and also took her by surprise. She was not aware that she was angry.

  ‘You have become arrogant,’ he shouted, drawing back from her, and she was further shocked.

  ‘I am doing everything I did before,’ she protested, feeling the beat of his breath upon her. Above them the old clock began its wheezy gasps, preparing to chime ten o’clock.

  ‘You have changed. You are doing the same things, but not in the same way. You are not even walking the same as before,’ he spoke bitterly above the hoarse clanging of the hour.

  ‘You were nothing when I married you.’ His accusation fell heavily upon her, but did not hurt her in the way it would have, before.

  His hand was on her shoulder, forcing her back. Gripping her arms so that she could not move, he laid his weight upon her with a roughness that was new, his anger mounting with his desire. Soon it was finished, but as he pulled away from her she felt her body stir, and tried to hold onto him, unable to control the strange convulsion rippling through her, making her cry out beneath him. Afterwards, he stared down at her, as if she embarrassed or even repelled him, but she found she felt no shame.

  In the morning he spoke stiffly, sitting cross-legged before his desk, drinking the tea she had silently placed before him.

  ‘I’m with the 3rd Division, and it is said we will be going to the front line, near Kohima and Imphal. That is where Netaji will enter India; that is where we will invade. I may not return. You could be a widow once again.’ He held up a hand to silence her protest.

  ‘This is the reality of our life. You are my wife, and I do not want you to face hardship again. If anything happens to me you should know I have already paid many months’ rent in advance to keep this room. You will not be without a home. If I live I will get a soldier’s pension, if I die you will get that same pension. In the camp we have talked about these things. Also, Swami Bhaswarananda has promised me the Ramakrishna Mission will always help you.’ He stared at her fixedly, as if trying to imprint her face on his mind, to carry with him wherever it was he was going.

  Sita was silent, contrition as painful as the guilt welling up in her. She wanted to move towards him, for what use were the strange feelings that had overwhelmed her the night before when they may never see each other again, but the emotions knotting within her held her back, and she sat silently where she was.

  18

  BURMA, 1944

  For the first part of Sita’s journey to Burma the platoon’s transport was a convoy of old cattle trucks. A strong smell of animals lingered in the vehicles, and crumbs of dry dung encrusted the metal floor. The long journey through the green world of the jungle and the rubber estates of Malaya passed easily, as they sang and laughed. When the sound of enemy aircraft was heard, the trucks drew to the side of the road under the camouflage of trees until the danger was passed. As she had promised, Prema was with them.

  At last they reached Ipoh and left the vehicles, making their way to the railway station to continue the journey by train. Striding forward, arms swinging, they marched smartly, backpacks now heavy with kit, rifles across their shoulders. They walked with the swagger of men, sitting with their legs apart or with an ankle crossed boldly over a knee. Everyone they passed knew who they were, and that they were going to fight for India’s independence. As they crowded onto the platform the stationmaster, a wizened old Indian with a luxurious moustache, saluted as he hurried towards them, shouting enthusiastically

  ‘Dilli Chalo!’

  ‘Dilli Chalo!’ they shouted in reply.

  Further down the platform they noticed Japanese guards observing them disapprovingly, and they quietened. Drawing closer together, they waited as Prema walked over to the ticket office to inquire about the train that was to transport them across the border into Burma. She returned grim-faced.

  ‘That is our train.’ She nodded towards the rusty shuttered wagons of a stationary goods train. The stationmaster, who had followed them down the platform, shook his head in concern.

  ‘You must not ride in that death trap. These wagons are used for taking supplies and prisoners to the Japanese camps, to work on the railway in Burma. No light, no air; prisoners die. Go home,’ the old man advised, casting a wary glance at the Japanese guards.

  ‘We cannot go back. We are soldiers,’ Prema told him.

  Alerted to the situation, the Japanese guards strode forward and began pulling back the heavy doors of the wagons, waving the ends of their rifles about in a threatening manner, ordering the women to get in.

  ‘Haite kudasai. Hayaku!’

  ‘Get in,’ Prema ordered in a low voice.

  ‘Don’t look at them,’ she added, turning away from the Japanese.

  One by one they climbed into the wagons, suddenly aware of their vulnerability as women. The doors were slammed shut upon them, leaving them in semi-darkness. A barred space at the top of the wagon let in some air and light. As soon as the door was shut, the heat radiating from the metal walls of the carriage became intense. The train had waited all day in the sun, and was hot as a branding iron.

  Pushed uncomfortably up ag
ainst each other in the stifling heat, they thrust their rifles and kit into whatever space could be found in the wagon. Crouched beside Sita, Muni fanned herself with her cap. Sita opened the top buttons of her shirt, and found a handkerchief to place under her collar to absorb the sweat flowing down her neck. They waited, but the train showed no sign of moving, and eventually Prema stood up and with some help pulled back the heavy door. At once the Japanese soldiers rushed forward to slam it shut again.

  ‘Dame. No,’ they yelled.

  ‘It will be cooler when we move.’ Prema encouraged them, glancing up at the open slits at the top of the wagon.

  Soon water and toilet facilities were needed. They pulled back the door once again to protest, and finally a rusty bucket and an enamel pail of water with a drinking cup were given to them. They drank gratefully and, making room for the bucket in a corner, used this one by one. Soon the bucket was full but when, in the hope of stepping out to empty it, they prised open the door, it was slammed shut again upon them.

  Finally, with a tremor and a grating of metal couplings, the train jerked suddenly into life, eventually settling into a slow trundling gait. From the narrow vent at the top of the wagon a soft wisp of air stirred about them. The engine’s plaintive whistle floated to them and the sense of movement at last was cheering. Their own feminine odour, baked to a rank and powerful smell in the wagon, was overwhelmed by the stench of excrement from the filthy pail. At times the wagon rocked dangerously, throwing them to the right or left, slopping the stinking contents of the bucket onto the floor to gasps of distress and disgust. Instinctively now, they concentrated their energy on enduring the journey, hoping that by nightfall their destination would be reached.

  ‘Let’s open the door now and empty the bucket while we are moving,’ Prema suggested once the train swung freely along, but they found the doors locked.

  Eventually, after some hours the train stopped, the doors were opened and the girls tumbled out into the fresh air. They found they were at a transit stop, a Malay village of attap-roofed huts. Japanese troops were everywhere. The most pressing need was for a toilet, and water to drink. A Japanese sergeant appeared and led them to a large hut built on stilts, and showed them also a primitive latrine with rush walls, that gave some privacy.