by Meira Chand
In the hut they rested, stretching cramped limbs. Village women served them a meal of rice, spicy vegetables and fish and they ate hungrily, aware all the while that they were objects of curiosity both for the villagers and the Japanese troops, neither of whom had seen women in uniform before, carrying guns. After a couple of hours they were ordered to climb back into the wagon to continue their journey, and found the bucket had been emptied and cleaned.
The carriage was cooler now that the sun had set, but they were still pressed uncomfortably against each other, and any sleep was fitful. As the train huffed and puffed its way forward, they tried the doors again, and finding them unlocked, pulled them wide open. Cool air blew in upon them now, and the relief was intense. Outside, nothing could be seen in the darkness, the vast black net of the sky stretched above them, alive with stars. In the early morning, they stopped once again at another transit point, where they rested and were fed, as before. They were told they were crossing the border into Siam, and when they were herded back again into the wagons they saw that a camouflage of palm fronds and tree branches had been tied to the top of the train, and knew the danger of bombing must await them.
The train went forward more slowly now, for the narrow track swung through hilly country, increasing the rolling motion of the wagons. Much of the time the track followed a distant river, but sometimes it curved inland through thick vegetation or narrow passes blasted out of solid rock. In places the hillside met the river, falling sheer into the water a distance below, the line winding terrifyingly along a narrow ledge hacked into the face of the cliff, and they held their breath until level ground was reached again. At some points the track appeared barely finished, crossing the river on what appeared to be makeshift trestle bridges. A constant view of the water refreshed them as the train chugged along.
Sita sat near the door and held her face to the breeze, filling her lungs with the dense earthy smell of the thickly forested land. Muni slept beside her, head resting on Sita’s shoulder. The sooty smoke of the engine blew in upon them, and the mournful keen of the whistle filled Sita with nostalgia, as she recalled the ride from Vrindavan to Calcutta long ago.
Below them, at a lower level, they saw large bands of workers, half naked in the sun, still working on the construction of the railway. In some places rough camps of rudimentary attap-roofed huts were seen. Many of the men appeared to be white-skinned, the British and Australian POWs captured by the Japanese that they had been told about. There were also dark-skinned Indians, and Sita wondered if this was where the men pulled from the scaffolding of the Ramakrishna Mission had been sent. She dozed again, but woke almost immediately with a start as the train stopped abruptly with a shuddering of brakes, throwing them all forward inside the wagon. The wail of an air raid siren was now heard, a thin bleating sound, far away.
‘Out. Quick. Hayaku.’ A Japanese soldier suddenly appeared before the open door, frantically gesturing for them to vacate the carriage.
‘Run, run.’ He ordered in English, pointing towards the surrounding jungle.
Grabbing their kit, they tumbled out of the wagon and, sliding down the embankment into the scrub below, ran into the hot tangled web of vegetation. Taking Muni by the hand, Sita pulled the girl down beside her. Flattened side by side in the sweltering undergrowth, they listened to the roar of approaching planes. Sita thought about snakes, but dared not move. About her the silence was broken by the buzz of insects, the cries of birds and the occasional yelp of monkeys high in the trees; mosquitoes and ants were everywhere. Head cushioned on her arms, the rich, earthy, rotting odours of the jungle floor filled Sita’s nose.
Although she had given Shiva little thought since the last uncomfortable day together, her mind now flooded with images of him. If she died, how would he know? Where was he now? Had he reached Kohima or Imphal or was he somewhere else, in the unfamiliar country of Burma? A sudden, intense ache for her husband welled up in her. She remembered again those last hours together, and wished she could tell him she was sorry for whatever way she had displeased him, for she might die, and so might he.
The terrifying roar of low aircraft filled her ears and she closed her eyes, heart pounding. The explosion broke the world apart, the earth trembling beneath her. Clods of damp soil and vegetation cascaded down upon them, while above, the jungle canopy was ripped open, the sun streaming suddenly down upon them. The high-pitched screams of monkeys reverberated about them, clouds of birds soared up from the trees, a dark mass of frantic twittering. Sita covered her head with her hands. Eventually, the noise of the aircraft became a distant drone, and at last the all-clear siren floated faintly to them. The Japanese guards appeared again, calling them back to the train.
As they climbed out of the undergrowth and up the incline, they saw the train was untouched, but behind it the track they had just travelled over had disappeared into a gaping hole. As Sita stared at the bombed track she became aware of something on her arm, and looking down saw in horror that leeches clung to her limbs, moist black slugs, expanding by the minute. Nothing would dislodge them, and beside her Muni laughed.
‘Like this,’ Muni instructed, sliding her thumbnail beneath one end of the creature, levering up its suckers and expertly flicking the slug away with a laugh.
‘On the plantations leeches are everywhere,’ she said in amusement.
Soon, they climbed nervously back into the train, aware of how vulnerable they were, settling back into the hot metal box of the wagon.
‘This is your first real test as soldiers.’ Prema remarked, but it was clear she too was battling terror.
‘We are all in this together. If we die, we die together. We are sisters now.’ Muni spoke up with unaccustomed determination.
Everyone turned in surprise, but Muni’s face reflected the comfort she found in this thought and the truth of what she stated. In the weeks of training at the camp they had moved through experiences together, crossing over the boundaries that first divided them, of status and community, sharing the intimacies of flesh and thought, unknowingly nurturing each other. They had become a community, and their commonality cemented them together in an intangible way that they were only now, on this journey, beginning to recognise and depend upon. They sat down in the wagon again, heartened by Muni’s sudden outburst.
When the train stopped next, it was at a sprawling encampment, a village that was now a labour camp. Once again they climbed out of the train and lined up, marching behind a Japanese officer to the huts where they would rest. It was clear the Japanese had some difficulty in evaluating them, for at each stop they were greeted with the same disapproving suspicion by the soldiers. They were not Japanese prisoners; they could not be manhandled, and as soldiers of the Indian National Army, they must be given respect. Yet, as women, they were dismissible.
The light was fading, and groups of prisoners were returning to the camp for the night from work sites along the railway line. Most of the prisoners were Caucasian men, tall, emaciated, underfed and exhausted, naked but for ragged loincloths such as common Asian labourers wore. They trudged wearily through the camp, some stumbling in fatigue, the sick supported by their companions, all of them wasted and skeletal. Sita stared in disbelief, distressed but also confused by the human misery before her. These men were the enemy she was supposedly fighting against, yet their wretchedness now in the shadow of death was hard to equate with Netaji’s ringing words for battle, or Shiva’s condemnation of the British. These men were no more than frail ghosts, as invisible to the world as she had once been in the bhajanashram. She followed their faltering progress, until they were lost from sight behind the mass of ramshackle huts.
Asian prisoners also crowded into the camp. Chinese and dark skinned Tamils, as skeletal and sick as the Europeans, were all whipped along like animals by the short legged, wide-jawed Japanese guards. Sita watched them herded into open-sided shacks that exposed them to the elements, snakes and wild animals. As she watched the crowd of men shuffling before h
er, she wondered again about the men pulled off the bamboo scaffolding outside the Ramakrishna Mission.
Unlike the prisoners’ huts, the Ranis were given Japanese officers’ quarters, structures raised up on stilts for safety and carpeted with clean rush matting. Once again villagers served them food, bowls of plentiful rice and vegetables. A short distance away, the prisoners lined up for a meagre cup of gruel dished out from large tureens. From where she sat on the wide wooden balcony of her accommodation, Sita looked down on the shacks of the Tamil labourers. In one corner of their accommodation she saw a small makeshift place of worship had been erected. A coconut shell garlanded with a plaited rope of grass, strewn with leaves and the petals of jungle flowers. These things were enough as a repository of hope. In her rucksack Sita carried the small picture of Durga on her tiger, and instinctively she reached in to touch it now, knowing the power of that unseen presence.
Later they were escorted to a stinking latrine used by the officers, open roofed but with rush walls for privacy. To get to this place they must pass the huts of the Tamil labourers. Heads down, the women hurried to the latrine, but Sita felt compelled to turn, as if to acknowledge that moment of witness, when men, who might be in this very camp, had been torn from their lives at the Ramakrishna Mission. That the Tamil labourers who now silently met her eye might not be those same men was of no importance. That she acknowledged her connection to them was all that mattered. The men eyed her curiously, and she turned away in embarrassment.
As the women sat on the open veranda of their sleeping quarters in the evening, conscious that they had an oil lamp while the camp now lay in darkness, there were low sounds. A small group of Tamil labourers crept towards them, looking fearfully about all the while for guards. Finally, feeling safe from the view of the Japanese, they crowded below the veranda, faces upturned towards the girls. They were men of small stature, wasted to the bone and naked, sores and wounds patterning their bodies. The oil lamp cast long shadows and lit up their faces so that their eyes, white against their dark faces, took on a luminous quality. One of the men began to speak in a low voice, while the others kept watch for patrolling guards.
‘We come to thank you, sisters. We know you go to fight for us, to free India. It does our eyes good to see you. Whether we live or die here matters not, but we know you fight for us, for our children’s future, for the future of India. If India is not freed, we will forever be imprisoned in our own land by a foreign power. We know now, white or yellow, all these great powers are the same. Fight, fight for us, fight for our children.’
‘The guards will come if they see us all here like this,’ Prema told them, pushing the girls back from the edge of the balcony, and leaning forward to speak to the men.
‘Go back, brothers. It is too dangerous for you to speak to us. We thank you and will remember you.’
It matters little if we live or die; what matters is that India is free. Sita heard Netaji’s words again as she looked down at the emaciated men, and knew some might not survive the coming day. In this camp, where the misery of death made men wretchedly equal, she saw more clearly than ever the commitment Shiva had made, and the reality of the cause Netaji fought for. The men crowding below the hut had risked their lives to tell them this.
In the early morning when they awoke the camp was already empty, its skeletal inmates gone before daybreak to their unspeakable work. Soon, they boarded the train once again, to journey on, and Sita stared out through the open door at the fast flowing river winding beside the track. The sky was darkening behind grey clouds, heavy with the approaching monsoon. She settled down for the long journey ahead, and pressed against her, Muni gave a yawn, their sweat mingling where their bare arms touched.
The long journey eventually ended at a small dusty station at the Burmese border just as the monsoon was breaking. Trucks were waiting to take them on to INA headquarters in Rangoon. After a few days in the capital, they travelled on to Meiktila, then to Mandalay and at last to the military camp at Maymyo, several hundred miles north of the capital. As they travelled, an early monsoon shower rained upon them, the Burma downpour eclipsing even that of Singapore in its ferocity, thundering on the canvas roof of the truck, splattering copiously through its open sides. The terrain turned hilly, the road carrying them up into the Shan Highlands, the air becoming steadily cooler.
At last they reached the scenic hill station of Maymyo. The place had once been the summer capital for the British in Burma, and a military outpost. It had also been known as a centre of education, where the colonial British and wealthy Burmese sent their children to school. Now the many deserted schools provided bases and billets for the Japanese military, and also for the Indian National Army. The fresh invigorating air and leafy avenues of trees, the rolling views of green terraced land, the quaint English-style cottages and mock–Tudor houses, were a different world. Sita had seen nothing like it. The fresh air and sudden lack of humidity heightened the sense of entering a new world where anything seemed possible.
‘Maybe Shiva is here,’ Sita told Prema.
The small town of Maymyo was a centre of war operations and hummed with military activity, its sleepy village roads busy with armoured cars, trucks, and ambulances full of the wounded. Scanning the Indian National Army men who, with Japanese troops, swarmed about the town, marching along or crammed into army transport, Sita’s heart lifted. Shiva had been unsure of where his regiment was going, so it was possible he might be here. At any moment she might turn her head and see Shiva, he might shout and wave to her from one of the crowded military trucks trundling down a road.
They also arrived to the startling news that Indian troops had crossed the Burmese border into India. In Manipur, they had raised the Azad Hind flag upon Indian soil, and were holding their position. The town fizzed with this jubilant news.
‘I will ask about Shiva,’ Prema promised.
Like most of the regiments crowding into the town, they were billeted in a deserted school, a large building with pseudo Tudor-style beams ornamenting its exterior. When they arrived, trenches were being dug around what was once the school playground. They were shown to the dormitories, airy rooms with high ceilings lined with rattan beds, topped by mosquito nets and mattresses and pillows stuffed with soft kapok. Precipitous views of wooded hills, stretching away in blue layer after layer filled the large windows. They rushed to look, breathing in the fresh air and the beauty of the sight. It was as if they were on holiday, not come to fight a war.
At night the rain coursed down again, drumming on the roof, hitting foliage and running off the leaves of fleshy vines in noisy rivulets. Once or twice Sita woke to the sound of thunder; a flash of lightning illuminated the sleeping girls about her, and Muni in the next bed. Sita stared up into the darkness and felt the strangeness of the place. When she thought of the long journey swinging away behind her, she imagined the silver trail of a snail. It was a relief to sleep in a bed again, and not doze in a moving train or a jolting truck, or beneath a thin blanket spread over the damp jungle floor, prey to ants, snakes, mosquitoes, leeches and worse. She seemed not to have slept for weeks. It was a relief just to reach a destination.
In Maymyo a new level of intensity impelled everything. The front was less than a couple of hundred miles away. The guerrilla warfare learned in Singapore was now relearned with a new intensity. They practised how to stalk their prey noiselessly, creeping forward on the ground, noses pressed to the dank moist earth, guns at the ready. They moved in small mobile units on long, tough route marches through the surrounding hills and stretches of jungle, depending on the local population for food and shelter, learning how to set ambushes and position bombs. They marched the sixty-five miles from Maymyo to Mandalay, rested there at night and then marched back. There was sweetness in the fresh air, and they marched with new energy, ate the plain food they were served with new relish, flung themselves enthusiastically into the exhausting manoeuvres. The sudden immediacy of war filled them all with new vig
our.
The town had a large military hospital and each day casualties were brought back from the front at Imphal and Kohima. In Maymyo life revolved around war, the talk of it, the thought of it, the sight of casualties coming in each day, the constant air raids. The proximity of the front line, to which sooner or later they would all make their way, to live or to die by its arbitrary choosing, heightened everything.
Shiva’s 3rd Division was not in Maymyo, Prema told her, but possibly near Meiktila, or even already in Kohima; nobody knew for sure. Even though Sita had not expected Shiva to be in Maymyo, disappointment filled her. The news they got of the war was mostly through the nurses who cared for the wounded soldiers in the military hospital. These girls were also Ranis of the Jhansi Regiment and had received basic military training, but they had volunteered to be part of the nursing corps. The girls worked in the hospital, but returned to sleep in the camp and usually joined them in the evening at supper, and gave them the news of the day.
‘The British are now fighting back, and the Japanese are not pushing forward like before,’ one of the nurses told Sita.
‘But the INA has crossed the border into India,’ Sita protested.
‘Well, now they have been pushed over the border again, back into Burma. The British are making new gains. A battle won, a battle lost, that is the way of war,’ the girl replied, with a shrug of her shoulders.
Not long after they arrived they met Captain Lakshmi, who had just returned to Maymyo from visiting a hospital at Jiyawadi. As they finished breakfast, sitting at long tables in the school refectory, she entered the room, walking towards them, smart in freshly starched jodhpurs, the shoulder epaulettes of her shirt slashed by the stripes of her rank. She seemed even more striking than Sita remembered when she first saw her garlanding Netaji at the rally on the Padang. She commanded the room as soon as she entered. The warmth of her smile included them all as they crowded around her, eager to be noticed. Lakshmi’s cap sat at a rakish angle on her head, and from a high window the clear morning sun spilt down, encircling her in a pool of light. She gave out a vitality that infected them all.