by Meira Chand
Nearby, a group of Japanese commanders stood talking, observing the women in a critical manner as, one by one, they jumped out of the truck. Everyone knew the Japanese military’s disapproval of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, and their incredulity at Netaji’s support of the women.
‘Don’t look at them,’ Prema advised, turning her back on the Japanese officers.
Leaving his tent, Netaji hurried towards the Japanese, while glancing anxiously up at the sky. The commanders turned to him politely, but soon an argument developed and it was clear by the gestures involved that it concerned the waiting Ranis of the Jhansi Regiment. Eventually, Netaji broke away from the Japanese abruptly, and they heard his angry retort.
‘Go to Hell. I will not cross until all the girls have gone over first.’ Netaji’s fury took the Japanese by surprise, and they glowered at the waiting women with open hostility.
Light was now edging out the darkness, and Netaji looked anxiously again at the sky as he hurried away to confer with his aides, his face contorted by anger. Soon Captain Sharma, a tall man with a flamboyantly curled moustache, made his way towards the waiting women.
‘The Japanese have commandeered all the ferries, although one was promised for you girls. However, we cannot wait any longer. There’s a place further up where the water is shallow. You will now have to swim across, as everyone else is doing. We will help you,’ Captain Sharma assured them, as murmurs of consternation were heard.
‘Give us your weapons. We will put them on one of the Japanese ferries,’ Captain Ahmed ordered.
‘What about the crocodiles?’ Muni asked again, daring to voice everyone’s dread. The danger of bombs appeared a modest peril compared to the snapping jaws of crocodiles.
‘The river is shallow here but also fast flowing. Crocodiles prefer slow moving water; you will not find them here. It is the current you must worry about, it can sweep you away,’ Captain Sharma replied.
‘There is no time left, it will soon be light. We must hurry.’ Captain Ahmed led them towards the shallow neck of the river to join the mass of men and animals wading into the water, everyone moving forward as fast as they could.
Sita turned to help Muni who stumbled under the weight of her heavy backpack.
‘I cannot swim,’ Muni’s voice broke in terror.
‘Hold onto me,’ Sita ordered.
The muddy bank had been churned to a sticky soup by the crowd of men around them. One by one the women dropped into the river. Immediately, the water sank into their clothes, the heavy backpacks weighing them down. Muni clung to Sita as they waded forward, gasping in fear as the riverbed shelved and the water suddenly rose up to their chests. The river supported them and eased the weight of the backpack on Sita’s shoulders, but as they pushed forward, they were suddenly out of their depth.
Muni’s weight and desperate flailing about pulled Sita down. Treading water, she gasped and fought to stay afloat. The strong current now tugged like a rope about her feet, and she swallowed a mouthful of the foul water. Then, coughing and pulling the terrified Muni along behind her, she began to swim again. As she struck out, she recalled that other river in the village, in which she had swum as a child long ago.
She remembered how, holding her breath, she had plunged down, wanting to swim where no one had been before, to reach that mysterious place where she knew she would find her sister. Beneath the water a sense of limitlessness had filled her. The sun filtered down and in that glassy world she saw the silver flash of fish about her. Brown trout, snake-like eels and large carp glided past, the light catching in their scales. Deeper and deeper she swam, pliant as a fish, losing herself in a vast depth of silent nothingness, searching for that invisible space where she knew her sister lived in a secret river beneath the river, with the goddess Yami. She imagined a dark grotto, silent and safe, and at its centre her sister rested. The current gripped her limbs and pulled her along, as if her sister held her by the hand. As she swam deeper the light would begin to fade, and looking down she saw the darkness below, and terror always seized her. In the river’s subterranean world lived monstrous, long whiskered catfish as big as a man with mouths that could swallow a child. She had seen one once in a fishermen’s net. Then, her lungs ready to burst, she had spun upwards to break the surface, into the sunlight, gasping for air.
Now, as she swam forward in darkness across the Waw with the weight of Muni dangerously hampering her every stroke, she thought of the bottomless world of all rivers, where besides ugly catfish, crocodiles could also lurk, and she struck out in sudden panic. Stirred up by the army of men now fording the river, the water engulfed them in unstoppable waves. Horses swam beside them, the whites of their eyes rolling in fear, and a convoy of ferries travelled past with mounted guns and lorries tied to the flat bamboo rafts. The river appeared alive with men and animals and hardware, all moving forward as quickly as possible under the breaking light of the day.
There were other girls like Muni who, unable to swim, cried out in distress. Captains Sharma and Ahmed splashed into the water with a rope they had tied to a tree on the bank.
‘Grab the rope and pull yourself forward,’ Captain Sharma instructed, unwinding the twine, encouraging the girls to take hold of it, wading out of the water on the opposite bank to secure the rope to another tree. Over her shoulder Sita saw Valli, Vasanthi, Ambika and Shivani, all wrestling with the fast flowing water, gripping the rope held by the colonels.
Eventually, one by one, they reached the bank and staggered out of the river. Immediately, without the buoyancy of the water, the heavy weight of the knapsack cut painfully again into Sita’s shoulders, water oozing freely from the canvas pack.
The Waw was crossed, but ahead of them the great Sittang River still waited. They rested through the day in a deserted village close to the riverbank. The rain had stopped and the sun emerged hotly again, quickly drying their sodden clothes. Enemy planes swooped low, but the heavy canopy of trees offered good protection for the convoy. Along with the others Sita unpacked the contents of her backpack, spreading things around her on the ground to dry, and was relieved to find her quinine pills were safe; she kept them in a small tin and not a paper box like so many of the other girls, who were now bemoaning this loss. They had only the clothes they stood up in, and the mud of the river now permeated everything, their uniform stiffening about them as it dried, perfumed by an unpleasant odour.
Early in the evening it began to rain again, but they could not delay, and left as darkness fell, clambering back into the trucks in their still damp clothes to press on towards the Sittang River. Soon, the road became a muddy track, littered with abandoned trucks and cars sunk deep in the mire. Eventually, it became impassable and an order was given to abandon their vehicles. Forming ranks and heaving their backpacks up onto their shoulders, they began to march again. Netaji was with them now, walking with the women at the head of his many regiments. Eventually, they reached the wide Sittang River before daybreak and crossed as planned at dawn, ferries plying them over the wide river, depositing them safely on the opposite bank. The Japanese troops occupied a village near the river, and Netaji and his army were allocated space and some shacks as a billet on the outskirts. Fires were lit, and from the Japanese encampment a smell of roasting meat floated to them. Everyone sniffed the air appreciatively.
‘The Japanese have taken all the chickens in the village, but whatever is being cooked is only for their commanders. Everyone else is starving like us,’ Prema reminded them.
23
SINGAPORE, 2000
Amita left the hospital and walked towards the bus stop. In the imaging department she had paid her ultra-sound bill in a daze, and then drifted, almost unseeing, through the hospital corridors towards the exit. It was only when she saw the bus stop ahead that she realised her intuition had guided her there; everything within her was blasted away. After a few minutes she saw the shuttle bus approaching, but as it drew to a halt she turned away suddenly, and walked on an impulse to
wards the taxi stand at the hospital’s main entrance. It was the only day in the week that she had so many free hours between lectures and tutorials. With the morning class behind her, Amita had a couple of meetings with individual students in the late afternoon and a supervisory discussion with a PhD candidate in the early evening; there was no need to hurry back to the university.
It was not far from the hospital to the Botanic Gardens. The taxi took a route through Holland Village, stopping before a traffic light outside the shopping centre. The place was popular with the expatriate community for its many small boutiques selling ethnic items from the region, woven mats and wooden bowls, silver, jewellery, linen and chinaware. A group of young Caucasian women, pushing prams and holding young children by the hand, began crossing the road in front of the taxi. One of the women was heavily pregnant and at the sight of her Amita caught her breath, her pulse quickening uncomfortably. As the traffic light turned green the taxi jumped forward with abrupt acceleration, and to Amita’s relief Holland Village was left behind.
She had not visited the Botanic Gardens for many years, but little seemed to have changed. The large iron gates stood open as always, and the lush green tranquillity of the place quickly enclosed her. The sky was darkening, already preparing for an afternoon squall. As a child, she had come here often with her mother, riding the bus away from the density of Serangoon Road with its press of noise, colour and odours. They always came in the late afternoon, when the soft yielding forms of the garden caught at shadows, and the evening deepened around them. Her mother said that here, amongst the embrace of tall trees and the jade water of the lake, she remembered the village beside the river where she was born, in far away India. Sometimes they walked around the gardens, between the manicured lawns and carefully trimmed bushes, to a bandstand where once Amita heard a man play a violin, the notes reaching the sky and dissolving the world. Sometimes they had fed the turtles that lived in the lake, bringing with them a bag of stale bread for this purpose, but mostly they just sat beneath the huge banyan tree beside the water, gazing into the murky depths.
‘In my village, near my home and the river, we also had such a great tree. It was hundreds of years old and big, like a house. We climbed its branches and swung on its long roots. Grandmother said Krishna himself always chose to rest in a banyan tree.’ Sita told Amita the same thing each time, her voice wistful, her eyes moist with tears that could not be shed.
Now, as she walked towards the old tree beside the lake and the seat that still rested beneath it, Amita realised that each time her mother brought her here as a child, she must have been filled with unbearable nostalgia. Through the old tree and the lake she touched faded memories, rekindling a past lost to her forever. Amita had never before considered the pain of exile her mother must have endured, and the realisation sat heavily upon her now. She herself might look back with interest to her roots in India, like a scene glimpsed through a dusty window, but she did not feel emotionally connected to that country, did not suffer from a fractured identity, or the grief of loss as her mother did. She was a Singaporean, and her sense of belonging was only to this small island, a city-state. Although primarily a Chinese city for Chinese people, it still made room for her, an Indian, and for the other ethnic minorities that peopled it, including them all in its identity. She did not think of herself as Indian, but as an Indian Singaporean, which was an entirely different thing.
The lake was before her, and to her left the massive old banyan tree soared up. She strode forward as she would towards an old friend, her heart filling with gladness as its shadow fell upon her. A squirrel scurried up the trunk and along a branch and then stopped, its bright eyes fixed upon her for a moment, assessing her largeness and the potential danger. Then it skimmed lightly away over the branches and was gone. Unchanged over time, the old tree had waited for her, a repository of memory and emotion, holding in trust the sad yearning of her mother’s heart and her own uncertain learnings. Under its huge skirt nothing grew, dry shrivelled leaves littered the gloomy floor. Sitting down on the seat, Amita looked up into the branches as she had when a child, and drew a breath of wonder. On and on, up and up, layer upon layer the tree ascended above her, like the vaulted roof of a great cathedral, until at last it reached the place where the sun broke through its canopy. A plaque near the tree told her it already stood there in 1877 when the Botanic Gardens were newly established, and no one knew how old it was. A beard of wiry aerial roots descended from its branches, touching the ground and growing back upwards again into the tree to prop up the central trunk, new streams of life merging with the ancient core. Glossy leaves cushioned huge boughs sweeping down about Amita, hanging low over the lake in a thick curtain. The branches almost touched the water, and were mirrored in its green face.
As Amita stared into the lake, a bubble of air disturbed the stillness, widening ripples circling over the water. As she watched, more and more bubbles appeared, then a quick splash as a fish broke the surface. Amita saw that she looked down upon the glass ceiling of another world, where dark sinuous shadows slipped through the murky depths below. A sudden breeze rustled the branches above her and lightning flashed through the sky. Looking back into the water, Amita met the eyes of a large fish staring up at her, unmoving. Sinking silently, the fish appeared to dissolve slowly, fading back into the gloom. In its place a dark-skinned catfish with ashen whiskers appeared, wheeled and turned and was gone. She heard another splash as a large water monitor, like a dark moving log, lizard head held above the water, began swimming steadily away across the lake. A jogger, an elderly man in shorts and singlet and a red cap, looked at Amita curiously as he passed. A woman with a small girl in a pink dress hurried by, the child pulling on the mother’s hand and pointing to the turtles beneath the surface of the water, just as Amita had done as a child. The woman squinted up at the sky, struggling to open her umbrella at the imminent threat of rain. In the lake the fish had risen to observe Amita again.
Mirrored in the thick green water the banyan appeared to stand on its head, its great branches descending into the lake, the trailing roots pushing back into the sky. The ancient tree was but a shadow in the water, while the hidden world below the lake was the reality. There were, Amita saw, two worlds before her, the one that was hidden and the one that was known. In its mirroring, the truth of the tree could be understood, yet what she took as the reality about her was but a reflection to that other secret world. Perhaps life itself was a form of mirror-imagery, an upside down reality, she thought. Perhaps the world she could not enter, the spiritual world, was the true reality as all the old books said, and the material world in which she now sat beneath the old tree, a world of sensations, of pains and joys, was but a shadow of that hidden one. A sudden gust of wind lifted the branches again, stirring the shrivelled leaves at her feet, moving in the feathery banks of foliage bordering the lake. A fish broke the surface again with a splash.
The darkening sky was ripped apart by a sudden clap of thunder as rain abruptly drummed about her, churning up the surface of the lake. Amita retreated quickly to shelter beneath the tree, pressing her back against the trunk. Unmoved by the onslaught, rain rolling off its great spreading branches, the old tree kept her dry, just as it had when she had sheltered beneath it as a child. She marvelled at how completely she was enfolded and protected. At her feet the desiccated leaves beneath the tree’s wide skirt lay dry and untouched by the rain.
Running her hand over the furrowed bark of the trunk, she felt again its rough and familiar caress. As a child, she had pressed her face against the old trunk, attempting to stretch her arms around it, embracing the tree as she would a friend, taking comfort from its ancient life. The original tree had rotted away long ago, enveloped and strangled by the thick mesh of its roots, to leave only a hollow core. Disregarding her mother’s protests, Amita had delighted in climbing into that empty void as a child. It was like a gnarled and murky cave and crouching down within its damp confines, thick with the scent of
rot and rodent droppings, she was at one with the old tree, protected within it by something she did not understand.
The floor about her, she remembered, was littered with a compost of rotting leaves, the moulted skins of cicadas, a dead mouse, a featherless hatchling; she never knew from one visit to another what she would find. As she watched, the corpse of a bee might be dismembered by an army of ants, and its parts carried away to nourish new life, or mulch the earth. Her presence did not disturb this endless process, the ants merely rerouting their path to avoid her, intent upon their task. She breathed in the deep rich smell of decay, an odour that was without end and that went on and on inside her.
Now, so many years later, she looked down again into the hollow where once she had crouched as a child, and experienced again its primordial scent, and the grief of loss. The small space that had so easily fitted her then in her innocence was denied to her now. The decomposing corpse of a squirrel, nestled amongst the damp rotting leaves, was black with a heaving mass of ants, intent on de-fleshing death. Here, nothing had changed over the years while she had grown and reached out to life; in the hollow of this old tree the process she had watched as a child continued, ceaseless and unstoppable, a continual transforming of death into life. She too, she saw now, was engaged in this same process, one version of herself changing into the next as she matured. She inhaled again and the scent of the past tunnelled into her head, resonating with her across a lifetime. She lived upon a narrow rope of time, waking afresh to each new morning, but she aged in an unseen experiential place. She was like the old tree, the original plant had rotted away but new streams of life grew back into the central trunk, thickening and texturing over the years. All the people she had been, the child hiding in the tree, the woman in America, the university professor, all merged with the timeless core of herself.