by Amitav Ghosh
‘Talk about what, sah’b?’
‘I don’t care. Just talk, Kishan Singh—about anything. Tell me about your village.’
Hesitantly Kishan Singh began to speak.
‘The name of our village is Kotana, sah’b, and it’s near Kurukshetra—not far from Delhi. It’s as simple a village as any, but there is one thing we always say of Kotana . . .’
‘What is that?’
‘That in every house in Kotana you will find a piece of the world. In one there is a hookah from Egypt; in another a box from China . . .’
Speaking through a wall of pain, Arjun said: ‘Why is that, Kishan Singh?’
‘Sah’b, for generations every Jat family in Kotana has sent its sons to serve in the army of the English sarkar.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since the time of my great-grandfather, sah’b—since the Mutiny.’
‘The Mutiny?’ Arjun recalled Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland’s voice, speaking of the same thing. ‘What does the Mutiny have to do with it?’
‘Sah’b, when I was a boy, the old men of the village used to tell us a story. It was about the Mutiny. When the uprising ended and the British re-entered Delhi it came to be known that a great spectacle was to be held in the city. From Kotana a group of elders was deputed to go. They set off at dawn and walked, with hundreds of others, towards the southern postern of the old capital. When they were still far away they saw that the sky above the city was black with birds. The wind carried an odour that grew stronger as they approached the city. The road was straight, the ground level and they could see a long way into the distance. A puzzling sight lay ahead. The road seemed to be lined by troops of very tall men. It was as though an army of giants had turned out to stand guard over the crowd. On approaching closer, they saw that these were not giants, but men—rebel soldiers whose bodies had been impaled on sharpened stakes. The stakes were arranged in straight lines and led all the way to the city. The stench was terrible. When they returned to Kotana the elders gathered the villagers together. They said, “Today we have seen the face of defeat and it shall never be ours.” From that day on, the families of Kotana decided that they would send their sons to the army of the English sarkar. This is what our fathers told us. I do not know whether this story is true or false, sah’b, but it is what I heard when I was a boy.’
In the confusion of his pain, Arjun had trouble following this. ‘What are you saying then, Kishan Singh? Are you saying that the villagers joined the army out of fear? But that can’t be: no one forced them—or you for that matter. What was there to be afraid of?’
‘Sah’b,’ Kishan Singh said softly, ‘all fear is not the same. What is the fear that keeps us hiding here, for instance? Is it a fear of the Japanese, or is it a fear of the British? Or is it a fear of ourselves, because we do not know who to fear more? Sah’b, a man may fear the shadow of a gun just as much as the gun itself—and who is to say which is the more real?’
For a moment, it seemed to Arjun that Kishan Singh was talking about something very exotic, a creature of fantasy: a terror that made you remould yourself, that made you change your idea of your place in the world—to the point where you lost your awareness of the fear that had formed you. The idea of such a magnitude of terror seemed absurd—like reports of the finding of creatures that were known to be extinct. This was the difference, he thought, between the other ranks and officers: common soldiers had no access to the instincts that made them act; no vocabulary with which to shape their self-awareness. They were destined, like Kishan Singh, to be strangers to themselves, to be directed always by others.
But no sooner did this thought take shape in his mind than it was transformed by the delirium of his pain. He had a sudden, hallucinatory vision. Both he and Kishan Singh were in it, but transfigured: they were both lumps of clay, whirling on potters’ wheels. He, Arjun, was the first to have been touched by the unseen potter; a hand had come down on him, touched him, passed over to another; he had been formed, shaped—he had become a thing unto itself—no longer aware of the pressure of the potter’s hand, unconscious even that it had come his way. Elsewhere, Kishan Singh was still turning on the wheel, still unformed, damp, malleable mud. It was this formlessness that was the core of his defence against the potter and his shaping touch.
Arjun could not blot this image from his mind: how was it possible that Kishan Singh—uneducated, unconscious of his motives—should be more aware of the weight of the past than he, Arjun?
‘Kishan Singh,’ he said hoarsely, ‘give me some water.’ Kishan Singh handed him a green bottle and he drank, hoping that the water would dissipate the hallucinatory brilliance of the images that were passing before his eyes. But it had exactly the opposite effect. His mind was inflamed with visions, queries. Was it possible—even hypothetically—that his life, his choices, had always been moulded by fears of which he himself was unaware? He thought back to the past: Lankasuka, Manju, Bela, the hours he had spent sitting on the windowsill, the ecstatic sense of liberation that had come over him on learning that he had been accepted into the Military Academy. Fear had played no part in any of this. He had never thought of his life as different from any other; he had never experienced the slightest doubt about his personal sovereignty; never imagined himself to be dealing with anything other than the full range of human choice. But if it were true that his life had somehow been moulded by acts of power of which he was unaware—then it would follow that he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness. Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion. And if this were so, how was he to find himself now?
thirty-seven
When they left for Morningside, the next day, the roads were even busier than on the way out. But theirs seemed to be the only vehicle going north: everyone else was heading in the opposite direction—towards Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Heads turned to stare as they drove by; they were flagged down several times by helpful people who wanted to make sure they knew where they were going.
They passed dozens of army trucks, many of them travelling two abreast, with their klaxons blaring, crowding them off the road. Over long stretches they were forced to drive on the grassy verge, crawling along at speeds of fifteen to twenty miles an hour.
It was late afternoon when they came into Sungei Pattani: it was just a day since they’d last driven through, but the town already seemed a changed place. In the morning, they’d found it empty and ghostlike: most of its inhabitants had scattered into the countryside; its shops had been boarded and locked. Now Sungei Pattani was empty no longer: everywhere they looked there were soldiers—Australians, Canadians, Indians, British. But these were not the orderly detachments they had grown accustomed to seeing; these were listless, weary-looking men, bunched together in small groups and ragged little clusters. Some were ambling through the streets with their guns slung over their shoulders, like fishing rods; some were lounging in the shade of the shophouse arcades, eating out of cans and packets, scooping out the food with their fingers. Their uniforms were sweat-stained and dirty, their faces streaked with mud. In the town’s parks and roundabouts— where children usually played—they saw groups of exhausted men, lying asleep, with their weapons cradled in their arms.
They began to notice signs of looting: broken windows, gates that had been wrenched open, shops with battered shutters. They saw looters stepping in and out of the breaches— soldiers and locals were milling about together, tearing shops apart. There were no policemen anywhere in sight. It was clear that the civil administration had departed.
‘Faster, Ilongo.’ Dinu rapped on the truck’s window. ‘Let’s get through . . .’
They came to a road that was blocked by a group of soldiers. One of them was pointing a gun at the truck, trying to wave it down. Dinu noticed that he was swaying on his feet. He shouted to Ilongo. ‘Keep going; they’re drunk . . .’ Ilongo swerved suddenly, taking the truck over the median, into the other lane. Dinu loo
ked back to see the soldiers staring after them, cursing: ‘Fuckin’ monkeys . . .’
Ilongo turned into an alley, then took the truck speeding down a side road, out of town. A few miles further on, he spotted an acquaintance standing by the roadside. He stopped to ask what was going on.
The man was a contractor on a rubber plantation not far from Morningside. He told them they were lucky that they were still in possession of their truck: on his estate, every single vehicle had been commandeered. An English officer had come through with a detachment of soldiers earlier in the day: they’d driven their trucks away.
They exchanged glances, all of them thinking immediately of the Daytona, back at its Morningside garage.
Dinu began to chew on his knuckles: ‘Come on, let’s not waste time . . .’
A few minutes later they drove past Morningside’s arched gateway. It was as though they had entered another country; here there was no sign of anything untoward. The estate was tranquil and quiet; children waved at them as they drove up the unpaved road. Then the house appeared, far ahead on the slope: it looked majestic, serene.
Ilongo took the truck directly to the garage. He jumped down and pulled the door open. The Daytona was still inside.
Dinu and Alison stood looking at the car. Dinu took hold of her arm and nudged her into the garage: ‘Alison . . . you should set off right now . . . there’s so little time.’
‘No.’ Alison pulled her arm free and slammed shut the garage door. ‘I’ll leave later—at night. Who knows how long it’ll be before we see each other again? I want to spend a few hours with you before I go.’
In the morning Kishan Singh went to investigate and found that the Japanese had withdrawn from the plantation, under cover of night. He helped Arjun crawl out of the culvert and propped him upright, on the leaf-carpeted ground. Then he eased off Arjun’s wet clothes, wrung them out, and spread them in a sunlit spot.
Arjun’s chest and stomach were puckered from their long immersion, but the pain in his leg had eased. He was relieved to see that the bandage on his thigh had done its work, stopping the flow of blood.
Kishan Singh found a branch that could be used as a crutch and they started off slowly with Arjun stopping every few paces to adjust his grip. Presently they arrived at a gravelled track. Keeping to the shelter of the treeline they followed the direction of the track. In a while they began to notice signs of approaching habitation—shreds of clothing, footprints, discarded eggshells that had been carried away by birds. Soon they saw curls of woodsmoke rising above the trees. They caught the familiar smells of rice and scorched mustard seeds. Then they spotted the plantation’s coolie lines: twin rows of shacks, facing each other across the track. Large numbers of people were milling about in the open and it was clear, even from a distance, that something unusual was under way.
The shacks lay in a gentle depression, a basin, surrounded by higher land on all sides. With Kishan Singh’s help Arjun climbed up a low ridge. Lying flat on their stomachs, they looked down into the basin below.
There were some fifty dwellings in the lines, arranged in parallel rows. At one end there was a small Hindu temple— a tin-roofed shed surrounded by a wall that was painted red and white. Next to the temple there was a clearing with an open-sided shed, also roofed in tin. This was evidently a communal meeting place, it was this shed that was the focus of the excitement. Everyone in the hamlet was heading in its direction.
‘Sah’b. Look.’ Kishan Singh pointed to a black car standing half hidden beside the shed. There was a flag on the bonnet, affixed to an upright rod. The flag seemed very small from that distance and Arjun failed to recognise it at first glance. It was both familiar and unfamiliar; of a design that he knew well, but had not seen in a long time. He turned to Kishan Singh and found his batman watching him warily.
‘Do you know that jhanda, Kishan Singh?’
‘Sah’b, it is the tiranga . . .’
Of course—how could he have failed to recognise it? It was the flag of the Indian national movement: a spinning wheel, set against a background of saffron, white and green. He was still puzzling over the flag when there followed a second surprise. A familiar khaki-turbaned figure came out of the shed, walking towards the car. It was Hardy and he was deep in conversation with another man, a stranger—a white-bearded Sikh, dressed in the long, white tunic of a learned man, a Giani.
There was no reason to wait any longer. Arjun struggled to his feet. ‘Kishan Singh, chalo . . .’ Leaning heavily on his crutch he began to walk down the slope towards the shed.
‘Hardy! Oye, Hardy!’
Hardy broke off his conversation and looked up. ‘Yaar?
Arjun?’
He came running up the slope, a grin spreading across his face. ‘Yaar—we thought for sure the bastards had got you.’
‘Kishan Singh came back for me,’ Arjun said. ‘I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for him.’
Hardy clapped Kishan Singh on the shoulder. ‘Shabash!’
‘Now tell me—’ Arjun jogged Hardy’s elbow—‘what’s going on here?’
‘No hurry, yaar,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ll tell you, but we should get you cleaned up first. Where exactly were you hit?’
‘Hamstring, I think.’
‘Is it bad?’
‘Better today.’
‘Let’s go somewhere where we can sit down. We’ll get your wound dressed.’
Hardy beckoned to a soldier. ‘Jaldi—M.O. ko bhejo.’ He led Arjun into one of the shacks and held the door open. ‘Our HQ,’ he said with a grin.
It was dark inside, the narrow windows being draped in ragged bits of cloth. The walls were of wood, covered with layers of soot, and there was a powerful smell of smoke. Beside one wall there stood a narrow string charpoy: Hardy led Arjun to the bed and helped him sit down.
There was a knock at the door and the medical orderly entered. He subjected Arjun’s bandage to a careful examination and then ripped it off, in one quick movement. Arjun grimaced and Hardy handed him a glass of water.
‘Drink up. You need it.’
Arjun drained the glass and handed it back. ‘Hardy?’ he said. ‘Where’s Bucky?’
‘He’s resting,’ said Hardy. ‘There’s a vacant shed down the road. It was the only suitable place for him. His arm’s been troubling him. We had to give him painkillers. He’s been out all morning.’
The orderly began to swab Arjun’s wound and he braced himself by gripping the edge of the bed.
‘So tell me, Hardy,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘I’ll make it as short as possible,’ said Hardy. ‘It happened like this: last night, not long after we lost you, we came across a couple of rubber tappers. They were Indian and when we spoke to them they said we would be safe in the coolie lines. They brought us here. They were very welcoming: gave us food, beds. Showed us the shed where we put Bucky. We didn’t know this then, but it turned out that some of them were members of the Indian Independence League. They sent word to their office and this morning Gianiji arrived, in a car—flying the flag. You can imagine how amazed we were. Turns out he’s Giani Amreek Singh—recognise the name? His signature was on the pamphlets the Japs dropped on us at Jitra.’
‘Yes,’ said Arjun, drily. ‘I know that name. What does he want?’
Hardy paused, humming a tune under his breath. Arjun knew that he was thinking carefully about what he was going to say next.
‘Arjun, do you remember Captain Mohun Singh?’
‘Yes. 1/14 Punjab, right? Wasn’t he at Jitra too? I thought I saw him on the way to the Asoon line.’
‘Yes. They took cover in the plantation and headed eastwards just as we did.’
‘So what about Captain Mohun Singh?’
‘Gianiji told me that he’d made contact with the Indian Independence League.’
‘Go on.’
‘Wait.’ The orderly had finished dressing Arjun’s wound. Hardy saw him out and then shut the d
oor. He paused, running a finger through his beard. ‘Look, Arjun,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how you’ll take this. I’m just telling you what I know . . .’
‘Go on. Hardy.’
‘Captain Mohun Singh has taken a big step.’
‘What step?’
‘He’s decided to break with the Britishers.’
‘What?’
‘Yes,’ said Hardy in a flat, even voice. ‘He’s going to form an independent unit—the Indian National Army. All the 14th Punjab officers are with him—the Indians I mean. Kumar, Masood, many others too. They’ve invited all of us to join.’
‘So?’ Arjun said. ‘Are you thinking of doing it?’
‘What can I say, Arjun?’ Hardy smiled. ‘You know how I feel. I’ve never made a secret of my views—unlike some of you chaps.’
‘Hardy, wait.’ Arjun stabbed a finger at him. ‘Just think a minute. Don’t be in a hurry. How do you know who this Giani is? How do you even know he’s telling the truth about Captain Mohun Singh? How do you know he’s not just a Japanese stooge?’
‘Amreek Singh was in the army too,’ Hardy said. ‘He knew my father—his village isn’t far from ours. If he is a Japanese stooge then there must be some reason why he became one. In any case, who are we to call him a stooge?’ Hardy laughed. ‘After all, aren’t we the biggest stooges of all?’
‘Wait.’ Arjun tried to marshal his thoughts. It was a huge relief to be able to speak out at last, to bring into the open the long arguments that he had conducted with himself in the secrecy of his mind.
‘So what does this mean?’ Arjun said. ‘That Mohun Singh and his lot will be fighting on the Japanese side?’
‘Yes. Of course. For the time being—until the British are out of India.’
‘But Hardy—let’s think this thing through. What do the Japanese want with us? Do they care about us and our independence? All they want is to push the Britishers out so they can step in and take their place. They just want to use us: don’t you see that?’