Sheila had met Elinor and Sinbad Sinclair at one of Sudhin’s drink and stand-ups. That evening Chhabi had made a rare appearance. She had quietly set out prawn and chicken curries, along with crisp puris blown up like small balloons and decorated with a sprinkling of red pepper. While her guests drank, talked, and ate around her, Chhabi had stood as still as a Jamini Roy portrait. Elinor had been sitting by herself watching her when Sheila, then hugely pregnant with Anita, approached to ask for baby advice. They talked until 2:00 a.m. Elinor had shown up at her flat the next morning with her old pram, begging her to accept it. The Audens were soon dining at the Sinclairs’ home upon beef stroganov and chocolate pudding or meeting at Shahid Suhrawardy’s for games of badminton and tennis.
At their flat at the bottom of Jakhu Hill in Simla, they hung handloom curtains. Sheila painted ballet dancers on the sitting room wall. Monkeys came in through the windows, snatching precious fruit off the table and frightening the children. They tortured themselves reminiscing about the crab soup, sweet-and-sour pork, and fried prawns at Nanking restaurant, those breakfasts with tinned fruit and cream or ham omelets served with proper marmalade and not the glutinous mess they all had now. The food in Simla was revolting. And then the rains came.
Whenever Sheila heard “J’attendrai” on the neighbor’s wireless she would long for those evenings when the Firpo’s orchestra would strike up this song as soon as she and John walked through the doors. But the music program was always followed by Subhas Bose’s hectoring broadcasts declaiming Axis triumphs on every front, the pending annihilation of Britain, and the coming liberation of India. Sheila would leave the room. But for the arrival of refugees who had survived the nine-hundred-mile journey from Burma, the war felt a million miles away. Indeed, a fortnight after the baby’s birth, John was still awaiting word of it. None of Sheila’s Express telegrams had reached him. His letters had become increasingly frantic.
“We shall either free India or die in the attempt. We shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery,” Gandhi had said as the police closed in, days after Sheila entered the Portmore Nursing Home for her confinement. The last of Gandhi’s mass protests, the Quit India Movement, had begun. By way of a reply, Linlithgow declaimed that the time for “appeasement” was over; Congress would now be crushed. While Sheila was giving birth, peaceful protests in Calcutta were met with lathi charges and tear gas. A mob descended on Cornwallis Street, attacking a tram with brickbats and setting it on fire, along with the street’s gas and electric meter boxes. Rioting crowds were fired upon. Congressites were rounded up by the tens of thousands and put behind bars in secret locations. While John Auden waited for word of the birth of his second child and Sheila listened to a deafening rain batter the tin roof, bridges were being blown up, rail lines dismantled, telegraph and telephone lines cut. “A peculiar feature of the disturbances,” a puzzled editorial writer noted, “has been hostility to post offices and pillar boxes.”
Referencing “secret evidence,” Leo Amery denounced Nehru and his lot as wicked men and saboteurs on the Empire Service, rebroadcast on All-India Radio. Viceroy Linlithgow piled on, accusing Congress of directing “bomb outrages and other acts of terrorism.” Calcutta’s Special Branch pounced on an informer who provided details of the courier system between Subhas Bose’s fifth columnists and Gandhi’s ashram. When questioned, the man admitted his source was a swami with mystic powers but Special Branch went with it.
One of Subhas Bose’s broadcasts suggested it wasn’t the imprisoned Congress leaders directing the sabotage but the BBC Eastern Service. Bose, who listened to George Orwell’s broadcasts as closely as Orwell listened to his, had heard him speculate about what effect “unchecked sabotage” might have on German war operations. “A few blows from a sledgehammer in the right place can stop a power station working. One tug at the wrong signal lever can wreck a train. Quite a small charge of explosive can sink a ship.” Perhaps Indian saboteurs had taken up his suggestions, Bose hinted, mischievously. They had. In response to police atrocities, rebels in Midnapore district embarked on an insurgent campaign of assassination, sabotage, and extortion that would last for two years.
Unaware of the insurgency under way, Sheila sent another cable to John and wrote letter after letter. She couldn’t bear Lila as a name for the baby. She would always think of that pretentious Lila Ghosh and inevitably Lila would be called Lily at school and that would be just too awful. Elinor had suggested Romila. Could John ask Sudhin what it meant? Sudhin had been promising to visit all summer, only to beg off by citing his work with Air Raid Precautions. She would have so loved a visit. Simla was overrun with women and healthy men were a rare sight. The only men there were recovering from dreadful diseases picked up in Burmese jungles.
Sheila confessed a growing allegiance to India, something she’d never really felt before. She saw something of her country’s vulnerability in the lives that stretched out before her half-and-half daughters. She hoped they would love both India and England, yet be worldly enough to see the faults of both. She supposed that once the rains stopped, it would be “Enter the Japanese and goodbye Bengal.” Either way, Elinor would soon return to Delhi and she would have to manage an infant and a toddler on her own. Ayahs were impossible to find. Was John disappointed to have another daughter? She was relieved. A mixed boy would have a difficult time. She hoped they would stop at two and resolved to be less vague about Dutch caps. Yet for a man who feared he was sterile, they hadn’t done too badly.
Sheila rambled on and on. Save putting a notice in the Statesman, she wasn’t sure what else she could do. She felt obscurely responsible.
When his first daughter was born, John had played Beethoven’s Seventh at top volume on Minnie’s gramophone. When he finally received news of the birth of his second daughter, he played it again. He supposed one day his daughters would find their suspicions they were different confirmed and would need to understand the meaning of their heritage. Where would they call home? England was out. Even India was doubtful; the words “a touch of the tar brush” shadowed anyone whose hair was not positively flaxen. John feared the virus of racial arrogance, the myth of the superior Nordic races that Hitler had unleashed, would prove contagious. In defeat, Germany might prove resistant, but he was less sure of the vengeful Anglo-Saxons. He no longer trusted anything England claimed it stood for.
In the early years of the war Sheila would move from rooming house to rooming house, living in lonely hill stations where she could be near family or friends while John traveled all over India writing engineering reports. Wrapped in blankets against the cold, her daughters sharing her bed for warmth, she wrote her husband long and loving letters with her gloves on. Sheila liked to relive the early days of their courtship, the predawn flights to see the sun rise over the Sunderbans and the dancing till the small hours. How many Dundee cakes and Firpo’s chocolates she had once consumed! How many plates of oysters! She hoped her daughters would know these little luxuries. They eased one’s way through life’s difficulties.
Of course compared to those women whose husbands were off in the desert or jungles facing lord knows what danger, Sheila knew she was lucky. Were she to die tomorrow she was certain people would say of her: that woman never had a day’s trouble in her life.
Subhas Chandra Bose, Free India Broadcast,
August 17, 1942
“The whole world now sees that the velvet glove, which ordinarily hides the mailed fist of Britain, has now been cast away and brute force—naked and unashamed—rules over India. Behind the thick screen of gas, underneath the heavy blows of police batons, amid the continual whistle of bullets and the angry defiance of the injured and the dying—the soul of India asks—’Where are the Four Freedoms?’ The words float over the seven seas to all corners of the globe—but Washington does not reply. After a pause, the soul of India asks again—’Where is the Atlantic Charter, which guaranteed to every nation its own government?’ This time Downing Street and White House r
eply simultaneously: ‘That Charter was not meant for India.’”
War Rumors File, 1942, Special Branch,
Lord Sinha Road, Calcutta
“Letters by soldiers stationed abroad are written by the post office. In Singapore a British high official was made to pull a rickshaw mounted by two Indians. Lorry loads of wounded civilians were taken from a Rangoon hospital into a forest; those slightly injured were told to leave while those more seriously injured were burnt alive. During the Rangoon retreat Indians were denied passage on steamers and were forced to go by jungle tracks bristling with thugs and dacoits. Thousands went mad with hunger.
“Japanese infiltration through the Sunderbans is imminent. The Japs are marching towards Chittagong along routes taken by the evacuees from Burma. A recent air raid alarm was not a practice alert but a real one and the information was suppressed to prevent a panicked exodus from Calcutta. Dynamite has been placed at Howrah and Ballygunj Bridges, at Howrah and Sealdah rail stations wired to blow up when the Japanese invade. A European was overheard in a railway waiting room saying Rudolph Hess’s visit to England had yielded a joint plan to crush the Soviets. Once Russia was defeated, peace would be declared. It is believed that Britain has mortgaged India to the U.S.A. and that Hess has become an American.”
The Streets of Calcutta, 1943
On September 5, 1942, the U.S. State Department received a long telegram regarding the widespread political upheaval from the American Mission in New Delhi. One paragraph noted that consular officers all over India were reporting food shortages. The following month a cyclone leveled the winter paddy crop in Midnapore and Chittagong districts, killing thirty thousand people. It was nearly a month before news of the cyclone appeared in the Calcutta papers. Referencing the central role these districts had played in the Quit India uprising, the district officer suggested that relief be withheld “in view of the political misdeeds of the people.” Most of the dead were farmers who had rushed out to protect their crops.
The cyclone was the one precipitating condition for famine that was not of human doing. The fall of Burma, long Bengal’s reserve granary of rice, headed the list of the conditions that were. A scorched-earth policy had targeted Midnapore and other rice-growing areas on the Bay of Bengal. All forms of local transport that might fall into Japanese hands were seized. Rail lines were taken up. Oxcarts were broken into pieces. Twenty-five thousand boats, the means by which grains were moved from cultivators to markets in Calcutta, were destroyed. In this way, the British governor of Bengal argued, the Japanese would be prevented from invading Calcutta.
They could, however, bomb it. Beginning on December 20, 1942, Zeros made three nighttime raids, killing a thousand dockworkers and destroying critical infrastructure. The raids precipitated a massive panic. Rickshaw wallahs, street sweepers, and petty bureaucrats fled Calcutta. Englishmen commandeered all transport and evacuated the city in droves, causing further disruption to food supplies and leaving Sudhin and his ARP colleagues to fend for themselves. Crows, kites, and pye-dogs fought over the garbage that filled the streets. The following month the War Cabinet denied Linlithgow’s request for six hundred thousand tons of additional wheat shipments to feed the influx of soldiers to Calcutta and to maintain the level of munitions production. The shipping could not be spared. Instead, during the first seven months of 1943, seventy-one thousand tons of grain, enough to feed four hundred thousand Indians for a year, were shipped to Ceylon, Persia, and South Africa. Bulk purchases of rice for government employees and those industries critical to the war effort both inflated prices and reduced supply stocks still further.
With thousands of Congressites imprisoned, Gandhi’s Quit India Movement had foundered four months after it began. When the viceroy refused to meet with him, Gandhi announced a twenty-one-day fast, beginning February 8, 1943. The War Cabinet, boosted by German defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, decided he would be allowed to die. “This is our hour of triumph everywhere in the world,” Churchill pointed out. “It is not the time to crawl before a miserable old man.” If the “blackamoors” on the viceroy’s council made good their threats to resign if Gandhi was not allowed to die in freedom, what did it matter? Gandhi survived.
The week Gandhi’s hunger strike began, Time magazine ran a cover story on reports of Indian food shortages, ridiculing the doublespeak of Leo Amery’s denial. Any report of food shortage was a famine marker and mandated that precise steps be taken in response. The first step was to declare a famine. By April landless laborers began arriving in Calcutta, overwhelming suburban rail stations. This was another marker. Encampments grew at each end of Howrah Bridge and under the trees on the Maidan. An autopsy on a corpse retrieved from the streets revealed a stomach stuffed with grass. The sudden appearance of a vast number of beggars on Calcutta’s pavements was thought to be the work of Subhas Bose’s fifth columnists. When it appeared the Japanese were not going to invade, British authorities began seeing fifth columnists everywhere.
“It is difficult to believe that they are all here of their own initiative,” a Special Branch officer wrote, noting that the beggars employed strikingly similar “professional techniques.” At first they touched people they importuned for food, but they soon began to put themselves deliberately in the path of pedestrians, wrapping their arms around legs. Did they have a natural-born right to make such a nuisance of themselves? He wondered how the soldiers kept their tempers. Calcutta was now the base of operations and supply hub for the war against Japan. Soldiers were everywhere, spending freely, inflating prices, and increasing food shortages. The officer recommended passing an ordinance closing off Chowringhee so that they might walk in comfort.
That same month, the Secretary of State for India was aghast to learn that Linlithgow had let a letter from Gandhi journey on to Muhammad Jinnah. It appeared that Jinnah had publicly remarked on Gandhi’s correspondence with the viceroy while under house arrest. Jinnah asked, why did Gandhi not write him as well? The Government of India wouldn’t dare stop a letter from reaching him. A clever snare indeed, Amery thought, and Linlithgow had fallen right into it. The viceroy had intercepted the letter but only to make a copy of it. Helpfully, he forwarded this to London before sending the original on its way.
After panicking that it was too late to stop its delivery, Linlithgow managed to swoop in and retrieve it. Still, Amery was flabbergasted to learn he was still considering a face-to-face meeting between the two. The sentiments expressed in the letter were perfectly innocuous, but the whole point was to keep the two sides from talking. An interminable telegram arrived from Delhi, setting out the viceregal reasoning for having let the letter go, and so on, and so on. Amery wasn’t nearly convinced; Churchill cabled his agreement from Washington. Amery had never bucked Linlithgow so strongly before. He was curious to see how he would respond. He hoped he would be gracious.
Would the letter’s existence and its subsequent suppression be made public? Linlithgow now asked. This would simply open the door to further chicanery, Amery cabled back. The sound policy was to announce that Gandhi, detained for promoting an illegal mass movement that had gravely interfered with India’s war effort, and who had thus far shown no intention of abandoning his methods, was unavailable to communicate with Jinnah or, indeed, with anyone. Roosevelt’s newest envoy to India, a patrician and pedigreed Bostonian, was struck by the absurdity of the government’s claim that the major parties were unable to come an agreement while holding all parties incommunicado. Even he was refused permission to speak with Gandhi.
The hullabaloo over Gandhi’s letter absorbed the War Cabinet for three weeks. Six weeks later Linlithgow was still revisiting the episode. Many telegrams were exchanged. Detailed minutes were kept. All the while the famine in Bengal continued unabated. While the viceroy argued over whether Gandhi’s letter should be made public or whether, as a matter of courtesy, Jinnah should be informed of its contents, Shaheed Suhrawardy, now the Muslim League minister of civil supplies in Bengal, insist
ed that sufficient rice was on hand. While the various British governors reported on the public response to Gandhi’s letter, Shaheed was in secret talks about procuring surplus stocks. While Linlithgow ruminated over Churchill’s demand that the letter be kept secret and accepted praise for his skillful handling of Gandhi, the price of rice had risen 600 percent. Hoarding was rampant. And still famine hadn’t been declared.
By July the pavements of Calcutta were lined with the dying, and a member of the Bengal Assembly asked Shaheed about declaring a famine. He refused. When a relief worker begged him he raged that rumors of famine were an opposition conspiracy to undermine his Muslim League government. Everywhere Shaheed went the roly-poly Apurba Chanda and an honor guard of goondas from the bustees of Howrah accompanied him. When anyone crossed Shaheed, Apurba noted, he could be quite vindictive.
That same month, the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare issued a report predicting that unless substantial quantities of foodstuffs were immediately imported, hundreds of thousands of Indians would starve. The average Indian had been subsisting on a daily diet equaling about a thousand calories, it reported. A minimum subsistence was thought to be two thousand, and the average American or Englishman tucked away nearly twice that. Linlithgow, still toiling away fourteen hours a day at his desk, had finally put in another request for additional grain shipments, seven months after his last one had been denied. “Famine conditions have begun to appear in parts of southern India and in Bengal,” he wrote in July. If his new request for three hundred thousand tons of grain went unheeded, he warned, he was not answerable for the consequences. As if the consequences were not now upon him.
The Last Englishmen Page 30