by Carl Muller
The British had to flee Penang on December 14. The Indian and Eurasian regiments began to withdraw. The order was to retreat to Singapore, but when the troops reached Malacca they found that their British leaders had disappeared. Soldiers without leaders. Many just stripped off their uniforms, discharged themselves and went back to the villages as civilians. But the Japanese were everywhere. In Negri Sembilan. In Kuala Lumpur. They searched every village, every house, stole all they could, took every bicycle they found. And, sickeningly enough, there were hooded informants who accompanied the Japanese, pointing out British sympathizers.
Singapore had reason to be confident. The British had assured them that all would be well. The British actually regarded Singapore their Eastern Gibraltar. But the Japanese came: a swift attack down the Malay peninsula, led by General Yamashita Tomoyuki, the Tiger of Malaya.
The bombs rained down, lorry loads of the dead were carried away and the British had to admit defeat even though their forces outnumbered the Japanese three to one.
The Japanese had plans for Singapore. They renamed it Syonam, the light of the South. Oh, they were so proud, so sure of themselves. Even the Germans had told Tokyo that it would take up to nine months to take Singapore, and they would need five divisions. They achieved in two months. A race to Johore Bahru, a massive aerial pounding, and victory!
Singapore would be the capital of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere . . . and the first thing was to establish a rule of fear. Thousands were executed, suspected of resistance. Heads of those killed were placed atop poles for public display. They stripped the people of everything, executed those who had nothing to give. And even when the British came back in 1945, the people were not going to forget. No more foreign rule. They could no longer rely on foreign rule. The British had given them a false sense of security; the Japanese had murdered thousands of their people.
Hong Kong had almost two million people when Japan attacked that colony on December 8, 1941. Thousands starved. British prisoners-of-war were brought into Stanley Prison. The tortures, the privations, the gruesome executions have not been forgotten. People even turned cannibal and hawkers sold the meat of corpses, claiming that it was dog meat. By 1945, there were only 600,000 people in Hong Kong. Many had been forcibly taken away to China. The horror haunted the colony for a long, long time.
In the Philippines, a 30,000 strong peasant movement was organized against the Japanese. The Filipinos fought alongside their American colonizers but to no avail. With the fall of Bataan, the country’s fate was sealed. And even the recapture by the Americans became a living hell for many. More than 10,000 were killed, caught in the joint pincer of American bombardment and Japanese savagery. There was no hesitation, at the end of it all, to look on Manila as the worst victim of devastation in the Pacific.
This was how the dream of empire rose . . . and died. This was the empire that would raise the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; that would grow fat on the lands of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. This was the empire that would rule the East and be the giant of the hemisphere, in position to command the world’s most populous regions and the natural resources of many nations.
It must have been galling to know that they were kicked back, defeated on their own turf; more galling still to realize that German-spawned scientific technology, the technology of her own ally, would be put to work in America in order to bring about her humiliating, scorching defeat.
31
Of Sundry Eruptions, the Language Dilemma and Other Fish to Fry
Colombo. Back, Carloboy thought, to the rancidity of this other Big Apple where, with every bite, one had to spit out a maggot. For one thing, home was as bad as ever, in a state of mild chaos that, his mother insisted, was all his fault.
‘My fault? What did I do? I was in Talaimannar. If the bloody roof comes down here its my fault? If—’
‘You’re the one who sent all the crab and dried fish.’
‘And you’re the one who brought a mangy baby into the house. Bloody scabies! All the buggers are scratching.’
It was an outbreak of the old, old enmity. Mother and son glared at each other and saw nothing but hatred in each other’s eyes.
For some, strange, unexplained reason, Sonnaboy von Bloss had gone with his wife to a convent and orphanage. In those times it used to be very much in order for the good people of the city to go to these institutions for a child who was to be a servant. True, one picks up a girl child of very tender age, but that child is easily moulded. At six she will begin to sweep the house, help carry out the wash, fetch and carry, help tidy the rooms. At eight she will carry water, sweep the garden, put the firewood out to dry, destone the rice and learn to cook. At ten there will be far too much to do and far too many kicks and slaps to make her do it. The little unfortunate will wash bundles of dirty linen, scrub floors, scour lavatories, weed the garden, cook, bathe the dog and pick up after the children. At thirteen she will steal food and go to the co-operative store and carry home the shopping bags and slit firewood and take out the garbage. She will also develop breasts which would be squeezed by the sons of the family. She will also attract the attention of the man at the oilman stores who would use his greasy fingers to stroke her and give her fifty cents to buy toffees. At fifteen, child and virgin no longer, she will scrub the pots and blow the kitchen fire and work, work, work until at the end of each day she will be too exhausted to protest when the elder son pushes her legs apart and enters her.
That was the pattern. Why, then, did his parents bring home an acid-faced baby—a boy—and with spreading patches of inflamed skin all over its body?
Carloboy had only one explanation. They had to be mad. The baby had infantile scabies. So he had sent home a couple of boxes of crabs and a box of dried fish. His father liked crabs. Dried fish cost the earth in Colombo. And the damn scabies was catching. He was appalled. The whole family scratched and scratched and had begun to look like polka-dotted albinos. Violet gentian, liberally applied, made his sisters look more awful than they already were. The baby, caked in fuller’s earth and some oily muck that must have been a soothing jelly, howled and howled and resembled a palpitating snail.
‘So bad to eat crabs and salted fish when there is a skin disease,’ his mother snarled, ‘that’s what I’m tellin’.’
‘Then why did you eat? Could have given the neighbours. And how was I to know? Did anybody write? Even one line? No. That nobody will think to do.’
He slammed out of doors. ‘Sit and scratch! Damn good for you. Not enough you have, went to bring some other bugger’s bastard!’
He went around the house, hauled his bicycle from the rear veranda. The rear tyre was flat, the front brake cable hung, snapped off over the brake shoe. Fuming, he wheeled it away, strode across the plank bridge over the canal, then to the bicycle repair shop at the top of Vihara Lane. His father had gone to the railway head office at Maradana. The old man had decided to call it a day. Werkmeister had been right. Engine Driver Class I Sonnaboy von Bloss had put in his papers for retirement.
Carloboy had heard the rumblings even in Anuradhapura. A new official language policy. Every government employee would have to take a qualifying exam in Sinhala—the national language. Suddenly, a politician who had a mouthful of a name that smacked of the Jew and the Briton, had begun to wallow in the myth of Sinhalese superiority. In 1956, he would force the switch to ‘Sinhala Only’ as the sole official language of the country, replacing English and not paying much heed to the Tamil language either.
Carloboy had listened to the way the drivers of Anuradhapura, at many different levels of alcoholic influence, had debated the issue.
True, there was the basic mass urge for social equality. It seemed that the English-speaking minority called the shots. But this politician himself was a product of Oxford, a brilliant product, let it be known, and he should have known better.
Even as these words are written (and this is 1996), the Sinhala Only experiment
of the fifties has proved disastrous. The people were made to ignore English at considerable cost and disadvantage to themselves. And to this day, the plums of office in every sector still go to those who have a knowledge of English, just as it was in the colonial past. Those who accepted Sinhala Only, basked in the dream of ‘our country, our language’, and spurned English are today a disadvantaged people.
‘It’s all bloody politics, what else?’ guard Harry Ball had said: ‘Trying to get the vote. All the villagers will vote for him, no? Going to give them a place in the sun, he’s saying.’
‘I say, you don’t know, men, what he said in 1943,’ said driver Beven. Trouble is you fellows must study the way things are going.’
‘So you’re the bloody know-all, no,’ said Ball. He tells the others, ‘Pukka bugger this is. Before buying arrack, he’s going to buy the Reader’s Digest!’
This makes Beven a most interesting Burgher to be sure. ‘No! Truly?’
Beven soldiers on. ‘In 1943 Jayewardene1 wanted to declare Sinhala as the only official language. That’s the bugger who started all this. He wanted Sinhala to be made the language of instruction in all the schools. It must be compulsory for all public exams and English must be thrown out.’
‘Bloody bastard! He was mad or what?’
‘Cute bugger. Said the Sinhala language needed protection. All politics, what else?’
‘One thing, nobody’s going to make my children study in Sinhala!’
‘Hear, hear. Pour another drink, men.’
Yes, the rumblings were very much in evidence. Carloboy went to Pereira Lane, shouted up old friends, then pulled in at Eardley’s. There was as ever a welcome at Eardley’s. Here he had lived when he left home in the time before he joined the Navy. Here he would bathe, change, write a letter to Sandra, play cards, and, in the evening, go to Vaverset Lane and then to see his grandmother at St Lawrence’s Road. Barbara would not be expecting him. He looked forward to seeing her with the greatest of pleasure.
Suddenly, he was sure it was good to be back. Why, Wellawatte was a blossom-time of girls who stopped, stared and giggled. Who was he, they must have wondered. A new boy on the block? And who were those ravishing creatures who claimed to be his cousins of a sort? Kingsley da Brea was his mother’s cousin actually, and the meanest-tempered man in all Dehiwela. Carloboy’s friend, Malcolm Abayakoon had cautioned him. ‘Don’t mess around there, men. You’re dicing with death. The old bugger is a killer.’
And that he was. Liquor made him go berserk. He took out his feelings of unstoppable rage on the citizenry—policemen, bakers, vendors, latrine coolies, young toughs who had the temerity to look at his daughters . . . and when there was a lack of object matter, his one and only son who was also named Kingsley and was more the family knave of hearts.
Sonnaboy told his son, ‘Go to your uncle Kinno’s house. You know where? That’s right. Say none of us can come with this damn scabies. His son died yesterday. He sent a message. Funeral is tomorrow. Just pay your respects and come.’
Dead? A nice boy like that? Tall, bronzed, wide-eyed and full of fun. ‘But how?’
‘I don’t know. Cerebral malaria, they say. But there is some unnecessary talk. Don’t go to hang about. Ipseems the father gave the boy a good thrashing. Had marks all over him.’
‘Uncle Kinno must have hammered. Who else?’
‘Never mind all that. Just go and pay your respects and come.’
Maybe Kingsley de Brea killed his son. The talk around the untimely death was dark and accusing. It was true. The father had thrashed the boy terribly, but it was the sister, Shirley, who took Carloboy aside and whispered, ‘Don’t tell I told. You won’t tell anybody?’
‘Tell what?’
‘Shhh. After Daddy beat Kingsley he—he dragged him to the canal and threw him in.’
Carloboy stared.
‘Some men jumped in and pulled him out and carried him home. Then he got like delirious and mummy took and went to the hospital. He died in the hospital.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Now we are afraid. See the way daddy is crying now . . . but if he starts drinking don’t know what he’ll do.’
Carloboy stormed away and faced the quivering man. ‘Why are you crying,’ he demanded coldly, ‘when he was alive all you did was hammer him. Now what for crying after killing him!’
People gasped. The mother, Iris, hung on Carloboy, implored him to leave. She was a young, shapely woman, many years younger than her drunkard husband. ‘You came here to start something?’ her voice was high, unnatural. ‘This is a funeral house! My son is dead!’
Carloboy shook her hands off him and looked around. Who were these people? He had never had much truck with them. The daughters, white-faced, trembled. There was Fairy. Yes, her father had actually called his eldest girl Fairy. And Joan, and Shirley. And Shirley, at fifteen, was the star of the show. So exquisite in this tumble-down house by the canal. Without a word, he strode out.
Shirley came to where his bicycle was. ‘You’re mad?’ she breathed, ‘now the hearse will also come. Are you coming to the cemetery?’
‘No. I’m going home.’
‘I’ll come with you if I can,’ she said huskily.
‘So come. I’ll take you on the bar.’
‘My God, Mummy will have a fit. But I go to the Polytechnic. You can come there and meet me.’
‘Right,’ and he rode away and told his father, ‘If he came out, I would have hammered him.’
Beryl, listening tight-lipped, went to the bedroom. ‘Hammer him,’ she muttered crossly, ‘that’s all they know to do. Hammer everybody.’
Sonnaboy bubbled with plans. ‘Commuted pension I’ll get. Pukka, no? Thirty years service. Provident fund, association money. They’ll commute it and give me a lump sum. More than fifty thousand. And still I’ll get pension every month. And if I want to go back and work, can always apply to work in Maradana. Guards inspector’s office or some other place. I had a long chat with Wadood. He’s the secretary of the Locomotive Enginemen’s Union. Straightaway I became a member. The LEU can take up my case anytime I want to go back and work.’
Beryl listened and her lip trembled. Her husband retired. At home. Life seemed to drag out before her like a long, long tongue, dry and sat upon by myriads of flies.
Carloboy discovered, to his regret, that many of his friends were leaving the country or were engrossed in plans to leave. They were not, they declared, going to have Sinhala thrust down their throats. The government, led by Sir John Kotelawala, stood for ‘parity of status’ for Sinhalese and Tamil as the official languages of the country. The Burghers were all at sea. A commission appointed to report on the language issue had actually advocated a single official language. The chairman of the commission, Sir Arthur Wijewardene, who had been a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, had noted:
The replacement of English by Swabasha (one’s own language) would have been very much easier if, instead of two Swabasha languages as official languages, one had been accepted . . .
This put the Tamil’s back up.
The Burghers found this all too unreal. What about their mother tongue, English? Suddenly, it seemed that the island considered it necessary that English be displaced. Even in 1943, J.R. Jayewardene, for motives best known to himself, was determined to ditch English. He wanted the business of the state council to be conducted in Sinhala. He called for the translation of all important books of other languages into Sinhalese. He asked for the appointment of a commission to report on all that was necessary to effect the transition from English to Sinhalese.
Oh, there was much flowery rhetoric. This chronicle will be doing readers a disservice if the outpourings of the architects of future chaos are not recorded. Listen, then, to the impassioned motion of J.R. Jayewardene in 1943.
‘It is argued that ... if we displace English and make Sinhalese and Tamil the official languages, we will be shutting out a large world of literature and culture from our people. They little understand that
the world of literature is already a closed book to ninety per cent of our people . . . In the field of literature, of science, of culture, we have been entirely barren of achievement.
‘It was not so when the native language was the language of government. I think history records that wise men both from the East and the West came to the shores of Lanka to read the books that were preserved in the sanctuaries of the Buddhist Sangha (priesthood). If one reads the travels of Huen Tsang, Marco Polo and Fa Hien, and the lives of great Western philosophers such as Doctor Paul Dhalke and Rhys Davies and others, we would find the contribution that this country made to world literature when we had our own language as the official language . . .
‘But (today) the official language is English, and that is why this country is always in danger of being governed by a small coterie who go through . . . English schools, whereas the vast majority who go through Sinhalese and Tamil schools must always be in the position of hewers of wood and drawers of water . . .
‘The great fear I had was that Sinhalese, being a language spoken by only three million people in the whole world2 would suffer or be entirely lost in time to come, if Tamil is also placed on an equal footing with it in this country. The influence of Tamil literature, a language used in India by over 40 million, and the influence of films and Tamil culture in this country, I thought, might be detrimental to the future of the Sinhalese language; but if it is the desire of the Tamils that Tamil also should be given an equal status with Sinhalese, I do not think we should bar it from attaining that position.
‘Language, Sir, is one of the most important characteristics of nationality ... it is because of our language that the Sinhalese race has existed for 2,400 years and I think that ... on the eve of freedom as a free country, we should prepare for a national official language . . . English should be deposed from its position as the official language of the country and Sinhalese and Tamil . . . should be made the official language of Lanka.’