Ethel and Robert said nothing.
Catching up to them brought me back to reality. I was glad to see them. In fact, I felt acutely conscious of my surroundings. I remember continually urging them to keep moving, but Robert was finding it very hard, as he was convulsed with dysentery and was bleeding badly.
We crossed a wide, rocky stream. It was knee-deep, and many bloated bodies were wedged between the rocks, partly floating in pools. I knew that most of the dead were natives of India, but seeing all these bodies half out of the water, bleached almost ghostly white, seemed strange. A feeling of unease came over me and I was driven to get away as far as possible from this horrible scene. The rain had eased and some shacks came into view up ahead. The rough lean-tos were scattered on both sides of the trail and every one was occupied by a group of corpses. We found one that had collapsed, but part of the platform remained. It was better than lying in the mud.
There was no sign of life and even searching for some warm embers was out of the question. We just huddled together a few inches off the ground on this shaky platform and slowly attended to the ritual of scraping off leeches. My shoulder wound opened up again but I felt no discomfort from it. All three of us continued to suffer from dysentery and the wrenching stomach pains and constant bowel movements kept us awake most of the night, but it was Robert who suffered the most.
As we huddled together under the last blanket, we were joined by a man. In the dim light I could see that he was tall, dressed in ragged khaki clothes and had a revolver strapped to his waist. I naturally thought we were at the point of being rescued, but then he asked if we would let him share the shelter with us. He introduced himself in English. We had become so used to speaking only Burmese amongst ourselves on the trek that this came almost as a surprise.
He told us that his name was Mr Rossiter and he was a district commissioner in Burma. He had been posted in the far north and when the Japanese overran it he had escaped. He had travelled for days behind Japanese lines and had eventually picked up the refugee trail. He, too, had not eaten for days and, like me, had been stricken with malaria. He talked of his family – in England, I thought – and asked which route we had taken.
We must have drifted off to sleep. I thought I heard other voices, but it may have been just the hallucinations of malaria. At first light, I moved off the platform to relieve myself, taking care not to disturb our companion’s sleep.
Robert had awakened too. He stared at the man for a moment and then leant over to touch him.
‘He’s dead.’
I was surprised. He had walked right up to us the night before.
I wouldn’t have thought he was weak enough to die. Perhaps he was more ill than I had realised. We rolled his body just off the platform and I noticed that his belt and revolver were missing. I didn’t look closely at his face.
I mentioned the missing revolver to Robert but he just replied,
‘Perhaps he lost the belt when he went into the bushes at night to relieve himself.’
Perhaps he did. Or perhaps it was even somebody else. We were so close to death ourselves that we had been drifting in and out of consciousness.
We set about covering the body in leaves to hide it from our view and to give the man some dignity and privacy in death. We were in no condition to drag his body any distance.
Then Ethel looked up. She whispered, ‘Ama’s rings! They’re gone!’
We just looked at her. The jewellery was gone, our only resource should we make it to India. We were too weak to react. Normally, Robert would have become angry. He would have wondered whether we had somehow been robbed in the darkness and he would have gone looking for the culprit. Perhaps somebody had taken the dead man’s revolver and our jewellery during the night. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence. Perhaps the rings had dropped from Ethel’s thin fingers. She had had to wear them on her hands; she had nothing in which she could carry them. Robert was too ill to say, let alone do, anything about it. I don’t think he had any anger left in him.
Mother, like all Burmese women, possessed a fair amount of jewellery. In Burma, a person’s wealth is measured by their own-ership of precious gemstones. Even our servants seemed to have some jewels tucked away. Mother preferred to wear simple items – her heavy, broad gold wedding band and a few pearls. But she had brought her most valuable rings with her when we set out on the trek, to use as a form of currency. She also had some gold coins, which she must have used earlier in the trek to pay our way.
I remember our father bought her the best Ceylonese sapphires, cornflower blue stones set with diamonds like sparkling flowers, when he went back to Britain on furlough every three years, stopping off in Colombo on the way. She also had rubies, the prized Burmese ‘pigeon’s blood’ stones that changed colour, from deep pink to blood red, depending on the light. But he refused to have anything to do with local sapphires from the Burmese–Thai border region, saying they were inferior quality and badly cut. He gave her emeralds from South India and opals from Australia, which he bought in Colombo also. I remember that she did not really like the opals, although the Indians loved them and would barter valuable emeralds for the semi-precious stones.
Now they were all gone, and it did not seem important. Nothing mattered anymore. We just sat around, too weak to move on, drifting in and out of consciousness.
The next morning I awoke, overcome by a strange coldness. The three of us had been resting huddled together. Robert was close beside me and the coldness I experienced was his body. He had died during the night.
I had not anticipated this. I knew Robert was terribly ill – more ill than I was – but we had all still been hanging on. Now I just wanted it all to end. I wanted to join my brother. He looked so much at peace curled up, dead, beside me. Ethel too was deeply grieved. There were no more tears for either of us to shed. I just wondered what it was all about. I had stepped over and around many dead bodies along the trek. Now my own were suffering the same fate as those poor people left along the way.
I had not known that Robert would die. I had never thought his life would just slip away in the night. Perhaps his big heart gave up the battle. I will never know.
Yet something in me willed me to fight for survival.
I had learnt that it was customary to say a prayer whenever one saw a coffin on the way to a burial. In a country like Burma, where death was a common occurrence, one seemed to pray daily. The prayer was just a few words Mother had taught us: ‘Lord, give those left behind the strength to carry on.’ The words came upon me, but they conflicted with the teachings of the Pongyi [monk] which were, ‘You yourself can only overcome the problems of the day.’
I was confused, and managed to whisper to Ethel, ‘Why is God putting us through this?’ I received no reply. She could not speak.
I covered my brother’s body with the last blanket. Ethel and I, though very weak, managed to gather a few leaves and sticks to lay over the blanket, to shield our brother from people’s view. I loved him. We had grown up together as the closest of friends, although we were very different. He was the brains and I the brawn. We argued for one another and we fought for one another. He was loved by all for his earnestness. The servants, the stallholders at the markets and the teachers at school all spoke highly of him. There were times when I tired of all the nice things people said about Robert: it was difficult to live in his shadow. But he always encouraged me and never, ever put his young brother down.
His love for animals was demonstrated in Maymyo when our neighbour, who was a Commissioner of Forests, shot and brought home a man-eating tiger one day. While we all gathered round to view the magnificent beast, Robert asked the Commissioner, U Nu, ‘Why did you shoot it?’
‘It was a man-eater and very dangerous.’
‘Surely the reason it killed people must have been either that it was hungry, or was guarding its territory,’ Robert said.
The principal of the school in Maymyo once described him as a child prodigy. He was
invited to sit for an open examination with students much older than himself, to select the nation’s top scholar. He streaked the field and achieved a near perfect score in all subjects. He even topped the Burmese paper. He was a talented musician and an above-average sportsman, although there were many things he preferred to do other than prove himself on the playing field or in the pool. Above all, he was a gentle person blessed with the gift the Buddhists call ‘Karuna’ – a compassionate spirit that revelled in the success and joy of others.
THE RAIN HAD NOT EASED FOR SOME TIME. Ethel and I, without a word, struggled off the rough slats that had kept us off the ground and moved away up the slope. On the other side we hit a quagmire on a flat section of track. We were some yards apart, both only inching along, and could not have been far from where Robert’s body lay. Ethel sank down as if to rest a moment. I moved on a short distance further, then I too let my body down into the ooze.
I felt completely at peace. There was not a thought of food or water in my head. I just gently created a pocket in the mud that was comfortable and warm. For the first time in many weeks I had found a resting place for my aching bones. The mud provided a cushion which would normally have been provided by flesh, but I had hardly any left.
As I lay there so near to death I observed, or perhaps I dreamed, a cloud of white butterflies floating down towards me. It was a comforting vision and I was not afraid.
I cannot remember how long I had lain in this comfortable position when I was aroused by a noisy group of people. At first I could only hear their shouting. My eyes had closed when I had dozed off and some mud had covered them. I must have wiped them open to see what appeared to be a huge European man looking down at me. He tried to stir me with his foot. It was extremely painful. I uttered something.
‘Who else is with you, laddie?’
‘My sister is somewhere nearby,’ I managed to croak.
‘Get up!’
I did not want to get up or be helped. I felt at peace and for the first time in many days I felt warm. A strange feeling of being with people I loved came over me.
‘Please let me rest,’ I pleaded.
He roared at me about people giving up the will to live and not fighting to keep going.
Being pulled out of the mud was excruciating. I remember my rescuers very kindly trying to wipe the oozing stuff off my body with a blanket. It was agony. My shoulder wound and body sores screamed in pain.
Then they laid me on a grey blanket, which they then hitched to a pole slung between two Indian natives.
That is how they transported me to a camp at Ledo, I learnt later. It was a devil of a ride. My shoulder wound was painful and as the bearers negotiated the uneven ground my body sometimes scraped along the dirt and mud. I recall very little of the trip. I must have drifted in and out of consciousness from pain and starvation. I do remember that it was still daylight when we reached the camp. Evidently I had almost reached civilisation unaided.
The camp had been set up by the tea-planters of Assam, of whom my rescuer was one. Their Indian labourers had carried me to the campsite.
When I was finally laid down outside a hut, I observed a lot of activity. Fires were alight everywhere and men were moving about pouring themselves mugs of liquid from drums atop the fires. I was offered a drink. It was a strong brew of tea, laced with salt. Some-body opened a tin of apricots and I made an attempt to eat the fruit. I was violently ill and when I came to, I found myself in a long hut occupied by sick and wounded soldiers. They had transported me to a place called Tinsukia, a jungle hospital away from the front line.
There I was head-shaved, bathed and sprayed with DDT powder to eliminate the body lice. My shoulder wound was also attended to in a fashion. I was then moved to another section of the field hospital where for the first time I saw some women dressed in nurses’ uniforms. They were Anglo–Indian nurses working with the troops on the Burma front.
I remember being told by somebody early on that my sister, too, had been rescued, but had passed away. I was not able to react. I was too near to death myself at that point to feel my own emotions, let alone respond to what I was being told. Perhaps it was my mind’s way of preserving what little was left of my body.
Later, the Scottish tea-planter who had saved my life told me that Ethel had been carried to the camp alive, but had survived for just one day after being rescued.
‘Your sister died in the camp before we could get her to the military hospital. She drifted away peacefully.’
He was very kind in the way he explained it. I was deeply upset, and he saw that I could not talk about it. I could not bring myself to ask him whether she had been buried. I just lay there silently. He quietly left me, and I was grateful for his understanding. For her to have come so close to survival and then to miss out on living was beyond my comprehension.
I had not been as close to Ethel as I had been to Robert in recent years, because she was older and was rapidly becoming a young lady. But when I was small she had always been there for me like a second mother, cuddling and comforting me if something went wrong, laughing and telling me stories, carting me about the place and spoiling me rotten. She had always been deeply protective of me. Now she too was gone, and I was truly alone.
PART II
MOTHER INDIA
Chapter 13
Hospital
For days I drifted in and out of consciousness. Then one morning I began to notice what was going on around me. The wound on my shoulder was troubling me and the smell was unbearable. The nurses said there had not been much they could do about it while I remained so ill.
‘Now that you are a little better, it’s time to begin treating it.’
The daily ritual of dressing the wound was the most painful experience I had ever encountered. Whenever the time came I would break out in a cold sweat and cry aloud. It was torture and the two nurses hated every moment of it as much as I did.
There were times when they would weep with me. The wound had opened up into a gaping hole into which the nurse would prod a gauze bandage.
‘It is the only way to drain the pus and clean the infected area.’ I was fed a battery of tablets to treat my malaria and to stop my bowel movements. The liquid food of concentrated chicken essence went straight through me.
As the days went by my vision, which had been cloudy at best, became clearer and I was more inclined to speak with the nurses and some of the other patients in the bush hospital. A lot of the other Indian patients were casualties of battle. Some were laid low with malaria. It was a pitiful sight to see these half-naked people who displayed such courage, despite having lost limbs and carrying bullet wounds to their heads and faces. Some of them gave their time to sit alongside my bed and talk. I still believe the nurses had instructed those fine fellows to visit the boy at the end of the makeshift ward.
My voice began to improve in strength, although I had not been aware that I had been speaking in a whisper until somebody pointed it out to me. Whenever I talked to a nurse or a visitor, there was a strange drumming sound in my head, as if I was bellowing.
As my health improved the events of the past weeks kept flooding back. One of the nurses who was particularly kind to me would sit beside the bed.
‘Think only about getting better,’ she said.
Whenever she came to visit or administer some medicine, she would take her leave by saying, ‘God is looking after you and has a mission for you.’
I think she was a Catholic girl because every time she went she crossed her heart.
The nights were hard to take. Many of the wounded soldiers had difficulty sleeping and one or another was constantly crying out in pain. The packs of jackals and the hyenas too began prowling at sunset and created a lot of noise as they scavenged for food in the compound.
The rope bed was painful. I was so thin that only skin covered my bones – there was no flesh to act as a cushion.
Some time during the week the doctor said, ‘It is time we had this y
oung man weighed.’
The problem was how to do it. The scales were the old-fashioned type used to weigh carcasses, hung from the rafters in the roof. The nurses had to devise a means to get me hanging off the hook. It was a painful exercise and I protested aloud. Eventually the staff had me slung by a sheet and hooked on to the scales. I weighed 50 pounds.
‘He has heavy bones,’ one nurse commented.
‘Whatever would he have weighed if he had a light frame?’ the second nurse replied.
I recalled having weighed myself at the commencement of the trek at the railway station in Mogaung, during an idle moment while the family was deciding which route to choose. I had weighed in then at around 124 pounds.
I asked my favourite nurse to get me a mirror because it had been months since I had taken a peek at myself. She went away to find one but soon came back.
‘I’m sorry, but there don’t seem to be any mirrors available,’ she said.
Much later, during a brighter moment, she confessed that she had lied.
‘The doctor instructed me not to let you see yourself – it was part of the process of lifting your spirits.’
Either I was developing a sense of awareness, or my eyesight was now improving daily. I began to watch things and people along the long ward. I was desperately sad, but also had moments when I thought of the poor souls around me. I was not alone. I was sharing these times with very sick and dying soldiers. They too were far from their homes and loved ones. Surely they must have felt as abandoned as I did.
A skinny Indian soldier befriended me and was a constant visitor. He was swathed in bandages from head to feet, but still managed to hobble around the ward. We spoke in Hindustani and he told me about his life in a village in Central India, talking lovingly of his wife and children. He had joined the army when the Japanese invaded Burma, not so long ago. After a short training session he had been posted to a regiment in Burma just before the defeat of the Allies there and had been wounded in a mortar attack. He was a humble fellow.
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