by Anuradha Roy
E. W. Grindal’s book appeared in 1942, the year the first group of Jews were taken to a chamber in Auschwitz and sealed there for several hours until they died from fumes of poison gas that was let in through holes in the roof. In our town that year, on a spring morning, someone was smoked out as well: the toothless dentist Mr. Ishikawa was led from his rooms into the daylight. Nobody knew for sure how old he was. It was as if he had been around forever, pulling out rotting teeth, chatting with his patients in formal, halting Hindustani and English until the day he woke up with no words. After that he retreated into the shadows, emerging at dusk for essentials, then hurrying back in again.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor a few months earlier, news came that the handful of Japanese expatriates in India, some attracted to the land of the Buddha, others running small businesses, were being rounded up, and Mr. Ishikawa shrank further into the safety of his rooms. The morning he was taken away, he appeared surprisingly straight-backed, his eyes shielded by his black-rimmed glasses, lips in a line. He wore a white bush shirt and gray trousers and had his case of dental instruments with him. There was a soldier behind him and another beside him, holding his free arm at the elbow. My grandfather came to the door of his clinic, Lisa appeared on the balcony along with Jeremy Gordon and Boy. Passersby stopped. It was still and tense, as if we were at a public execution.
For years, I, along with some other boys, would follow him chanting “Sayonara Ishikawa, Honshu, Hokkaido, Shikoku, Kyushu” in a nonsensical chorus to torment him if we ever saw him outside. But that morning, not one of us opened our mouths as the soldiers put him into a van and drove off. Later we heard he was taken to an internment camp in Bikaner, Rajasthan, where he died in the summer because he could stomach neither the food nor the heat in the canvas prison tents.
Mr. Ishikawa’s internment and Mantu’s death were among the few things of note that happened in our town during the war.
What was I doing during those months of the war just before the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, when my mother—unknown to me—was writing to Lisa of her extreme isolation and illness? I remember that after my father was sent to jail, I wrote to him rather than to her. Watching him being taken away by the police as his followers chanted slogans reminded me of Mukti Devi’s integrity and courage and made me uncharacteristically worshipful of him for a time. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why my correspondence with my mother petered out. I cannot recall precisely how it happened but maybe I was too occupied by my present to be lost in daydreams as before. The changes around me had put a stop to my yearning to be where she was. The intensity of her absence had worn me out and then, imperceptibly, waned. There is a merciful finitude in our capacity to sustain grief. Those months when my mother felt her isolation most keenly were the very months when she slipped over the edge of my consciousness and into oblivion, soundlessly, as a pebble into the sea.
At school, every morning, assembly began with “Ourfather whoartinheaven” recited at a speed that made it all but unintelligible. This was followed by a homily from the headmaster. Usually it was about honesty, cleanliness, God, hard work, but now it ended with news of the war, every morning a different item of news—Burma’s fall, then Hong Kong’s, to the Japanese, read out in mellifluous, leisurely tones from the paper as a digest of the main points by our English teacher: refugees across land and across the seas were trudging into India, hundreds of thousands of them. French, Austrian, Greek. Ten thousand Poles, 450,000 from Burma. As well as from Persia, Djibouti, Aden, Somaliland.
Where was Somaliland? What, for that matter, was Djibouti? We had never heard these names before. One day, the headmaster unrolled a large world map and it was nailed onto the wall behind the podium from which he spoke at assembly. He had a box of pins with him, each pin had either a blue paper tag or a yellow one.
“Blue is for Crown victories. Yellow indicates temporary losses.”
One of the boys got onto a stool and stuck pins into the places we were being told about. The English teacher announced the name of each one as the pin went in. The Andamans, he said—the only part of British India to have fallen so far. Singapore. Malaya. There were many more yellows than blues. The yellows were massed towards the east—towards us. A yellow pin pierced Burma. And then a few rapid yellows nailed an area further away, almost Australia. “Batavia, Sumatra, Bali, Borneo—the Netherland East Indies,” the English teacher said. “Dutch losses to Japan.”
We were not allowed to ask questions at assembly. I could not stop the teacher. Had he just said Bali? After assembly, we were herded off to classes. Had a bomb hit my mother? Were the Japanese torturing her? The classes went on and on and it was only in the afternoon, during the lunch break, that I was able to drag the stool back from its corner to the map on the wall and examine it closer up.
A yellow flag on a tiny patch of green in the middle of a blue sea.
Bali.
The war had seemed thrilling until then, a faraway circus with interesting events bringing excitement to a town where nothing happened. The trenches being dug, the soldiers who were everywhere, a delicious sense of imminent catastrophe. One hot summer afternoon I had run to the station and seen a trainload of prisoners being transported to the Dehradun prison camp. I was jealous of Dinu, a soldier now. He had sent me a postcard from North Africa, he was in the distant worlds I could only dream about. When I saw newspaper pictures of wrecked ships and bodies floating in the ocean, it did not strike me that my mother might, at that moment, be in a ship crossing that very ocean on her way home. My mother, Mr. Spies, Beryl, Bali—they had long made the passage, in my mind, to the realm of fantasy. They had nothing to do with newspapers, weather reports, casualty lists, and timetables.
“She will not be in any danger. She is Indian, not Dutch, nor British,” Dada told me when I came back from school. He tried to sound reassuring rather than worried. “The Japanese are on our side. I mean the Indian side.”
“But isn’t India a part of Britain?”
“She started out on her way home last year,” said Lisa. “Was it October? Yes, just after her birthday. Can’t she drop me a line?”
In her last letter, Lisa now confessed, Gayatri had said she was not well. She had not told us anything because she did not want us to worry. Since that letter, she had been waiting for news from my mother about her ship to Madras so that she could take me there to find her and bring her home. She had asked Jeremy for news now, perhaps the army would know.
But the army did not know. There was no news from my mother, not that year, nor halfway into the next.
We waited every day—for a telegram, a trunk call or letter, or for her to arrive miraculously on our doorstep. Waiting as we were at that time was like music that began softly and gathered pace until it became charged, explosive, describing an apocalypse, then died away unfinished, note by note, until you could hear not another sound.
In the middle of the next year, a telegram arrived from Dinu, who had recently been posted to Dehradun. I was fifteen, my father had been in jail more than two years, and my grandfather decided I was old enough, given the circumstances, to travel on my own. Dinu’s cryptic message sounded important. “Have news. Come soon.”
The evening I arrived, he took me out in his jeep and we drove uphill from the internment camp where he was posted. The air was cool, darkness would fall soon, I was out on my own for the very first time in a jeep that had no roof. I flung my head back, face to the sky. It was as if I had grown up overnight—I was free. Yesterday my grandfather had put me on the train, patting my head through the window, warning me of strangers and dangers. Today I was in an open-roofed jeep and I knew Dinu had cigarettes.
Where the road ended, we went on foot and climbed until we reached the top of a ridge. Dinu pointed downwards. “There,” he said.
Far below us lay an area encircled by barbed wire and watchtowers: the internment camp. It had appeared large when I reached it, but now I could see how enormous it really
was, how far its lights twinkled in the soft, new darkness. Beyond it were dense jungles that rose into the foothills of the Garhwal Himalaya, through which my great-grandfather had walked in 1857. You could see the mountains from the camp in the daytime, at night they were massed shadows.
We sat on the ridge and Dinu lit cigarettes for us both. His face had acquired angles, he was almost nineteen, he talked about North Africa, the shrapnel lodged somewhere in him. He had seen friends being blown up, limbs falling nearby, and slept with a girl in Ethiopia whose physical charms he described with careful attention to each body part. As he went over the details of his night of lust, the clock reached 10:15 and the lights in the camp went off. Searchlights came on, white, powerful beams that cut the sky in ribbons as far up as the eye could see, and we both gazed at the sky and searchlights and the dark sprawl of the camp as if we had only then realized that below us were thousands of people far away from home, no foreseeable hope of going back, soldiers, civilians, Nazis, Jews, all packed together in seven sections surrounded by double lines of barbed wire.
A few of the prisoners had spent the better part of the year collecting maps and compasses and other equipment, Dinu said. One of them, Heinrich Harrer, a famous mountaineer, had been exercising with such ferocity every day it should have warned the camp officers that he was readying himself for something, but they thought of it as masochism: he was German after all, and must relish killing whatever came to hand, even his own body. Harrer became as fit as any high-altitude mountaineer and knew every mistake he needed not to make because he had already attempted escape innumerable times. The end result was that Harrer had vanished, probably into Tibet, as had a few others. Among the prisoners who had tried running away with Harrer was a German civilian from Java, but he had fallen too ill with dysentery to carry on and had turned himself in. He was in solitary confinement at the camp.
“I searched him and his bags after he was brought back. Look.” Dinu held a picture towards me and shone his torch on it. The picture was slightly creased, we had to smoothen it out. A group of people smiling at a camera. A dog being petted by a woman’s hand.
My mother’s hand.
My mother is not smiling, her eyes are on the dog while her chin rests on her knees, she is unfamiliar in her cropped hair. It gives her face a pointed, elfin air, as if she is a rebellious boy who has run away from school. But it is my mother, there is no doubt in my mind about that. Next to her, squinting into the sun, is Mr. Spies. All the light in the picture seems to have collected together in a funnel and poured down on the two of them. Mr. Spies’s golden head is blazing and my mother’s dark hair has a ring of fire around it.
The sky was vast above the mound we were sitting on, nothing but miles of black shadows around us, and there were rustling sounds in the darkness—mouse, hare, leopard—I did not care. Dinu lit a cigarette. I had forgotten I wanted another. I had not seen my mother for six years, not even in a photograph.
“It was taken four—maybe five—years ago,” said Gustav, the German in solitary confinement, when Dinu took me to his cell the next day. The man seemed grubby and half-starved, he was still unwell, and twice during our conversation he had to run to the toilet. He had drunk dirty water from a stream. If not, he would have been in Tibet by now with Harrer and the rest, he grumbled.
Gustav spoke English in an accent that reminded us of Mr. Spies, and as then, we often found him hard to follow, but when Dinu and I compared notes afterwards we strung together the threads we had missed. Gustav began his story telling us he had come to India last year in December, that his ship had docked in Bombay and before he knew it, summer came, the heat was infernal, the asphalt melted, he had thought he would die. There was a storm one day and he ate a windblown mango, his first.
Dinu sensed my impatience. “Get to the point. We don’t need your life history,” he said.
He was an entomologist by profession, Gustav said, and his interest in insects had taken him from Java to Bali, where he met Walter Spies, who had been supplying insect specimens to scientists in Europe. He had taken the photograph with my mother and Spies on one of his visits to Bali—such memorable trips. Ah, the dances at night, the beauty of the girls, the drinks in candlelit verandahs to the sound of tinkling music! Paradise could not have been happier. Three times he went to Spies’s house in Tjampuhan, and then the next time he saw Spies it was in a prison camp in Sumatra. At Sibolga, a Sumatran port. Miserable place. They tried to make the best of it, but really there was not much you could do—even Spies, who smiled through every kind of misery, was hard put to remain cheerful there. He himself was transferred from Sibolga to India in December—put on a ship and sent off to Bombay along with several hundred others. He had thought he would find Spies again, here in Dehradun, but had heard from other German prisoners that of the three prisoner ships headed for India, only two had arrived. Rumor was that the third had been bombed. Nobody was clear what had happened to the people on board the bombed ship, or who was on it.
Which ship was Mr. Spies on? He did not know. Impossible to say if he was alive or dead.
“What about my mother? What happened to her? Was she on your ship?”
“There were only men on ours. I do not know about your mother. Perhaps she is still in Bali, I would not know.”
“What does he know? Nothing,” I said in Hindi to Dinu. “Why did you call me all this way? For this?”
I walked out of the cell and lit a cigarette, staring at the dusty courtyard and a dismal line of gray-and-brown men shuffling from somewhere to somewhere a few yards away. I did not know what I had expected after seeing that photograph but the disappointment was acute enough for the line of men to turn into a blur.
“It’s a start, Myshkin. We’ll find out the rest. News will come. This is how it comes. Bit by bit. I’ll keep trying.”
Dinu had followed me out and put a hand on my shoulder before he went back into the cell, quickly, as if a thought had struck him. He wrote my address as well as his own in Gustav’s notebook, and told him to send us news if ever he had any. The day would come when he would be out of the cell and home, who knew when, but one day, Dinu shrugged as he wrote the addresses. It was a fanciful thing to do, he knew. The war was nowhere close to ending, we did not plan anything anymore, we had forgotten about futures, we lived in the present and we hoped the present would last. He knew he was clutching at straws and said it was something to have a straw to clutch at.
“You can keep the photograph,” Gustav said, turning to me. “It has your mother in it, no? You look like her. I met her a few times only, I know she was an artist. I saw one of her pictures in the museum. She was selling her pictures, she was making a name. The Indian Painter, people called her. When I saw her she had paint and mud on her face but she did not know it. She didn’t care for mirrors. She was like a fire, glowing. And her voice! She could be on radio with that voice. She used to sing and mimic people. Everyone would beg her, now sing a song, now do a cockerel, now do Walter. A friend of mine bought a picture by her. Very intriguing one—unreal—how do you say it? I caught my breath seeing that picture.”
Gustav got up from where he was sitting and put a thin, dirty hand out and held mine in it. “You have her eyes,” he said. “You have the same way of being. Maybe you too don’t like mirrors.”
To think that my mother’s paintings were once in a museum and I have never seen any of her real work, only the small pictures she enclosed in her long-ago letters to me. Many times I have considered going to Bali, to find the world she inhabited, the part of it she created for herself, to see what a sea mango was, and all the other trees and animals and rivers she sent me in her letters. I have never wanted to go the simple way, like a tourist. I dream instead of making the same journey as hers, by train, ship, steamer, boat, across the Indian Ocean, passing a thousand islands, stopping every few days, pausing until I want to go on again. She had found a way to do it, she had stood on the rim of a volcano, seen the fires below, and take
n the plunge. Why didn’t I?
The addresses Dinu gave Gustav were to prove fortuitous. After the war ended and he returned to entomology in Germany, he found Father Unger, a man he had known a little at the internment camp. Gustav sent me a note describing what he had found out.
Father Unger was a missionary who had been put into an internment camp in Java, then transferred to the Sibolga camp in Sumatra. At that camp, he made friends with Walter Spies, struck by the way he stood out among the other prisoners. Tall. Red shirt. Lean face made leaner by the hardships of prison, and impervious to the foul conditions in the camp, immersed in painting on scraps of paper and canvas. He told Father Unger that once the war was over he would paint dragonflies and wasps, insects were his latest obsession. The translucence of dragonfly wings. Their fragility.
Father Unger remembered watching Spies walk onto the ship, the Van Imhoff, in which they were to come to India, with a roll of his canvases under his arm and a cigarette in his mouth, only to have them taken away from him as he started up the gangplank. Even so, Spies thought it a special piece of luck to be on that ship, he told the priest, since he would be going back to a country where he had been happy, where he had friends from before the war.
They walked up the gangplank and were packed into barbed-wire cages on the deck. Thirty men to each cage about 150 centimeters high. Spies was not far from him, but inside the cages they were no longer able to talk or even move. The ship set sail. Nobody had enough water, the sweat, heat, and stench were unbearable. There was hardly any food. Two days like this rocking in the ocean, and then at about noon on the third day a Japanese bomb fell close to the ship. It was 19th January 1942.
After some time another explosion, then a third when the ship reared up and fell back. And then silence. The hissing sound of steam. Cries of wild panic from the prisoners as the Dutch guards began abandoning ship. They took the lifeboats and were gone. They left wirecutters for the prisoners, but that was all, and in the frenzy that followed, some of the prisoners jumped off the ship and drowned while others broke into the stores and drank themselves blind.