A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  Tilik walked carefully in the dark so as not to stumble inadvertently into a dugout. It was a government order that each household should build a shelter. Or scrape from the soil a suitable hole before their home, into which to fling themselves during air raids. These unsightly craters littered roads, as if the city had been invaded by an army of moles. He could not see what good the shallow burrows were to anyone. They appeared no more than potential tombs. The Government had planned no shelter for the millions of people in its largest city. When it rained the holes filled up with black mud. They had been dug in the summer, but there had been no raids to test their use until a week ago.

  Tilik entered the NHK building and ran up the stairs to the studio. They were waiting for him. He took his seat before the microphone. The red light came on and the man signalled to him from behind the glass. He leaned forward.

  ‘I have come from a meeting with two great men, Subash Chandra Bose, or Netaji, as he is called, and Rash Bihari Bose. The two Boses. Netaji is here in Japan to replenish the ammunition of the INA. Imphal was no defeat, but the greatest of victories. We set foot upon Indian soil, upon the Motherland herself. It was the first step on the road to victory. Liberation is near. Netaji prepares for the next attack . . .’

  There was a clock high on the wall beyond the glass partition. He kept his eyes upon it. Blackout blinds covered the windows. He willed the hands of the clock to turn, to reach the half hour without the disturbance of sirens. At last it was over and he drew back from the microphone, filled by inexplicable exhaustion. Nothing made sense to him any more. He was a puppet who mouthed the empty words of others.

  His house was not far from the studio. Inside he lit a few bits of charcoal over the gas in the kitchen. Carrying them into his bedroom, he placed them in the small brazier, spreading his fingers above the glowing coals. Where would anyone find charcoal this winter? In each home across the city he knew the same thoughts filled everyone’s mind.

  He was lucky still to have a house. Fire-trails, to stem the danger of conflagration after raids, had been incised in a grid across the city. Thousands of houses were marked for demolition. Inhabitants were given no more than a few days to evacuate with their possessions. Troops and schoolboys then tore down the homes with their bare hands and axes. From the rubble housewives scavenged bundles of firewood for the winter ahead. Strange new vistas had opened up across the city, uncomfortable in their starkness. Once he was warm Tilik lay down on the bed, pulling the thick quilt up high upon him. He never undressed nowadays. It would have been best to stay in Manchukuo. It was only anxiety about Michiko that had brought him back.

  When Hasegawa refused his pleas to return to Japan he had tried to arrange for Michiko to come to Hsinking from Tokyo. Hasegawa had not been helpful, even when on one of Tilik’s visits to Japan Michiko again became pregnant. It was not until after the fall of Singapore that Hasegawa announced Tilik might at last go back to Tokyo.

  ‘It seems you will now be needed far from here. I have received word from Tokyo that you must embark on a course of direct action. The Chief of Army Staff in Tokyo supports the idea of establishing centres for your Indian Independence League in the newly fallen British enclaves in Asia. It has been viewed as useful to co-ordinate effectively with the Indian communities in these places. We can support your struggle for independence in a concrete way now. You are to return to Rash Bihari Bose.’ Hasegawa smiled and produced a bottle of brandy.

  ‘We have many things to celehrate,’ he continued ‘I too am retuming to Tokyo. Now that our Empire is spreading I am also needed elsewhere.’ He raised his glass to Tilik.

  Since the day of his return to Tokyo Tilik’s life had been one of movement, travelling constantly between Bangkok, Singapore, and Tokyo in the cause of Indian independence. The main centres of cooperation with the Japanese military had been set up in these places. Excitement had buoyed them all up. The Indian Independence League cartwheeled along on the tumbling Japanese victories. Now Tilik drew the quilt further over his head. The cold would not leave his body. What would he do when Rash Bihari was dead? How would the war end? His role was already obsolete, all he had worked for was disintegrating. Even the centre of action for Indian Independence was now far removed from Tokyo. Rangoon was now that centre, nearer in access to India.

  The NHK broadcasts to Indian communities across South East Asiam now anchored Tilik’s day, but there was little more. If Japan surrendered, where would that leave him? And there was a new fear. He was being watched. He had a special status of trust and collaboration with the authorities. Yet, as the war sunk its teeth deeper into Japan, even that trust was wearing thin. Paranoia was everywhere. Subash Chandra Bose no longer had the support he had earlier been shown in Japan. The antipathy his name now ignited amongst the Japanese military had filtered down to Tilik. He saw danger, moving towards him in the dark.

  A siren cut a sudden jagged edge through the night. Tilik jumped up, heart pounding, and began to run. A light rain had fallen earlier, and he hoped the wet would protect the house. The fire-fighting methods pinned up by the Neighbourhood Association seemed basic in the extreme. They relied on straw mats soaked in water and a bucket brigade of women and children. It was believed such measures could save Tokyo from the power of modern incendiary bombs.

  Tilik ran from the door and climbed awkwardly into his dugout. There were several inches of water at the bottom. He was taller than most Japanese and the standard depth of the hole left his head sticking over the top. Already searchlights lit the sky. All about him people scrambled like crabs on a beach, into their muddy burrows. Children wailed. Caught in the searchlights he saw for the first time the big B-29s, chased by red flashes of anti-aircraft fire, soaring across the moon. Soon, like fireworks in the distance, clusters of bombs began to explode, ripping the sky apart, shaking the ground like an earthquake. He crouched down in the hole.

  A deep buzzing pulsated suddenly in his ears, vibrating through the damp earth. A geyser of flame was thrown up before him. Raising his head he saw his house was on fire. Above the city the sky was bloodied, reflecting these blossoms of the night. There was nothing he could do but watch the destruction of his home. Before the all clear went the house had already burned beyond repair. The bucket brigade lined up by the water cisterns, but were driven back by the heat of the surrounding fire.

  Tilik waited by the dugout for a long while, warmed by the flames and flying sparks, as if to store up a heat to keep him through the bleak months ahead. Within the furnace of his home he recognised at times the blazing shape of some familiar object, a mirror, a sofa, a child’s chair. His papers were kept in a metal box, and he hoped this might survive the conflagration. About him people ran from the collapsing neighbourhood, and red hot falling beams. Only Tilik stood rooted by his dugout. It seemed to him suddenly that, in the fiery nebula before him, his own life was burning to a pile of ash.

  He remembered the pyre on which his father was cremated after he was killed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and that Tilik had lit as custom demanded. Not since that day had he stood before a heat as great as this. Then that long-ago fire, when he turned from it at last, had displaced him forever from comfortable acceptances. He had been fitted for nothing from that day; anger drove him on. Now, looking back, he saw in his life only one dislocation upon another. They locked together in the flames before him, amalgamating into this one, monstrous dislocation: war. When the flames died he would be bereft.

  There were forces against which it was not possible to win. In taking up arms, he had joined, unwittingly, the malignant force that had killed his father. His anger had not eradicated it. Instead, by supporting violence he had propagated the very force he had wished to subdue. He had become the man who held the gun. In all the years of activism, who had he helped in the smallest way? All he could offer of decency was that one episode with the Chinese, Teng Li-sheng.

  He watched the last flaming beams of his home crash down. His whole life was burning be
fore him. Suddenly then he felt relief. If all was gone, a new beginning might be possible. Perhaps, even now, a fresh journey still lay before him.

  34

  The Radio

  January 1945

  In the darkness he turned the knob of the radio and the crackle of the universe filled the room. It was as near, Kenjiro thought, as one might get to a time machine, landing unexpectedly in unknown terrain. Each day, after he returned from the ammunitions factory to which he was conscripted, he listened to the BBC news. Once, his father had crouched with him, pressing an ear to the radio. His encroaching deafness and the constant texturing of interference frustrated him. He thought it also safer to pretend to know nothing of a short-wave radio in the house. He demanded instead daily bulletins from Kenjiro.

  There was the sudden creak of wood. Kenjiro sat up, listening intently, then went to the door. The corridor was empty. He returned to the radio. The old house groaned continually, one wing had already burned down in a raid. They were lucky to still have a partial roof over their heads. Usually, with a signal from him, his mother busied the servants downstairs before he came up here. The Kempeitai kept him under strict surveillance. The two servants who remained with them were undoubtedly informers. He could not blame them, the pressure of the Kempeitai was not one to stand against. Yoko would say little, she had been with them twenty years. But, Kimiko had come to them soon after he returned from China. There was no doubt she was planted. He had seen her once on the street corner, talking to a man.

  He returned his attention to the radio. As he twisted the knob a voice gathered depth. Every day at this hour he heard the disembodied words of Tilik Dayal, flickering in strength over the hum of the airwaves. The first time he stumbled upon the voice, shock punched through him. He realised Dayal must be back in Tokyo. The voice droned on, placing its platitudes neatly. To Kenjiro each word drew tight again the threads of complicity between them. He was tied to this man for life, as he would be to an ex-lover, some invisible exchange of spirit remaining between them. Truth was a see-saw neither could dismount.

  He found at last the clear, incised tones of the BBC and listened to the news. Once it was finished he returned the radio to its place of hiding, a space hollowed out beneath the tatami mats. No one was supposed to own a short-wave radio. No one was supposed to know Japan was on the brink of disaster. Home broadcasts still spoke of victory. They harangued people to repulse invasion. Kenjiro pushed the tatami back into place and pulled the table and a cushion over the joint. He heard the creak of wood and went again to the door. The corridor was still empty, but there was a tread on the lower stairs. Kenjiro heard his mother call and almost at once, from the bottom steps, Kimiko’s answering words. He swore beneath his breath.

  Soon he went downstairs. His mother sat darning a pair of worn mompe trousers, his father was reading a newspaper and looked up as he entered the room. His eyes had sunk deeply into his face, and the padded kimono, once especially made for his extra large frame, was now ample about his frail body. Kenjiro pulled the door closed behind him and sat down on a cushion beside his parents. They had already, some months before when the fear of raids was imminent, sent Naomi to stay with Uncle Juichi. The way they were watched by the secret police was unnerving for her. It was also impossible to tell when Kenjiro might again be arrested. Already they had taken him once since his return from China, terrorising Naomi.

  It had been at the time of the Russian spy Sorge’s detention. A Soviet spy ring had been cracked in Tokyo, bringing with it many arrests. Kenjiro had despaired of deliverance in that dark, damp place with its weevil-filled bowls of gruel. He lost count of the weeks of incarceration, of grim questioning, but eventually, without explanation, he was released again. It seemed they were satisfied that he knew nothing. But his health had been broken. Tuberculosis now filled his lungs. His father, at great expense, had sent him for a time to a sanatorium in a mountain village.

  Yuzuru looked at Kenjiro questioningly, waiting for the latest news bulletin. ‘Leyte has been captured at last by the Americans. Now anything is possible. From there they’ll strike at Luzon and Manila. Everything now is in MacArthur’s favour.’ Kenjiro spoke in a whisper, listening for the approach of servants.

  ‘Nothing yet of course on the local station. If anything is said at all it will be followed by the same old chorus: By drawing the war within the inner Japanese defence lines, the enemy has put his head in a noose, and we are going to strangle him,’ Yuzuru sighed.

  ‘The people are not hoodwinked so easily. All these B-29s, raining bombs upon us every day, speak louder than government words,’ Kenjiro replied.

  ‘According to the Women’s Volunteer Association, if things worsen, we are all to be issued with bamboo swords to defend the country when the Americans arrive. Soon everyone will have to drill every day.’ Shizuko Nozaki did not look up from her darning.

  Her silk kimono, patterned with fans and clouds and birds, and obi of gold brocade were now gone. Elegance, beauty and every frivolity was frowned upon. Now, Shizuko wore the ugly baggy trousers all women were required to wear, sewn from the salvaged cloth of old kimono. Any other apparel would have brought upon them the wrath of the Neighbourhood Association. Whispers about the reason for Kenjiro’s return from China and his later imprisonment meant disapproval lay heavy upon them. Already they were marked.

  His mother now appeared as if carved from antique ivory, and yet there was a wiriness about her that surprised Kenjiro. She had adapted to these times. She climbed about agilely in the absurd baggy trousers of stripes or flowers, tackling tasks unknown to her in better times. Retaining her innate elegance, she reminded him sometimes in the shapeless pants, of a frail clown.

  Never in his life had Kenjiro been closer to his parents. Never, he suspected, had they been closer to each other. Age, the eye of the Kempeitai, and the present grim austerity had drained his father’s life of other women. Geisha had been abolished, and all luxury establishments closed. Oyasu, his chief mistress, had been returned for safety to her village in the mountains. His father had sent her away, like a precious object that must be secured against better times ahead. Only for the highest government officials did a black market in geisha now exist. He sensed a new companionship between his parents.

  ‘Kimiko was up there, I’m sure of it,’ Kenjiro muttered suddenly to his father. ‘I must get the radio out of the house.’ They stepped through each day as if upon eggshells.

  The wooden doors to the verandah were closed. In the small room their breath clouded frostily between them. A few bits of charcoal glowed in a brazier next to his mother. Shrapnel had splintered the shutters and blackout paper peeled from the hole. Through it Kenjiro stared at a brittle crescent of moon, hanging high above the garden. The sky was black and cloudless.

  ‘There is a cold winter ahead.’ Shizuko followed his gaze.

  Outside, little was left of the garden. The charred remains of the camellia bushes were no more than blackened stalks. The great stones were scorched amber. Two sides of the garden, once protected by an arm of house now lay open to the road. Between where they sat and the street was a mound of charred beams and wet sodden ash, all that remained of that part of the house after a recent air-raid. They trod carefully about in the crumbling structure, expecting floors to collapse beneath them.

  ‘I have hired a truck,’ Yuzuru announced suddenly.

  ‘A truck? Who can get hold of a truck? How much did that cost you?’ Shizuko looked up from her darning in alarm.

  ‘I was lucky. Ask me no more. The day after tomorrow we move to Uncle Juichi’s. The raids are accelerating. Let us get out while we can,’ Yuzuru replied.

  The siren began to wail. Shizuko put down her darning, folding it neatly beside her sewing box, and stood up. ‘How I hate this. I would rather die here, in this room,’ she grumbled. Kenjiro took her arm and guided her out of the house.

  ‘We are lucky to have a proper shelter and not a mud dugout,’ he told her.
/>   He pushed her before him into the damp, fetid chamber. It was a crude affair, an extra large hole with concrete sides that he always expected to fall in upon them. He could not bear the wet, airless interior where his mother always crouched. The door had already been blown off. He sat on the steps, inside the open entrance. Every night now the raids came in increasing ferocity. They had all heard the new term, ‘carpet bombing’.

  Now, high up, the bombers threaded through the clouds. Searchlights swayed, like shafts of sun in a cellar, with planes caught like flies in a beam. Bursts of light flashed through the night, falling in a fiery rain over the city from plane afterplane. The thud of distant bombs shook the shelter. Behind Kenjiro his mother whimpered softly.

  The sky was lit now with a pink borealis spreading in a surreal dawn. Smoke and flames rose up from the city towards this unnatural light. In its glare, dark as gliding birds, the planes could still be seen, the fiery glow far beneath reflecting on their wings. They flew on, suffused in gold light, unearthly as meteors. There was a fierce beauty in this theatre of the extreme.

  There was some counter-attack in a dispatch of light Kamikaze planes. They buzzed about, ineffectual as mosquitoes, intent upon destroying themselves. One flew into a great plane and exploded in a blaze. The B-29 began to trail black smoke and careered drunkenly about. Soon it disgorged a white parachute which floated, like a feathery seed, down towards the fire. Kenjiro watched, his eyes on the black speck dangling beneath the parachute until it was enveloped in the flames. Soon the all clear went.

  Now the second danger came. The wind scooped up the molten debris of the town and blew it to the inflamed sky. The air was filled with burning morsels of wood and paper, drifting like a devilish confetti back down upon their heads, starting up new fires. Before they could move to douse them, the siren went again. A second wave of bombers appeared. More dark birds upon the night.