part0018

The air was hot and sultry although it was midnight. Crickets chirruped loudly and the croaking of a solitary bull-frog from the rivulet behind the Forest Ranger's quarters were the only sounds that disturbed the brooding jungle.

June lay awake on the narrow cot that was her bed. She was sweating profusely beneath the additional heat caused by the green-hued mosquito net that enveloped her recumbent form. She heard the frog and knew that his solo notes would in time become a chorus, sung by hundreds of frogs that would line the stream when it became a raging torrent, swollen by the expected monsoon.

Her father was sleeping in the next room and his deep breathing intruded upon her thoughts. A lantern burned dimly in the doorway between, casting long velvety black shadows across the wall opposite her, spookish through the meshes of the curtain.

June was troubled. For some reason she could not understand, a face kept appearing in her mind, in which a pair of grey-green eyes looked at her. It belonged to a man who was driving a jeep—the face of John Greystone—husband of that horrid Englishwoman.

As she lay thinking, she heard the chugging of a motor car and wondered who could be driving it. Perhaps it was the jeep. Perhaps John Greystone was coming to visit her. It was a pleasant thought and she lingered on it awhile.

The drone of the engine grew louder and nearer. She heard the squeak of brakes. Next came the voices of men speaking in undertones from the quarters of the Indian Forester and the five Forest Guards who lived with their families adjacent to the Ranger's bungalow.

June strained her ears to catch the words, but the curtain and the distance of the window from her bed muffled them. A few moments she lay thus, wondering who the visitors at this time of night could be, and what they might want. Then curiosity overcame her and she got out of bed and walked to the window.

It was too dark for her to see anything. A few words, here and there, floated to her hearing, and being conversant with Tamil she had no difficulty in understanding their meaning.

The Forester was speaking. "But what you ask us to do is impossible. We are servants of the British Raj. If we listen to you, we will get into serious trouble. The Ranger Sahib will report us and we will be dismissed if not put in jail. We will lose our pensions. Who will feed our families? Will you, or the people you represent?"

There was silence for half a minute.

A strange voice began to reply—peculiar in its intonations—it was sibilant and had an unaccountable quality of toneless, malevolent silkiness. The speaker seemed to hiss the words like a snake.

"It's because of rats like you, who serve the accursed white men, that we Indians who are struggling and sacrificing all for the freedom of our country, find it difficult to make headway. Don't you realise that the millions of this great land are uniting and will shortly drive the foreigners out? Then, where will you be? If you join us now, there will be promotion and a position of responsibility awaiting you in the new government. But if you do not; if you remain loyal to the British; what will you do when they leave India? Be very very sure they won't take you with them. They'll desert you—leave you behind—with us! We will reap vengeance upon you when that day comes. We'll treat you as traitors to the motherland!"

The voices went on and on in their argument. June's first thought was to awaken her father and tell him what was happening. She knew that the secret agents of Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party were everywhere, stirring up rebellion against the Government, against the British, against white people in general. Her father's sympathies had been her own; and like those of the million or more Anglo-Indians throughout the peninsula, strongly pro-British.

Had she heard the conversation a few hours earlier, June knew her reaction would have been to awaken her father and drive the strangers off, if necessary at the point of a gun. But something had happened that very morning. Something shocking. It had been a blow to her. Nevertheless, it had brought her face to face with herself.

A white woman—an Englishwoman—one of the ruling race to whom she had always given her unstinted loyalty had disillusioned her.

She had been angry at the time. She had been resentful. She had even wept. Now all of a sudden, the truth dawned upon her. What the Englishwoman had said was a fact. The white folk despised people such as her and her father. They looked down upon them because they were dark; because they were Eurasians.

She was, after all, an Indian herself!

God's truth; there was not the slightest doubt about it! Then why should her sympathies lie with the English? Rather, they ought to be with the strangers outside, and people like them, who were trying to free this country which was her very own as much as it was theirs, from the bondage of British rule; from the yolk of the white foreigners who despised Indians and Anglo-Indians alike!

The men outside were not traitors as she once would have considered them. They were patriots. The muffled voices broke in once more upon her hearing. The same man was speaking again.

"Are you aware that a few days ago, the townsfolk at Ooparpet burned down the police Station, killing all the five policemen who were loyal to the Government? Had those men denounced the British and joined the freedom fighters, they would have been alive today. But they were foolish and didn't do so. Now they are dead. Will the English bring them to life again? Will the British Raj feed their families? Do you want the same thing to happen to you? Join us before it's too late. Within the next forty-eight hours the coolies on the coffee estate are going to rebel. They will burn the bungalow with the white man and his wife in it as a warning to these foreign dogs to get out of our country before they meet with a similar fate. Think it over seriously. We'll return soon. Then you must join us—and act!"

The mumbling ceased and June heard the car move off into the jungle night. Soon the beat of its engine faded away in the distance. Her thoughts were filled with confusion. She had just overheard the horrible fate that lay ahead for the planter and his wife. John Greystone, the man with the grey-green eyes who had met her that morning and whom she had thought to be so nice; and Ruth his wife, who had disillusioned her. A plan that was only part and parcel of the much bigger move to drive the English out of India—the India that was her mother-land!