Rangoon Harbour
Burma
25 December 1966
Christmas Day. It was an unusual Christmas for Simon because it wasn’t the kind of Christmas he had had the past 15 years. There weren’t the usual presents or the scintillating Christmas tree, nor were his friends and cousins around. He was not in a home with family but on a ship.
Only Solomon, his best friend in the land, was there standing on the wharf of the Rangoon harbour to bid farewell. Thiers had been a great friendship, and it had hurt Solomon that Simon would not be constantly by his side anymore to grow together into manhood. He had decided to stand on the wharf in the scorching sun that morning, until the eventual moment when Simon would disappear from his vision. His act was an epitome of an endearment that rebelled at the vagaries of life.
Simon missed those few now, Solomon in particular, who had made him feel like he belonged, those few whom he grew up with intimately, sharing the problems of growing up and the illicit excitement of guarding the same prohibitive secrets— secrets which were, in reality, facts of life but would have only earned admonishment from the elders were he to have enquired them as to the nature of his discoveries. The comfort he had enjoyed in the country as an adolescent and a budding youth had ended abruptly.
It was also a significant day for Simon—a day that would change his life forever, a day that would separate him from his mother’s land for an indeterminate stretch of time. He was a victim of a new emerging politics, typical of post-World War II South East Asia; a kind of politics that had fuelled in the leadership a sense of nationalism, and a leadership that had aggrandized itself with loot and usurped power while stifling the voice of freedom and rationality in an infant proletariat they had chosen to lead for the many decades that would lie ahead.
‘Simon,’ his father had said, ‘I realize that things will not be the same again, Son. It’s a new country, a new people and a new environment. You will have to adapt to it. You might look at me in anger when things don’t turn up right, but I think leaving Burma, even under these circumstances, is the best for us all.’
‘But why, Dad?’ he had asked. ‘Mom’s folks will take care of us. They have said so…and getting started with a new job shouldn’t be difficult, should it?’
It was then that his father revealed to him the nature of political and social consequences. As the son of an Indian father and a Karen mother, his life would have been filled with discrimination and suspicion going ahead. A university education for Simon would have been improbable, and securing a comfortable niche in the new social order unlikely. Worse still was the probability of being influenced by some fatalistic sense of romance or bravado and turning radical, joining the Karen Army at the Thai border, or the misfortune of being gang-pressed into the Burmese Army’s slave labour.
It had startled him that his father no longer had a future in Burma. His father was now 55 years old, and at the end of meaningful employment. His mother would have had to leave Rangoon and return to her ancestral countryside eventually, which was fraught with hostilities between the Burmese soldiers and the Karen insurgents.
Had the countryside anything to offer, he wondered, except raring chickens and ducks, pigs and geese? What would they do for rice? Bridges that were blown up by the insurgents and the retaliatory measures resorted to by the government soldiers—claiming its toll on hapless civilians—had also laid to waste thousands of acres of paddy land his mother had a share in. And…no more of the Beatles’ songs!
Was it vision, wisdom, paranoia or just human instinct to survive that prompted his father’s move? Simon wasn’t quite sure then, but there he was, on the deck of the rusty old ship, curious at the void ahead of him that was waiting to be filled.
*
On Board the SS Saudi
26 December 1966
The SS Saudi, rumoured to have sunk off the Andaman Islands on a timber run several months later, was a decrepit cargo vessel hastily modified to transport a different kind of cargo. The old vessel would now be carrying in its hold an unwanted humanity— human beings, young and old, male and female, families; Indians, ostracized and no longer encouraged to live in Burma, and no longer desired in the new era that was dawning upon the country.
Captain Fernandes watched from the bridge a group of Burmese immigration and customs officials, along with a pilot, board the ship. The captain was not particularly anti-Burmese, nor was he a stranger to the port. In fact, he had visited this port many times during the past several years of his maritime career, and had found Rangoon appealing amongst the various ports he had called on in the South and Middle East; he had known quite a few Burmese on shore to whom he had taken a liking.
But today, Captain Fernandes felt a strong resentment building in him, and he wished that he had the power to throw overboard the party of Burmese officials arrogantly boarding his ship for the final clearance. He was surprised at the developments in the country since 1962 that had changed the demography of the country almost suddenly. The new era in the country was called the Burmese way to socialism, recalled Captain Fernandes; a socialism that, to him, seemed to have punished entrepreneurs with confiscation, a socialism that had invoked a larger political apparatus called nationalization.
‘We’ll sail immediately as soon as the buggers get off the ship,’ he said to his chief, and prepared to meet the approached officials.
‘Yes, sir,’ acknowledged the chief, himself incensed with the degradation of his countrymen by the very people his government had time and again helped during their moments of crisis, and especially when their government had been threatened by an insurrection in the country in recent times.
The formalities were completed with the fewest of words that rose above the pregnant silence of the ship’s crew, presenting the Burmese officials with a stiff atmosphere of uncommunicativeness. Captain Fernandes chose not to ease the discomfiture of the Burmese officials and carried himself just short of rudeness which, to his satisfaction, expedited the inspection. The officials hastily left the ship, their nerves on edge under the sullen glare and the indicting roar of the ship’s manifest that their government had deprived of a livelihood, stripping the people of their dignity and self-respect.
Given the clearance by the officials, U Hal Sein—the Burmese pilot on board the SS Saudi—navigated the ship through the mouth of the Irrawaddy River and handed over the command of the ship to Captain Fernandes, his job now done. Their eyes met and locked for a moment, sharing a commonality as marine men, uncompromised by the politics of power and racial prejudice. Captain Fernandes extended his hand which was taken warmly by the Burmese pilot.
‘I am sincerely sorry to see the misery on this ship,’ U Hal Sein said over the firm handshake. ‘I never dreamt that Burma would become a dictatorship. It’s an aberration to our religion, which is so grounded in compassion, tolerance and peace. Maybe the country is suffering from bad karma,’ the pilot offered apologetically.
‘I don’t know about that, Mr Hal Sein,’ replied Captain Fernandes, ‘but I suppose there will be some like you whose human values will prevail and hopefully restore this beautiful country again to what it was.’
U Hal Sein smiled at Captain Fernandes but refrained from comment. Pensively leaving the ship, he carefully concealed under his jacket a carton of American cigarettes that the Indian captain had given him. The magnitude of the Indian refugee crisis had stunned him and he was lost for an explanation. Probably their karma was as bad, he thought as the tugboat took him back to the harbour. He looked back at the ship he had just left and felt a guilt he hadn’t experienced before. It had made him feel miserable. ‘May God go with those unfortunate Indians,’ he prayed.
On that day on the Irrawaddy, Dora, too, bore a misery. She bore the misery of severance from her roots and she bore the misery stoically, holding back her tears and waving back at the fading figures of her family at the harbour as the SS Saudi began its voyage. It was her turn now to be the foreigner. The ship steamed for six days across the Bay of Bengal: its destination, Madras, South India.
And on that day, leaving a Burma that was metamorphosing into a xenophobic society and still ambivalent about the surrender of his attachments in the land of his birth that the turn of events had necessitated, Simon’s unreconciled mind was assuaged by the inducement of new discoveries waiting on a distant shore. The spirit of adventure thrilled him and, for that moment, Simon didn’t feel the pain of uproot and sailing the uncharted waters ahead of him.
*
The Bay of Bengal
26–31 December 1966
Except for one still and dark night when the soothing calm of moonlight and the twinkling beacons of the stars were curtained from the sky, there wasn’t any cause for apprehension. Throughout the voyage, the usual seasickness was evident on the ship. Captain Fernandes could not help that the food was symptomatic of refugee quality. But he had a great admiration for the Indian government for bringing home her people. Thousands and thousands of them! He had already made half a dozen runs and was due back in Rangoon, and in a fortnight hence, be ready for the final sail to pick up the last group of refugees.
The thought briefly alleviated the captain’s moral discomfort over the misery that swamped the ageing ship.
The sea was frequent with a display of its aquatic troupe of flying fish, jubilantly breaking surface and dexterously flying in the air and diving again into the deep blue, momentarily delighting those on-board, while an occasional ship appearing on the horizon would cause ripples of excitement amongst the passengers, only to leave them awash with a sense of hollowness as it vanished like a mirage. Captain Fernandes thought it was, perhaps, symbolic of a cherished past materializing momentarily with stirring clarity in their minds, only to remind them that it was now beyond their grasp forever.
Simon met new friends during the voyage, teenagers like him who had left their attachments behind and whose adolescent dreams had remained unfulfilled. Their first infatuation and crush now only a wistful memory as the SS Saudi inevitably distanced their watery thoughts from the land of their birth with miles upon nautical miles of Poseidon’s kingdom. These were friends who he wouldn’t meet again because, like him, they, too, would become preoccupied with their own survival in the new land but friends, nevertheless, they were for that moment in time. They sang the songs of The Beatles, spoke of the girlfriends they had or had fancied and passed amongst them a few treasured photographs, and vaguely fantasized about the future. They hardly spoke of their personal sorrows and loneliness, or their fears. Instead, they created a bond for that short time they had, filling their moments with fellowship, for they were all fellow travellers ‘in the same boat’.
Simon wondered about his father’s people, whether they were anything like the baffling human swarm around him…or how they would react to an alien incursion upon their established turf. Images of rampant thievery and beggary said to be a peculiarity of the land dominated his mind above that of the alluring grandeur of an ancient civilization.
Simon strolled along towards the stern of the ship and sat through the evening watching the evanescent wake slowly reclaimed by a silent sea. And for the first time, he felt the pang of abandonment by the land of his birth gnawing at his soul.
A curtain had fallen for him at the Irrawaddy River.
*
New Year’s Eve
The Bay of Bengal
31 December 1966
The crew of the SS Saudi organized a small affair that night on the deck, and invited a few talents they had scouted for that purpose. They wanted a reprieve from their monotony, and New Year’s Eve was opportune enough an excuse to indulge in a little revelry. They kept the liquor to themselves under the express orders of the kindly captain but were generous with the food, which was specially prepared for the occasion.
Simon wasn’t surprised that he and his new-found friends were the only talents the crew could find on-board, and was honoured to return the compliment. They played popular rhythms of the times on a couple of guitars that the Burmese customs had allowed to get on-board, and sang songs that stimulated them and encouraged the crew to participate in any that they could. He missed his friend Solomon who was an accomplished guitarist, and was glad that he had handed over Solomon his collection of six thousand stamps as a gift rather than leave it with the Burmese customs. He hoped to keep in touch with this friend.
The crew had their own version of musical prowess and all together, they celebrated and ushered in the New Year with alacrity. There was no mention of a competition until a sailor, perhaps feeling a little more generous but apparently more inebriated than the others, decided to award a sum of one Indian rupee to the best twister among the contestants.
For Simon it was an opportunity to earn, and earn he did… that first Indian rupee.