IN APRIL MR SHINOZAKI was transferred, along with Raj, from MAD, the Military Administration Department to CAD, the City Administration Department. It was a relief to escape the high-handedness of Colonel Watanabe. The Colonel had taken over the running of the Overseas Chinese Association from Mr Shinozaki. He was an ambitious man intent on collecting the $50 million donation demanded of the Chinese community. To do this he had released many people from prison to arrange their finances, but he did not release Mei Lan.
Mayor Odate welcomed Shinozaki to his new office in City Hall overlooking the Padang. Shinozaki as Chief Officer of Education at once focused his attention on reopening schools. Welfare and liaison were also part of his work and he continued to issue Good Citizen passes and trace people disappeared by the kempetai. Shinozaki gladly left his team of spies at MAD; those working with him at CAD he regarded as genuine helpers without the same level of ulterior motive.
He did not, however, find himself entirely free of Colonel Watanabe’s influence. There were brothels enough in Singapore but no high-class geisha house where top army staff could hold a party. Colonel Watanabe was a man of big appetites who enjoyed carousing with his friends. He liked the idea of such an establishment, which was to be housed in the Cricket Club overlooking the Padang, opposite City Hall. Porcelain, chopsticks, tatami mats, Japanese rice, soy sauce and miso paste were all quickly imported from Japan for Colonel Watanabe’s new venture.
The high-pitched singing of geisha, the twang of samisen and the answering calls of drunken officers in the Cricket Club across the road were constantly heard in the offices of City Hall. This noise, which started early in the day, disturbed not only Mr Shinozaki but also Mayor Odate. The dignity of civilian administrators in the City Department was diminished by the goings-on across the road, the Mayor fumed, affronted. Soon, he made the situation known to higher authorities and eventually the Cricket Club geisha house was closed.
In his new position Shinozaki felt free to work discreetly for Mei Lan’s release. Already, the kempetai had held her for months. ‘It may still take time but I have not forgotten her,’ he told Raj with a smile one morning.
‘It means nothing to me,’ Raj replied, afraid to show any interest in a woman suspected of having communist connections.
‘Her Eurasian boyfriend seems to have disappeared. It appears he had a radio and the penalty for this, as you know, is death,’ Shinozaki added.
Much of Shinozaki’s time was taken up by the reopening of schools. The Military Administration had ordered the Japanese language to be taught to every child in Singapore. This was not an easy order; there were no Japanese-language textbooks and also a shortage of school buildings as so many had been requisitioned by the military for their own purposes. Shinozaki employed an able Eurasian as Inspector of Schools and with this man Raj was busy about town, collecting chairs and desks, chalks and notebooks and the occasional piano to rebuild the looted schools. Although teachers were traced and, if still alive, persuaded to return to work, there were still no Japanese-language textbooks. Mr Shinozaki took it upon himself to personally write out lessons that were then printed in volume and distributed to all the schools.
Mr Shinozaki’s department was a large one with many local staff. Raj found it easy to slip away to attend to his own work. The war had catapulted him aggressively into the black market business. People constantly needed things Raj could acquire through his Japanese contacts. He had been given licences to trade in many of the commodities he had previously supplied to Japanese ships. Loot from the first chaotic days of the occupation was also now reappearing for sale on the black market. Much of this was from abandoned European homes: furniture, lace dresses, silk cushions, refrigerators, violins, watches, sewing baskets and ice-cream makers. Raj was able to buy sought-after items and sell them advantageously, often to the Japanese themselves. There was now a continuous influx of civilian Japanese arriving from Japan to populate the new colony of Syonan. Licences to trade were given first to these new immigrants, before distribution to local people.
Arriving at City Hall one morning, Raj found Shinozaki in a heat of excitement. ‘General Yamashita has ordered that for the Emperor’s Birthday celebration, all Syonan schoolchildren must gather on the Padang to sing ‘Aikoku Koshin Kyoku’ and then they must sing ‘Kimigayo’, the Japanese National Anthem. The Emperor’s Birthday is on 29 April, ten days away and schools are only just now reopening. We have no time to prepare.’
But prepare he did, personally overseeing the printing and distribution of the musical scores, just as he had the school textbooks. When, on the Emperor’s Birthday General Yamashita, Tiger of Malaya, portly, chubby cheeked and gruff of voice stood before City Hall, the foreign children’s unfailing rendering of Japanese songs brought tears to the strong man’s eyes.
‘Just like Japanese children,’ he said, blinking hard to suppress emotion.
When she could free herself from Ancient Mistress’s service, Ah Siew spent her time cleaning Mei Lan’s room. She ironed again the clothes she had carefully ironed just a few days before, rearranged underwear in drawers and books upon shelves and re-polished the silver photo frames, staring long and hard at the photo of the four-year-old Mei Lan with her arms around her mother. Each day she spoke to the photo of First Mistress who Mei Lan so much resembled and, eyes shut, tears streaming down her face, beseeched her to bring Mei Lan home. Every day she stood at the window that looked out towards Lim Villa and remembered the long corridors she had traipsed to Ancient Mistress’s rooms, Mei Lan tightly clasping her hand. Whenever she saw Mei Lan in her mind, she saw her as a child. Ah Siew could not eat and each night was spent battling fiendish thoughts that only the daylight put behind her.
Things had deteriorated between Leila and Krishna. Sometimes they barely spoke for days. When they did, they argued.
‘They say not all Indians are wanting to join the Indian National Army but are forced into it by the Japanese out of fear,’ Leila told Krishna, daring his disapproval as he handed her the rough notes of his latest lecture to copy out.
‘I have joined because soon with Japanese help, we will liberate India,’ Krishna answered, pursing his lips, as if even to reply was a favour to her. ‘Chalo Delhi.’ This was how it was now between them. Anger simmered within them both and Leila knew it was her fault; her body refused to accept his child, rejecting it roughly each time, as if to deliberately slight him.
In the few years of their marriage he had taught her to read and write and now trusted her with drafts of his Indian National Army lectures. Leila was glad to copy them out, still marvelling at her newfound literacy, carefully forming each letter with her pen. Every new word she looked up in a dictionary Raj had given her, writing it down and learning it. Now that she could read, she entered as if by magic worlds that continually astounded her and journeyed through experiences that left her expanded. Although Krishna took credit for her learning, what this gift had done to the deepest part of his wife he dismissed. All he was interested in, apart from the Indian National Army, was that she should bear him a son.
Since Krishna had joined the INA his views had sharpened fanatically. There was now a growing split between himself and Raj on matters of ideology. Like his brother-in-law, Raj too had joined the INA after the Japanese arrived, but his position with Shinozaki left him no time for soldiering duties, while Krishna had become deeply involved. Krishna now lived almost permanently at the INA Officers’ Training School at Newton Circus where he was an instructor. His expertise was not in the tough areas of drilling and guns but in the arena of morale. He gave propaganda lectures, lessons in Indian history, map reading and more, extending his former role in the Indian Youth League.
Sitting on a low charpoy, Leila hung her head, her knees drawn up under her chin. She looked no more than a bundle of rags, Krishna thought, observing her impatiently. He had not lived at home properly for weeks and knew he was neglecting Leila at a difficult time; she had suffered yet another miscarriage. In a corner near the bed was the wooden crib that still waited for their child. Just the sight of it made Krishna angry for it seemed to encapsulate everything that was wrong with their life. If there had been a baby, Leila would be busy and happy and he would not always feel guilty. A woman needed a baby to be fulfilled, and if she could not make one she must blame only herself, he thought angrily. He leaned forward, grasping Leila’s arm roughly.
‘Today is an important day. Subhas Chandra Bose is in Singapore. He has come all the way from Germany on a submarine. He is addressing people on the Padang. General Tojo, who is visiting Singapore from Japan and who seems now even more powerful than the Japanese Emperor, will also be there.’ Krishna’s eyes shone as he spoke of Subhas Chandra Bose who now carried the title of Netaji, Great Leader. He had heard the man speak the day before at the Cathay Building. Flags and bunting and a huge arch had been erected to welcome Netaji. Thousands had packed the area.
‘Netaji has accepted the presidency of the Indian National Army.’ Krishna shook his wife again, wanting her to share these great moments.
Leila stared up at Krishna. In his INA uniform he appeared a different person. He was no longer the husband she knew in his worn sandals and dhoti, but a fanatical uniformed stranger. She turned and curled up on the bed, her back towards him, her eyes shut, wondering even as she turned away how she had the courage to so stubbornly disobey her husband.
‘You will come with me,’ he ordered harshly, furious that she should reject him. ‘I want you to see him. It will do you good to get out,’ he insisted, speaking more kindly.
They began the walk to Beach Road and the Padang where Subhas Chandra Bose was to speak. Leila was surprised to see that from everywhere Indian people were streaming in the same direction. When they finally reached the Padang they found the ground already packed, people squashed tightly together. On the steps of City Hall a raised platform had been erected, decorated in red and white bunting. Krishna pushed his way to where Raj, who had arrived earlier, waited in a VIP enclosure with a good view of proceedings. Leaving Leila with her brother, he marched off to join his regiment.
‘It is like God himself has arrived,’ Raj said. As he talked he smiled and nodded distractedly, acknowledging the greetings of passing people. He was now a person of some weight because of his Japanese connections. Leila stared over her shoulder at the waiting crowd that stretched behind her in a dense blur of faces. The INA troops, guns to their shoulders, chins thrust proudly to the sky, stood waiting for their leader. She searched for Krishna but could not see him in the great pool of khaki uniforms.
An open car flying pennants of Japan and the new Free India drew up to deposit its passengers before the dais. From one side a small man with a short moustache climbed out and from the other the powerfully built Bengali.
‘That is General Tojo with Netaji,’ Raj shouted to Leila above the cheering that had erupted on the arrival of Subhas Chandra Bose.
As the two men made their way on to the decorated dais the jubilation rose to a thunderous pitch. Men stood up and shouted; women began screaming, Netaji! Netaji! The word reverberated around the Padang.
The Japanese premier came forward to speak through an interpreter. He reminded Leila of a picture she had seen of the German leader, Hitler, except for his Japanese eyes. The interpreter spoke in a thick accent and his words were incomprehensible to Leila, who could understand nothing of what was said but kept her eyes upon Netaji. ‘. . . India’s emancipation . . . the peoples of Greater East Asia will inevitably bring . . . the glorious day of independence and prosperity to India.’ As the Japanese premier sat down, Subhas Chandra Bose stepped briskly forward to another eruption of cheering.
He was thickset, straight backed, balding and bespectacled, with the full-throated voice of the orator. His dark skin appeared as soft as chamois leather; his high polished boots caught the light. As he reached up to adjust the microphone Leila felt a dull leap of energy within her; she was near enough to see the determined flash of his eyes. She sat forward as he began to speak, his smooth voice rolling effortlessly to her.
‘. . . This must be a truly revolutionary army . . . I am appealing to all the civilian youths to come forward to join the army. I am appealing also to women . . . half the population of our country is women . . . women . . .’
Afterwards, she could not clearly recall his features or the things he said. There was only the burning shower of him falling upon her.
‘. . . women must also be prepared to fight for their freedom, to fight for independence . . . along with independence they will get their own emancipation . . . Give me your blood and I will give you freedom.’
Even before he finished speaking women rushed forward, breaking through the barriers, some with babies in their arms shouting, ‘We will fight; we will fight for the freedom of India!’ Leila ran with them to where he stood looking down upon them with a proud smile, arms outstretched as if he would embrace them. She wanted to touch him, to tell him she would do whatever he bid. Instead, Japanese soldiers were suddenly holding them back with bayonets.
Give me your blood and I will give you freedom. His words flowed into her flesh.
She was not the only one who felt the intensity. He asked for the support of women and they came, giving jewellery to fund his cause, pushing forward sons and husbands to swell his army. Within days a women’s regiment was founded, named after a legendary national heroine who rode into battle against the British army in 1857. Women of every age came forward to join the Rani of Jhansi regiment – even illiterate women from the rubber plantations; training camps were established, uniforms designed and sewn, new guns acquired for the women from the Japanese.
‘I want to join too,’ Leila told her husband.
Her eyes shone with the thought of it. She would train with the other women in the camp beside Krishna, she would be given a uniform and a gun. Soon, she would shoot like a man. Krishna stared at her askance and laughed nervously at her enthusiasm. Looking down into her face, he realised with a shock that the emotions he saw there were not for him.
In Mei Lan’s cell the electric lights glared down twenty-four hours a day and even with an arm across her eyes, she could only sleep for minutes before waking with a start of fear, heart pounding sickeningly. The wall of the cell facing into the corridor was meshed like a cage with heavy wooden bars, and had a small opening for passing food through in one corner; guards patrolled the corridor beyond. Twice a day a scant bowl of rice with a scrap of meat or vegetable, and a bucket of tea with one filthy mug to be shared by them all, was delivered. To leave the cell for interrogation prisoners crawled through a knee-high door. Most of the area was taken up with a wooden sleeping platform and it was here they were ordered to squat, silent and uncommunicative, unmoving all day. Rats scuttled in and out of the cell; large spiders and cockroaches stalked about. Many of the inmates had been arrested unexpectedly in the early hours of the morning and some were still in pyjamas. At night the guards shouted ‘Sleep!’ and they lay down crushed together under the endless glare. From the cracks of the wooden sleeping platform large ticks emerged to fasten upon them, bloating with their blood. They were ten, sometimes twelve in the cell and Mei Lan was the only woman. Most of the men were Chinese, one was Eurasian and another an elderly Englishman. At the back of the cell was a filthy latrine, encrusted with deposits of dried excrement growing a slippery carpet of moss; sometimes it clogged and overflowed. When she wanted to use the latrine the men turned their backs, making a wall before her and hiding her from the guards. The water that flowed into the latrine from a high faucet must also be used for drinking and washing. At first she waited for the mouthful of tea that was served with each meal, but eventually she learned to drink from the vile outlet, as did everyone else.
In the cell, and the other cells in the corridor, people were always coming and going, dragged out through the tiny door and later thrust back through it in varying states of collapse and injury, marks of torture and beating evident upon their bodies. Sometimes they were gone for hours; screams could be heard echoing through the building. Everyone waited, knowing their turn must come. The summons was arbitrary and unpredictable yet mechanically and inhumanly regular. The cell was imbued with the smell of this fear, rank with the leaking bowels of dysentery and the metallic effluvium of blood. At first there had been another young girl who, like Mei Lan, was said to be a communist. She came back almost unscathed from interrogations and within two days was gone.
‘Make up names, say anything,’ she advised. This Mei Lan would not do; the only names she could give were those of Howard and Cynthia.
‘Give us the names of your communist friends.’ The question was repeated endlessly.
‘I know nothing,’ she answered and was slapped about for such upstart determination. Captain Nakamura stood in the background at these initial sessions held in a bare, concrete-floored room with barred windows, a table and a chair and a large hook in the middle of the ceiling. Behind the roars and iron-like hands of her tormentors, Nakamura stood impassively, arms crossed, booted legs apart, watching silently. A short square man with a thick neck, protruding eyes and rough umber skin, his bandy legs forced him to walk with the roll of a drunken man.
They began to come for her every day. She was made to kneel on rough logs, unmoving for hours at a time, a block of wood between her legs to keep her knees apart. Her legs lost all feeling, pain burned through her body. Every time she toppled over she was viciously hit. Then came the beatings with a long bamboo cane, usually on those soft parts of the torso where there would be bruising but no internal injury – the calves, the buttocks, thighs, inner arms. She screamed for them to stop. Usually, there were two of them but more and more the one in charge was Nakamura. From silent detachment, he now stepped forward as her chief tormentor. He bent over her and she caught the rancid odour of him, saw his wide teeth, yellow like those of an old horse.
‘Tell us the names of the communists you help. Where is their hideout, where is their camp? How many men are there? What are their names? Tell us and everything can stop in a moment.’ Nakamura flexed the cane, stroking it tenderly, bending it between his fingers.
She was stripped, and the shame of her nakedness preoccupied her even when the beating began. Her hands were tied and the rope slung over the ceiling hook. Nakamura brought the cane down again and again, lashing into her flesh, and the agony of it ripped her apart. Soon she was ready to say any name, say anything, Cynthia’s name, Howard’s name; she held them back by screaming. Screaming brought relief, stopped the names from falling out of her. Tears streamed down her face, her nose ran, she felt her bladder open and the warmth of urine spill down her legs. Still Nakamura went on, stopping now and then to grip her by the hair and shout into her face. Tell us. When she collapsed in a faint they threw water on her face and started their work again.
‘This is nothing,’ Nakamura said when he had done with her. She was dragged into an adjoining room where the water treatments took place. He showed her the tap with the hose that would be pushed down her throat to bloat her innards before they jumped on her belly. Water ran over the floor from the leaking tap; blood stained a corner near the wall.
‘Two or three treatments and your stomach will burst,’ Nakamura told her.
Her body was broken; her flesh became a bloody pulp. She heard Nakamura clear his throat, saw him flex his fingers, cracking his joints for relief. She wanted to wipe her nose and the tears on her face; the discomfort of having no handkerchief filtered through as a further torture before blackness swept mercifully through her.
A middle-aged Eurasian man arrived in the cell but did not last a week. Each day he was taken away for hours, to be returned dazed and bloody and semi-conscious. The little medical knowledge she had was useless; all she could do was to hold a filthy wet rag to his brow, offer him words of comfort. When he was unable to walk, he was taken away on a rattan chair and later tipped back through the door like a lump of carrion. When the man died in the night his body was left in the hot, airless cell until the end of the following afternoon, when the stench of the corpse was unbearable even to the patrolling guards. By the time they came to remove him, rigor mortis had set in and to pull him through the tiny cell door his arms must both be broken.
She lost count of the days, and lay staring up at the small barred window near the ceiling. A patch of sky, and a branch of green leaves glowed luminously, like a light beyond the cell. At night she sometimes saw the moon through this keyhole, gliding translucent across the dark sky and knew the beauty of the world she had left. Once she heard a golden oriole sing, saw the brief flash of its molten wing. She struggled in an ocean of torment and terror, no sight of shore to guide her. In this place of nightmare she remembered the phoenix, its strong wings, its great beak, its fabulous tail, its undying resolve across time. Then, in the blackness of the cell, the moon through the window was but the luminous eye of the phoenix. Strange hallucinations carried her up until she floated freely between life and death and knew that whichever claimed her in the end was but a guardian of the same essence. Then, as one breath ran out of her and another filled her, she knew that life and death were not opposite forces but different sides of a single thought; death gave birth to life.
There was no day; there was no night. There was no past or future. She lived only in the present. The lamps glared down and even if the tiny window with its blaze of sun or dark moon sky showed her the passing of days, all that mattered was that one moment she stood poised upon, compressed by fear and pain: no yesterday, no tomorrow. No comb, no toothbrush; she rubbed her teeth with a finger, straightened her hair with her hands and then gave up as it knotted with sweat and filth; her clothes hung upon her, rank and torn, she stank of blood and pus and urine. Inside her and outside, Nakamura invaded her, lived in the deepest corner of her being, in unspeakable intimacy. She had become his object and he called for her now each day. The beatings had ceased, he was the inflictor now of a new agony. She knew the vile scent of his breath, every pore and pit on his face, the spittle on his rubbery lips, the feel of his hands and his body upon her. Dreams of the man possessed her even if she did not sleep. There was no space now between her thoughts and the looming shadow of Nakamura; he had ripped the skin of her mind away.
Then, one morning, she was released. The guards pulled her out of the cell and she shrank from them, paralysed by the sick terror of what must wait for her that day. Instead, they took her to an office on the ground floor and returned to her a purse of coins, a handkerchief and the watch she had worn the night of her arrest. An officer came to see her to explain the conditions of her release. The donation of $50 million to be made to the Imperial Army by the Chinese community was slowly being collected. A sum based on her grandfather’s estimated wealth must be produced by her on his behalf. The figure quoted made her gasp. They left her to find her way home. The sun was hot and unreal, the world a raucous cacophony of unbearable colour and sound. It was an effort just to lift an arm to stop a rickshaw and, the words rusty now in her mouth, she gave the directions that would take her back to Little Sparrow’s house. She had been away for nearly three months.
Even in his tormented dreams Wilfred seemed to be digging, or hacking his way through virgin jungle. For part of its excavation the railway ran alongside the river, Kwei Noi, and the camps with their POW labourers were on the muddy riverbank, camps were strung out through virgin jungle below the craggy granite mountain peaks. Each camp was responsible for completing its own stretch of railway that would later be linked to the others so that it would stretch eventually from Thailand to Burma, carrying troops and goods across the Japanese Empire. Here, deep cuttings must be hacked out with crude tools and the rock dynamited; often the falling debris killed men. Wilfred lay in the hut too sick to move yet knew they would come for him. The Japanese took no notice of illness; those shaking with malaria were beaten for slacking. The shivering took hold of him again, knocking his bones and teeth together, splintering through him in an unbearable ache, splitting his head apart. Consumed by the shaking and pain he did not hear the guards enter the hut. They set about him with bamboo canes so that, standing, collapsing and standing again, he was prodded like an animal out of the hut to join the waiting work gang.
They called this camp Wampo after a village some distance away, and there were almost two thousand of them here, mostly Australian and British POWs. From Singapore they had been transported to the place like cattle, in metal goods carriages that heated to boiling point under the glare of the sun. Against orders they kept the sliding door open, not only for air but also so that those with dysentery could relieve themselves by sticking their backsides out of the carriage while their arms and legs were held. No water, no food. Then the march to the transit camp, twenty miles a day with constant savage punishment for supposed insubordination. When they finally reached Wampo many of the men were already dead, left on the roadside for scavenger dogs.
Wilfred remembered the internment kit he had packed with Cynthia, the smart jacket and polished shoes and sets of underwear, and wondered at the innocence of that far off time. At Wampo everyone had been forced in the end to cut up their shirts and trousers and make Japanese style loincloths, fundoshi, for comfort and because the steaming heat and the acidity of sweat quickly rotted clothes or produced raw rashes that rubbed painfully under shirt seams on their undernourished, overworked bodies. Sweating also caused loss of salt that brought on agonising muscular cramps. Everyone without exception was blotched all over with septic sores. Everyone without exception had malaria.
When they arrived they were ordered to build themselves bamboo huts. Scorpions were found, fourteen inches from pinchers to tail. Hastily dug latrines with no roof quickly filled up and overflowed with the monsoon rain. A man had coughed his dentures into a latrine pit and when they were retrieved he boiled them for hours in his tin tea mug. As ever, beatings and other punishments were freely meted out. Wilfred did not know how long he had been at work on the railway: time was meaningless, daylight and darkness and exhaustion was all anyone ever registered.
The Wampo work site was below a high tree-covered ridge. All day was spent shovelling earth from the digging pits, carrying it on rice sacks stretched across bamboo poles up the embankment to where it must be dumped, then levelled. They must bring supplies up to this site on their backs, climbing the steep incline on their wasted legs. If they put the loads down to rest they were too heavy to lift on to their shoulders again. As he trudged uphill holding one end of the heavy stretcher, Wilfred thought of those other stretchers with wounded soldiers that he had carried into the General Hospital to Cynthia. He remembered her face on the pillow beside him, the scented silk of her hair. He wondered if he would be able to stay alive for however long was needed to survive this hell. Men were flogged to death, worked to death, starved to death and, if they still survived, disease waited to do its worst. Death swatted men like flies each day.