Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

With the soil turning to mud, their jeeps and lorries began to slide out of control. The vehicles were found to have been equipped with sand-grip tyres, intended for use in the deserts of North Africa. Orders were issued banning them from entering the plantation: supplies now had to be carried in on foot.

On the afternoon of the second day, Hardy came running over and dropped into the trench. Arjun could tell from his face that he was ripe with news.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Just heard a rumour.’

‘What?’

‘There was trouble with the 1st Hyderabads, at Kota Baharu.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘After the first Jap attack there was a panic at the airstrip. The airmen were Australians and apparently they left in a hurry. The Hyderabads’ NCOs wanted to pull out too but the CO wouldn’t let them. They mutinied, shooting a couple of officers. They’ve been disarmed and arrested. They’re being sent to Penang, as a labour force.’

Arjun surveyed his trench, looking uneasily at the faces of his men. ‘Better keep that to yourself, Hardy.’

‘Just thought I’d let you know.’

The battalion’s headquarters were deep inside the plantation, well to the rear of Arjun’s company. Late on the second day, signals engineers laid a telephone line. The first call was from Captain Pearson.

‘Contact?’

‘Nothing yet,’ said Arjun. The day had faded almost imperceptibly away, the gloom deepening slowly into a dripping, clammy darkness. At that very moment, the dark wall ahead was pierced by a red flash.

‘Sniper!’ said the havildar. ‘Down, sah’b, down.’ Arjun lunged face forward into the ankle-deep water at the bottom of the trench. There was another shot and then another. Arjun fumbled for the phone only to find that the line had gone dead.

Now the flashes of gunfire began to range through the surrounding darkness. The shots sounded at irregular intervals, punctuated by the dull thud of mortars and the spitting of light machine guns. To the right, from the direction of Hardy’s emplacement, there came the sound of a Bren gun. This brought only a moment’s relief, for Arjun noted suddenly, with an odd sinking feeling in his belly, that the Bren was rattling on too long: it was as though the men were too panicked to remember the ordered bursts that Hardy had tried to drill into them during weapons training.

Now the enemy snipers appeared to be on the move, pivoting freely around their position. As the hours passed the trench began to seem more a trap than a shelter: there was a peculiar defencelessness about being pinned into a stationary position by a mobile adversary. When they returned fire, it was as though they were letting fly randomly, in the way that a chained animal circles at the end of its leash, snapping at an unseen tormentor.

The dripping of the trees continued without interruption through the night. Soon after daybreak, they saw a Japanese spotter plane, circling overhead. A half-hour later another plane flew by, dipping low over their lines. It left behind a trail of paper that fluttered slowly down from the sky, like a great flight of butterflies.

Most of these sheets settled on the canopy above, but a few trickled through to the ground. Kishan Singh fetched some, handing one to Arjun and keeping a couple for himself.

Arjun saw that it was a pamphlet, written in Hindustani and printed in both Devanagari and Arabic script. It was an appeal directed to Indian soldiers, signed by one Amreek Singh of the Indian Independence League. The text began: Brothers, ask yourselves what you are fighting for and why you are here: do you really wish to sacrifice your lives for an Empire that has kept your country in slavery for two hundred years?

Arjun heard Kishan Singh reading the pamphlet aloud to the others and the blood rushed to his head. He shouted: ‘Hand those to me.’ Crumpling the pamphlets, he buried them deep under his heel, in the mud. ‘Anyone who’s found with these,’ he said crisply, ‘will be up for court martial.’

Minutes later, with a blast that was like a moving wall of sound, the Japanese heavy artillery opened up. The first shells went skimming over the tops of the trees, sending down showers of leaves and small branches. But then, slowly, the explosions began to move in their direction. The earth shook so violently as to send the water at the bottom of the trench shooting into their faces. Arjun saw a fifty-foot rubber tree rising gracefully from the earth and jumping several feet into the air before somersaulting towards them. They flattened themselves at the bottom of the trench just in time to get out of its way.

The bombardment continued without a break for hours.

Manju was in a deep sleep when Neel shook her awake. She rolled over, in a daze. It seemed as though weeks had gone by since she had last slept. Jaya was a colicky baby and often cried for hours. Nothing would stop her once she started. Even Woodward’s Gripe Water had little effect: a tablespoonful would send her into a light doze but an hour or two later she’d be up again, crying harder than ever.

Manju glanced at Jaya’s crib and saw that she was still asleep. She rubbed her eyes and turned away from Neel. She could not disguise her annoyance at being disturbed. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Why did you wake me up?’

‘I thought you’d want to know. .’

‘What?’

‘The Japanese have entered the war.’

‘Oh?’ She still could not understand what this had to do with her being roused from her sleep.

‘They’ve invaded Malaya.’

‘Malaya?’ Now everything was suddenly clear. She sat up. ‘Arjun? Dinu? Is there any news?’

‘No.’ Neel shook his head. ‘Nothing directly. But the radio said something about the 11th Division being involved in the fighting. Isn’t that Arjun’s division?’

She’d had a letter from Arjun just last week. He hadn’t said very much about himself — just that he was well and thinking of her. Mostly, he’d asked about Jaya and her own health. He’d also mentioned that he’d met Dinu and he was fine— Dolly had been glad to hear that.

‘Do you still have Arjun’s letter?’ Neel asked.

‘Yes.’ Manju jumped out of bed and went to fetch the letter.

‘Does it say anything about his division?’ Neel said.

The numeral 11 leapt at her almost at once, from the folds of the page. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s his division.’ She looked at her husband and her eyes filled with tears.

Neel put his arm round her shoulders and held her tight. ‘There’s no reason to worry,’ he said. ‘As far as I can make out the 11th Division is headquartered very close to Morningside. Dinu will let us know what’s going on.’ Then the baby woke up. Now, for the first time, Manju was grateful for Jaya’s cantankerousness. Her ceaseless crying left her with no time to think of anything else.

Later that evening they were paid a visit by an eminent member of the Indian community in Rangoon — a lawyer by the name of Sahibzada Badruddin Khan. It so happened that the whole family was at home when the visitor dropped by.

Mr Khan was worried and he had come to give them some news. He had attended a meeting of some of the city’s most prominent Indians. They had decided to form a Refugee Evacuation Committee. It was felt that in the event of a Japanese advance into Burma the Indian population would be vulnerable on two fronts — they would be defenceless against hostile sections of the Burmese public and, what was more, as subjects of the British Empire, they would be treated as enemy aliens by the Japanese. Many members of the community had expressed fears of a coming catastrophe: the committee’s intentions were to get as many Indians out of Burma as possible.