A Different Sky (29 page)

A sudden explosion moved the ground beneath Mei Lan, the blast ricocheting through her head. One moment the earth spurted high about her and the next she was lying deep in a trench unable to move for the weight of bodies upon her. Loose earth covered her face and hands; there was a dense scent of wet soil and the stench of brackish water collected below her in the pit. Mosquitoes swarmed about. Machine-gun fire, sounding like a bag of marbles dropped on a stone floor, followed the explosions. Bodies pressing down heavily upon her, muffled the noise. Panic overwhelmed Mei Lan: she thought she might suffocate and struggled to dislodge the heavy mass. Then there was movement, she heard voices, the load upon her lessened and people were climbing out of the trench.

‘Are you all right?' She heard Cynthia's voice above her, and realised they had both jumped into the trench. One of the medical students
gave her a hand, and Mei Lan scrambled up into the sunlight, weak with relief. The sky was thick with a dark cloud of twittering birds; disturbed by the blast they were now settling noisily again in the trees. Mei Lan turned to peer back into the trench. Just a short distance from where she had been thrown she saw the young man who had waved at her minutes before, staring up at her, dead and open-eyed. The blankets she had carried were strewn about, covered by clods of damp earth.

For Singapore, the New Year's Eve that saw in 1942 was a dismal affair; no one could any longer deny that the enemy were only 150 miles from the island. Troops were already retreating into the city from more northern posts on the Malayan mainland, filling Singapore's streets and dance halls. Already, preparations for a siege were under way. Amongst other premises, the Capitol and Pavilion Cinemas had been turned into food dumps. Nine thousand cattle had been imported from Bali for slaughtering; 125,000 pigs had been counted in the colony. Two large dairy herds from Johore had crossed the Causeway on to the island, and now grazed by the roadsides and on golf courses. Confusion was everywhere. On government orders trenches were forever being dug and then re-dug in a contrary design, and then filled in for unfathomable reasons, leaving the Padang and other public spaces furrowed and rough. At the docks vital military equipment could not be unloaded; coolie labourers had already fled town and all the wharfs were bombed.

January brought a change of pace in the bombing. Sporadic raids on the docks and the airfields, with occasional sorties over the town, became ever more frequent, increasing in viciousness as the days went by. The raids were almost always in daylight and carried out by massive formations of up to eighty planes. No British planes were to be seen in the skies, and Japanese bombers flew like proud birds far above the reach of anti-aircraft guns. Through it all, the monsoon kept up its steady drumming. Finally, the Japanese reached Johore and occupied the Sultan's palace: they were now fifty miles from Singapore. The European community danced on defiantly at Raffles Hotel, while swarms of restless, drunken soldiers queued for taxi girls at the barn-like dance halls of the Great Worlds. Only the Chinese community, understanding there was trouble ahead, withdrew the age-old chit system, demanding cash from every European for even the smallest
purchase. Chinese were leaving the town in droves for more rural areas, and were seen every day pushing loaded carts of belongings out of the city. Tinned food and whisky were still available at Cold Storage, but fresh fruit and vegetables were hard to come by; Johore was Singapore's market garden and the Japanese now controlled it. Hundreds of corpses were trapped irretrievably beneath bombed buildings, and their decomposing perfume pervaded the city; nothing could scrub the dreadful odour away. Bodies lay unattended in the street waiting for burial squads, black with flies, just like the meat hanging on hooks in the Beach Road market.

Weeks had slipped by in growing and nightmarish confusion. The naval base, where Rose had toured the
Prince of Wales,
was deliberately fired and evacuated by its European personnel, following a scorched earth policy. A black miasma hovered over the city as oil burned day and night at the base. Abandoned cars and bomb craters littered roads, damaged water mains flooded streets, making progress about the city difficult. Finally, at their Orchard Road premises the staff of Cold Storage, in spite of continued government bravado that Singapore was in no danger, stood on the first floor balcony of the shop disposing of their liquor stores, unwilling to leave such comfort to the Japanese. Bottles of spirits, wines and champagne were tossed at a great rate into the street below. Soon, thirty thousand British troops had crossed on to the island from mainland Malaya, blowing up the bridge of the Causeway behind them. The last ninety men on to the island were pipers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who marched over the Causeway playing ‘I'll Take the High Road' on their bagpipes. Dishevelled soldiers packed the island, wandering drunk in the streets, desperate with fatigue, with no unit, no billet and no one to give them orders. Only those battalions that still had commanders were returning gunfire at the front line. Across the narrow stretch of water separating the island from peninsular Malaya, the Japanese could now be seen walking about, to everyone's indignation.

I
N
D
ECEMBER OF
1941, soon after the first enemy air raid, all the Japanese in Singapore had been interned in Changi Prison, joining Mr Shinozaki who had earlier been charged with spying.

‘Japanese internees may be sent to India, Singapore is too small a place to imprison so many people,' Mr Ho said, and shook his head sadly when Raj discussed the matter with him. ‘I sent Yoshiko and the children out of town, to Mrs Ho's sister in Katong. Nobody there knows Yoshiko is Japanese, so she will be safe.' Mr Ho's face was furrowed by anxiety.

As the weeks went by, Raj tried to keep his mind on the good news that he was soon to be an uncle. Leila was pregnant and she was sure the baby would be a boy. It excited him to think of the things he would teach this nephew, things the boy could not learn from his unworldly father. When he was born he would buy the child a silver rattle, and gold bangles for its mother. Other than this future happy event, everything around him appeared to be deteriorating. The New Year, when it arrived, offered only a further bleak forecast.

There had been rain earlier in the evening, and it was cool up on the small terrace of Manikam's Cloth Shop where Raj sat in the evenings to smoke a quiet cigarette. He heard the drone of planes approaching, and watched them emerge from the clouds to be caught in a net of searchlights. Whenever he watched an air raid, he found himself remembering the first plane he saw long ago as a child in the village. It had sounded as if a great bee was above the schoolhouse; everyone put down their slates and rushed to the window. The plane had circled high above, a great bird in the empty sky. Then, without warning, the aircraft turned in an arc and began to descend like a faulty firework, a trail of black smoke behind it. The children ran out of the schoolroom, and raced to the nearby millet field where the plane had fallen. A great heat issued from the charred wreckage, but there
were no flames. The dead pilot sat bolt upright, strapped to his seat, eyes hidden behind dark goggles, a leather hat covering his head and ears. The teacher arrived to shout at the boys, driving them back into school with a cane. Soon, the pilot had been buried and the machine dismantled and cleared by the villagers in the manner of ants disassembling an insect and carrying its parts away. Now, so many years later, Raj still remembered the plane gliding freely across the sky, and felt little sympathy for the pilot. He had learned that once airborne a man must find the currents that will lift him high and hold him aloft, like a great creature of prey.

The following day Raj made his way to Krishna's home. In the crowded tenement, the room was squashed between that of a tailor, an Ayuvedic doctor and an Indian Chettiar moneylender. The house was always full of the doctor's patients, and they pushed past Raj as he climbed the stairs. The humming of the sewing machines in the tailor's room mixed with the sound of Indian music playing on a phonograph in the road below. Raj was hungry and, as he lifted the thin curtain over the doorway, he hoped Leila would have something for him to eat.

Two middle-aged women, the wives of a milkman and a wheat grinder who also rented rooms in the house, were crouched beside Leila who lay groaning on the sleeping mat. The milkman's wife was wringing out a towel above a bowl of bloody water. Leila's sari was pushed up about her legs and the wheat grinder's wife was pressing down upon her stomach as if she was kneading dough. His sister let out a scream of pain and Raj started forward, his eyes on the bloody cloth bundle lying beside the mattress. The milkman's wife sprang up at once to bar his way, waving her slimy wet hands before him. She was a muscular woman, and quickly thrust him back into the corridor through the curtained door. Krishna had gone as usual to the schoolroom in the Ramakrishna Mission and was not to be seen anywhere.

‘What has happened?' Raj shouted at the woman.

‘Baby is gone, that is what has happened. It is God's will. There is nothing a man can do here.' Even as she spoke the air raid siren wailed, and almost immediately the sound of aircraft was above them. The woman turned and disappeared behind the curtain again.

Raj rushed down the stairs and forced his way through the crowd sheltering under the five-foot way, running out into the middle of the
road to stand looking up at the sky. The shock of what was happening to Leila made him lose all fear of the bombing. High above him the planes roared over in perfect formation, like a flock of migrating birds. People shouted for him to take shelter, but he stood where he was, watching bombs drop with the effortless beauty of streamers taking flight in the wind. Serangoon Road had yet to be hit and it was reasoned that the Japanese, knowing India's wish to be free of British rule, avoided targeting the area. In the distance the sun glinted on the falling bombs, Raj waited for the thud of explosions. Instead, a deafening blast from behind him tossed him to the ground. A cloud of dust and a hail of debris descended upon him. From the direction of the slaughterhouse came the wild screams of wounded animals. People were running about, shouting hysterically. Raj saw with surprise that he was unhurt and that the buildings still stood about him.

He raced back up the stairs to Leila. The milkman's wife had thrown open the window shutters and with the wheat grinder's wife was leaning out to converse excitedly with people in the street below. Raj crouched down beside Leila, who now lay quietly on the mat, hollow cheeked, eyes smudged with dark shadows. Her sari was tucked neatly about her and the bloodied water and bundle were gone. He knelt and took her hand. Leila clung to her brother, but turned her head away to hide her distress. She had not expected that, once again, it would end like this in blood and pain and a sodden parcel of remains that was taken away to where she did not know. It was the second time this had happened.

‘My baby!' she had screamed seeing the milkman's wife clearing away the metal bowl with its bloody pile of wet newspaper.

The wheat grinder's wife shook her head, wiping her clean and pulling her sari back into place. Leila looked up at the dirty walls and the ceiling spotted with the droppings of insects and geckos, and despair washed through her. Each day the child grew within her she had felt her life more real, more whole. Immediately he heard the news of her pregnancy, Krishna had bought a small, carved wooden crib on rockers. For our son, he had said, beaming at her and she knew what the child would mean to him. What Krishna wanted most from her had been this child; his son.

‘There will be another time, you are still young,' the wheat grinder's wife said briskly.

‘I could not stop it. The baby is gone,' Leila sobbed to Raj as he squeezed her hand.

‘There will be another time. It is God's will.' Raj searched for words of comfort.

As the days progressed and the bombing accelerated in early January, Lim Hock An became increasingly focused on the safety of his opium and jade. Mei Lan, returning home one afternoon from the General Hospital, heard her grandfather's gruff voice in the garden of Bougainvillaea House giving loud directions. Lim Hock An was seated in his wheelchair wrapped in his ancient purple dressing gown. He had lost much weight since his illness, and had the appearance now of old and delicate porcelain. Before him half the garden was dug up, the dark open wounds of wet trenches were everywhere. Boxes of jade, carried out of the storeroom of Bougainvillaea House where they had lain since the family vacated Lim Villa, were stacked about. Bougainvillaea bushes had been ripped out of the earth and lay in a pile, their roots like dark claws pointing uselessly at the sky. Metal cases containing the old man's opium, left to mature in a shallow grave beneath a tree, had already been exhumed and resettled in a small pit of their own. Coolies were busy lining the trenches with sacking and lowering in the boxes of jade.

Second Grandmother now appeared in the garden, carried upon a young
mui sai
's back like the gold and silver so long ago. The girl was no more than fourteen years old, and was bent double under the old woman's weight. Second Grandmother rode the girl as she would a horse, kicking her with a heel whenever she slowed down. A second
mui sai
followed, dragging a suitcase of Grandmother's jewellery, her mistress's ivory-topped canes under one arm. As soon as Second Grandmother was balanced once more upon her canes, she gave angry instructions for the suitcase to be handed to Lim Hock An. Standing before him, still protesting the decision to bury her jewellery, she glowered at her husband, defiantly patting the roll of pink satin wrapped about her waist beneath her clothes and into which were now sewn her best diamonds. Lim Hock An sighed; energy leaked from him and he tried to accept his diminished state as gracefully as he could. The evening was drawing in, shadows thickening in the trees. As he stared at the distant silhouette of Lim Villa, his mind was full of what once had been, and his eyes turned wistfully to the slave girls. Second Wife
met his gaze boldly, happy to flaunt their young bodies before him now that profligate ways were beyond him.