By the end of February, he was in Secunderabad, in the Madras Presidency, and any time Kosh heard a plane drone past overhead, she ran into the garden waving both her hands and shouting, ‘It’s Manek, come to see me!’ The war, now rising on both sides of them, still seemed a mirage, difficult to believe. But they felt like heroes already.
In Guindy, on another morning, Bobby passed a crew of painters at work in the halls, putting up fat yellow letters on the building’s pink brick – ‘E4, LCE3, E3, LCE2’ – each followed by a dripping yellow arrow. What the cipher meant was clear, but even so his professor began class by reading out from a circular about how, in the event of an aerial attack, students should proceed to the slit trenches being dug around the college grounds. ‘Please commit to memory,’ he droned, ‘ahead of time, the assigned portion of trench according to your course and year.’
He was interrupted by the head of the department, Dr S. Paul, who commanded the engineers’ company of the local University Training Corps, and had been put in charge of Guindy’s air-raid precautions. After glowering at the students for a minute, Dr Paul began once again to inform them that Guindy College would very probably be a bombing target. In the absence of any plausible defences, their lives would depend on their taking ARP seriously.
‘And so,’ he said, ‘if there is going to be an air raid, you are sure to know what to do?’
‘Yes sir,’ the class mumbled, not at all sure.
‘You, Mugaseth – you know what to do?’
‘Yes, sir!’ Bobby sang.
‘So what will you do if they come?’
‘This,’ said Bobby, and he sprang to his feet, moved lightly to the window of the ground-floor classroom, and leapt out of it. He ran out into the campus, shouting ‘Boom!’ at every classmate he passed, and he didn’t stop running till he was back at his room.
‘Boom!’ he yelled at Mukundan, as he burst through the door. ‘Everybody take cover!’
Then he got under the covers and took a long nap.
At lunchtime, Bobby walked onto the grounds to watch the trenches being dug: zigzag gutters, each ten feet long, two wide and three deep. The hard soil thrown up on the sides was already dancing, grain by grain, back down to its bed. A group of radical students stood nearby, under the lone Indian beech that was called the Unity Tree.
They were seething, Bobby could tell, at the pathetic sight: the whole college preparing to crawl into its own shallow grave, to await the blows of an imperialist war that had already set three continents on fire. He heard them arguing, their rage newly stoked. He wondered if they meant to rush the trenches themselves. Perhaps he’d be expected to resist them, here on the orange grounds of Guindy, a new front of the world war; driving the points of their setsquares into each other’s eyes.
One after the other, the great Eastern metropolises filled with fire and emptied of Europeans. Native staff were left to save themselves, and native officials to organise basic services and manage their surrender. In Malaya, soldiers were ordered to enact the ‘policy of denial’, a scorched-earth retreat, which meant demolishing ports, power plants and oil facilities, tearing out railroad and telegraph lines; leaving in ruins every modern installation the Empire had built and held up as the proof of its greatness.
In the jungle the Japanese were like muggers in the water. They scissored through terrain the British had considered impassable, their squadrons moving by bicycle, and patrols on elephant-back. A garrison remained in Malaya to oppose them: British, Australians and Indians. The Indians outnumbered the other two combined, but they belonged to an army still held in the amber of another era, of pack mules and breech-loading rifles. Most had never seen a tank, and now were scattered before Japan’s armoured advance. The Rajputs and Pathans of the 45th Indian Brigade, just trained for desert fighting, were turned mid-passage and unloaded on the jungled peninsula. They were outflanked, outfought, bewildered by the failures of their command and the sheer superiority of the enemy. They began a fighting retreat, over ten miles each day for two months, toward Singapore, the bastion of the eastern defence. The 22nd Indian Brigade – numbering more than 3,000 men – was hewn down to sixty-three fleeing survivors. As they fought their desperate rearguard battles, military lorries rolled south rescuing golf clubs and porch furniture.
A pincer movement half the span of the planet was closing in around India. The grand strategy was laid plain in February by George Orwell, then working for the BBC: ‘The general plan is for the Germans to break through by land so as to reach the Persian Gulf, while the Japanese gain mastery of the Indian Ocean … The Germans and Japanese have evidently staked everything on this manoeuvre, in the confidence that if they can bring it off, it will have won them the war … If Singapore is lost, India becomes for the time being the centre of the war, one might say the centre of the world.’3
Nugs knew someone in Singapore, Lakshmi Swaminathan, a friend from college. The Swaminathans were from Malabar too, where they were thought of as radicals. As a result, the girls never met until Nugs arrived at Queen Mary’s, where Lakshmi was two years ahead. She wasn’t a banshee wearing a homespun sari hitched up above her knees, as Nugs might have expected, just a sort of prettier, communist version of Nugs herself, neither of which was as offensive as Nugs might have expected. A girl had to have both delicacy and grit, Nugs knew, but she had never seen those virtues twinned quite this way. Lakshmi, unimpeachably gentle in college, could go to marches and return all bruised by men’s elbows. She preceded Nugs to medical school, where she married a man from a different caste, with no fuss.4 In 1940, Lakshmi left Madras to start a practice in Singapore.
She was still there on 15 February 1942, when Singapore was lost – and not only lost, but abjectly surrendered. Nugs tried not to wonder if Lakshmi was alive or dead. Hearing the stories of what the Japanese did to women, she didn’t know which was worse. Along with the city, nearly 70,000 Indian troops concentrated there – a third of the entire strength of the pre-war Indian Army – were handed over as prisoners, along with 15,000 British and Australians. One entire division had marched down onto the docks just in time to be made captive. Never in its history had the British Empire surrendered so many troops en masse: troops who were still needed to defend Burma, or if Burma fell, to defend their own homeland.
India had felt numb pains of distant war creeping up its limb, but with the loss of Rangoon, they burst open as a weeping wound. Until 1935, India and Burma had been a single colonial state, and for long Burma was seen as a green field of opportunity for Indians of all classes: Tamil plantation labour, Anglo-Indian railwaymen, Oriya stevedores, Muslim petty traders, Bihari landlords with whole indentured villages in train. In Rangoon, more than half the population was Indian. When the Japanese invasion began, not only was the Empire unable to defend them, it had no plan to help them escape.
The city was invaded first by rats and bombs; then by fire, as the air-raid defences collapsed. Weeks before the Japanese marched in, parts of the city were in anarchy. Looters, even White soldiers, sacked the shops along the boulevards. Officials had recognised the impossibility of defending Rangoon at least a month earlier, but its residents were given only forty-eight hours’ notice, after which, they were told, neither trains nor petrol would be available. The last boats left the docks at Taungyup and Akyab, and those left behind were stripped of any choice but one: to cross the remaining length of the country, and reach India on foot.
The retreating Army