A Different Sky (55 page)

‘Marry me,' he had mumbled into her neck, still lying upon her,
the weight of him pressing the breath from her body before he rolled awkwardly off her and she could breathe again. He had asked her several times before and she made no reply, but now she was tempted to agree. His kindness and strength were becoming addictive, like the wine she looked forward to drinking with him each night. It might be a means of escape, she recognised, but escape was all she wanted.

‘Marry me,' Norbert pleaded again, lying flat on his back beside her. She turned her head away, her eyes settling on his clothes folded over the back of a chair – the worn, long-sleeved woollen vest, the baggy underpants, the looped braces of his pinstriped trousers – and inhaled the medicinal smell of his hair oil and knew in that moment that there was no escape, and that she would return to Singapore.

‘I must go back,' she told him. ‘I cannot go forwards unless I go back. I'm just living in limbo here.' As the words fell from her she knew something inside her must work independently, shaped by a will of its own.

T
HE LAND DREW AWAY
, the water cutting about the boat in foamy streaks of quartz. The sound of the engine vibrated in Raj's ears and a breeze blew on his face. Ahead, the small island of St John's was a green blur, and the weight of memory shifted within him. He remembered the long-ago day of his arrival in Singapore. He remembered standing on the deck of a ship as, wrapped in mist and mystery, this same shoreline approached and at last Singapore was before him. In those times all deck passengers were quarantined at St John's before entering the town. Now, since the government had declared a State of Emergency, St John's, although still a quarantine area and a medical facility for opium addicts, was also a detention centre for political subversives. Surrounded by water, cut off from contaminating contacts, it was hoped that in isolation radicals might mend their seditious ways. Nowadays, there were too many of these men about for comfort, and the colonial government was hard pressed to keep track of them. It was here that Krishna had spent the last few years, detained without trial under the government's Emergency Regulations.

A gust of wind lifted Raj's thinning hair as he sat in the prow of the small boat. Looking across the water, he sighed as memories passed through him. To take in that first view of Singapore so long ago, he had wrapped himself in a filthy blanket against the early morning breeze, a blanket he had slept on every day of the voyage. As he left the village his grandmother had given him the cloth, rolled up and tied tightly with string. He had it still in an old tin trunk, for he was unable to throw it away. As the launch bucked and dipped over the waves, Raj looked down at the panama hat in his hand and the gold watch on his wrist and felt giddy, not with the movement of the craft but at the thought of how far he had travelled.

The boat neared the shore and a rope was thrown out. Raj disembarked, but a rush of resentment filled him at the thought of Krishna's
return to the Waterloo Street house. While his brother-in-law had been shut away on St John's, Raj had felt only guilty relief to be free of his brooding presence. Head held high, Krishna had walked out of the house on Waterloo Street to be imprisoned with the cream of Singapore's radical core, as if arrest were a badge of honour. The ensuing shame and notoriety had not been easy for Raj or Leila to face.

‘He'll be out of trouble for a while,' Raj had told Leila at the time of the arrest, guessing she was no less relieved than he.

Leila shook her head. ‘All prisoners on St John's belong to the Anti-British League; they are all people like him; all communist sympathisers. They will have a lot of time to talk together about their mad ideas, so how will anything change?'

The Malayan Democratic Union had been forced to dissolve five years before. Heavily infiltrated by communists, it was seen by the colonial government as an open front for the Malayan Communist Party whose post-war honeymoon with the British Government had not lasted long. MDU members, faced with arrest on these grounds, quickly and prudently disbanded. Soon afterwards the Anti-British League was born and paraded many of the Malayan Democratic Union's familiar faces. It met, like the MDU before it, at the Liberty Cabaret, although now in a highly furtive manner, and Krishna attended meetings as before.

The two years Raj and Leila had spent alone together had been a peaceful interlude; Leila was now running Manikam's on her own, leaving Raj free to concentrate on Ho Biscuits. The Emergency Regulations that had resulted in Krishna's arrest had not affected Raj's life in any way. Law-abiding people lived as before grateful that, by declaring a State of Emergency, the colonial government had put the lid on communist-backed subversion. Communists had undermined the colony since the end of the war, penetrating every walk of life, instigating strikes and violence and terror.

It was a steep climb up the hill and there was no transport. Raj huffed and puffed and sweated resentfully as he walked. Soon he stopped to catch his breath and looked up at the buildings above him on the top of the hill, buildings full of communists who, to his mind, were like an infestation of cockroaches; nothing stamped them out. Raj and Leila had expected Krishna to be kept on St John's indefinitely,
but now he was suddenly free. They heard he had recanted his seditious ways, although Raj found this hard to believe. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his perspiring neck and his anger overflowed; he must now take a suspected communist back into his home and what this would do to his reputation he did not know.

The road continued up the slope to low, whitewashed buildings enclosed by a thick metal fence. His anger hardening by the moment, Raj pulled the panama hat well down on his head for the sun burned hot on his back. Singapore had been an orderly town when he first arrived, he thought grimly. Now, Ho Biscuits was beset each month by escalating agitation and union demands. Workers seemed to be on a permanent go-slow, always threatening a strike. Fanatical communists had caught the imagination of the mob and men like Krishna were to blame. At least, thought Raj, the Emergency had forced most of the communists back into the jungle from where they had so audaciously emerged after the war. On mainland Malaya they now waged an armed insurrection against the British, identical to the one previously waged against the Japanese. Communist guerrillas were murdering British rubber planters at such a steady rate that even in faraway Singapore men like Krishna were detained without trial. Raj had lost all patience. While he worked hard at Ho Biscuits to maintain them all, his brother-in-law lived the idle life of a political dilettante.

At last, breathless and dripping with sweat, he reached the top of the hill, mopped his face once again with a handkerchief, stated his business at the guardhouse, and sat down on a bench before the barbed wire fence to wait for Krishna. In a few minutes his brother-in-law appeared with a prison guard, and the gate in the fence was opened. Raj nodded a silent greeting, feeling both unable and unwilling to speak, rose to his feet and turned back to the road with Krishna following him. Soon, they climbed mutely into the waiting boat for the journey back to Singapore.

From compulsory exercise as a political prisoner Krishna had acquired new physical fitness. His face was relaxed, his biceps developed, the harried look had gone from his face, but he had aged. His thick hair was now almost grey, although his eyebrows remained as black as ever. A rush of euphoria filled him as he turned to look back at the whitewashed buildings where he had spent the last few years.
There was no one to wave goodbye. His exit from St John's was considered paramount to treason by his fellow prisoners. Krishna had not yet served out his detention but bargained his release with a British Special Branch officer who occasionally visited the inmates of St John's.

‘If you admit you are a member of the Anti-British League and renounce it, we can consider releasing you,' the officer had told him. Two other detainees had already left the island in this way and Krishna began to think more deeply about his incarceration. Martyrdom on St John's served no useful purpose he decided; his work lay back in the world, undercover. Now, as the motor launch pushed off from the shore he looked out at the boundless space of the sea and knew he had made the right decision.

‘The feeling of being cut off is the worst thing about St John's. Prisoners are allowed to mix freely; we even cook our own meals and play cards. Sometimes, it seemed like a seaside holiday, but it was still detention,' Krishna said conversationally to Raj, turning again to observe the retreating island as the boat gathered speed.

His time on St John's had passed slowly in a state of seamless monotony. His fellow detainees on the island were all card-carrying communists, fully-fledged members of the Malayan Communist Party. They were men who had been in and out of the trade union offices above the Liberty Cabaret, and Krishna's network of subversive contacts had widened considerably during his stay on the island. Every day at the detainment camp, there had been secret indoctrination sessions to deepen and strengthen their communist spirit, as well as heated discussion and the surreptitious reading of subversive books smuggled on to the island by a guard they bribed.

‘Prison is not a hotel. You should have thought about life there before you got yourself arrested,' Raj replied angrily. Nowadays, he was no longer ashamed to admit that his mind shut down at any discussion of abstract ideals, unless they led to trade.

‘I'm warning you now, before you reach the mainland, do not get involved again with that communist group, or their filthy newspaper,
Freedom News
. You have put us through too much; think of Leila.' Raj glowered at his brother-in-law.

Krishna shrugged and stared silently at the sea. On St John's, like everyone else, he had secretly continued to write inflammatory articles for
Freedom News
, which were smuggled to the mainland by the
guard who brought in their books. The boat pushed against the swell, a fine spray hit his face, and Krishna licked the salt from his lips. After two years of monotonous incarceration, the risky nature of a life spent courting arrest was something he looked forward to. The Anti-British League had gone underground, and
Freedom News
was still in business, its printing equipment and editorial staff forced to move constantly from one safe house to another. To allow for easy concealment the publication was now printed on thin translucent paper. If for any reason printing had to cease, militant students in the Chinese Middle Schools, who were the staple fodder of Anti-British League cells, devotedly copied out the newspaper by hand many hundreds of times.

As the boat pulled against the incoming tide its frail body shuddered against the waves. Krishna stared at his brother-in-law's fleshy neck and well-greased hair as he sat before him in the prow of the boat. Raj's belly protruded substantially, and there was a capable, consolidated aura about him. He used pomade from England and cologne from France and changed his shirt twice if not three times a day. He had acquired a large wardrobe of Western-style suits and refused to be seen in Indian clothes, only wearing a
dhoti
now to bed. Krishna realised with a start that his former illiterate pupil was already forty-two, and that he himself was fifty.

The launch neared a busy wharf crowded with sampans and other small boats, and a rope was thrown out to them. On the quay Raj's car, a large new Rover, stood waiting. As they disembarked, the driver eased the car forward and scrambled out to open the door for Raj. As both the driver and Raj ignored him, Krishna walked around the car and climbed in from the other side, eyeing his brother-in-law sourly. When the car drew up before the house in Waterloo Street Krishna got out, but Raj sat on in the car and spoke to him through the open window.

‘Leila is still at Manikam's; I don't know what time she will be home. I am returning to Ho Biscuits,' he said, then left Krishna to the ministrations of a servant who hurried out of the house.

Raj's car crossed Anderson Bridge but drew to a halt in a mass of traffic about the General Post Office in Fullerton Building. Horns honked, bicycle bells rang and irate tradesmen trapped in the bottleneck with loaded carts, shouted their annoyance. Raj looked out of
the window in vexation. The postmen were striking, and people were forced to collect their own mail. The strike had been in progress for more than a week, postmen picketing peacefully outside the building. The area before the monumental structure was crowded, with everyone intent on pushing inside to retrieve letters and parcels. Gurkhas stood about with guns at the ready to prevent any violence. Beside placards demanding pay revisions, Raj saw one apologising to the public for the strike. He gave the group of picketing postmen a look of fury as he drove past.

This was the first strike since the Emergency, and local newspapers like
The Malayan Tribune
were making the most of it; screaming headlines on behalf of the postmen pushed out all other news. A young lawyer called Lee, determined to pit himself against the government, was legal counsel for the striking postmen. His high-handed rhetoric was reported in the press every day, in special coverage of the strike by a young Indian journalist by the name of Rajaratnam, newly returned from England. Special meetings had been called in the Legislative Council to debate what should be done. Local opinion was largely behind the postmen, who were aflame with defiance in previously unthinkable ways. After the stress and exertion of the visit to St John's, the crowd queuing to retrieve their mail spiked Raj's anger anew. He had recently developed high blood pressure, and reached into his pocket for one of the pills he always carried with him.

When Raj drew up before Ho Biscuits the usual smell of baking poured through the car's open windows. Even after all these years the vanilla-edged perfume never failed to melt him. He left the car and walked through the gate, feeling as always a sense of homecoming; Mr Ho's spirit seemed to remain in the house. On the altar shelf inside, his Ancestor Tablet stood between that of his murdered son Luke and his wife, and Yoshiko tended them devotedly, putting out fresh offerings and making obeisance each day. Raj too made it a habit to press his hands together before the altar, remembering Mr Ho with gratitude.