Churchill's Secret War (32 page)

After Monju menstruated, the madam said that she would arrange her marriage. “I still didn’t understand,” Patro recalled. “I was weeping
because it didn’t feel like a real wedding. Where were the guests, the music, the turmeric ceremony? She gave me something to drink, my head spun, and I went to sleep. When I woke up I was paining all over, I couldn’t get up. I never saw the man.” Following that initial rape, she had been made to stand on the street, wearing colorful print saris, in front of 14 Maniktola Lane—an address that, judging by her precise and bitter enunciation of it sixty-three years later, was tattooed onto her brain. “I never understood who it was I serviced—they spoke all kinds of languages. I never saw the money.” Life in the brothel had been a miasma of terror. Early one morning Patro watched, through a slit that served as her window, as thugs in the lane below strangled a customer for his watch and wallet. Another time a gangster forced his way in and, laying a sword on the bed between two women, raped them all night long. “We saw a prostitute cut up and stuffed into the gutter,” Patro remembered. “Couldn’t do anything.”

Patro eventually fled the madam, running off with a man who had fallen in love with her. She continued to sell her body, because they needed the money. Her boyfriend was a chef, but after he broke a hand he could not earn much, so they had returned to Sonagachi, Calcutta’s main red-light area and fetid slum, where they lived cheaply. Years after her children were grown, Patro complained that they neglected her. “One son is a cook and lives far away,” she said. “He took everything I had.” Patro still remembered the faces of her own parents, whom she had never seen again. “Where will I find them now?”

 

PUSHPO ODHIKARI ALSO came from Midnapore but forgot the name of her village. At the famine time she had been about eight; she had a brother and a sister, and her parents were old. “My mother couldn’t feed me,” she remembered. “If we ate in the morning, we couldn’t eat in the evening.” One day, while she was playing with other boys and girls, cooking up a banquet out of mud, a stranger wearing a dhuti and vest had approached them. He offered to find her work in a babu’s house, where she would eat well and even earn money to send home to her parents.

Pushpo was hungry. “I said to him, ‘I’ll just run in and tell my mother.’ He replied, ‘Don’t bother, I’ll tell them later.’” As had happened to Monju Patro, the man had given her sweets at the train station, brought her to Calcutta, and sold her to a madam who had first made the girl work as a maid. After Pushpo menstruated the madam put her in a room with a young man, left the door open a crack, and sat herself on a stool outside, to intimidate the child into cooperating.

After four years of prostitution, “when I got smarter,” Pushpo ran off. Not knowing any other trade, she continued to work the streets of Sonagachi. She fell in love with a chauffeur, but he would beat her when she did not give him her earnings. Odhikari’s son had died young. Her daughter had fortunately escaped prostitution by working as a maid in a rich household—so rich that they had security guards at the entrance. Speaking in old age of her own survival in the slums of Sonagachi, she said, “I’ve spent my entire life in this Hell.”

 

BOTH THE ORPHANAGES and the brothels saved the lives of some thousands of the millions of children under ten who suffered from the famine and represented almost half the refugees on Calcutta’s streets.
²⁹

Stationed in a Bengali town that he did not name, Clive Branson went out one evening to buy underwear and to eat in a restaurant. The food was very good and the prices astonishingly low. But walking back along the dark streets, he heard someone “sobbing her heart out” and found a little girl lying on the edge of the pavement. He gave her a few coins and tried to speak to her. Some locals gathered, explaining matter-of-factly that she was one of the starving. “At that I lost my temper completely, and told them they should be bloody well ashamed to walk past a child in her state,” he related. Branson made some of them carry her to a relief center. “The whole incident upset me so much that I cannot face going into the town again, because being in the army I don’t know what I can
do
to help these creatures.”

Another soldier, William A. Barnes, wrote in his diary: “I have heard many homeless little children of between 5 and 10 crying bitterly and coughing terribly outside my room in the Rest Camp at Chittagong at
3 & 4 in the morning in the pouring monsoon rain. They were all stark naked, homeless, motherless, fatherless and friendless. Their sole possession was an empty tin in which to collect scraps of food. We were strictly prohibited from helping any of these refugees in any way, under heavy penalties. Many could not endure to see this suffering, though, and did help surreptitiously.”
³⁰

Sergeant John Crout recalled that famine sufferers surrounded his army camp, because they were given the leftovers of military meals. A guard patrolled the edges of the camp to make sure any bodies were promptly removed. Once he was badly shaken by the sight of a girl, not yet dead, whose arm had been torn off and devoured by a jackal. Even battle-hardened soldiers were unnerved by such things, Crout said.
³¹

Unsettling sights and sounds were all too common. The
Hindustan Standard
reported on November 15, 1943, that a stranger had guided three nuns in Islampur in eastern Bengal to an abandoned stable by a riverside. “There to their utter horror, they found about 20 babies laid in rows on the dark and unclean floor of the stable. Some of the babies were crying in agony for food, some gasping for breath and the rest in a state of utter exhaustion and stupour. On enquiry they learnt that the mothers of the babies, no longer able to carry them on their arms in their trek through the city in search of food, had left their dear little ones behind hoping to return after the day’s wanderings to their babies with food for them.” The odds that a mother would make it back to her baby were slim. On November 21, a doctor described women at a gruel kitchen, also in eastern Bengal: “mere skeletons covered simply with skins; some gasping for their last breath in my presence; mothers hugging their dying and dead children unable, having no strength, to weep or cry; some practically in delirium”—calling for food, only to expire within minutes or hours of eating.
³²

 

IN THE THIRD week of September a temporary governor, Thomas Rutherford, arrived in Calcutta. The “scenes are pretty ghastly,” he reported to Viceroy Linlithgow, but he added that native ministers were being “obstructive about forcible removal to outside camps of hordes
of destitutes in Calcutta.” When he met the new governor, civil servant Olaf Martin was astonished to realize that he had no idea of the extent of the catastrophe. Rutherford insisted that only the few thousands who fouled the city streets were starving, whereas in fact they were just a symptom of the famine stalking almost all of Bengal’s villages. Even after touring Midnapore, Rutherford assured Linlithgow that the “majority of starving are the parasitic beggars and old people hitherto maintained by private charity.”
³³

The new governor seemed to have believed the official line that ordinary cultivators were causing the shortages by withholding grain from the market. These secret hoards should have kept villagers from starving, he and other officials were convinced, so the dead and dying had to belong to a small, and hopefully irrelevant, section of the population.

In truth, the worst of the hoarders were allies of the government. The administration in Bengal had issued five thousand licenses for grain procurement, and licensees could store rice with impunity. As a result, Barnes complained, “the big merchant, largely responsible in many instances for the slow and agonising death of hundreds or thousands of his fellow-countrymen, careened merrily on, unassailable and untouched in mere virtue of his wealth and connections, cornering ever more waggon-loads of life-giving produce, holding up distribution, forcing up prices, securing more Government contracts.” And whereas natives “hoarded,” which was at least in principle a penal offense, white men “stockpiled”—which was not only legal but recommended. British business houses were advised to store at least a month’s supply of rice for their laborers. One Mr. Parker, a merchant who served on Bengal’s legislature, admitted to having kept much more than he needed.
³⁴

That autumn, parts of Bengal that had a perennial water supply harvested a minor crop of rice. The famine commission found that the Bengal administration purchased 370,000 maunds of it in a central district, Jessore, and heaped it onto a railway platform there. The district magistrate, who was determined to preserve the stockpile, did not release any of the grain “except for small quantities in October and November, 2,400 maunds in December 1943 and about 12,000 maunds
in January and February 1944,” the commission stated. That is, a tiny portion of the hoard was made available for famine relief—but only after the winter harvest, reaped in late December, had reduced the necessity for stocks. Some 90,000 tons of grain were also stored under tarpaulins in the Royal Botanical Gardens near Calcutta. Although it was pressed by legislators, the administration refused to yield its stores to the starving.
³⁵

In 1944, witnesses testifying before the famine commission charged that part of the rice secreted by district officials had rotted and was being surreptitiously disposed of. According to contemporary accounts, the public was allowed to scavenge from the government’s dumps, such as the one in the botanical gardens, only after much of the contents had decayed. Rumors also abounded of the police and military having thrown rotted rice into canals.
³⁶

 

FOR MORE THAN a year Asok Mitra, the civil servant in charge of Munshiganj in eastern Bengal, had watched the suffering increase. In August 1943 he sensed that the people were finally collapsing under the strain of starvation. “Of the people I saw on the streets, more than half had blank looks, their faces and eyes were shrunken, and their skin stuck to their bones like paper. They took a long time just to focus their eyes.” Their joints poked out, and the hair on their bodies stood straight up, Mitra wrote, like “big black pins.” This marker of terminal starvation, sometimes described as growth of fur, was also noted in previous Indian famines and in the Irish famine.
³⁷

In late September, Mitra heard that the government in Calcutta was making some of its stocks available for famine relief, and he visited the district magistrate in Dacca to see if he could get any. By the stately stairway of his superior’s office he found a giant signboard, one side of which announced that the sahib would be in between 11 A.M. and 12 P.M. but would not see anyone, and the other side of which stated that he would not be in at all. Mitra finally located the district magistrate at a club, pouring himself a second pink gin before lunch. He graciously offered his subordinate a drink, but refused to discuss rice.

Mitra was subsequently able to obtain rice through a military officer. When it arrived from Calcutta it was half-rotted and gritty with gravel, but food nonetheless, and by October 20 he had opened a hundred gruel kitchens all over Munsigunj. At first the kitchens provided just soft boiled rice and phyan, but later they began to offer a nourishing mixture of rice, lentils, and bits of potato or squash, flavored with salt, turmeric, bayleaf, and a little oil. The starving would fall upon this
khichuri
, eat their fill—and swell up like balloons, their arms and legs as translucent as the whites of uncooked eggs. Their bodies having partially consumed their cell walls, the fluids they ingested had flowed into the spaces between the cells.

“If you saw the thrill in their eyes, you couldn’t scold them for eating too much,” Mitra said. The mixture would hasten their demise, but he felt death was inevitable for them at such a late stage of starvation. “That they got some tasty food before they died was some comfort to me.” Most of those who perished in this manner were women and children; the men, he believed, had already died.
³⁸

 

AT THE TURN of the eighteenth century the marquess of Wellesley, governor-general of India, had ordered the construction of a residence grand enough for the ruler of the vast possession. The palace, built in a Greco-Roman style and surrounded by more than twenty acres of gardens, served as the seat of the British Raj for more than a century. Twelve white marble busts of Roman emperors, including those of Nero and Caligula, adorned its spacious public hall. Calcutta had long ceased to be the capital of India, but the governor’s residence was still the well-spring of imperial power in Bengal.

An Englishwoman said that while driving past the edifice during the famine, she saw that someone had laid the dead and the half-dead along the walls so that they formed a circle around the kilometer-long perimeter of the palace. The wreath of corpses marked the passing of empire.
³⁹

I
n late August 1943, the mayor of Calcutta cabled to President Roosevelt, appealing to him and to Churchill for grain shipments “in the name of starving humanity.” The president and the prime minister were in conference at Quebec, Canada. Churchill also received messages from the viceroy, which were seconded by the commander-in-chief in India, warning that the paucity of wheat shipments threatened all operations based in the colony. The secretary of state for India, for his part, continued to contend with the War Cabinet for grain for the remainder of that summer, as well as through the fall and the winter.
¹

At Quebec, the Allies agreed to create a collaborative military structure based in India, the South East Asia Command (or SEAC), in anticipation of an overland thrust into Burma in 1944. The forces in India were to be supplemented with troops and equipment that could be air-dropped into the dense jungle of the east Himalayan foothills, and these preparations for war would further strain the Indian economy. Churchill went on from Quebec to stay at the White House for about ten days, with a break for a lecture at Harvard, but whether or not he discussed the Bengal famine with Roosevelt is unknown.