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The story with a WW2 twist that I recounted in my previous two posts got me reminiscing about a few others…
During my stint as a management trainee at a Chennai hotel in the early 1980s – yes, the very same one where I had to do a juggling act with three telephones at the front desk(!) – I got talking to Mrs. Fernando*, an Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) lady in her fifties who worked in the linen room. One day she sprang a huge surprise on me when she told me she was a survivor of Japanese prison camps in Singapore/ Malaya! She was very young at the time, around nine or ten years of age, and she remembered being force marched for several months between POW camps with her family – and surviving it all!
It really is amazing how you can meet people who have the strangest stories to tell.
Which brings me to three excellent books based on each author’s experiences in South East Asia during the war.
Empire of the Sun (also made into a riveting movie directed by Steven Spielberg) by J G Ballard.
A Town Like Alice (US title: The Legacy) by Nevil Shute.
*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.
© Sosha Srinivasan
The story doesn’t end there.
Yohanan* stayed, thriving on the small kindnesses of the extended family, while Lukachen’s* wife cursed him every time she lay eyes on him – and treated him like a slave…
There he lived another ten years far from the land of his mother’s ancestors (Tamil Nadu) and even further from the land of his birth (Burma (Myanmar)), until Lukachen drew his last breath. The treatment he got from Lukachen’s widow only worsened until Lukachen’s youngest brother, who worked in Bombay (Mumbai) intervened. He arranged a job for Yohanan in the same city.
Yohanan, now a strapping young man, returned to our hometown every few years and his thoughts naturally turned to settling down. A young servant maid caught his eye, a fact not lost on the family. The wedding was arranged in due course and the couple moved to Bombay. After several years there, Yohanan landed a better-paid job in the UAE, where he lived and worked while his wife and three daughters stayed back in Mumbai, where they eventually bought a large, well-appointed apartment with his hard-earned money (something most Indians couldn’t even dream of in the 1970s and the 1980s).
Yohanan was well into his fifth decade when he was felled by a massive heart attack. His daughters, though, subsequently did very well for themselves and the last I heard were well settled in the United States…
Footnote: I am not sure how Appachen’s brother who went to Singapore fared during WW2. I know, though, that he decided to settle there and his family flourished in the years that followed. One of his grand-daughters married a Singaporean Chinese, and another, a Swiss guy. Other cousins of mine from the same side of the family (the “house name” is Ikareth) have married, variously, a Swede, an Iranian, and Americans of Indian and Pakistani origin. Thus our generation is truly an international melange.
*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.
© Sosha Srinivasan
I spent quite a few summers at my maternal grandparents home in Kerala while growing up. Invariably there would be visitors – neighbors from across the hill or the next village dropping in for a leisurely chat and tea, and sometimes relatives on a round of visits during their vacation…
One such family was Yohanan’s* – only we didn’t know for sure whether we were blood relatives – or did we?
Once Yohanan and his family had left, Ammachy, my grandmother, filled me in on the history – and my jaw dropped and stayed that way for a long time – I’m not exaggerating.
It’s a story that is truly stranger than fiction – one of those amazing tales of not just adventure, but unimaginable hardship and heartbreak…
It all began in the 1930s when one of Appachen’s (my grandfather’s) dozen brothers (let’s call him Lukachen*) took off to seek his fortune in what was then colonial Burma (now Myanmar). He was followed closely by another brother who decided to try his luck in Singapore…
The Japanese conquest of Burma
But elation turned to consternation for, what was this? He had a young dark-skinned boy, not older than five, in tow!
Lukachen explained that he had traveled overland into Assam as part of a huge exodus of half a million strong Indians fleeing the Japanese invasion. The refugees died in their thousands of malaria, typhoid, dengue, infections, starvation, and gastrointestinal causes… It had taken him over a year to travel mostly on foot, down from Burma to our home state of Kerala in the deep south of peninsular India. He had joined a group of Tamil laborers traveling south when they were all stricken with cholera. Already weakened, the group, including the mother of the toddler, was decimated by the epidemic. Before she succumbed she had asked Lukachen, who had recovered from the diarrheal illness, to take responsibility for the child…
The only problem was that Lukachen’s wife – he had married shortly before leaving for Burma – wasn’t buying the story! It wasn’t helped by the fact that Lukachen refused to give up the child and put him in an orphanage… His wife then accused him of fathering the child… and our Kerala village buzzed with the scandal…
There was a family huddle and still Lukachen refused to back down. The child, by now named Yohanan*, stayed…
Did Lukachen actually father the child, or was it just that he took a promise made very seriously – or was it simply because he could not break a strong emotional bond he had formed with Yohanan on his long journey home? We never did find out…
*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.
© Sosha Srinivasan
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