Lieutenant Kurosawa's Errand Boy

Dedicated to Papatti

I was born in the year Showa 9 by the Japanese calendar, the year 1934 by British convention, and although I was born in Singapore, raised a Hindu and speak Tamil, I know of no other metric of time that mattered. That was the world I was born into.

My father worked as a coolie on His Majesty’s Naval Base in the north of Singapore, then a lucrative British colony. The Englishman, not content with his gunboats and Bible, or perhaps spurred on by them, borrowed the title coolie and the indentured labourer from South India to fatten out his dictionary and Treasury, and returned neither. That my father, at the age of seventeen, said sayonara to his parents in Tamil Nadu and bought a one-way meal ticket across the Indian Ocean for any work in an unknown country is testament to his faith, infinite as faith must be, that life could only get better. And a repudiation of the hierarchy of the Indian caste system, where rich Indian Brahmins repressed other Indians before the Englishman came along and repressed them all, and at whose bottom my father would have found himself ingloriously squashed in either scenario.

My father’s ship moored at Tanjong Pagar Harbour in the south of Singapore during the April of 1928, where a few Tommies herded him and other young healthy males onto a pickup truck bound for the north, an experience that vindicated my father’s religious distaste for eating cow meat. Used to the torrid heat, he slept thinking the journey across the country would take a few days. He woke up delirious when soldiers shouted at him to get off, and he realised barely an hour had passed. They put him to work immediately, instilling in him the industry of the Protestant (because only Protestants could be industrious in those days) and rewarding him with the pay of an Asian.

King George’s Naval Base in Sembawang was then half-constructed and the white man taught my father to operate a mechanical crane so he could lay the final stones to cement the Royal Navy’s dominance east of Suez. Having accomplished this worthy endeavour, my father swept the Naval Base’s pink-cobbled parade square, repainted its white bungalows, fixed the lights in the barracks, and unloaded crates from the ships and stocked them in the warehouses. He did anything the white soldier didn’t want to do and reported to him after that. That was a coolie. But my father loved his occupation and he was a British man—or possession—through and through. At the end of ten years of service, his supervisor, whom we called Corporal Gibraltar, presented him with a copy of The Jungle Book, perhaps unaware that my father and I didn’t read, but my father proudly placed the cover of the Indian boy in his loincloth next to our mini statue of Ganesha, even remarking that we looked alike. He called Corporal Gibraltar a good man.

My mother migrated from the Tamil-speaking north of Sri Lanka and cooked in the Naval Base canteen, where she had the fortune of meeting the hero that was my father. They say necessity breeds invention, which I suppose is the only way I can explain their union. Being the only two civilian Tamil speakers on base, they were naturally drawn to each other. He kept turning up at her stall without money in hand but plenty of love in his eyes, and she kept giving him dollops of rice and beef rendang (that he learned to eat for the higher virtue of love), until finally she had to ask for his hand in marriage.

My mother died giving birth to me and I never got to know her and thus cannot say much except this: sometimes, I think I killed her clawing my way out to take my first breath. It was a tragic fact of my world that new beginnings were often sought through violent exorcisms. My father never spoke about my amma except to say that she lived on inside me. He, like any person, spoke his share of crap that held a deeper truth. But from the beginning, it was just Appa and me. He was a hardworking and humble man and I respected him for that. I merely think that whatever courage and pluck I have, I must have inherited from Amma.

I must stop here, for my grandson who is writing this down on his foolscap paper tells me that I cannot talk like this about Protestants and Englishmen and Indians, that people are one and the same. This is all fine and well. But I have had more salt than my grandson has had rice. He doesn’t know oppression or division, militarily and hierarchically enforced, where the colour of your skin and the employment of your father decided from birth whether you lived in a brown congested room in a demarcated zone called Little India, or a white bungalow facing the snot-green sea. Where a Briton hurled racist slurs like Hurry up you keling! while you polished his shoes, and you just scratched the difficult dirt away with your fingernails and called him Sir as you stood up with blackened hands. My grandson does not know how it is to feel humiliated, backward and lesser every day, and think that this is your fate in life and that you must accept it. I must treat such a past with a little anger and a little irony, for without the first, the world would never move on, and without the second, I never would. But my grandson lives in a different world and I haven’t even started on the best bits of my story yet.

I was eight years old when I encountered War. He was a calculating and unbridled man. The Japanese invaded Singapore from the north in the February of 1942, raining bombs on a city of bazaars. Appa never thought the Japanese, an Asian army, would dare attack a British colony, so we had barely fled before they liberated him of this fantasy and captured Sembawang. We took with us a second-hand army haversack stuffed with spare clothes, our cash savings wrapped in underwear, a two-kilo sack of white rice, a mess tin cradling some sour mango achar to embellish the rice, a robust iron pot, matchboxes and The Jungle Book. We trekked south and southeast towards Singapore city with the battle to our backs, trudging by the edge of long roads rutted by Bren gun carriers and Lanchester armoured cars, ready to dive face-first into the long grass if War flew over us or lobbed an artillery shell, our hands protecting the back of our heads against explosives and metal shrapnel.

One night, Appa and I slept under a stilted kampung house in what would now be called Bishan. I stared up at brown wooden planks with iron nails the size of my eyes and hoped the nails wouldn’t transform into missiles and shoot down at us.

Appa had always called me Thambi or younger brother in Tamil. He had said we were more than father and son; we were brothers and best friends. I had liked that idea. Thambi. Are you awake?

I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

He patted the dry, packed earth between us. The stray mongrel lying at our feet perked its head. Flies scattered, swollen lumps of black diptera hovering over my skin. You would think that War would at least kill these parasites, but War was unsparing. Thambi? Appa said again.

What, Appa? I opened my eyes.

I want you to know—this is the last time we’ll run. The British are going to make one big advance tonight and we’ll kick the Japanese out by tomorrow morning. You wait and see. God willing, when morning comes, we’ll walk back to Sembawang and Appa will go back to work. Okay?

I kept quiet, knowing he had been wrong before. He had been wrong too many times. Now, whenever he spoke of War as if he knew it, as if he were some Brigadier-General, I felt ashamed of him, and I felt even more ashamed and angry when we quietly packed our things and walked south and southeast every morning. I wished he would just be quiet.

Instead, he said, The British are fighting hard, Thambi. They’ll win, you’ll see. How about this? Tomorrow, when we start work, I’ll let you climb onto the ships, shimmy up the top deck and jump into the water. Your super dive. What do you say? You can swim in the sea for as long as you want. I’ll ask Corporal Gibraltar to let you. I know he will. What do you say, Thambi?

I want to sleep, Appa.

Don’t talk like that, Thambi; just pray and it will all work out. Okay?

I said I want to sleep, Appa.

He stopped talking, stung. I closed my eyes, unbothered. In the quiet between Appa and me, I heard gunfire and grenade explosions. I no longer knew if I imagined it and I certainly didn’t bother praying. Om Shanti Shanti wasn’t going to save us and if the meek really did inherit the earth, my father would have been Emperor by now.

The next morning, we woke up and walked south and southeast again.

Appa and I finally reached Kallang, a warren of two-storey shophouses ringed by the brown and sullen Kallang River and the bumboats congesting its banks. Colourful bamboo laundry poles jutted out of the shophouses, their paint peeling. The roadside coffee shops were littered with cigarette butts and broken glass bottles and black footprints. A few wooden benches lay on their sides. A rickshaw was missing its wheels, sitting on the road like a duck. Over these, the Sultan mosque with its beautiful golden dome rose, its minarets piercing the sky. Near it was the gated colonial palace the Sassenach had built for the old Malay Sultan.

A Chinese man was trekking south to Tanjong Pagar with his family, and had heard the news from a teashop playing the Malayan Broadcasting Corporation radio. Face to face, he was a carbon copy of Appa, despite Appa’s swarthiness. Their faces were tanned and beaten from heavy labour under the sun, and their hair dirtied by sleeping in the jungles. Their singlets and shorts were muddied. They wore slippers, smut caking their toes and spattered on their calves. The Chinese man said in Malay, They surrendered. In two weeks. Two weeks! They forgot how to fight. They said they won’t lose, they said they can’t lose, then they surrendered. They only know how to talk. Talk and talk only. They only look out for themselves, because they are fighting in Europe also. But still, two weeks! He swore in Hokkien, a language whose lewd vulgarity sparkles with its own delight. They did not even send tanks. Did you see a tank here? There were no tanks, right or not? Kan ni na!

Appa was shaking his head, stunned, as if he had been the one fighting and shell-shocked. No, they can’t lose. They said they can’t lose.

Lose? What lose? The man spat. A wad of saliva burst onto the sand like a bomb. Surrendered! My grandma can fight better than them. Na bei! It’s our fault. We never should have trusted them. You lost your wife already? Go save your son. Okay okay, enough rest. Come, let’s go! Come! He shoved his wife, whose eyes were closing and head was drooping, and she stumbled forward. He carried his youngest son in one arm and prodded her further. The older son, my age, dragged the family’s sole portmanteau the way he dragged his feet, and I thought: all over the world, our fathers are leading us to our demise.

Appa chased him. Wait, are you sure? Are you sure? Where are you going?

The man didn’t stop. I lie for what! It’s over! What more you want? Go save yourself. We are mati.

We are dead.

Appa turned. His eyes, disbelieving black orbs, met mine. The family disappeared behind him. I can’t believe this, Thambi. They gave up. How could they surrender?

Surrender. The word still echoes in my head. To stop trying. But what’s the word for not trying in the first place? I am not sure if I thought this then or realised it after, but that Chinese man was right. It was our fault. Appa never fought. I never fought. We never even learned to fight. We just ran and ran from the Japanese like cowards and trusted the British to defend us. We had given up first.

That evening, Appa and I snuck onto an abandoned bumboat on the Kallang River to sleep. The floor bobbed with a deceptive gentleness. There were no gunshots. There were no missiles. Instead, an empty silence hung over Singapore, brooding with the uncertainty of tomorrow, a terrifying sky to sleep under.

At midnight, glass shattered and a baby cried. A saw shrieked through metal as looters tore shutters apart and hammered down doors. I rolled against the damp wooden starboard side and cupped my ears as a man screamed and another man yelled at him. A thump. Then a woman begging. Appa started talking into my ear and I pushed him away. Although the bumboat owner didn’t return, I didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, a light blue sky dawned on quiet and empty streets, but the night revealed itself in the brown bloodstains congealed on the road, the crusted glass bits and broken metal jewelling the asphalt, and a parang lying in a drain, crimson-tipped. Watch shops and pawn shops and mama shops were laid open, missing shutters and doors. Their shelves were empty, glass cabinets broken, tin containers toppled over, and leftover rice grains and biscuits trampled over. The people of Kallang had boarded themselves inside the tenement houses above the shops and shut the windows, and no sound came from them. The bamboo poles had been emptied of clothes. Only a few men like Appa roamed the street in wide-eyed amazement. One carried a butcher’s knife. I reached for the parang but Appa told me to toss it back into the drain.

We walked up to Jalan Besar and I tugged his arm. A mama shop stood across the street, four jumbo Chinese characters emblazoned across its peeling iron signboard. Inside the mart, three men hauled a fourth away from his cash register. They wrestled him against a cupboard stacked with Chinese alcohol bottles, and spread his arms like a crucifixion. They stuffed his mouth with cloth and punched him in the gut. His eyes bulged and they punched him and punched him until he sat. A looter booted his privates and his eyes rolled up into his head. They started pulling an empty rice sack over his body.

Appa said, Mind your business and walk. As if reading my mind, he clasped my mouth and picked me up. Muffled, I slapped his arms and kicked at air as he dashed down the road. He turned into an alley between the shophouses and only put me down in the middle of it. The alley was empty except for a pile of rubbish buckets, cardboard boxes and a grey mattress leaning against the wall at the end. Two alley cats coiled amidst the rubbish and watched us. Appa grabbed my arms. His bushy eyebrows sat heavily above large deep eyes.

I spoke before he could. Why did you do that, Appa? Why didn’t we help him?

Help him? How? We would have ended up dead. This is no time to be a hero, Thambi.

We could have tried. Now he’s going to die. For sure. I kicked a loose stone at the cats. They did not move.

Thambi, stop fooling around. Please.

I am not fooling around! He’s going to die! We must help him, Appa!

Stop shouting. Please, Thambi.

I quieted. I’m not scared. Not like you.

Well, you should be. There is no law, no police, nothing to save us now. You saw what those thieves were doing, right? You think anyone is going to punish them for it? You think they would have just done a namaskaram for you and said sorry and left if you had told them to stop? Be smart, Thambi.

Stop talking like you know everything, Appa. You don’t know anything. That man is dead because of you. We are homeless because of you. We lost everything because of you. Because of you! I stuck a finger into his face.

His eyes widened. So you are going to behave like a little child? You’re not my thambi anymore, right? You’re a child, right?

I glared back. I refused to be emotionally blackmailed like this and I shouted, I am not scared!

His hands bolted over my mouth. Then a spondaic pulse throbbed under my feet. The street shivered. Tenno¯ heika banzai! Tenno¯ heika banzai! Leather boots beat against the tarred road. The sounds grew louder and closer. Locks latched into the doors and clicked into the windows around us as Kallang sprang to life for one second. Then it died away. Appa said, Jappankarran.

The Japanese.

He grabbed my hand and we sprinted to the end of the alley to see if it was true. The cats, the smarter creatures, slipped past us and ran off towards Jalan Besar.

The Japanese soldiers were marching onto Kallang Road in four columns. The soldiers wore earthy uniforms with peaked caps and gripped long and polished rifles high and still over their shoulders. A blood-red band wrapped each cap and a gold star in the centre of the band glinted in the sun. Rows and rows of thin bayonets stuck out like a field of luminescent silver grass. The soldiers swung their left fists in swift jerks, up and back, up and back. They marched as one disciplined leviathan called War, boots crunching together, advancing furiously. A fluttering flag led this parade, white with a large crimson ball in the centre, a big pottu, burning brightest of all.

Migi! Hidari! Tenno¯ heika banzai!

These were the men who had chased me from my home. These were the men who had made Appa look like a fool. A fury came into me as they advanced closer: anger at them and at Appa. I wanted to show Appa that we didn’t need to be afraid. So I stalked onto the street.

Appa yanked me back. I struggled even more furiously against him, and he wrestled me into the rubbish, sitting, pulling me into his clutch, a bucket upturning its waste, the stench of rotten fish and manure rising around us. He hissed, Thambi. Stop this. Please. Please. Listen to me for once. Please, I’m begging you. I could not speak because his hand covered my mouth. Still I struggled to escape and throw myself at the enemy as the drumming under my feet grew louder and louder, as if the earth itself was churning, and wanted to erupt against the oncoming army. I didn’t care what happened to me.

The commands boomed inside the alleyway. The soldiers filed past the entrance and the timed beat of their boots shook the hutong. Left, right. Left, right. Every second, a new soldier marched past the entrance. But he could have been the same tanned clean-shaven face, cropped hair, clenched jaw, pinched eyes, left arm swung to ninety degrees, leg kicked out to forty-five, cold, ruthless, relentless. They looked the same and marched the same. They had no differences. They were one machine.

Then a soldier turned his head. His sharp eyes met mine for an instant, and a cold fear gripped me. He turned back and disappeared.

Appa’s grip had become painful, but I had also stopped struggling.

It was an endless parade of soldiers. When the last trooper marched past, desert-green light tanks thundered after him, the same Japanese soldiers standing at the turrets, saluting the flag, proud and confident. Then armoured jeeps and lorries camouflaged in green netting rolled after the tanks. This time, I let Appa cover my ears.

The procession lasted forever. Even after the victory parade moved on to the Municipal Building that is now City Hall, it felt like Japanese soldiers and tanks still rumbled through Kallang and the ground still shook. As I let the aftershock subside, Appa took a long breath. We knew who was in charge now.

Appa sensed the difference in me and did not press the point. Are you okay, Thambi? he said.

I nodded. What do we do now, Appa?

Survive, he said, reaching for the mattress.

Appa and I built a house on a patch of grass and sand between Kallang Road and the river. We propped thin sheets of rusted zinc and tin, cardboard and wood to resemble the four walls of a container, a little shorter than Appa, and nailed them into place. Then we leaned the ramshackle concoction against a tree and nailed it to the tree. We used the spare sheets and enormous attap leaves that had drifted down the river from the mangrove swamps to make a roof. I sat on Appa’s shoulders and thatched the roof, alternating long logs below and above the layers of metal and leaves to hold the roof in place. Appa smacked it a few times to make sure it wouldn’t collapse under rain. There was no door, only a sheet to be dragged aside for us to enter and leave our new home. It was a small house and it took us two days to cobble it together.

The Japanese patrols started the next day. The soldiers were sharply dressed and carried themselves with arrogance. They strutted in pairs in the middle of Kallang Road, rifles hung in front like warning signs saying Behave, fingers near the trigger saying Do not give me an excuse to kill you. They stared disdainfully at the underclothes that had started hanging from the bamboo poles again, at the rubbish thrown outside and at the few boats that had started plying the river in search of work.

The locals started trickling out of their houses to go to work and pretend life could continue as usual. When they saw the patrols, they squirmed even as they tried not to look uncomfortable. Once, a man broke and ran; the soldiers hollered and chased after him and they disappeared around the bend. A brief breakout of chaos, quickly replaced by the veneer of peace where everyone pretended nothing had happened in the hope that nothing would happen.

Appa noted that the soldiers patrolled Kallang Road at nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, making one pass in the direction of Jalan Besar. During those hours, he hid in a corner of our house and left the door open to show we had nothing to hide. He held me to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, but as the days passed and the patrols continued, I needed less and less warning.

A week after Surrender, I realised our small rice sack was almost empty and waited for nighttime to retrace my steps to the mama shop on Jalan Besar Road. No one had cleaned the dried blood that had spilled onto the street, and I imagined the shopkeeper’s assailants dragging out his body in the sack to dispose of it, the blood soaking through the canvas.

I followed the red trail into the shop and it led to an emptied cash register. There were still spare rice grains that had spilled onto the ground. I thought we could boil the dirt away, so I took off my shirt and swept the grains into it, careful to avoid any blood-soaked rice.

I rolled up my shirt and took it back to Appa. When I showed him the rice, he frowned. Did I raise a thief?

The Mahatma was balancing the iron pot on four jagged stones, a slapdash stove. He had lit a fire with the broken branches underneath and only its weak orange glow and the moonlight shone upon the dark walls of the house. The haversack lay crumpled behind Appa. A few extra stones, a mound of red nails, a corroded hammer, and our leftover pickles sat listlessly on it. We had lain out the lumpy mattress beside the haversack and piled our clothes at its end. Appa had buried that useless weight of The Jungle Book the moment he accepted that the Japanese had won. The house stank of us and the river, but we had become used to it.

I said, Appa, our rice is running out. I was hungry and I wanted to help you.

We can find a kopitiam or a market or something. We still have money. We are not a family of thieves. Put that down.

I put my shirt filled with rice on the grass. Appa, all the shops are shuttered. He touched the pot to feel it warm up and I pushed my case. And there was no one in this shop. It was empty. The rice doesn’t belong to anyone.

Did you pay for it?

No, but everyone else is taking from the shops too.

Thambi, what are you saying? So if everyone does something, that makes it okay? If everyone kills their fathers for food, will you stab me too?

Of course not, Appa.

I raised you to be better than that.

Then we should have helped the shopkeeper instead of worrying about stealing from him after he’s dead!

What shopkeeper? His eyes widened. You went back to that mama shop. Thambi, that was different.

Why?

What could we have done?

We could have tried. We didn’t even try.

Try? You’re an eight-year-old boy. You must know your limits. How could we have fought off three armed men, all grown up? They would have killed you and me and strung our bodies upside down outside the shop. My job is to look after you. You are my first and only priority. What does the Gita say? We must all do our duty. My duty is to you.

Why are you always scared? Why are you always running away? 

Are you not afraid of the Japanese soldiers when you see them? 

No.

Appa smiled. Okay. You are more man than me. And I’m proud of you. But maybe one day when you have your own son to look after, you’ll be afraid for him. Sit. I want to tell you something.

What? I sat cross-legged.

Don’t be rude, Thambi. Even his admonishingly arched eyebrow was kind. He was never angry with me. Thambi, these Japanese are a different species from the British. You heard them going around with their loudspeakers telling the Chinese men to report for screening, for an examination. People say that the Japanese are looking for anyone who opposed them. And some people don’t come back from the screening. You know Appa used to work for the British. Do you think they’ll be kind to me if they find out? The Japanese are ruthless, Thambi. I want us to keep a low profile. This is serious. You cannot go around stealing or attracting any kind of attention, or we are both dead. You must listen to me. Will you do that please?

The water started to bubble. I was tired of his excuses.You didn’t help the British fight. You didn't even help a dying man. And now you don’t want to take free food when you can’t even feed us. Why would the Japanese want you?

Appa looked wounded that I thought the Japanese wouldn’t want him. I bit my lip. I had not meant to hurt him. He said, I know what I can and cannot do. You must too. He extended his hand, producing a packet of pandan leaf wrapped around rice.

He must have hoped to surprise me before we started arguing. I hated myself then. I turned my head away and said, I’m not hungry. I didn’t deserve it.

Take it. I know you are. He put on his fake parent smile, pretending to be unhurt and encouraging.

You? I asked.

I’ve eaten.

For as long as I can remember, he never ate without me. I don’t believe you, I said. I’ll only eat if you take some.

His smile broke out more sincerely. In the end, he was my Appa, and when we got along I felt better. He said, Okay. But will you behave?

I nodded.

By erecting our makeshift home on grass, we had also effectively laid claim to some of the land around it, a mini-colonisation, so to speak. But over the next weeks and months, we shared this riverside property with other dwellers who arrived but never left, and I assumed they had fled their homes too. They constructed their shacks around ours and I started calling our shared land Garden Country.

And Appa and I were grateful for the other Garden Country residents. For one, our home blended into a maze of jerry-built houses that blocked our views of Kallang Road, which meant the Japanese soldiers couldn’t see us from the road either. What’s more, Appa didn’t want to collect ration cards from the Japanese administrators because they would ask him many questions. So we planted sweet potato sprouts into the soil and let it rain and shine on it and we urinated on it and shat on it. After two months, we boiled and ate the potatoes. But we and the other residents could never know when our potatoes, tapioca, or anything else we reared in our commons would run out and so we shared our food. The farmers Wong and Chin kept chickens and Uncle Malik fished in the Kallang River. Appa occasionally bartered a potato for an egg or a small tarpon. This was our banana money. And we helped each other to keep an eye on these chickens and vegetables in case robbers had any ideas, and warned each other if a Japanese patrol approached.

However, Appa did not trust the Garden Country dwellers, or anyone or anything for that matter. I sometimes caught cockroaches and grasshoppers, collecting them in glass bottles and giving them to Uncle Wong as chicken feed, in exchange for the tapioca crisps I heard his wife fry. But I lied to Appa that Aunty Wong gave me the crisps for free and did not tell him that I had climbed into the canal near Rochor Road and wandered among the homeless sleeping under sarongs to catch bugs. He would have banned me from leaving our house altogether.

Appa did not even like me talking to Uncle Wong. But knowing interaction was inevitable within Garden Country, he reminded me to talk as little as possible. Which is in general good advice. He said at every dinner, Thambi, you remember that kampung house that we slept under? Remember, we used to live there. I reared chickens and farmed spinach and we lost everything during the war. Are you listening to me?

How do you grow spinach, Appa?

"You put it in the soil and wait. One day, it grows up and never listens to you and asks you a thousand questions. Now, remember this.

Don’t say anything to anyone unless you are asked. Okay, Thambi?" 

Yes, Appa.

And if you are asked…

We lived in a kampung and farmed spinach that talks back to their fathers.

You rascal. He tried to pull my ear but I leaned away. He laughed. But Thambi, no joking. There are informants everywhere and we cannot take the risk. Be careful what you say. These guys are scoundrels. Traitors. If I lay my hands on one, I will strangle them myself. Bastards. His eyes widened and he bit his lips. I was also taken aback by his vehemence. I hadn’t imagined him capable of such intensity of feeling, let alone violence, even towards quislings.

Appa rubbed his callused legs miserably. "I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have spoken like that. In fact, I shouldn’t speak about these things to you at all. You are my thambi, yes,