Here in Kuala Kangsar we still tell the story of Mr. Veloo's youngest wife, the one who lay down in the pit in the backyard and did not flee with the rest when the Japanese invaded the town. Some of us even have an old snapshot lying in a drawer or moldering in an album, and several parents have passed down newspaper articles about the incident to their children.
In these pictures you can see how young Sujata was: twelve when she was brought to Mr. Veloo's house as a bride, fifteen when the Japanese invaded in 1942. You can tell from her blunt, wide-set gaze that she was just the type of girl some people would have called slow. She was indeed slow in some ways: slow to come when called, slow to follow the simplest of instructions, slow with her hands in the kitchen. It took her forty-five minutes to pick the stones out of a pot of lentils and an hour to dress a freshly killed chicken. Whenever a loud noise startled everyone else, she would only turn her head slowly towards it, holding her chin at an angle and sticking out the tip of her tongue.
But she was slow and quick, quick and slow by turns. Everywhere she went she tripped along on the balls of her feet. She could make her way to the market so quickly that a servant on a bicycle had trouble keeping up with her. When Mr. Veloo's oldest wife asked her for an account of the vegetables she'd bought for the day, she listed them quickly and breathlessly, her voice never rising above a whisper: tomatoes fifty cents cabbage twenty cents French beans thirty cents coriander leaves ten cents. Then, tired by the effort, she sank onto her haunches to watch the others as silently as a bewildered old dog, or sidled out to the yard and sat swirling a forearm aimlessly through a basin of greens one of the other wives had left to soak. It was impossible to say what she'd do next: fall into a lizard-like doze right where she squatted in the sun, or sprint away after a blackbird that had ventured too close to the guava tree. You had to be prepared for either. This was why watching her disoriented people, made their heads swim, tired them out and left them thirsty.
Sujata ata AAAAA SUUUUUJATA ata aaaa..... When they call me that is how their voices sound, small and far away then closer and closer and closer until the noise is too big for my head, my head will burst this time I know it will it will it will -- then thank god thank god their voices pull out and fade like the train in and out of the station.
Thank god.
Once I saw a train. I was four years old. My grandfather was on it and we went to meet him and the train pulled into my head. Sharp sounds and soft sounds, chuff-chuff-chuff. Then the train left but it came back later after we went home. Then it left and came back later after everyone went to bed. Sharp sounds and soft sounds in the dark.
In and out all day ever since I was four. That is what my ears do they trap sounds and don't let go and all these sounds struggle inside my head like fishes in boys' fists.
I'll tell you what sounds: clocks one o'clock twelve o'clock four o'clock I don't know because each one chimes a different hour. Is it early or is it late? Is it sleeping time or eating time? I choose a clock to decide but sometimes I wish there weren't so many.
Another sound: drums and a nagaswaram, I think so they are from the temple where I wore a saree long and red and heavy and that man, I think so his name is Veloo he tied a chain around my neck. A gold chain shiny and gold and he fed me some sweets and they put some sweets in my hand for me to feed him, like a cow he was, like a favorite cow you can feed from your hand and then he brought me home to his house with a lot of people in it. Me and my sister. He fed her some sweets too and her saree was pink.
In his house in a big empty room there were flowers, lots of flowers like a curtain, and it was pretty. But then people came with their angry voices and after they left he lifted up my skirt and I didn't care, I said if you want to see my backside then see it. But when he climbed up on top of me like a toad and there was something down there I didn't like it at all, it hurt and I bit him very hard on his shoulder and everywhere there was blood. Blood is salty but his shoulder was salty even before there was blood. I tried to tell them when they rushed into the room, the short lady and the fat lady, I said it to them: it was already salty, don't simply-simply shout, it was already salty, but they beat me with their hands like wings, hands everywhere like big moth wings, and they dragged me out by my ear that hurt more than the hands, and I kneeled and kneeled and I was not supposed to get up. They asked my sister to come and look at me to learn a lesson but I didn't know what lesson to teach her.
Fifty cents sixty cents seventy cents I could teach her that lesson, I learned it once it's called counting money and I learned it carefully from a lady I knew in the old house before I came here. But my sister already knows all that and she stopped talking to me after I didn't teach her a lesson. If sometimes she asked me to come or go or sit they shouted at her and their hands were like wings and she didn't ask me anymore.
My sister doesn't go to the market to buy vegetables. That's just me. I go with the servant boy. He puts the vegetables in his bicycle basket dring dring dring rings the bell all the way down the road and we come home. I am faster than him because the wind pushes me, two hands on my shoulders, sometimes it pushes too hard for me but I have no choice I have to keep going. I love to choose the vegetables, lovely white cabbages shiny green peppers nice fat carrots, I love that. But my sister doesn't go to the market she stays at home and cooks because the fire is not dangerous for her, she will not hurt herself. And also there are babies but not mine. I'm supposed to have babies but I don't know how. I wait and wait and nothing comes out.
But I'm not useless you know. I own all the sounds because they stay only with me. If you've forgotten a sound you can ask me nicely. You can put your ear right here and hear it through my ear. If I let you.
Sharp sounds and soft sounds and each time I can hear the whistle past my face when the train comes.
Dring dring dring the bicycle bell in the dark.
More sounds are rain on a tin roof, I like rain I don't mind it so much as the clocks, and goats that are thirsty and chickens that have just laid eggs. And a priest chanting and ringing a big bell. I like that, I like him chanting it's not words just sounds lovely and rumbling and lovely.
But it's not my favorite sound. My favorite is a secret. I don't tell anyone, they laugh at me but I don't tell them this one. My mother with a laughing voice a scolding voice and in the evening calling the cows home but I like the laughing voice best. And the song she sings:
Araro, ariraro.....
It's only two words but I like it.
My mother died. My father my grandfather my brothers and sisters said it was my fault. She died when I came out of her I think so I got stuck. She forgot how to have babies. Halfway through she forgot. Oops. But now she comes out of the tap in the kitchen and it's easy and she doesn't get stuck. She slips out slippery when no one else is there and she sings to me. Araro, ariraro..... She makes me porridge, I'll tell you what kind it's oats porridge, and in the morning I am not hungry for a long long time. Oats porridge is a heavy thing in my belly but when I get hungry again I eat some leaves or some flowers or things, oh I find this and that you know. No need to worry.
My mother is not like other people, she's thin and clear, other people are thick and they get thicker and thicker like syrup in a pot on the stove when I watch them. They shout like they're rushing about but really they're swimming, their arms and legs and hands and feet are heavy. It makes me sleepy to watch other people. It makes me awake to watch my mother. She sings to me and I sing back to her, happy songs all the words I want and she knows what they mean but here is the thing: the short lady comes, she laughs but not a nice laugh, she drags me by my hair or my ear, she shouts and my mother slips away scared.
Some of us blame Mr. Veloo's mother and his oldest wife for what happened. We can't help going over and over the same old story, even now, even sixty years after it happened. Nothing much happens here in Kuala Kangsar, you see. Every year our local newspaper still runs a small article about Sujata on the anniversary of the Japanese invasion.
Mr. Veloo was no imbecile, no helpless vegetable, but that is how men have always explained difficult things, and after all this explanation is often true: Mothers-in-law and aunts, first wives and sisters-in-law, these are the people who rule households with iron fists. They have not much use for velvet gloves. They prop their fat, well-fed men up before them and work behind the scenes. Powerful women controlling the lives of weak women. Lucky women controlling the lives of unlucky women. That is the way of the world. The weak must accept their place: perhaps they sinned in a previous life, perhaps they've simply not lived enough lifetimes. They feed their suffering into the furnaces of the gods and the twice-born, daring only to hope that their next life will be better.
It was Mr. Veloo's mother who had suggested that he marry Sujata's older sister. The girl's family had borrowed more money from him than they would've been able to pay in four generations. "I told him," Mr. Veloo's mother was to explain later, "to ask for the oldest girl, and tell them he would cancel half the debt in return." When he came home and announced that he'd cancelled the whole thing in return for both girls, his mother and all his wives had called him an idiot and a fool.
"Arre, I could not believe it!" his mother would say whenever she told the story, always as dismayed, always as indignant as she'd been on the day it happened. "I told him, it's bad enough their mother died in childbirth, even the older one will hardly know how to do anything I tell you, but at the very least she might give you a son or two. Cooking cleaning housework all who do you think would've taught them, I asked him. Their senile grandmother? Their aunties, each one with eleven, twelve children of their own? On top of that he went and took the younger girl also!" She would sigh weightily and fan herself with one exasperated hand; she would summon a servant to fetch her coconut-frond fan before going on. "Hai, hai, that one," she'd continue at last, her fan beating like the heart of a small animal, "that one even a dog-baby she won't have, maddayan, I told my great son, why do you think the father has locked her away out of sight all these years? Nobody who goes to the house has ever laid eyes on that girl. I think my son agreed to marry her because he could not control his hunger for young-young girls. You know what I asked him to his face? Next time a four-year-old also you'll take for a wife, is it? That's what I asked him, point blank, just like that. I'd had enough of it." She'd turn her head and spit a scornful stream of betel juice into the nearest drain. "The boy" -- always, until the end of her days, Mr. Veloo's mother called her son "the boy," even when he was fifty-five years old, gouty and completely grey -- "the boy just looked at me like a buffalo. Like he also had no brains, just like the girl he'd picked. Hai, hai, what to do? For nine months we carry our children, in what pain we bear them, and then they throw our wisdom in our face only. Even at that time I told him, only the idiappam man has laid eyes on that girl. One evening on his rounds he accidentally saw her, and he also said there was something funny about her. Mind and body both stopped growing when she was five years old, the idiappam man said. But still my great son stood there and looked at me like I was talking Chinese. Your other wives and I, I told him -- mark my words, I told him -- your other wives and I will have to take both girls and keep them on our heads only, feed them bathe them put them to bed. Watch and see. And sure enough, what I said came true, isn't it?"
In fact -- though Mr. Veloo's mother never pointed this out, and after the war she stopped telling the story altogether -- the older girl turned out to be useful enough. She had strong, sinewy arms for grinding spices, and she knew how to drive a hard bargain with the tradesmen who came to the back door. And Mr. Veloo's mother's predictions concerning her childbearing potential proved accurate: in three years she bore him three children, two of which were boys.
All that time, Sujata remained childless. They say that on her wedding night Mr. Veloo let her sit on the edge of the bed for hours, playing with the chains of jasmine flowers that had been strung from the canopy. Mr. Veloo's mother and his older wives could hear her late into the night, talking to herself and singing her nonsense. When they could no longer bear it one of them said, "What is this, all night long he's going to let her sit and sing or what?" and they marched in a procession into the nuptial chamber and asked him if he had gone mad, or lost his manhood, or both. But no sooner had they left than Mr. Veloo began to shout so loudly they feared the house would come tumbling down, and they charged back into the room to find that Sujata had bitten him hard on the shoulder. One of his wives later told a friend of hers that Mr. Veloo's sarong was still up over his waist when she and the other women burst into the room: he lay on his back in shock, his belly heaving with each breath, his thighs and balls glistening with the sweat of his alarm. The wife who divulged this detail giggled and covered her face and made her friend swear never to tell anyone, but the story got out as stories do, promise or no promise. Today, sixty years later, the image of Mr. Veloo with his sarong pulled up around his shoulders, his nether regions shining in the dim yellow light of his bedroom, remains stubbornly lodged in our memories.
Till the day he died he bore the scar of that night, a thickened patch you could see through his thin cotton singlets. He never tried to sleep with Sujata again, and the older women never tried to make him. At first they were all a little afraid of her, but as the memory of that night faded and Sujata proved herself to be nothing but a harmless half-wit, they began to boss her around again. She was never much use, though. Mr. Veloo's mother's prediction didn't quite come true, for the older wives did not feed Sujata or bathe her or put her to bed, but the only service Sujata ever provided was to do the day's marketing and rattle off her precise, rapid-fire accounts.
When the older wives sent her out to gather the eggs from the chicken coop, she broke half of them and wiped the yolks in her hair. When they sent her to the back door to pay for the firewood she sang for the tradesman, made a noise like a train, and then -- when he laughed contemptuously and asked her if she had chicken shit in her head -- lifted her skirt to show him her naked bottom. During the day she fell asleep while watching the others work; at night she sat in the kitchen inventing words and stringing them together into mad tunes that scurried off her tongue for hours on end. "So so, you praying to your secret gods again, is it?" Mr. Veloo's oldest wife would cackle as she dragged her off by her hair or an ear. "You dreaming you selling something or what?" she'd tease as she locked her into the store room so that the family could sleep.
Sujata ate almost nothing at all at the table, but in the afternoons they caught her scavenging in full view of neighbors and passersby, eating handfuls of peppery weeds from the cow pasture, a chicken bone from the dustbin, a fish-head someone had thrown to the cats. She held her food up to her mouth with both hands and gnawed speedily around the edges, working her way in like a rat until the whole thing was gone. Mr. Veloo's older wives were constantly trying to keep her from eating poisonous berries and nettles, but really it was luck that preserved her, and not their efforts, since by the time they came upon her she was usually snapping up the last fibers of whatever she'd found, withdrawing her fingers from her own sharp, quick teeth at the very last moment. "Eh thevadia!" one or the other of them would shriek. "You want the whole town to think we have no food in the house or what? How you think it looks, hanh, Veloo saar's wife eating rubbish from the dustbin?"
On Sujata's fifteenth birthday Mr. Veloo's mother caught her suckling with the newest litter of baby goats, pushing her mouth in among the others and pulling at the nanny goat's sore teats with her lips. She punished the girl by making her kneel on all fours in the yard and bleat like a goat until dinnertime, so that when Mr. Veloo walked past her on his way to the banana grove he had to be told what had happened. "Why not turn into a real goat once and for all?" he scolded, knocking the top of her bowed head with his knuckles. "Hanh? Then at least you'd be useful for something." The girl looked blankly at him, pulled up a fistful of grass, and stuffed it into her mouth roots and all. When he turned away, shaking his head, she sniffed and rubbed slowly at her nose with one index finger. Her eyes suddenly large and moist, she chewed her grass and watched his broad back recede, the old scar from her bite making a lump under his singlet.
"That bloody girl is far more trouble than she's worth," Mr. Veloo's ancient mother reminded him every day. "You got nicely-nicely cheated, I tell you." Then Mr. Veloo would grunt and bellow for his breakfast or his tea. He didn't like to admit that his mother was right, but it was true.
When the first rumors about the Japanese Army began to circulate, Mr. Veloo started to panic. Every evening we heard his radio blasting the latest news; afterwards we saw him pacing by the mango tree, muttering to himself. In the south, Japanese planes were bombing Singapore; in the north they'd landed in Kota Bahru and were sweeping ineluctably down the north-south road. Mr. Veloo wasn't alone, after all; we all felt their grip tightening around the tiny town of Kuala Kangsar, around the clock tower, the bus stop, the whitewashed walls of Clifford School, as if these sat at the center of the Japanese commanders' strategic maps. All the way down the north-south road, or so the rumors went, they'd been raping and killing and rampaging, looting Chinese businesses, bayoneting Chinese babies, decorating town squares with severed Chinese heads on stakes. There were frightful stories of the horrors they'd visited upon women, though in the chaos of war you never knew what to believe. Someone's cousin from Kuala Krai passed through our town on her way south, still shaking, even after her six-hour ride in a fruit lorry, from the sight of three young girls with their breasts cut off. One night a muffled radio program, crackling with static, warned that Japanese soldiers were gang-raping women and girl children when they entered towns and found the men missing. And one of the last letters any of us received before the Japanese arrived in Kuala Kangsar contained a terrified paragraph about a woman whose legs they'd cemented together when she went into labor. We discussed these rumors late into the night, whispering in our orchards, clustering around each other's radios. We prayed that all the reports were exaggerated.
Some said the Indians had nothing to fear from the Japanese, but Mr. Veloo wasn't taking any chances. He had a lot more to lose than the rest of us. A fine, airy mansion with a banana grove behind it. A great deal of ornately carved mahogany furniture. Thirty-five cows, sixteen goats, and too many chickens to count. A Victrola phonograph, a vast collection of His Master's Voice Latin dance band records, an old mother with arthritis, four wives, twenty-two children, and seventeen (or so his retainers claimed) framed portraits of his ancestors. He sent his servant boys scurrying around town trying to hire a lorry, but there were no lorries to be hired. Everyone who owned one had driven themselves and their families off towards Siam. So he did the next best thing. He dispatched collectors to the homes of his debtors, with orders to seize bullock carts from those who could not pay. Those seven unfortunate families had to leave Kuala Kangsar on foot as the Japanese approached. We never saw them again, though often, on those long, idle nights immediately after the occupation, we wondered what had become of them. Among them had been the husband and wife who maintained the graveyard, whose job had to be given to another family without even a respectful wait. It wasn't our fault; there was much work to be done in the graveyard at that time. But Mr. Veloo's strategy certainly worked for him. After two days he'd assembled a sizable fleet of carts, enough for him to take all his people and some of his livestock up north, where his brothers prepared a hideout in an abandoned barn. Then he ordered his retainers to dig an enormous pit in the backyard and to fill it with whatever possessions could be carried out in time.
Japa-neece. I don't like that word. When they say it their eyes blink a lot and their teeth are sharp. Bombs they say. Guns. Killing people. Killing babies. I don't know how to have babies but this is what I know how to do: I know how to hear, that's the other thing about noises, they reach me before they reach anyone else. Sometimes that is good and sometimes that is bad. Now it is bad.
Bombs are louder than trains. Babies scream like something ripping and there are words I don't understand, even my mother doesn't understand these words though she understands everything else. They are ugly words like scratching your throat. And boots marching up and down and up and down. The words are louder than the boots but the boots never stop. You tell me which is worse.
My mother promises me I will be safe but then when the short lady comes and locks me up my mother slips away to hide.
Mr. Veloo had sixteen retainers, and still it took them five days to dig a suitably large pit. When they were done all his wives and children came out to look at it. There it was, large enough for the fine mahogany furniture, the Victrola phonograph, the framed portraits, the Persian rugs. We all went to see it, first the children, and then, when they came home babbling as if they'd seen a spaceship, the rest of us, in pairs and threes. It was huge, like an emptied-out lake or a meteorite crater, right there in Mr. Veloo's backyard; we'd never seen anything like it. Mr. Veloo's wives kept indoors for fear they'd fall into it. They confined the hens to their coop and tethered the cows and goats to posts. Then the whole family busied themselves with packing, with choosing what to bring on the bullock carts and what to store in the pit. Only Sujata, who could not, of course, be charged with any important decisions, had nothing to do in these last days. They say she spent hours standing at the edge of the pit as the men dug deeper and deeper, looking in, sometimes carefully lowering herself onto her backside and letting her legs dangle down. She never left her place; after every one else had come and looked at the pit on the fifth night and gone back indoors, she stayed at its edge, scratching her mosquito bites, humming to herself. The sunlight began to fail, but still she didn't come in. Through the kitchen window they saw her lie stomach-down on the damp earth and hang her face over the edge.
When a white moon appeared in the violet sky, Mr. Veloo's oldest wife sent one of the younger children to bring the girl in. He returned five minutes later without her, showing his empty hands as if he'd expected to catch her in them.
"Won't come," he said.
"What you mean won't come?" she snapped. "You told her I asked her to come in or not?"
"Told her, told her," said the boy. "But she lying there like dead only. Won't show her face also."
So Mr. Veloo's mother sent one of the older children to bring the girl indoors with a stick. "The other day she thinking she a goat, isn't it? So we must treat her like goat only," said the old lady. "Go and beat her legs with the stick and tell her if she don't come in we going to lock the door. She can sit outside and eat grass until morning."
But it was no use; when Sujata felt the blows of the stick on her skinny calves she only turned and smiled, and then closed her eyes again, still dangling her face over the edge of the pit. Mr. Veloo's mother and his oldest wife watched, bewildered, then, deciding that the battle was not worth fighting, shrugged and rapped on the shutters to summon the boy back indoors. Then they switched off the lights and went to bed.
Sujata was still there the next morning. The men built a wooden ramp leading down into the pit, and half them went down into it to receive and arrange the things the others carried out. Sujata retreated to a spot under the mango tree and squatted there, nibbling on seeds and stalks of grass and eyeing the men as they went back and forth from the house, carrying chests of drawers and coffee-tables, armoires and secretaries, pots and pans and raffia-reinforced crates.
They dug a big hole. I watched them dig it and it got bigger and bigger and when they were finished it was quiet inside like water.
Like holding your breath underwater. But it has a smell, too. A brown smell, you can lean your face into it and feel it go up your nose and then it's cool inside your head and very quiet. One by one the trains stop, the clocks stop, the bicycle bell stops, the drums and the nagaswaram, the temple priest, the goats and chickens and guns and bombs the screaming babies and ugly scratchy words everything stops. But my mother still sings.
Araro, ariraro.....
It's only two words but I like it.
Inside the hole it's not that man's house anymore, it's not Kuala Kangsar, it's not Malaya or England or earth. It's something nobody knows.
After they move all the things into the hole they'll pick up the house too, the outside parts I mean. The walls and doors and all. They'll pick it up and carry it to the hole and put it over all the things you know the tables and chairs the carpets and the big shiny thing that makes music. They'll think it's the same house but I know you see I'm not useless I know these things. The things that people can know reach my head before they reach anyone else and this is what I know: it won't be the same house. It'll be quiet and peaceful in there and nobody will stop my mother from singing all day. Maybe that man and the old lady and the short lady and the other ones and my sister will all still be there but it won't be the same.
We often wonder what happened when the men began to load the cows and goats onto the bullock carts. A dark cloud must've come over Sujata's face, that sullen frown-and-pout she pulled when she didn't want to do something. Maybe she dug her toes into the earth under the mango tree and crouched there, biting her lower lip. When the suitcases and trunks followed the cows and goats, she might've burst into tears and clung to the mango tree for solace, but no one would've paid her any attention. And finally, when the family climbed aboard the carts, the women hitching their sarees up above their knees, the children leaping lightly onto the piled suitcases, she probably -- it's easy to imagine, given how nimble the girl was -- sprinted to the pit and tiptoed gingerly onto a dresser that stood inside it. No one would've seen that splash of color streaking across the yard, that tiny, willful scavenger bird picking its way across the things that lay like great dying beasts in the pit. No one would've seen her hop from the top of the dresser onto a pile of crates, and from that onto a kitchen cupboard that lay on its side. But this is what everyone knows: at some point, perhaps between the padlocking of all the doors and the securing of the suitcases with rope, Sujata slithered down onto the bottom of the pit and rolled herself up tightly inside a Persian rug.
We imagine what the first showers of earth sounded like to her: the muffled sprinkling around and on top of the rug, the men's voices fading a little, as if an invisible hand were pulling them slowly upwards on a string; the shrill voices of the women slowly submerged; the crashes and thuds of dropped crates soft as pillows; the alarmed mooing of the cows faint as foghorns out at sea.
Though all of us shudder and shake our heads to this day when we recall the incident, it wasn't Mr. Veloo's original plan, or even his wives' or his mother's, to leave the girl behind. When every member of the family was settled in a cart, Mr. Veloo himself did a head count. This was the role his mother and his oldest wife let him play, clucking and retreating into the background themselves but keeping an eye on him nevertheless as he performed his man-of-the-house rituals. He ticked his retainers off on his fat fingers, then his children, and finally his wives. "Lakshmi, Tulsi, Manimala, Su-- " He paused. "Where is Sujata?"
No one had seen her for hours. Mr. Veloo ordered four retainers to get off the carts and fan out in search of the girl. They looked in the kitchen where she'd slept almost every night. They looked in the store room, the outhouse, the shed, the banana grove. Mr. Veloo sent off the first few carts carrying his mother, his oldest wife, and some livestock, but he and his men -- according to some accounts -- were still looking for Sujata when a little boy came dashing down the hillside, his face streaked with tears. He ran up to Mr. Veloo and grabbed the hem of his trousers with both hands. The men who'd been filling the pit dropped their shovels and spades. On the remaining carts the women and children stood up and clutched at each other.
"They're coming," the boy panted in Malay. "They've already passed the railway station, hundred two hundred of them, they got five lorries, I ran all the way here to tell people. Please Uncle, Rich Uncle, can you take me and my mother in your cart?"
For a moment there was only the sound of the boy's breath, desperate as the gasping of a fish out of water. Then under it there rose an unmistakable rumbling, and the soft pop of distant gunfire.
"That's it," barked Mr. Veloo. "You fellas stay and find the bloody girl and finish covering up the pit, then come when you've finished. I can't be risking my life and my children's lives for her."
There's always been some disagreement on what happened to the little boy and his mother. Mr. Veloo's wives and some of his servants remember that he pulled the boy up onto his own cart and stopped and got the boy's mother on their way out of town. Others say the carts began to pull away without taking further notice of him, and the boy, crying, hung by his hands from the back of one of the carts for almost a mile before falling off and being shot by the Japanese a few hours later. But because no one but some members of Mr. Veloo's own household saw the little boy that day, and because neither the boy nor his mother were ever seen or heard from again, and because, most curiously of all, none of us remembers a Malay family that lived at the top of the hill, there are those among us who maintain that there never was a little boy, and that the Japanese were in fact miles away when Mr. Veloo left. They say that he had positioned himself in the choicest place on the first cart, and that the cart was already moving before he realized that Sujata was missing. Without climbing down, he ordered his men first to finish covering the pit, and then to find the girl before joining him in the countryside. The truth is, people whisper behind their hands, he was secretly hoping they wouldn't find her. The truth is, he figured she'd cost him enough already.
It's difficult to say if those of us who tell this version of the story are simply the ones who had always been jealous of Mr. Veloo, of his wealth, his Victrola, his virility. Did Mr. Veloo send out a search party only because it was his public duty as a husband, whatever his private feelings (and however much the scar on his shoulder still throbbed when he sweated too much)? In truth, was he hoping even as he ordered the search that it would be fruitless? In a way it doesn't matter, because the story ends the same way no matter which version we choose. Mr. Veloo, his mother, his first three wives, and all their children made their way safely out to the barn in the countryside where his brothers were waiting. The retainers followed soon after, having abandoned the pit the moment they heard gunfire and lorries just down the hill. Years later one of the retainers, who married the daughter of the bottle-shop owner, would still sneer when he remembered their quiet mutiny. "Yah, big-shot only the Boss Man," he'd say, "he himself took off in style but expected us to risk our lives for his chairs and tables and his no-brain wife. If you want to buy expensive furniture and marry stupid women, then you only should carry all those things on your own back, isn't it? No way, we decided. No way we were going to stand there with our spades and our cangkuls and wait for the Japanese bastards to find us! That side he left, this side we threw down our cangkuls and followed behind him."
Only a thin layer of dirt lay at the bottom of the pit when the retainers left, so that all the mahogany furniture and all the framed portraits remained out there in the open, all stacked up neatly in one place as if the family had merely tried to simplify the arduous task of looting for the Japanese Army. When darkness fell the Victrola's brass finishings gleamed in the moonlight. Just before the Japanese arrived, the sundry shop owner's son, passing through on his own furtive way into the countryside, caught sight of the gleam and dropped lightly into the hole to see if he might find anything he could fit on the back of his old bicycle. He took a small Chinese vase and twelve embroidered place mats, but before he could pick his way further through the treasure the lorries pulled up in the yard and he sprinted to a spot behind the mango tree from where he could see, just in front of him, the marks Sujata's heels had left as she'd squatted there all day. Not until the Japanese soldiers unrolled the Persian rug with howls of amusement did he realize that she'd been in the pit the whole time, but by then it was too late for him to do anything but save up her story, along with the vase and the place mats, and tell it months later when the bombing had stopped and he and the other townspeople had come out of hiding. What happened that night changed him forever, though: even now, seventy-five years old, he trembles when he sees black boots. Even now he has to have at least three beers before he tells the story in full, and then he spills his drink and stumbles, his voice barely audible, on the simplest of words. He remembers what each soldier did to her, and how they egged each other on. He remembers how her voice gave out without warning after she'd been screaming for ten minutes. He remembers the dull crack of the youngest soldier's gun against her cheekbone when she tried to bite him. And he says he remembers -- though of course he doesn't, of course he was too far away to hear this -- the sound of her blood bubbling up through her lungs when at last one of them plunged his bayonet into her belly.
Mr. Veloo and his household camped out in the barn for three months, subsisting on boiled rice and salted fish, and when the worst of the fighting was over they moved to a house in Taiping where they waited out the Japanese occupation. After the Japanese left and the British came back, Mr. Veloo built himself a new house, even bigger than the one he'd left in Kuala Kangsar, and had a banana grove planted behind it. He filled his new house with a great deal of ornately carved mahogany furniture, a new Victrola, a vast collection of Latin dance band records. He hired new retainers, because of course, after how they'd disobeyed his orders, he no longer trusted his old ones.
And Sujata? You can still see a mark shaped like five outstretched fingers on a small boulder just a few feet from where the pit used to be. Some say it's her hand print, because the boulder was the last thing she grabbed. And the more superstitious among us -- mostly women and young girls -- say that when you walk through the scrub where Mr. Veloo's old mansion used to be you can hear her light footsteps, tripping along behind you.
Arre HURRY up don't drop that box faster FASTER stupid boy go and bring the OTHER bag locked the back door already or NOT hurry up no NO ENOUGH goats already no place leave that one behind the house put the SMALL box on TOP of the big box and on and on like that stopping and starting and stopping and starting and it was very loud and even inside the hole I could hear them they were very loud.
Then quieter and quieter and my mother's voice clearer and clearer. My mother's voice pushed the other voices down and it was quiet like water inside the hole. Like holding your breath underwater. But it had a smell, too. A brown smell a grey smell a big grey smell.
There were some noises maybe, I think so I remember, but I'm not sure. My ears don't trap the noisy noises so much anymore. But maybe somebody whistling, and breathing fast fast fast like a mouse you catch in your hand, and scrabbly feet like chicken claws quick and scrabbly in the night. Somebody whistling a funny tune and running away. Then maybe I think so lorries. Maybe boots and things and ugly words and I think so a goat died I think so they shot it I heard it cry I felt sorry. But my carpet you see I had a carpet here and my mother sang to me and some things scraped against my carpet on the outside and someone laughed a lot and there were things that were cold and hard and hands that were even worse than wings but my carpet you see my carpet was a flying carpet and I flew on it.
Araro, ariraro.....
Over the green mountains and across the water. Quiet as the water quiet as the sky. And that's how it was and that's what reached me before it reached anyone else. My ears trapped the quiet and held on to it and it was just for me.