Passage of Arms (2 page)

"Yes, yes. It is best. We will forget."

Girija smiled benignly and moved away. He knew that they were watching him and wondering fearfully if he would betray them to the Lieutenant. He had no intention of doing so; but there was no point in telling them that. They would not quite believe him ; and in any case they had served their purpose. He had found out what he wanted to know.

II

Girija was born of Bengali parents at Cawnpore in the United Provinces of India. He had five sisters but no brothers. When he was six his father, the subahdar, went to London with a detachment of his regiment to march in the coronation procession of King George the Sixth. During his stay, the subahdar was taken on a. conducted tour of the city which included visits to the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the British Museum, the Law Courts, Battersea power station, and, for some obscure reason, a factory in Acton where bus bodies were made. He returned to India laden with souvenirs and fired with ambition for his only son. The Law Courts had particularly impressed him. Girija would become a lawyer, or, failing that, a policeman.

Girija became neither. The subahdar was killed at the battle of Alamein, and Girija spent the next three years in a military orphanage at Benares. When the war ended, however, his mother wrote to a brother, who had a cotton goods business in Singapore, explaining that she had only her widow's pension and asking if she might join him with the children. The prospect of securing this windfall of cheap labour appealed to the brother, and he replied sending passage money. In December nineteen-forty-six the family sailed as deck passengers from Calcutta. With them went the subahdar's medals and the precious
souvenirs
of his visit to London; the coronation mug, the picture postcards, the newspaper cuttings, the photographs, the ash-tray from the Warrant Officers' mess at Chelsea Barracks, and the bus body manufacturer's catalogue.

In his last year at the orphanage Girija had been taught book-keeping, office organisation and the jargon of commercial letter writing. The uncle in Singapore found him useful; so useful, indeed, that after three months he got rid of the book-keeper to whom he had been paying forty dollars (Straits) a week and replaced him with Girija to whom he paid twenty. Girija was sixteen then. He stayed two years in Singapore. During them, he learned Malay and a smattering of Cantonese, and made friends with a Parsee who worked in the offices of a Chinese financial syndicate.

At that time, shortage of capital, ill health brought about by internment, or sheer hopelessness engendered by the early successes of the terrorists were persuading many British rubber planters in Malaya to sell out. The Chinese syndicate was buying. It was through his Parsee friend that Girija heard that the new manager of a recently acquired estate in the north was asking the Singapore office for a clerk.

His uncle was angered by Girija's decision to leave him, and talked darkly of getting a court order requiring Girija to repay the cost of his passage from Calcutta. To his astonishment the bluff failed. Girija, whom he had come to regard as a pliant and somewhat timid young man, not only laughed loudly and made a disrespectful noise with his lips, but also threatened to take his mother and sisters north with him unless their wages were immediately doubled. There was a shrill Bengali family quarrel during which Girija uttered a further and more compelling threat. He had made a secret analysis of his uncle's accounts which he was prepared to send to the Inspector of Taxes. The uncle wept and spoke of ingratitude, but capitulated.
  
Girija's mother embraced her son proudly and said that he was his father's true heir.

When the time came for Girija to leave, however, he asked her for only one thing that had belonged to his father; the bus body manufacturer's catalogue. His sisters were relieved. They had been afraid that, as a man, he would feel himself entitled to the subahdar's medals.

The catalogue was a quarto size book with a brown cover on which the name of the manufacturer was embossed in green. Inside there were forty-eight pages of thick, shiny paper displaying the specifications of twenty different types of buses together with colour illustrations of the exteriors and interiors of each. There were double-deckers and single-deckers, buses designed to enable the driver to collect fares, and buses designed to carry conductors. There were twelve
seaters,
twenty-four
seaters
and sixty
seaters.
There were buses for long distances and buses for local services in cities, for cold climates and for hot. The cover was dog-eared from much handling and some of the pages were loose. There was an ink stain on the title page. It was Girija's most treasured possession.

As a small boy he had sat for hours turning the pages, studying the illustrations and re-reading the text. He had, in the end, come to know it by heart. At the orphanage, when he had been separated both from his mother and the catalogue, he had found comfort in reciting it to himself, beginning with the Foreword by the Chairman ("In presenting to our customers all over the world this, the Eighteenth Edition, of our Catalogue and Price List, we are proudly conscious that . . .") and finishing with the specifications of a forty seat medium range staging coach (available on A.E.C. or Commer chassis) "as supplied to the Argentine Government. Price £8,586, f.o.b. London."

One day, in the streets of Benares, he had seen a new bus that he thought he recognised as a modification of one of those listed in the catalogue. It had been just starting away and he had run for almost half a mile before he had caught up with it at a stopping place. Breathlessly he had searched for the body manufacturer's name-plate. The bus had been moving off again before he had found it; but it had been the right plate and a wave of excitement had swept over him. From that moment, he had known exactly what he wanted to do in the world. He would operate a bus service.

His first letter to the body manufacturer had been written from Singapore on his uncle's business stationery. He had been aware for some time that the original catalogue from London, precious though it was and always would be, was now very much out of date. Nevertheless, the decision to send for the latest edition had not been easily taken. For some reason that he had been unable to account for, it had seemed almost like an act of treachery.

However, the arrival of the new catalogue had given him other things to worry about. The catalogue itself had been magnificent. Unfortunately, it had been accompanied by a courteous latter from the sales manager, informing him that the company's Far Eastern representative, Mr.
W. W. Beiden,
would shortly be visiting Singapore and would take that opportunity of meeting Mr. Krishnan and discussing his fleet requirements with him personally. For weeks Girija had gone in fear of
W. W.
Belden's arrival at his uncle's office and the humiliating scenes that would ensue when the truth was known. But Mr.
Beiden
had never come, and eventually Girija had drawn the correct conclusion. Mr.
Beiden
had investigated the financial status of this new prospective customer and decided not to waste his time.

His prudence had been understandable. The cheapest twenty-four
seater
now cost over three thousand pounds ; almost double the price of the cheapest bus in the nineteen-thirty-six catalogue. But one thing in the new edition had caught Girija's eye; a quotation from a trade journal devoted to the interests and activities of road transport operators. Girija had found that this journal could be obtained in Singapore, and had bought a subscription. From the articles it published he began to learn about the economics of public transportation. By the time he went to work for Mr. Wright, he had acquired a reasonably realistic view of his chances of achieving his life's ambition. Unless he could find a working capital of at least twenty thousand dollars (Straits) his chances of starting even the most modest country bus service were non-existent.

III

Girija had a one-room atap house in the estate compound, and an arrangement with one of the servants at the Wrights' bungalow to keep it clean. There were Indian families of his own caste living in a village six miles away, and on Saturdays he would cycle over there for tiffin. One of the families had an attractive daughter named Sumitra, whom he thought he would one day marry. However, during the week, the curfew kept him at home, and there he always cooked his own food. Sometimes, he would go back to the office after he had eaten his evening meal and do some more work before going to bed; at others, he would listen to Radio Malaya and read and dream.

On the evening of the day of the ambush, he stayed late in the office trying to make up for the time he had lost by going with the burial party. The following morning he would have to drive in with Mr. Wright to the bank at Bukit Amphu to cash the weekly wages cheque, and he had not yet completed the time sheets.

The work required care and concentration and he was glad of it; for it postponed the moment when he would have to entertain once more the dangerous thoughts which had come to him in the morning.

The things he had observed at the scene of the ambush, and learned from the two tappers, had made it possible for him to reconstruct the recent history of the dead men with reasonable certainty.

They had only recently arrived from the north and were relatively inexperienced. Of that he was sure. Their use of the easy route offered by the gully showed that. True, they had had a lot to carry, but that did not excuse carelessness. In an area where British patrols were being supplied by the R.A.F., a fact which they could scarcely help knowing, they had not even troubled to send scouts on ahead to feel the way, but had blundered straight into the ambush in a body.

The Lieutenant's opinion was that they had been on their way to mine the main road. Girija did not agree with that. The quantity of ammunition they had been carrying was out of all proportion to the needs of such an operation. And how was the lack of cooking utensils and food supplies to be explained if they were going so far from their base ? To Girija there seemed only one possible explanation. What the Lieutenant's patrol had ambushed was a supply column on its way to deliver mines and ammunition to another gang operating farther south.

It had been at this point in his argument with himself that Girija's heart had begun to beat faster, and that an unpleasant sensation had come to his stomach. If his reasoning were correct it could mean only one thing. The base camp near Awang was a guerrilla arms dump.

He finished his work, locked up the office and walked slowly back across the courtyard to his house. It was a warm, humid night. He took off his shirt and khaki drill shorts, washed himself carefully all over and then put on a dhoti. There was some lentil soup in an iron saucepan. He lit the oil burner under it and sat down to wait.

What had disconcerted him had been not so much the nature of his thoughts, as the way in which they had presented themselves. He did not regard himself as being fundamentally honest or dishonest, idealistic or corrupt, law-abiding or delinquent. He did not think of himself as definable in such terms. His dilemmas had always been capable of resolution into simple questions of choice. Choice A would be wise (advantageous). Choice
B
would be stupid (disadvantageous). The discovery that his mind could explore enthusiastically the possibility of his committing a major crime, with only a belated and distasteful glance at the path of rectitude, had been disturbing.

And a major crime it undoubtedly would be.

He had heard about these dumps and caches. It was known that the arms were brought in by professional smugglers operating from beyond the Thai border and employing different routes from those used by the guerrillas. A number of consignments had been intercepted; but it was generally believed that a far greater number always got through. Terrorists captured far to the south in the Kuala Lumpur area had been found to be in possession of substantial quantities of weapons, ammunition and explosives of the same pattern as those intercepted in the north. It was said that there were not enough troops in the whole of Malaya to patrol the border with Thailand effectively.

Just before the burial party had finished its work that morning the Malay sergeant and four more soldiers had arrived with packing crates strung on bamboo poles. When the ammunition and grenades had been loaded into the crates, they were taken off to the compound. While the machine pistols were being gathered up, Girija had asked the sergeant a question.

The sergeant had looked down at the machine pistol in his hands and shrugged. "How should I know what they cost?"

"But don't you know how much your own cost, Sergeant? Supposing a man lost one."

"He would be court-martialled."

"But surely he would have stoppages of pay, too?"

"Oh yes.
 
Two hundred dollars perhaps."

"So much?"

"They do not grow on trees."

The sergeant had gone. Girija had turned and looked at the row of graves. Each man had had a machine pistol; and ammunition was costly stuff. It was more than likely that what the ten men had been carrying between them was worth anything up to three thousand dollars. It would be interesting to know how much more there was where that had come from.