‘Never you mind who I am. Just remember what I have told you. And Commy bastards like you don’t have a God, which proves that you’re just a wind bag like the rest of them.’

With that the Englishman turned abruptly and left. Sharkey only realised that he was the pilot when, sinking his beer in a furious rage, he went and looked over the railings and saw his unwanted Pom stepping into a small speedboat and going back to the harbour.

Cursing under his breath, he wondered how many of the drinkers at the bar had heard the exchange. It made him even more determined for the Conference to be a success and he spent much of the rest of the voyage rehearsing his script, my ‘battle plan’ as he called it.

At Rangoon he took a rickshaw around the town, although it was against his gut instinct to sit in a two-wheel vehicle pulled by a bare-footed human. He was appalled by the poverty and squalor: it was his first visit there and, talking to his table mates at meals, he was told that Calcutta was even worse.

Once the boat had docked at Calcutta and the medical and immigration officials had interviewed each passenger, it was, thankfully, time to disembark. He was about to head off the boat when a voice said, ‘Excuse me, Sahib. Are you Mr Sharkey?’

He spun round on hearing his name and saw a man with a slight ‘outward’ squint, heavily hirsute with a pockmarked puffy face. His speech was a bit difficult to understand and the Australian soon saw why – the man’s moustache covered a hair lip.

‘Yes, I am Lance Sharkey but I’m not a sahib. I’m a prole.’

His questioner grinned. ‘That is our goal, all to be prole,’ and extended his hand. ‘I have come to meet you and escort you to your accommodation for the Youth Congress. My name is Vikas Bugga, a proud Bengali, trooper not snooper.’

Calcutta! It soured Sharkey’s soul as he gazed around: how sordid it looked and how horrible it smelt from close quarters. He stared in fascinated horror at the crowds of teeming humanity, ever milling, scantily dressed and depressingly poor, either volubly gesticulating in strident tones or dejectedly silent, avoiding eye contact wherever possible. The turbans, the beards, the dhotis, the shirts outside the trousers, the pyjamas by day were as he had expected and didn’t much offend him. What did, though, were the blind, the beggars, the wheedling children, the laden women, the old and rheumy-eyed, the young but prematurely shrivelled, everywhere eddying and churning in kaleidoscopic patterns in the hot, sticky, fetid air, the scavenging dogs and the bare-ribbed horses pulling over-loaded tongas. He felt many eyes were on him – a white man with an Indian travelling by tonga – huge precocious eyes of children, tormented yet at the same time covetous, and, from a distance, tender, forlorn and velvety eyes of girls glancing at him. The raucous black crows and skeletal cows wandering in the streets with an air of indifference were the only living creatures seemingly unaffected by the heat, the clamour and the squalor. Even so, life throbbed and swirled despite everything wearing an aura of dilapidation.

Sitting together, Vikas and Lance talked. ‘Our Plenum will be held in the same place as the Youth Conference.’

‘I have to leave the day after the Plenum finishes. That is the Indian government’s stipulation on my visa being granted,’^[4]  Sharkey lamented, wishing he could have a cold beer.

‘In that case, what I’ll do is to see if there is a boat steaming out Singapore-way on that particular day, isn’t it? We have a couple of days before the Conference starts on the 19th. It lasts till the 25th.’

‘Good on yer,’ was all Sharkey managed to say as he wiped his sweaty forehead. ‘For crying out loud, what have the Brits done for Calcutta in all the years they have been here? Look at it: never seen such a mess.’

‘I agree, I agree, Mr Sharkey. But there were so many refugees when partition created East Pakistan. But the population increased more when many thousands arrived as penniless refugees from the famines during the war. And the place deteriorated even more because of the terrible killings last year.’

Sharkey nodded his understanding. He knew that the underlying problems of poverty had been there for centuries.

‘I have booked you into the Garuda Hotel in a modest room. It is just off Koletola Street, to the north of Bow Bazaar. The Asian delegates are also there.’

Sharkey stifled a yawn. The names meant nothing to him, so he said nothing. Bugga took his silence as interest and went prattling on, ‘and the Conference and the Plenum will be held in the same large hall, already booked in Wellesley – he was a great British General from Great Britain, ha, ha – Street, off Park Street, near Chowringhee, not far from the Christian cemetery.’

‘Chum, that’s where I’ll be soon although I am a practising atheist. I don’t have a map and the names mean nothing to me – yet,’ he added, realising he had to soften what might be taken as a snub.

‘Here we are,’ the Bengali called out a few minutes later as the tonga came to a halt. ‘The Garuda Hotel. This is where we’re booked. Bring your kit with you and come inside.’

A bare-headed man in a suit and tie came out to meet them. Sharkey noticed his beak-like nose and strange, jutting mouth with a thin upper and a thick lower lip which protruded beyond a sullen, bony jaw, a rugged, ugly face but it had a pleasant smile. He called out, ‘Welcome, welcome to you,’ and told the tonga walla he’d pay him directly and walked over to Sharkey. ‘You must be Mr Sharkey. I am Mr Dutt.’ His voice was well modulated. They shook hands. ‘Excuse me being booted and suited but not hatted or spatted but I have to play a part. You are sensible to be casual.’

He could tell from the dull look in the Australian’s eyes that the allusion to ‘spats’ was lost on him.

Sharkey wiped his brow. Could I do with an ice-cold beer or even two while I’m about it? It’s that hot! By mid-March Calcutta had started to heat up during the day.

‘Tell you what, Mr Dutt,’ said Sharkey, armpits of his shirt dark and damp. ‘I don’t know about you but I could do with, in fact, desperately need, a glass of ice-cold beer I’m that thirsty.’

‘Then your luck’s out, my friend, I fear. Everywhere in Bengal, in the whole of India come to that, except in registered places, is dry. Nothing hard and no beer. Sorry,’ waggling his head.

Sharkey just couldn’t believe his ears. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’ he asked hopefully.

‘No, indeed I am not.’ Mr Dutt saw a look of anguish on the Australian’s face. ‘You’ll have to be content with a cup of tea or a squash while you’re here but if you book in at the Great Eastern Hotel as a foreigner, you can drink all you want with a doctor’s certificate as a certified alcoholic,’ and may your Christian God, if you as a dedicated Communist even have one, have mercy on your liver as well as on your soul.

While Sharkey was booking in, Mr Bugga espied Padamsing Rai coming down the stairs. With him was an odd, elemental, narrow-shouldered, long-necked Chinese man, slightly stooped with a worried look on his deeply pockmarked face that had a mouth as thin and cruel as a well-healed knife wound. Padamsing brought him over and introduced him, nameless, merely as a guest of Lee Soong. Although his English was good, he had few words to say. When he spoke, his voice sounded like fingernails being drawn down a blackboard. No one had any idea he was a member of the Chinese Security Service, the Kwok Ka On Chuin Bo.

***

The representative of the MGB had contacted the senior member of each group individually, given him to understand that there would be a channel for future work between the pair of them. No details were yet ready but, after the conference was over, each one was assured that, even without his knowing of it, contact, two-way if necessary, would be established over the coming months. Code names would be issued and used. The impression given was that each person was the only one to be contacted. However, in case of that one becoming a casualty, a stand-by would have to be detailed. Although it would probably be impossible to keep all this an absolute secret, if and when its existence became known, it would add to the mystique of an unplaced mystery. Not said was that the location of the Soviet controller would only ever be made known to a strictly limited group of the already indoctrinated and then its real task would always be disguised as, for instance, a normal Soviet consulate.

Soviet planning, though strict, was often shoddy. In this case the representative from Malaya was not told about such an arrangement but, in the manner of such secrets, vague details leaked out over the coming years. The Soviet planners, all in fact Russian, emphasised that the one common thread running through all the colonial powers, including the Japanese in the late war, but not quite so much in the case of the British, was thinking that they were superior in almost every aspect than the people over whom they ruled. It was ironic that the Russians themselves were probably the most ‘racist’ of all.

***

The conference programme included sessions for those already fighting their colonial masters, the Indonesians and Indo-Chinese, who would be asked to address the meeting. Language had become a bigger, much bigger, problem that had been considered initially when planning the conference. Stupidly, or perhaps arrogantly, the Russian advisors had presumed that the language would be either English or Hindi, quite forgetting that delegates from Indo-China would not know English but French and, likewise, those from the Dutch colony wouldn’t know either but, presumably, Dutch. Getting an interpreter for both languages had been a problem but had been overcome by finding, after great difficulty, one of each language in Calcutta – but the expense!

The two delegates from the Dutch colony were splutteringly annoyed when their country of origin was put on the list of delegates as ‘Dutch East Indies’. As soon as the war had finished in August 1945 the commander of the Nippon forces in the area, the 16th Army, Major General Nagano, on orders from Tokyo, had ordered that the occupying troops hand the country back to the inhabitants as the Republic of Indonesia. None of the conference planners had realised this, so hackles had unwittingly been ruffled. The journey to Calcutta had been fraught as well as being difficult to arrange and both delegates, Akbar Salleh and Atmaji Anugerah, felt that their presence had been taken too lightly.

‘Which one of the Indonesian delegates would like to address the meeting?’

Atmaji Anugerah put his hand up and walked to the rostrum. He was a tall man with a mean face and a wispy black beard, hard eyes and, in all, a commanding presence. The interpreter joined him.

‘Comrades, I come from Java. From what I have heard so far, I am inclined to think that the organisers of this conference have never been in as difficult a struggle as we have, since during the war and until now’ he began. There was a stir of interest and of uneasiness in the hall. Hadn’t they all suffered, indeed from childhood, by dominating colonial masters? What was this man getting at? ‘The Dutch regarded us natives as their permanent servants. They came and most of them spent their whole lives in our country. I gather that, here in India, the British came to work then mostly returned to their home country and in Indo-China most French likewise. Bad though they were, they were never the arrogant, inflexible and often cruel masters as the Dutch were, or tried to be, over us, making money for themselves with never a thought for us.’

Heads in the audience nodded. Whether or not the Dutch were worse or just as bad as the English or the French was not to be argued, they had all suffered in one way or another: that those who had not suffered in any way but who had prospered were, obviously, not in the lecture hall, nor would have been invited to the conference in the first place.

Atmaji Anugerah went on with his talk: ‘The Dutch army in Java surrendered to the Nippons,’ a name strange to the others, ‘after only nine days fighting so useless were they. We Indonesians suffered under the Nippons but they made our youth, I among them, into a Fatherland Defence Force and we were known as Pemuda – Youths – by the Nippons and Indonesians alike. We went into action by ourselves. We were formed into battalions and companies, and armed, drilled, exercised by the Nippons and then went into action on our own. Yes, we worked as an army. We were the army. All the Dutch people that the Nippons had interned when they invaded in 1942 were kept in their camps on a short diet with purposely limited medical supplies. This pleased us considerably as it was their turn to suffer.’ He stopped talking and his eyes took on a look that told his listeners that his mind was back in his home country, gloating. After a significant pause he pulled himself back from infinity and continued. ‘One day, in the August of 1945, we discovered that a 4-man recce group, with one of them being from the nearest village and who had escaped in 1942, had been brought to our shores in a submarine. They were landed not far from my village, a place called Subah, about halfway between Semarang and Batavia, now known as Jakarta. We were told that in Batavia there were signs saying “The Nippons must go. We are hungry”. We had no idea the recce group had come until one small detail gave their presence away. The man who had left Java in 1942 went to a farmer who was working in his fields and offered him some money for information.

‘He also brought some food, including palm oil, with him. We were short of food and the farmer took the stranger to his nearby shack and, with the palm oil, cooked a meal with the food he had been given none had eaten for a few years: tempeh, deep-fried, fermented soya beans and bakwan, vegetable fritters. Even krupuk udang, prawn crackers. Where the man from the submarine had brought the uncooked stuff from the farmer never found out and knew better than to ask.

‘The money he gave to the farmer was not rupiahs that had come into circulation under the Nippons but a brand new, crisp guilder, one with palm trees and mountains with the head of the Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, on one side and on the other the crest of the Nederlandsch-Indische Handelsbank, something we had not seen since pre-war. That just shows you can’t be too careful in every aspect, however small, that comes your way.

‘Without thinking anything of it, the farmer took the pre-war money to the market to buy some paraffin but the shop keeper, who was a sympathiser of ours, asked him how he got it, so unusual was it, so suspicious was he. The farmer told him. Why should he hide it as the man who gave it to him said he had been born in the village but had moved out when still a boy? The shop keeper handed the note to the Nippons. Why? As it was so unusual, he would have been closely asked about how he got it if it had been found in his possession. He dared not keep it. It was dangerous as it had to mean something not allowed. The Nippons ordered us Pemudas to search and yes, our whole battalion, hunted for them and after two days we found two of them, killed one and captured the other.’ A thrill went through his audience as his voice slid along each nerve in his listeners’ bodies. This was an exciting story, showing resolved, tenacity and courage.

‘The prisoner told us about the submarine and we learnt they were Australians. Why so few? To look for friends, which could only mean more invaders were coming. The Nippons were worried. But before the invaders came the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and the war ended. That meant the Nippons had to go back to their country but nobody knew quite when.’

He looked around, seeing how his audience was taking his talk, sensing they were with him. He scratched an itch in his nose and continued.

‘The Nippons had let us fly our red and white national flag since September 1944. They were stern. They had two types of punishments, for “combat insurgency”, or as they called it genchi shobun, on-the-spot-punishment, and genju shobun, punishment by law. They handed the defence of the country over to us and at the same time we became the Republic of Indonesia. The Dutch internees were still kept in their camps. They didn’t concern us. However, the leader of the 4-man groups came to visit the Nippons and us also, claiming that he had come to let the Dutch prisoners free.’ He shook his head. ‘In no way did we allow it. We did not apprehend the one remaining Australian because it was now peace time and he was not Dutch. We were in charge and some of the Nippons took our side and some took the Australian’s. That meant battles between them and us and, curse them, rival groups and us, that left so many dead we couldn’t count them, not that it mattered, the more the better because anyone not wanting to fight properly for his own country was better dead. The battle for men’s souls, often invisible, is always relentless.’ These sombre words affected everyone listening.

‘The Nippons who taught us most were the Kempeitai, the military police you could call them.’ Yes, everybody in the room knew all about the dreaded Kempeitai, the Nippons’ special service for political surveillance. ‘They were not under the command of any officer in Java as they were directly under their own boss in Tokyo. The man in charge of our lot was like the Indonesian dalang puppet master. They knew what they wanted and how to get it. Because the imperialists were still in internment camps and could not get out, some of the wasters of our society began to live in a way that was disgraceful. The lieutenant in charge of the Kempeitai cleared out all the rubbish, the opium users, the whores, the swindlers and such like. Killed them all. There was no trouble after that. That taught us what to do to the Dutch people in the prison camps. Kill them, either by letting them starve, letting them have no medicines or shooting them.

‘The Australian came to see us and begged us to help the prisoners, especially the women and children. No, never. That way they would never come back to take over our country.’

‘What about weapons and transport?’ someone asked him.

Atmaji Anugerah laughed derisively. ‘We used Japanese armoured vehicles, small arms weapons, artillery and tanks.’

‘Your Pemudas could manage all that by yourselves?’ asked almost disbelievingly.

That brought Atmaji Anugerah down to earth. He shook his head. ‘No, not to start with. But we had some older people who had been in the Dutch army and some of the Nippons helped us. The civilians were afraid of us and obeyed us instantly, but only when we were united. We did have another way of dealing with those who came silently to ravish our women.’ Again this drew everyone’s attention and the speaker’s self-confidence returned. ‘I’ll tell you about one incident, in brief: a man, just a poor farmer, who wanted to kill two Nippons, Kempeitai they were, who had barged into his house and had started to rape his daughter. Near his house was some jungle. Even though it was dark, he had to take his revenge, there and then. He groped his way to where lengths of young bamboo and bundles of strip-like ties were stacked ready for thatching work. Feeling for a bamboo the right length and thickness, pushing quietly with his blade rather than chopping, he trimmed the slender end to a sharp point. It was only a short distance from his house where he knew an alert sentry would be sitting while the Nippons were doing their worst to his daughter. The wind was gusting from the south, carrying away any slight noise. Taking half a dozen of the ties, carrying his impromptu spear butt-forward, the angry father set off on the most difficult stage of his task so far: getting through to the top end of the timber path unheard and unseen.’