In walked a middle-aged, suave Indian whom the Brigadier had met before but knew only slightly. ‘I am sorry to disturb you, Brigadier sahib. I know how frantically busy you are.’ The man’s English was perfect. ‘My name is Dutt, Anil Dutt.’
‘Not at all, not at all.’ The Brigadier had stood up, glad to stretch his legs. ‘Please sit down, Mr Dutt,’ the Brigadier said, pointing to a chair to one side of his desk. ‘I can certainly spare you some of my time.’
The Indian visitor had a 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. The Brigadier felt that there was something about him that did not ring true, hard to pin down quite what. For his part, the Indian, now seated, saw one whose eyes demanded attention, cool wells of reserve, flanked not by laughter lines but creases of careworn deliberation, belonging to one who was having a running battle without knowing who or what awaited him.
He’s on the defensive and a hard one. Will I be successful? Mr Dutt thought, refusing an offered cigarette, came straight to the point. ‘Brigadier. I am an advisor to a cabinet sub-committee. I have come to see you in your role of Commander, British Gurkhas India. We, too, are overburdened with new problems, to say nothing of a completely unwanted struggle over Kashmir. We can fully appreciate how hard you are finding moving your Gurkhas overseas.’
The Brigadier, a man of few words, nodded.
‘We have heard, true or false but probably true,’ the Indian continued coyly, ‘that standard accommodation both in Malaya and Hong Kong will not be ready for most units for at least another year.’
‘Yes, Mr Dutt. Indeed that is a problem but I don’t think it is as severe as you are making out.’ What business is it of his? What’s behind this? Why now when everything has been settled?
‘The purpose of my visit is, so far unofficially, to get your reaction to my government offering your government accommodation and all facilities, on payment of course, for a year while your accommodation is being built.’
The Brigadier, ever courteous as only an English gentleman can properly be, stood up. ‘I thank you, Mr Dutt, for your kind offer which I can tell you here and now I totally reject. It will not be worth my reporting it to the War Office in London,’ and, making for the door, opened it.[3]
The Indian left without a word and neither man offered his hand. I knew it would be hard to sell. I’ll have to alert Sharkey and let Pavel Dmitrievich Yerzin know. This last was Dutt’s MGB handler who had recently arrived in a ‘trade’ guise.
***
Friday 19-Tuesday 30 March 1948, Calcutta, India: The Conference of Youth and Students of Southeast Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence, familiarly known as the Southeast Asia Youth Conference – a youth being anyone up to thirty-five years old – lasting from the 19th to the 23rd of March, took place in Wellesley Street under the ægis of the Indian Communist Party but orchestrated by the Soviet MGB. Its organisers had thought that the shortened and unassuming title was a way of avoiding suspicion and undue scrutiny. Its genesis lay as far back as 1946 when Soviet anti-imperialist policy was formulated with the aim of indoctrinating those whose job would be to spread Communism all over colonial southeast Asia by teaching the participants how best to prepare for and then launch the Communist-inspired risings against the imperialist colonialists.
Apart from such representatives, the rough-tongued Secretary General of the Australian Communist Party, ‘Lance’ Sharkey, had accepted an invitation to attend and, as he was rated as a ‘star’, to address the meeting. He was a tactless, forceful bully, hostile to his own government and had never allowed anyone or thing to stand in his way. His face chimed in with his character, frowning, bellicose and alert for insults.
He had flown from Australia to Singapore and now, aboard the SS Rajula alongside Keppel Dock, hot and sweaty, he was parched. He quickly went to the nearest bar and ordered himself a pint of ice-cold beer. That went down in two long, gorgeous gulps. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, ordered a refill and sat down on a long-legged stool. Ignoring the other drinkers, he thought back to the recent past. Having got his visa, he had flown to Singapore the week before, staying in a small hotel in Beras Basah Road, not far from the Chinese comrade, Lee Soong, a fluent English speaker, who had been a member of the post-war British Military Administration’s Singapore Advisory Council as well as on the Town Committee of the Communist Party of Malaya, MCP. He had been to Prague the year before as a member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth and was a skilled operator.
Sharkey had paid a protocol visit to the new Secretary General of the MCP, Chin Peng. Nothing substantial was discussed and an invitation was given to the Australian to attend the MCP’s 4th Plenary Session on his return from Calcutta.
Thinking about what had happened to date and well into his third pint, Sharkey had not realised that the gangways had been withdrawn with the thick hawsers unwound from the bollards. Neither did the withering blast of her deep-throated horn make any impression on him as the SS Rajula slowly made her way out to sea, bound for Rangoon and Calcutta, nor did it register when the boat slowed down prior to letting the pilot off.
‘You Lawrence Sharkey?’ A drawling, upper-class, English voice intruded into his thoughts.
Sharkey looked around and saw a middle-aged Englishman in white uniform. ‘Yeah, what of it?’ was his surly answer.
‘Just come to warn you to keep your bloody Commy nonsense to yourself. You’re not the sort of person we like in this part of the world or on board. Understand?’
‘And who the eff are you, for God’s sake? An effing Pom dressed in fancy white.’
‘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.’
