Below is about one of the three person’s interview :
“Chapter 8 Ming’s account ( pg 27 )
The 116 Scarborough bus drops me off at Canmore Street and Half Moon Square. Five teenage boys rush down the steps of the bus before me and dash across the road. I turn towards Half Moon Square, an empty street lined by houses hidden behind hedges, shrubs and trees. I walk up the driveway to the front of Ming‘s house and ring the doorbell.
The day before, I called her to confirm our meeting.
―I am always at home, except when I am at the doctor‘s or out at aqua class,‖ Ming said. ―But some days I am better than others. Call me before you come.
Ming suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and Fibromyalgia1. She volunteers in weekly aquatic classes for CFS and Fibromyalgia sufferers. Ming meets with Fibromyalgia support groups regularly.
―I was standing above Hoover Dam in Las Vegas last year, Ming recalls. ―I closed my eyes and let the sun warm my face. At that very moment I realized that I wasn‘t in pain, just for a few seconds.‖ Ming smiles. Her laugh erases pain lines on her forehead.
Ming and I sit across from each other in her living room. Three family portraits in black frames sit on a piano.
―That one, I say, ―must have been taken in the studio next door to Wellend Goldsmith on Bowbazaar Street in Calcutta. The one run by the Chinese family.‖ I point at the yellowed picture. ―I recognize the background in the picture. My mother had a family picture taken there before I left for Canada. I still have it in my album.‖
Ming laughs. ―Oh, yes, all the Hakka had their family portraits taken by that Studio. I forgot the name of the studio.
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I compare the man in the picture with the woman sitting across from me. They have the same wire-straight hair, the same hooded eyes, the same square jaw, the same stocky build.
Ming laughs again. ―Yes, I do look like my father. We all do—my four brothers and my sister. But I think I am the most like him.‖
Like most of the Hakka in Calcutta, Ming‘s grandfather immigrated from Moi Yen, Guangdong Province, to Calcutta, India. He arrived in Calcutta in the late 1800s and took up shoe making. His opened his first shoe shop in New Market. He then sent for his wife. They had six children and Ming‘s father was the third.
I pulled my tape recorder from my purse and turned it on. Ming cleared her throat and began her account.
My father graduated from a Chinese language school. He then studied in an English language school. When he was 18 or 19 years old, he started helping out in his father‘s shoe shop. After a while, my father found that he preferred food preparation to leather working, so he opened a small Chinese restaurant in Calcutta. My dad‘s restaurant, Tien Yan, served steamed buns and dim sum stuff.
My grandfather contacted my granduncles and grandaunts in China, and they found a wife for my dad. It was an arranged marriage. My mom came from Moi-Yen, near my grandfather‘s village. She arrived in Calcutta in the 1940s. My mom had six kids. I am the youngest, born in 1953, in Calcutta.
One day, my dad met this guy from Digboi. They struck up a conversation and this guy said, ―I have a new cinema with a restaurant next door. Why don‘t you come and look the restaurant over?‖ So my dad said, ―Okay.‖ He went to Digboi, looked at the restaurant and signed the contract.
At first my father stayed in Digboi by himself, leaving my mother, my four brothers, my sister and me in Calcutta, living in my grandparents‘ house. In Digboi, my dad ran the restaurant and a catering business. Many English and Frenchmen lived in Digboi. They worked in the oil
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refineries and the oil fields. Many of them had their families with them. My dad became a popular caterer when these foreigners hosted parties.
In Calcutta my sister, my youngest brother and I studied at Moi Kong Chinese language school, and my three older brothers at an English language boarding school. Six months after my dad started his business in Digboi, my mom pulled us out of Moi Kong and we joined my dad in Digboi. My three elder brothers stayed in the boarding school in Calcutta until my dad transferred them to a school in Shillong much later. Digboi didn‘t have any elementary English language schools, so we hung around the house while my dad looked for schools for us to attend.
My father hired a tutor for us. Every day the tutor came to the house. Of course I was never there. The back door of the restaurant opened out to the back of the cinema. I used to sneak into the cinema and hide behind the curtains in front of the white canvas screen. Well, I used to hide there until the film started. I could hear the footsteps of the person who started the movie, you see. I waited until he was gone and then came out to watch the movie, for free. My sister and my brother never did that. I was the only one who sneaked into the cinema.
My father found a boarding school for my four brothers in Shillong. My eldest brother wanted to stay in Calcutta. So my dad transferred only my second and third oldest brothers to the boarding school in Shillong. Later, he registered my fourth brother in the same boarding school. My dad then registered my sister and me in St. Mary‘s Convent in Shillong. I was in St. Mary‘s for only one year. I transferred to St. Joseph‘s Day School the next year, in 1961. My father boarded me with a Hakka family nearby when I transferred.
My dad did really well. Everyone wanted to hire him for their parties. He also got the contract to cater the hotel next door to the cinema. I loved Digboi, although I was seldom there. I remember the air was so clean, although there were oil refineries and big structures like that right across the street from the restaurant. After I started school in Shillong, I only visited my parents during the holidays. It was great. My father had many friends. The French and Englishmen who worked in the oil fields and oil refineries had their families with them, and they always asked my dad to cater their parties. I think they became my dad‘s friends and I got invited to his friends‘ kids‘ birthday parties.
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In Shillong, I learned Cantonese and the local language, Khasi2. Mr. and Mrs. Lin, the family I boarded with, had many Assamese, Cantonese and Hakka friends, and they were always dropping by to visit. I think most of the Assamese originally came from Tibet. I learned Khasi from Mr. and Mrs. Lin‘s Assamese friends and also from my friends in school.
I don‘t speak Khasi or Cantonese now. I have forgotten how.
When the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident started, the Assamese shunned us. We became taboo. The Assamese taunted me and all the Chinese, like pulling the corners of their eyes upwards and shouting, ―Cheena, Cheena, Chin, Chin.‖ Sometimes they threw stones or rotten vegetables at us and yelled at us to go home. I had to change my route to school. I went through the back alleys and walked really fast. Most of my friends became my tormentors overnight.
Indian soldiers knocked on the door around the middle of November of 1962. It was five in the morning. Someone shook me awake. I opened my eyes and saw Mrs. Lin. ―Get up. We have to leave. We have to pack up a few clothes because the cops are here to take us.‖
The soldiers told us that they were there to evacuate us. They told us that they would protect us and they told us not to bring too much stuff. We will be back in no time, they said.
I was only 9 years old. I didn‘t know what was happening. I think I just grabbed some clothes. I didn‘t know I would end up in Deoli for four years.
The soldiers loaded us on a bus, dropped us at the local jail and locked us in. We stayed there for what seemed like months. But I think it was only for two weeks, maybe three.
In the four-story jail, we shared the rooms with people who had mental issues, with murderers and with thieves.
The jail got very crowded. All the Chinese from Shillong were put in this jail. I think there were some from the neighbouring towns, too, but most were from Shillong.
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In the jail, we Chinese stayed by ourselves. The Indians who had mental conditions sang and danced and we, the Chinese children, made fun of them, imitated them. At that age we didn‘t know better. After what seemed like months, we were all taken to a railway station and we were told we had to get on the trains and that we would be all taken to Rajasthan.
Later we found out the Chinese from other northern towns like Darjeeling and Makum were ―evacuated‖ to the local jails in their areas. The jails were like holding centres, I suppose. Some Chinese from Calcutta were evacuated to the Calcutta jails, we heard. We waited there until the government got all the Chinese they wanted evacuated. The Indian army then transferred us to Deoli Concentration Camp.
The soldiers took all the Chinese from the jail to a train station near Shillong. The train, with over 2,000 Chinese, started on its seven days journey to Deoli, Rajasthan. We got herded on to the train according to where we were evacuated from. My three brothers and I were assigned the same compartment, with the Chinese who lived in Shilling. The nuns hid my sister, so she wasn‘t evacuated.
My three brothers, you see, were on the foreign registry, so the Indian army knew where to find them. My sister wasn‘t. When the Indian army guys went to St. Mary‘s and asked the nuns if there were students with Chinese surnames in the school, the nuns said, ―No.‖ So the soldiers went away and my sister stayed in school, hidden, I guess. It was something like the last scene in The Sound of Music. I wasn‘t on the foreign registry but because I was staying with a Chinese family, I was picked up with them.
On the train we had a lot of military people around with guns on their shoulders and gun holsters on their belts. I was in the middle compartment in the long line of the train. Two soldiers guarded each compartment. We travelled all day and only stopped at a station for lunch. At some stations, we had to stay on the train and have all the shutters on the windows of the train turned down. The Indians at the stations pelted us with eggs or with stones and shouted at us.
A military guard stood at each door of the car. The car had two doors. The military people cooked for us. It was always rice and dal (lentils), mixed together in a big pot and boiled. The soldiers were terrible cooks. Most times, the food was half-cooked.
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When the food was ready we lined up and got the rice and dal. That was our meal for the day. Some people were lucky. They had two plates. They had one plateful of warm rice and dal for lunch and another plateful of cold rice and dal for dinner. My brothers made sure that I had my plate of rice and dal every day.
We only stopped once a day to get our meal. Fortunately for us, the two Indian soldiers in our car guarding us were very nice. At each station, they brought samosas and fed the little kids. I always got one samosa, and sometimes I got two.
My parents were in the last car of the train with the Chinese from Makum. At each station, my dad came out and tried to find my brothers, my sister and me. They worried about us. My mom wasn‘t feeling well. She had a tonsillectomy two days before she and my dad were evacuated.
Halfway through the journey to Rajasthan my parents found us, but we were not allowed to move to their car. After that, at each station, my brothers and I got off the train and walked towards the end of the train, and my parents walked towards the middle. We checked on each other.
On the train we had three or four families in my car, but they left my brothers and me alone. I guess they figured my three elder brothers would look after me. My second brother, who was 18 years old at that time, made sure that my 16 and 13-year-old brothers and I had enough food to last us for the day. Plus, the soldiers in our car always had enough samosas for us.
Looking back, I guess the older people must have been wondering what was happening and feeling very displaced. I didn‘t know what was going on, just that we were just going somewhere, and that seemed okay. At 9 years old, you don‘t know much.
We reached Deoli in the late afternoon, about a week after the Indian army put us on the train. The army guys herded us onto lorries and buses and dropped us at the gate of the camp, with soldiers around us. We stood by the gate and waited for our parents. There was so much confusion and fear. We didn‘t know what was waiting for us beyond the gate. We, my three brothers and I, wanted to be with our parents. So we told the soldiers we wanted to wait for our parents, and we waited.
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I watched the Chinese stumble to a table at the gate. We sat on the train for so long, our legs were not used to walking. I watched the two or three army guys at the table say something to the Chinese and the Chinese answered and the army guys scribbled on some forms. I watched the soldiers separate the men and boys from the women, girls and small children. I watched the two lines, one line of the men and boys and the other of the women, girls and small children, go into tents set up inside the gate, one or two
at a time. I watched the Chinese stumble out of the tents, adjusting their clothing. The guards then led them away.
When our parents finally got off the lorry, the army people processed us. I went with my mother to the women‘s side. A woman guard led us to the tent and told us to remove all our clothes. Everyone was stripped-search, even the kids. They confiscated my mother‘s money and jewellry, and they supposedly made a record of what we owned.
I walked into the concentration camp with only the clothes I had brought with me.
The Indian Army divided Deoli Detention Camp into five wings, each wing surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Inside the fence, there were four or five barracks and small houses clustered around a compound. A large cement water tank sat in the middle of the compound, with taps built into its four sides. Another barbed wire fence circled the camp, with watchtowers at intervals, and lights outside and around the main fence.
The soldiers assigned us to the barracks in the order of the train compartments. The Chinese from Darjeeling went into the first wing. My parents and the Chinese from Digboi and Makum went into the last two wings.
Some Chinese were lucky. They didn‘t need to share the living space with other families. The army people assigned them to houses. The houses went early. My family shared a barrack with four or five other families. I think we were all rather big families. There were six of us: my parents, my three brothers and me. My parents set up our space in one corner of the barrack, other families at the other corners, and more families along the middle. Each family had cots for each person. You know the cots where you have jute ropes woven loosely together on bamboo frames? Those were kind of the beds we slept on. We piled blankets on the cots, for the jute ropes were rather rough and scratched the skin. We had no privacy. We could see, hear and smell
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everyone. So each family kept to itself. There were quarrels—someone took more space than they should, or someone stepped on someone‘s belongings. We sorted it all out among ourselves.
I entered the camp in the early evening. When my parents and the grown-ups were busy settling into the barracks, I walked around looking for water to drink. In the compound in the middle of the wing I found a big concrete tank, with taps built into the sides. I thought, ‗Good, there must be water in there.‘ I turned on the tap and red water dribbled out. I don‘t know why the army people added red dye to the water. The whole camp didn‘t have any water on the first day.
There were a lot of military guys walking up and down guarding the compound and the barracks. Seven-foot-high barbed wire fence surrounded our wing. A gate connected our wing to the next wing. Soldiers guarded the gate. A roll of barbed wire spiraled along the top of the fence to discourage anyone thinking of climbing over it—just like a prison camp. It was a prison camp.
We didn‘t get food on the first day. The next day the army sent in people to cook for us, three times a day. The cooks threw potatoes and other vegetables into a pot and added curry spices, and we got something like baji (mixed vegetables). They didn‘t even wash the vegetables or the potatoes.
Three times a day we lined up with our pots and pans, just like you see in the war movies or movies about prisons or like the World Vision documentaries of disaster areas. People with pots and pans lined up to get food.
At first we didn‘t eat the food as it was so gritty, full of dirt and sand. Then we got really hungry and we ate the food but we complained.
We sat in the barrack and my parents told my brothers and me what happened to them in Digboi. The Chinese army came within 24 km of Digboi. The government opened the jail doors and told the prisoners to run for their lives, so everyone ran for their lives. It didn‘t matter what the prisoners did, murder or something, they had free passes and only the Chinese got arrested and put into jail.
―The guards in our train car were rather friendly. One of the guards told me that he cut himself rather badly on the front line,‖ my father said. ―He was scared and he didn‘t want to fight, so he cut himself and got medical leave. This soldier was assigned to guard us on the train.‖
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My parents, like the other Chinese, had to leave everything behind in Digboi. They worried and wondered what happened to us, my three brothers, my sister and me in Shillong, and my eldest brother in Calcutta. My parents hoped that my sister, who studied in St. Mary‘s Convent in Shillong, was okay, as she wasn‘t on the train with us.
Much later we found out she was still in school. The nuns in her school lied to the Indian soldiers who looked for Chinese students in boarding schools, so she wasn‘t evacuated. When my father found out about my sister, he was really worried. He thought my sister might be the only Chinese left in Shillong and, with the Indians so against the Chinese, she might not be safe. So my father wrote to the nuns asking them to take my sister down to my aunt‘s in Calcutta. My aunt in Calcutta had written to my parents that most of the Chinese had not been arrested and my eldest brother was safe, staying with her.
Anyway, that was six or eight months after the army interned us. I will go back to the first few days when we just arrived in Deoli.
We sat around with nothing to do and lots to complain about. The grown-ups complained about the food, they complained about the camp, and they complained about the food some more. I was really bored. All the kids in the camp were really bored. We had nothing to do, so the boys tried to find things to amuse themselves.
One evening after dark I wandered out of the barrack for a walk around the compound. There were people sitting outside the barracks. I heard the toilet doors swing to and fro. I think it was windy that night. A group of boys loitered nearby. One of them laughed and said, ―You know, many Japanese prisoners died here years ago.3 Their ghosts wander around here. Sometimes you can hear them moaning, sometimes they bang the doors. That noise you hear, it must be one of the ghosts. They are looking for little girls.‖ The boys pulled down the corners of their mouths and moaned.
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I ran back to the barrack screaming. I had a hard time falling asleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes I saw a Japanese soldier with blood all over him moaning and coming towards me. My mother had to comfort me every time I whimpered and sniffled.
The grown-ups tried to control the boys but the boys kept getting into trouble. Then they really got into trouble—they rioted. My mother kept me indoors when the whole thing started. It started at another wing, so I didn‘t see what happened but I heard a lot of shouting. The loudest ones were the guards telling the boys to go back to their barracks.
I guess the boys didn‘t obey, so the guards arrested them and put them in solitary confinement. They didn‘t get all of them, though. I heard some of them talk about it.
The guards released the boys after a week, and they went back to their families in the different wings. I don‘t know what the guards fed them when they were in solitary confinement. The boys all had diarrhea. Oh, did they have diarrhea! They never rioted again.
The grown-ups speculated on what started the riot. My mother said it was a fight between Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek supporters.4 The Chinese communities in India had split between the two Chinese leaders, and the two groups always fought. I think the Deoli camp riot happened because the young people had absolutely nothing to do. So they fought.
It was really funny to see these macho teenage boys running to the toilets. They couldn‘t strut while they ran for the toilets. Anyway, that was really worrying for the grown-ups, but we girls thought it was funny.
The grown-ups in each wing had a meeting. They discussed the food mainly. Then the Chinese selected a representative in each wing to talk to the camp commander. My dad represented Wing E. The Chinese selected men who spoke English. The representatives asked the commander to let the inmates do their own cooking. ―Just bring us the raw food,‖ they said, ―and let us cook for ourselves.‖ The commander agreed.
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So every morning representatives from each wing went to the canteen outside the camp to pick up the day‘s food supply. They couldn‘t leave the camp without a guard escort. So every morning my dad went to the gate. The guard would open the gate and a soldier would go with my dad to the canteen.
Each wing set up a schedule where everyone in the wing took turns to get the stove ready, prepare the meat and vegetables, cook and wash up. When the camp commander agreed to let the inmates cook for themselves, the grown-ups gathered bricks left over from the construction of the barracks. They stacked the bricks and mortared them with wet mud and built a stove in the compound, a huge wood-burning stove.
The girls, kids like me, helped out in the morning making parathas (flatbread). The teenage boys took turns stirring the food. We had to cook in a huge big wok, and it needed muscle power.
We ran into a major problem: knives. When we first entered the internment camp the army people looked through everything we brought and confiscated anything that looked like a knife or scissors. They took away our butter knives, our pen knives and anything that looked sharp. They even stripped-search us in case we had knives hidden in our clothes. So there we were with a big piece of mutton, a bag of potatoes and baskets of vegetables, and we didn‘t have anything to cut them up with. One of the inmates from Darjeeling used to work in a metal shop. He taught the men to take down the shelves in the barracks and sharpen the metal pieces. So for the first couple of days everyone, well almost everyone, was happy.
There were again a lot of complaints, complaints that some people got more than their share, complaints that they got less than their share, complaints that some lazy Chinese were not taking their turns in cooking, complaints that food tasted too bland, and complaints that food tasted too spicy. The complaints got so bad that the grown-ups decided to split up the raw food and let each family do its own cooking.
The inmates needed more knives, a knife for every family. The men surrounded the person who was sharpening the metals by the cooking fire, and some men loitered near the gate as lookouts. They talked loudly and generally made a lot of noise to cover the scraping of metal on stones. When a guard wandered by, the lookouts would sing songs, usually in awful voices, to alert the
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knife-making crew. But you know what? The guards didn‘t care. They knew what we were doing and they just ignored us. So we sharpened metals openly after that.
The grown-ups also found another job for the teenage boys: cutting up the firewood. The camp commander gave us huge chunks of firewood that needed breaking up. The boys wedged sharpened metals into cracks in the wood and smashed the wood on the ground. One or more of the metal pieces usually split the cracks wider. After several repeats—the boys competed with each other on who could smash the largest pieces of wood—we had firewood for our stoves.
Shortly after we reached Deoli, the Chinese government sent a lot of stuff, essential stuff for each family to use. They (the Chinese government) heard that the Chinese barely took anything when they were evacuated. Supposedly each family had a big bag of lots of different things. When the stuff came, the camp commander asked all representatives from each wing to help him distribute the stuff. We were very excited, excited because someone in China cared and excited because we were quite short of things. The commander and the guards picked over the things and gave a small package to each family: toothbrush, toothpaste and face towels. My dad was one of the representatives of the wings. He was really disappointed.
The Chinese government also sent blank application forms to Deoli, applications for inmates who wanted to go to China. The camp commander passed around the forms. When the Chinese applied, the Indian government took them by train to boats sent by the Chinese government especially to pick them up. I think there were three boats in total.
My second and third yountest brothers wanted to go to China, but they were underage. My second brother was 17, and my third brother was 15. My parents refused to give permission. My second brother was more obedient, so he gave up the idea. But my third brother forged my father‘s signature on the form, and he slipped out onto the lorry before my dad noticed his absence. He had a rough time in China. He was sent to Hailungchang, he and a bunch of other Chinese who went to China from other parts of Asia, like Indonesia and Malaysia. Life was pretty bad there-no food and hardly anything. He met his wife there. She was born in Indonesia and went to China, more or less at the same time as my brother. I don‘t know why she went, as only she went to China and her whole family stayed back in Indonesia.
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When those who elected to go to China had left, the camp commander moved everyone into three wings, the wings with smaller barracks. So instead of five or six families in each barrack, we now had three families.
The military people started to build more barracks outside the compound. The soldiers said it was to house the Chinese evacuated from Calcutta. Then the Chinese army retreated. So no more Chinese were evacuated from the cities. It was very funny. One day the soldiers worked day and night, hammering and sawing, keeping us awake. Then they just stopped, with the buildings half finished. At that time we didn‘t know why. It was only later we found out the Chinese soldiers had retreated.
Life in the camp more or less became routine. The grown-ups set up classes and asked the teenagers to teach the younger ones. We had classes in English, math and Hindi. My dad wrote to my aunt in Calcutta and asked her to send books. My second brother was one of the teachers. My mother was a teacher in Calcutta, teaching Chinese. She sent for Chinese textbooks, and we had Chinese lessons.
We had a wedding in the camp. A Tibetan couple got married. The bride was very pretty. She died in childbirth a year later. A Chinese from Darjeeling became mad in the camp. He walked around muttering to himself. Sometimes he held a large aluminum pot behind his back, covering his behind. We kids used to run behind him. We imitated his walk and mutterings, and we laughed at him. He died not long after his incarceration.
The inmates received mail. The mail was censored by the camp commander and his staff. My dad used to get English language newspapers from Calcutta. Sometimes there were so many cutouts that I held the papers in front of my face and ran around the compound looking out of the holes in the newspaper. My dad used to laugh when he got a letter with lots of blacking out. He sometimes wondered what his letters looked like when he wrote to his parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters. The Chinese language papers and letters took much longer to be delivered as the camp commander sent them to Delhi to be read by their people who could read Chinese.
During the day the inmates visited their friends in another wing. We had to get through a checkpoint and were questioned by the military guard there. The guards always asked for our names. Most of us said, ―Ah kung‖ (honorable grandfather), ―Ah pho‖ (honorable grandmother),
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or ―ney kung‖ (your grandfather) or ―ney pho‖ (your grandmother). One of the guards asked my dad, ―How come you Chinese all have the same names? Like Ah kung and Ah pho?‖
After a while the guards stopped asking for our names and we just breezed through the checkpoint to the other barracks. I think the guards became comfortable with us. I think we were resigned to be there, after a while.
The women in the camp got together and rented a sewing machine. We needed new clothes. The merchant charged a lot for the rental. So the women bought materials beforehand. You could get quite a lot of stuff in the canteen adjacent to the camp. The Indian soldiers would escort us to the canteen. Anyway, the women got together and had a cutting day before renting the sewing machine. When the sewing machine arrived in the camp, the women took turns sewing. Those who couldn‘t sew paid someone else to make their clothes. The sewing machine was used every minute of its rental.
The Deoli area was very hard on shoes. The gritty sand and rocky ground destroyed the soles. A man from Shillong set up a shoe repair stall. He made up a very professional sign. The Indians from around Deoli Detention Camp came to him to have their shoes and sandals repaired. He did really well. I think he was sorry to leave the camp when he was released.
Although the winter was warm in the camp—you only needed a cardigan—the air was dry, very dry. Our heels cracked and bled, and so we went to the clinic for Vaseline. The nurse there smeared Vaseline onto a piece of paper. We took it back to the barracks and applied it to the sore or bleeding spots.
The sandstorms were very bad. When the sandstorm came we closed all the doors and windows and covered everything. We had to really clean up after the sandstorms. The sand got into everything, even into the clean clothes folded away. I remember there were lots of sandstorms.
I became a Catholic in Deoli camp. A Catholic priest from the nearby church came every Sunday to say Mass. I talked to the priest a lot. After a couple of months, he baptized me. He also introduced his niece in the United States to me as my pen pal. We corresponded for five years. Then somehow—I don‘t remember how and why—we stopped writing. I think it was after my family was released from Deoli and my dad relocated us to Calcutta. I missed four years of
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formal schooling because of the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident. I returned to school in Calcutta, and I struggled to catch up with the other students. I guess I didn‘t have time to write to my pen pal.
Everyone in the camp was given a stipend. I think it was three rupees a month. We bought things from the store inside the camp, things like materials to make clothes and also knives for preparing our food. I guess the guards trusted us by then.
My family bought live chickens from the camp store. We had this egg-laying hen and without fail, she laid an egg with a double yoke—every week! My dad loved this hen. So we had eggs once a week, double yoke.
I liked to help with cooking. Many of the younger girls did. We had a competition to see who could make the roundest parathas. I became very good with the rolling pins. At that time the camp commander must have trusted us because those were heavy rolling pins. We could have killed someone with them.
We had mutton a lot, and they usually gave us a big chunk, bone and all, to share among the families in the barracks. I tried to cut up some meat. I held the meat with my left hand, I raised the knife high, and I came down on my finger. My dad rushed me to the clinic. I still have the scar.
I think I got really sick once. I don‘t remember what I got. My second eldest brother carried me to the clinic. I think the doctor wasn‘t there. He only came to the clinic in the mornings. Anyway, I was rushed to the hospital. But I think I recovered two days later and I went back to Deoli Detention Camp.
The Chinese in the camp got tired of mutton, chicken and eggs. So one day everyone in our wing pooled their money together and bought a live pig. The men tried to butcher the pig in the compound and, of course, the pig squealed and struggled. The commotion brought the guards. The guards rushed in with guns drawn and ordered everyone to go back to the barracks. They went away after they found out it was a pig.
After two years in the camp, the commander started to release some of the families. I watched my friends leave with their parents. But my family‘s name stayed off the Release List. I watched the camp gradually empty.
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For four years I played in the camp and, occasionally, I asked my parents when we could go home. They didn‘t know. The International Red Cross came to the camp. They brought things for the inmates. I tasted canned chicken soup for the first time. I asked one of them when we would be released. They didn‘t know. The Indian prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, visited the camp. I remember I and other children posed for pictures beside him. I asked Shastri when we could go home. He said he would talk to his cabinet when he got back to Delhi. But I guess he forgot about us when he got back.
By the fourth year of internment, there weren‘t that many Chinese left in the camp—a few families from the Hill Stations and some Chinese from Tangra, Calcutta. The grown-ups speculated the military had arrested these people from Tangra because they were more visible, probably having been seen going to the Chinese embassy, I think. I still wonder why we weren‘t released.
We were finally released in July or August of 1966, almost the last batch to leave Deoli. My dad wanted to take his favourite hen with us, the hen that lay the two-yoke eggs, but the soldiers said, ―No. No chicken, no pets.‖ My dad couldn‘t and wouldn‘t use the hen for our last evening meal. So he gave the hen to one of the Chinese families who didn‘t have their name on the Release List. I think they were Hakka from Tangra. I think we were the last ones out of Deoli. There were others left, but they were Tibetans, and a few single guys. They were not pure Chinese, more like pan-sien (half-Chinese).
I don‘t remember if we took the train or flew back from Deoli, but each of us was given money. I remember we had a lot of mustard greens from our garden plot and we salted them. When we were released we brought cans of cookie tins full of salted mustard greens.
The military people just dropped us off outside our old address in Digboi and drove off. But the restaurant and the house had been taken over by someone else. We just stood there. We didn‘t know where to go. Luckily the landlord saw us, and he was able to give us a place to stay in his housing complex. The landlord had three houses in the housing complex. He let us stay in an empty house at the back of the complex. The landlord took us to the godam (warehouse) where our stuff was kept. My dad found most of our things were picked over. All the good stuff was gone. The soldiers, when they came in 1962 and arrested my parents, confiscated all the money. We never got it back. The soldiers said they would put it in the central bank, but at the time when
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we were evacuated my parents did not know the name of the soldier who took the money. In all the confusion they didn‘t get any receipts, so we didn‘t get anything back.
The landlord tried to persuade my dad to stay in Digboi. He said he had two cinemas. One of the cinemas had an empty lot beside it. He told my dad, ―If you stay, I will build a restaurant and housing for you.‖ But my dad didn‘t feel comfortable in Digboi any more. He felt there were always people following him everywhere he went. Most of his friends before the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident were foreigners: French, American and English. They had already left, so as far as business prospects went, it wasn‘t good.
The foreigners owed my dad a lot of money. When they ate at my dad‘s restaurant or used his catering service, it was all on credit. My dad sent bills to his customers once or twice a month. When the Chinese Army came close to Digboi, the foreigners all left. They left in such a hurry that they didn‘t settle their bills. The Indian solders confiscated all the money anyway, so I guess in the end it didn‘t matter. The foreigners didn‘t return to Digboi when things calmed down. So they still owe my dad money.
There are many Chinese from Darjeeling, Shillong and other Hill Stations now living in Scarborough. They have a joke that if you go to visit your house where you used to live before the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident, you take a shovel with you. The Chinese buried their jewellery and money in their backyards just before the Indian soldiers evacuated them. When they were released, they found strangers in their houses. So these Chinese didn‘t have a chance to dig on their properties.
My father stayed around Digboi for two or three months. He started his catering business again. Since most of his equipment, like woks, had disappeared, he wrote to my aunt to send woks and restaurant stuff.
My father‘s Anglo-Indian friends also wanted to build a restaurant for him to manage. They even had the plot of land selected. But my dad thought there were always two or three people following him wherever he went. He just wasn‘t comfortable in Digboi, with people dogging him. He also didn‘t want to start fresh. He didn‘t want to lose it all over again. So we left for Calcutta, two or three months after we returned to Digboi.
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My dad was an Indian citizen, but I don‘t know how they classified him as an Indian citizen because if you were born before 1950 you could not be an Indian citizen. The British wouldn‘t recognize us as British, so we were in no-man‘s-land. No one recognized us even though we were born in the country.
Three months later, our family returned to Calcutta. My dad rented an apartment in Chattawalla Gully. He went into partnership with his friend and opened a restaurant. Less than two years after we were released, my dad had a heart attack and he passed away. He had the heart attack on Labour Day. You know how the West Bengal government thought Labour Day was sacred? The doctors refused to see my dad. It was a holiday, they said. When he died, the doctors came. Go figure.
My mother got very sick after my dad died. I had to do all the household chores when I got home from school, and then I studied, usually late at night. Somehow I graduated with a Senior Cambridge Certificate. Of the six of us, only my fourth brother, my sister and I finished school.
My eldest brother immigrated to Canada in 1969, and each of us followed. I emigrated in 1975.
I couldn‘t talk about the internment for a long time. My two sons didn‘t know about it until recently. During the Iraq War in 2001, we watched the news on the television and ―concentration camp‖ was mentioned. I told my sons I had once been interned in a concentration camp in India.
They said, ―Yeah? Oh, hmm.
Recently my eldest said to me, ―Mom, you must write down your experience in the camp.‖
I said, ―I am not a writer. But, maybe, one day. “
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