Chen’s Account

   Chapter 9   Chen’s account   ( 3)

The big wok brought out the flavours of the food. You should have tasted the atta bread (whole wheat thin flat bread) we made for breakfast and the fried fish coated with chickpea flour! I don‘t think I have tasted food that good ever since. Food cooked in a small wok can never compete with the tasty stuff cooked in a big wok.

We had trouble with our firewood for cooking. These were thick as the size of my thigh. The camp commander issued us a hammer and a four-inch-long blade. We filed teeth into the blade, which made the cutting of wood a little bit easier.

We cleaned meat and vegetables on the verandah, where we could hose down the concrete area after every meal preparation, as it was easier to do than anywhere else. The flies swarmed our cooking area, especially when we prepared fish. We had a hard time waving flies off the fish and yet still found the dark green worms that burrowed into the flesh of the fish.

I think the wing representatives tried to be fair in distributing the foodstuffs. But some people were not happy. When the International Red Cross people visited Deoli camp, they talked to the Chinese and wrote down what they said. One guy from Shillong walked up to a Red Cross guy holding a bowl with a large bone in it. He spoke in Mandarin. He said, ―I line up every day to get food. I don‘t like to fight over food, so this is usually what I get. How can I eat this bone?

We weren‘t allowed knives when we first arrived in the camp. A few resourceful Hua7 people who knew a little metal working made knives. We took down the metal shelves in our rooms and sharpened the long pieces. The sharpened metal made excellent knives and the people in charge of food preparation thanked the metal workers every time they used the illegal knives.

7 The Chinese called themselves Hua people. Another two often-used names are Tang people and Han people.

When we first started making the knives we surrounded the person filing the metals and posted people to watch for guards. At first we only made a few. After a while we noticed the guards didn‘t seem to worry about our knife-making activities, so we made knives openly.

A thin wooden board we used for chopping was not suitable for cutting up meat and vegetables. Mr. Chu, a furniture importer from Makum, went to the camp store and spoke to a local merchant who supplied the firewood to the camp. Chu contracted the merchant to cut three-inch- (51)

thick slabs from a thick tree trunk and distribute them to the wings in the camp. This chopping board and the sharpened metals became the ―twin treasures‖ of each wing.

Six months after we were interned, my second brother and I were caught up in a riot and shut in solitary confinement.

There was lots of stone throwing, shouting and people running around. When my brother and I saw the security police come in with guns pointed at us, we ran back into our barrack.

The security police came into our barrack and asked me, ―Where did you go?‖ I said I had been out walking around, just walking around. They said, ―Okay, you come out and stand there.‖ I went out and stood at the side. They selected a lot of people, mostly young teenage men.

The soldiers let the better-dressed people go. Like my friend Hua. He brought an iron with him and he always starched and ironed his clothes. Hua used wastewater from cooking rice as starch. So he looked okay and the security police let him go.

They also let the older people go. But they kept the younger guys. They kept me and my brother and then they took us to solitary confinement.

The security police marched us outside the camp and locked us in four rooms. The rooms were just outside the barbed wire fence. I think they squeezed 10 people in each room. These were small rooms, only about eight-by-eight, I think.

At first we tried to be polite to each other. We tried to give each other some privacy. We were polite and careful. We tried not to touch each other. After a while we were just too tired. We slept on the floor, someone‘s dirty feet by my head, my dirty feet by someone else‘s head. Our feet were not just dirty, they were sweaty and smelly. You know the Indian weather—always hot, even during the monsoon. There was no monsoon in Rajasthan. But we sweated all the same. My brother and I were very scared. We didn‘t know what would happen to us. The security police locked us in solitary confinement for about a week. We weren‘t allowed to go out of the room. As the days dragged on we got more and more frightened and so we sweated some more—oh, how we sweated! Most of the time my legs were slick with sweat. We smelled pretty bad, and we farted. The security police fed us rice and dal. Too much lentils made us fart. The farts thundered in the small room, especially at night. We tried not to breath, but…. (52)

We begged the security police not to cook lentils. They ignored us. So we waited, getting smellier and smellier, and sweated. We had to do our business in a fired clay pot placed at the corner of the room. It was a large-mouthed pot, like the ones we used to store water. At first we were rather self-conscious about doing our business in public, but after a while, we just went. Oh boy, the smell was just terrible!

There was this guy from Shillong, a very law-abiding guy. At the time of the riot he was in his barrack napping. When he heard the shouting and yelling, he came out to see what was going on. The security police saw him wandering outside his barrack. They hit him with their nightsticks. Blood poured from a cut on his head. The security police took him to the clinic outside the camp, and the clinic people put a dressing on his head. Then the security police threw him into solitary confinement with us. For seven days he had this bandage on his head. The bloodstains got darker and the bandage got dirtier and dirtier.

I was in the room with this guy. Liang, I think his name was. He had lots of facial hair, with his beard growing almost to his navel. We all thought he looked like a Muslim. He was in solitary confinement with us. On the second or third night we heard the guards talking outside. Those guards spoke very loudly. One guard said, ―You know, bhai,8 there‘s this Cheena (Chinese), with a long beard. I have seen him around the camp. He is a troublemaker. I think we should single him out for punishment.

Bhai is brother in Hindi. In the context of the conversation, bhai means fellow soldier.

The other guard seemed to agree. They talked about looking for this bearded Cheena later in the day. Liang was frantic. He thought the guards would come into the room to look for him in the daytime. He thought the guards would march him off and shoot him in front of the whole camp.

Liang didn‘t have a razor or anything to shave off his beard. None of us did. Liang started plucking his beard, one strand at a time. Oh, man, did he cry while he pulled his beard out. It must have hurt. I was sitting on the floor next to him. He asked me to help him because, he said, he couldn‘t do it as it hurt so much, and if the security police found him they would shoot him. He begged me to pull his beard out. I tried to, but he cried so much, and my fingers sweated and his face sweated, and his hair became so slick with sweat that my fingers kept slipping. (53)

He kept begging me to pull more of his beard out. He kept this up all night. Anyway, by morning his beard must have been looking rather thin. The security police didn‘t come in to look for him. I wasn‘t sure they looked for him at all.

So we stayed in the Black Hole of Deoli9 for a week. We ate rice and dal, and we sweated and we farted. After a week, the security police released us back to our barrack to our relieved relatives.

Chen alludes to the Black Hole of Calcutta. Siraj Ud Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, overran the British settlement, Fort William, in Calcutta, India, on June 20, 1756. He locked 146 Europeans in a 14‘ by 18‘ holding cell overnight. Only 21 men survived.

Remember I told you about the guy from Shillong? The security police bashed him over the head and he wasn‘t involved with the riot at all. When we went back to our barrack, a lot of us lined up for baby‘s urine. You know that a baby boy‘s urine is like an antibiotic. It kills germs. But it has to be a baby boy‘s, a baby boy too young for solid food and totally on his mother‘s milk. A woman in our barrack had given birth to a boy a couple of weeks before she and her family were arrested. There was always a line-up in our barrack for the baby‘s urine. The guy with the dirty dressing on his head lined up first thing in the morning with his cup. He always drank it right on the spot.

After the riot, many Chinese applied to go to China. I think about one-third of the Chinese went. Many of my friends left. Those of us who remained were resigned to settling in the camp. I often went up to the roof of a building at the edge of the barbed wire fence. From this roof I could see a very big bush some distance away. Deoli is desert-like, brown everywhere. So this large patch of green in a brown landscape looked so beautiful. I think I went up to the roof very often and thought that I would like to get up close and look at the bush. But of course I couldn‘t because it was on the other side of the fence. I don‘t think I ever went close to that beautiful green bush out in the brown desert.

Every morning the guards opened the doors connecting the wings but locked the doors at night. The young people cut holes in the wire fences to visit their friends in other wings. Anyway, the young people took bets with each other and went from wing to wing just to show they could. At first the soldiers repaired the fence the very next day, but after a while they didn‘t bother. Let‘s (54)

face it. We were innocent people caught up in a war. We were not criminals and we didn‘t harm anyone.

I made many friends in the camp. When we were more settled we started to have parties. We decorated the canteen, arranged all the benches facing a stage we rigged up, and we had an evening of entertainment. Some of the young Chinese guys were really good singers. They sang Hindi, Nepalese or Khasi songs. We had movie nights. The camp commander brought in Hindi movies, set up a large screen in the compound, and we enjoyed Bollywood movies with all the singing and dancing. Some of the Chinese didn‘t like movie nights. They said all the noise kept them awake.

Then my father got sick.

The clinic in the camp admitted him to a hospital outside the camp. The camp commander allowed a family member to stay with a sick person. I went to the hospital in the evening and looked after my father. I got back to the camp in the morning. At night, I slept on the floor beside my father‘s cot. In the hospital, I acted as my father‘s nurse. I fed, washed, medicated and generally looked after my father. He couldn‘t do much for himself. The doctors didn‘t tell my mother or me what was wrong with my father. In those days doctors never told you anything.

My sisters were small so my mother only went to the hospital to look after my father during the day. My mother didn‘t speak much Hindi, and she wasn‘t too good with directions. She didn‘t understand the doctors‘ instructions, and when anyone said anything to her she just nodded.

My father stayed in the hospital for two or three weeks. I figured my mother now understood the routine, like giving medication to my father, changing his clothing and feeding him, and so she stayed full time in the hospital and looked after him. I stayed in the camp and looked after my brothers and sisters.

On May 6, 1964, my father died. That day I bummed around the camp with my friends. At about four or five in the afternoon one of my father‘s friends ran up to me and said, ―Where have you been? We have looked everywhere for you. Your father has passed away. Your mother‘s looking for you.(55)

I heard him but I thought he was mistaken. I didn‘t believe him. He said he had looked for me for quite a while. My mother came back to camp after my father died and looked for me.

I needed permission from the camp commander to go to the morgue. I applied and went to the morgue with my second brother. The morgue was outside the camp adjacent to the hospital.

It was the next day or the day after my father died when my second brother and I got to the morgue. It was hot, very hot, I think over 40 degrees, and the morgue smelled worse than the toilets.

My daddy lay on a wooden bench. His chest and stomach area had been cut open and sewn up. The lines of nylon stitches spread all over his body like a spider web. The side of his arms also had stitches all the way to his armpits. I don‘t know why they cut him open and sewed him up like that.

I didn‘t ask why they did that. I didn‘t know to ask. I don‘t think I said much. I didn‘t think we had the right to say anything as we were in a camp surrounded by barbed wires. We didn‘t have any rights in the camp.