The Scorching of Bengal
As the dragons of the East curled their tails around Rangoon, the sahibs began carting away rice to the city they called Calcutta.
Harihar and Sarbojaya stood in the door of their hut, watching the olive-green lorries rattle past on the cracked mud road. One of the lorries belched a great, black billow from its tailpipe. The noise of the backfire drew a whimper from the lump of blankets on the cot behind Harihar.
“Husband, Subir’s fever grows worse.” Sarbojaya whispered, staring sightlessly into the distance. “Could you ask again for quinine?”
“There is none to spare in Nischindpur.” Harihar replied.
“Could you go to the contonment and ask them?”
“Cantonment,” he replied, avoiding her question. Another lorry backfired, and Sarbojaya clenched his hand tight. He sighed and relented. “I will try. But you know what they will ask of me.”
“Would it be so bad? To fight by their side again?”
Harihar shook his head sadly. The women had been spared the Great War. They hadn’t seen their brothers-in-arms turned into sand-serpent droppings at Gallipoli or seared by the Temerins in Flanders.
The war to end all wars, they’d called it.
And now, once again the walls of the village had been papered over by the sahibs and their men. Thousands of red, black and white Huns glared down at the villagers from atop their lightning wyrms.
The lorries still rolled on toward the cantonment, gorged on Nischindpur’s paltry harvest.
Harihar hitched a ride on one of them to meet the officer-in-charge of the cantonment. Harihar had served as the officer’s orderly in the Turkish theatre, and so had some measure of the man’s character. Lieutenant Harding was a good, solid man of the Raj.
“Harry? What brings you here?” The lieutenant’s face was hot pink in the heat. Despite the scorch in the air, his shirt was buttoned up all the way up to the collar. “Beastly hot, isn’t it? Bloody Japs and their sickly worms. What I wouldn’t give to raze their pigsty of a capital down to the ground.”
“Salaam, lieutenant sahib.” Harihar saluted – enthusiastically, to make up for his broken English. “I am here to meet you, sahib.”
“Whatever for?” The lieutenant wiped his forehead with a muslin handkerchief.
“My son is running a fever, sahib. My wife and I wanted to ask for a spare ration.”
“Can’t be done, Harry.” Harding replied, switching to a broken Bengali out of – was it sympathy? Reciprocity? “Herbert’s got everyone pinching pennies and saving up paise. With the Japs in Rangoon and the scorched air, everyone is hard up. Is there no rice you can keep from your harvest?”
“The cyclone last year wiped out my crop in seed, sahib. Rain last year. Scorch this year.” Harihar smiled sadly. “Very well, sahib. If there are no spare rations, could I get some quinine from the apothecary instead? The fever-dreams will soon begin. In this scorch, who knows what that might do to his feeble mind?”
Harding smiled a knowing smile on hearing this new plea, sending a line of sweat down Harihar’s spine. “Of course, Harry.” The lieutenant scribbled onto a scrap of paper and held it out to Harihar. “Take this to the apothecary, and he’ll get you some quinine. If there’s none to be had, ask the barkeep for a few glugs of tonic. It’s not as good, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Thank you, sahib.”
“You’re sure I can’t persuade you to enlist again?”
The sound of the backfiring lorry reverberated in Harihar’s head. “No, sahib. I’m sorry.”
“Of course, of course. Can’t force you into it, of course. We wouldn’t be any better than the Hun then, would we?” The lieutenant smiled jovially.
No rice-laden lorries were heading back towards Nischindpur, so Harihar walked back home. He reached as the golden sunset turned over into a blue and gray night. Outside their hut, Sarbojaya sat with her arms on her knees and her face buried in them. She didn’t look up as he neared.
They cremated Subir the next morning.
Few attended the ceremony. It was a pitiable funeral for the son of a Banerjee – the highest name in Nischindpur. In times of plenty – years of full bellies and plump cheeks – a Banerjee’s last rites would last thirteen days, consuming pails of ghee and buckets of rice. But these were not those times.
◆◆◆
There was to be no respite for Nischindpur.
First the rice and preserves ran out. Then the wild yams and tubers around the village were dug up and eaten. Those that would eat meat then fell upon the rats and dogs of the village. And then the village began to wilt away, its dried petals floating into the wind as dozens fled to Kolkata chasing rumors of the city’s dole lines. Others flew North to sit at the Mahatma’s feet and join his truthful agitation against the sahibs of Delhi.
Those few hopefuls that remained did so in hope that the monsoon would arrive on time and bring them relief. They would gather every evening around the village radio and listen to news trickle in over the subtle magic of the airwaves. They eagerly listened to every word from the newscasters’ mouths, in hopes of catching any word of rain amidst newsworthy bulletins from lands spanning Rangoon to Russia.
Sarbojaya refused to join these gatherings, fearing the pity of the remaining housewives, so Harihar would carry these stories back, embellishing them to amuse her. “And they say Hitler – that’s the Hun commander – smokes opium and is driven mad with power. They say the emperor of Nippon gave birth to the dragon army himself. And they say the Mahatma is fasting again – for peace in the empire.”
“Bengal stands in solidarity with the Mahatma,” she said weakly, her words eliciting a crazed laugh from Harihar. The radio wouldn’t say it, but he knew. She knew. All of Kolkata knew. All of Bengal knew.
The real hunger had begun.
Two days after the wheatpaste had been licked clean off the posters, the village finally ate itself. The villagers ate the seeds reserved for next year’s sowing, and Nischindpur’s future was swallowed up whole in the darkness of their huts.
◆◆◆
Even when almost all the villagers had fled to Kolkata, Harihar and Sarbojaya still remained in Nischindpur. Losing Subir had paralyzed them long before the hunger set in. Even if he wanted to move, Sarbojaya could not.
She had stopped eating entirely even before the villagers made their grim meal of the seed stock, refusing to take food away from Harihar’s plate despite his entreatments. Her dimples grew deeper day by day and her bones poked through the skin stretched over them. His heart ached at the sight of her, but a part of him was pleased. Disturbing stories trickled over the radio - stories of good Hindu men and women taking to aghori ways in the face of starvation.
On her last night, she was awake throughout, staring silently at the ceiling. Harihar sat at her side, wondering if the beast in her stomach had been stilled.
Right before she passed, she rose from the cot in a daze. Ignoring Harihar, she reached under the cot to pull out her little box of kohl. With quivering hands, she applied the lampblack onto the rims of her eyes before wordlessly settling back into the cot.
A tiny smile graced her lips as she closed her eyes to never open them again.
When he saw her lying still, he placed his fingers on her lips and felt the cracked skin cold to touch. A low moan began in the depths of his hollowed-out stomach, reverberating in the walls of the hut where they had built their home. The grief he had burned when Subir died was reincarnated in his heart, joining the grief that was Sarbojaya's final gift to him. Tear cascaded from his eyes as he cried without regard for who might see or hear. Anyone still remaining in this doomed village would understand.
Harihar cried till the tears ran out, after which he howled himself hoarse in an impotent rage. Finally, he fell deathly silent as a realization came to him. He was already dead. They had both died with Subir. They had both died that day. Sarbojaya had but completed the formalities and left this village of death for the heavenly cities of the dead. The drought would reunite them soon enough.
The next morning, he muttered snatches of prayer half-remembered from Subir’s funeral as he waited for Sarbojaya’s pyre to burn down. A log splintered loudly, sending motes dancing heavenwards.
Lost to grief, he didn’t notice the winged shadow at first.
The torch in his hand flared up into a white-hot glare and singed the back of his hand and the heat in the air grew unbearable as the shadow grew flickered overhead again. Harihar swallowed his muttered prayers with an audible gulp as a dragon landed onto the pyre with a fiery crash, scattering the logs like matchsticks.
The beast was enormous, almost as large as six rice-lorries end to end, with jaws wide enough to swallow up Harihar in one quick gulp. Its sinuous neck to take in its surroundings, freezing when it spotted the grieving husband. A feral intelligence contemplated Harihar from behind slotted pupils. Harihar stared back at the blood-red glare, focusing his defiance on the left eye – ringed by the white and blue tattooed insignia of the Royal Air Dragons.
Fear rooted him to the ground as the dragon crawled through the wreckage of the pyre, brushing logs aside with its bat-like wings as its gray-and-green scales drank in the glow of the embers.
Fear stole Harihar’s voice as it descended on Sarbojaya’s lifeless, charred form.
Fear forced shut his eyes as its jaws closed on her.
But he still heard it. Nothing could save him from the sound. Harihar remembered that wet, visceral crunch for the rest of his life.
◆◆◆
After that, dying in Rangoon seemed a small price to pay for a shot at a dragon. He walked from the pyre straight to Harding’s office in the cantonment and re-enlisted into the British Indian Army.
On his first day back in the sepoy’s mess, the kitchen boys ladled watery gruel onto his plate and topped it off with a bone-filled fried fish the size of his middle finger. The first crunchy bite of semolina and flesh triggered a bout of retching. He tossed the fish aside and ate the gruel greedily.
They began drills immediately.
The scorch had originated in Rangoon, where the Jap dragons and their riders had settled in. It was imperative to free Rangoon, so famine could end and all of Bengal could eat just as the soldiers did. Reports from the countryside were grim. Tales snatched from the camp radio flew thick in the mess hall - laborers filling their bellies with dirt, women burying their children to spare them starvation, taxmen coming upon whole villages filled with only desiccated, half-eaten corpses. The sepoys were worked up to a fever pitch by these stories of their brothers and sisters.
Harihar used this energy to focus on his training. His body recovered quickly enough from the hunger. His new sepoy friends commented on it sometimes as they prepared for the march out toward Dhaka. “Haribhai, you look much better now. Like you can actually hold up a rifle, eh?”
“I’ll definitely hold up a rifle. You’ll see.” Harihar would reply to their jibes.
Every morning before their marching drills, he would take from his pocket a poster of a Japanese dragon. It was one of the few that had survived the hunger of Nischindpur. He would pin up the poster and fire six rounds into it from volley distance before carefully folding it back up and heading to the drills. At night, he would fall asleep staring at the crumpled, bullet-riddled dragon.
The call to march on Dhaka came one day as they were drilling over the dusty tracks. They would leave in a week.
“There must be thousands of those Jap snakes in Rangoon,” The sepoy to Harihar’s left exclaimed. He was a stout Mohammedan fellow who would hum revolutionary songs to himself whenever he thought he was alone. Harihar had seen the man surreptitiously distributing pamphlets stamped with the tricolor and tiger of Bose babu’s army. “To send this blasted curse across all these lands and all these rivers – even across the Meghna. Thousands! That snake-birther’s imperial project will end us all, just you mark my words.”
“I knew a Meghna once,” said the sepoy marching to Harihar’s right. He was, like Harihar, a twice-born Hindu of Bengal. “We’re all going to drown if this one is anything like her.”
“Meghna is east of Barisal,” Harihar replied, “We won’t ford it before Dhaka.”
“The quiet one speaks!” The Mohammedan exclaimed, earning a glare from the officer at the head of their column. “Tell us more, o learned one. How goes the paper-shredding?”
“Better than your paper-distribution, friend.” Harihar replied, evenly.
“That’s just a little bit of energy for our friends, brother.” The Mohammedan winked. “Nothing wrong with a little reading every once in a while.”
Harihar understood why the militants wanted to ally with the Axis, but the beast in his stomach would gurgle restively whenever he considered taking the pamphlet from the Mohammedan. He had to stay keen. He had to remain focused on the poster and the sinuous serpent on it.
Japanese dragons were different from the bat-winged and dinosaur-bodied beasts of the Royal Air Force. The Japanese army’s dragons were like bearded and antlered serpents, related the Royal Air Dragons only through the spirit of fire. Just as the veins of the German wyrms were filled with northlander thunderstorms, the British and Japanese dragons carried the essences of fire and death.
Sarbojaya had loved these little facts about the dragons. She used to sit by the village radio in the evenings and pick out little tidbits of knowledge to string into her image of dragons. “Even in their similarities, there are differences.” She had told him that. “The British one only breathes fire. The Japanese ones are fire itself. They are born in volcanoes. They carry the dragon-scorch, the bringer of droughts.”
Those were the times before she’d started avoiding those gatherings. Before they’d burned their son. Before her ribs had stuck out past her breasts and her kohl-lined, hollowed-out eyes had closed forever.
She haunted Harihar at night in a way Subir hadn’t. Their boy had been taken by malaria. Little could be done for mosquitoes. Drain one puddle of their wriggling and tumbling spawn, and they’d appear in the next. There would be no respite from mosquitoes.
But drought? Dragons could be killed.
The bullet-holes on the poster began to close in on the serpentine head.
Lieutenant Harding grew grimmer day by day as the troop prepared to leave Kolkata. On the morning of their departure, he came to Harihar and asked, “Listen, Harry. With what happened your wife’s funeral and all, would you be comfortable with the troop dragon? I can ask for you to be reassigned if you want it. We need the scaly bastard to fight the Japs.”
“Of course not, sahib.” Harihar replied. It was true. He didn’t mind the dragon joining their troop’s march to Dhaka. Firstly, it wasn’t the one from Sarbojaya’s funeral. And secondly, though the crunching noise still haunted his dreams, it was the serpents in Rangoon that had hollowed out those cheeks and snatched away her life. They had brought on the scorch. They had dried up the paddies. They had broken the flow of commerce that sustained Nischindpur, Kolkata, Dhaka, Chittagong, Oudh, Delhi, Rajputana, and countless other villages, cities and towns under the aegis of the Raj.
“Good man,” Harding nodded. “Let’s get on with it then, for King and Country.”
The troop’s route was to take them through Khulna and Barisal, and then up the Meghna and into Dhaka, where they would reinforce the garrison for a Southward push into the jungles. With any luck, they would retake Rangoon before the Japs even knew what was happening. Privately, Harihar hoped some that Jap dragons had followed the British retreat into Bengal, so he could practice his marksmanship sooner.
As they grew closer to the source of the dragon-scorch, the sticky warmth of the coast dried up into an arid burn. Sepoys fell to heatstroke and were left behind to catch up or die.
On the morning before they reached Khulna, Harihar shot six bullets into the poster and left only one hole. The sepoys camped on a ridge overlooking the district that night. Beyond the ridge lay the paddies whose plump, white grains had once fed all of Bengal.
They lounged around by their campfire under a starry sky, watching the troop dragon’s shadow scudding back and forther overhead in faint light of the half-moon.
“What do you think it will be like in Rangoon?” The Mohammedan asked through a mouthful of unpalatable, unplaceable meat which the steward had assured them was neither beef nor pork. “I hear their dragons are a lot smaller than the British ones.”
“A lot easier to kill, then.” The twice-born Hindu replied cheerily.
“We’re a lot smaller than the Jap dragons, you know,” the Mohammedan replied, drawing a laugh from the gathered crowd. “You all know how I feel about this war. But I will say this, empire or no, the fight against Japan is just. So tomorrow, let us pinch our noses and swallow our misgivings, before we head over the ridge.”
“There’s no dragons ahead of us at least till Dhaka,” the twice-born pointed out. “No need to get melodramatic just yet.”
The Mohammedan shrugged and began tuning the radio. After a few hissed rejections from the gods of the airwaves, he threw up his hands and headed for his tent.
Harihar followed his lead and turn in for the night. Despite the twice-born’s words, Harihar felt the Mohammedan’s words keenly. Under the sear of the dragon-scorch, the air felt heavy with portent.
He wished he had a memento of Sarbojaya right now. But her jewels had been pawned long before the dragon-scorch. What meagre trinkets she possessed had been with her on the pyre.
All he had now was her smile.
◆◆◆
The next morning, Harihar made his way up the ridge to a wizened tree standing lone against the brightening sky.
He pinned the now bedraggled poster to the tree and stepped back to take in his surroundings. Over the ridge, the Khulna district of the Bengal presidency unrolled out from his feet to the horizon. The morning spilled down the low hills in the distance and slowly trickled across the plains. As the light burned away the mist, Harihar’s stomach twisted into a knot of horror.
Khulna’s patchwork of rice paddies lay dry before him, but they weren't the yellow of fallow land or the brown of cracked mud. They were black.
Black of death and decay.
Black of ash.
Of kohl.
Each and every field from here to the horizon had been razed. The Japs were here already from Rangoon.
The bastards.
“I suppose you’re wondering why,” Harding spoke softly at his shoulder.
Harihar didn’t flinch at the lieutenant’s arrival. It wasn’t just heat that had killed the rice-bowl of Bengal.
The Japs had burned down fields knowing what it would do.
They’d known what it would do.
There had been rumors that the Japs had been burning fields. But who would do such a thing? Who would do such a thing after three years of cyclones and crop rust?
They knew what they had done.
They must have known about the failed crops. This wasn’t the olden times, when news took years to travel. There were radios now. Telegrams. Phones.
Even Nischindpur had one radio, surely all of Japan had at least one?
“Herbert commanded that we do it,” Harding said, his voice sticking on the words. “In case the Japs took Rangoon and Dhaka both, we wanted to deny them any rice.”
Something in Harding’s tone pierced through Harihar’s reverie. “What?” he asked, forgetting the ‘sir’ or the ‘sahib’ in his confusion.
“Governor Herbert? John Herbert.” As Harding spoke, the troop dragon crawled up the ridge on all fours, a gentle rumble emanating from his throat. The beast rested its head at Harding’s side. Harding continued speaking, “We drained and scorched the paddies all along the retreat.”
Harding's words were swallowed up by the cacophony in Harihar's ears. Crackling pyres and cracking bones. The beast's claws running ragged over his ribs again. Lorries belching clouds of kohl into the sky, laden down with rice.
“Masterful,” Harding's words trickled back into his ear, poisoning him drop by drop. “It was an incredibly coordinated retreat. A shame we didn't win, of course. But you can be certain we turned it Pyrrhic for the Japs!”
The dragon yawned loudly beside the lieutenant. Grey wisps of smoke trickled skyward through the slots in the beast’s teeth.
“Where did the lorries go?” he mumbled.
“Excuse me?” Harding’s demeanor grew stern.
“The lorries, sahib. The ones carrying rice.”
“Lorries? I don’t know. Someone in the head offices would know.” The lieutenant said in a hard voice, “You’re not here to ask questions, Harry. You’re here to serve the people. You should feel lucky I’m letting you waste bullets on this sharpshooting nonsense. What is even the point of all this early morning tomfoolery?”
Harihar felt the reassuring weight of the rifle at his shoulder as the dragon’s eye blinked open. "I have to kill the dragons that killed her, sir."
A blood-red eye ringed by white and blue.
A marksman’s target.
"You can't kill a dragon with that, boy." Harding scoffed. "I've seen one of the bastards take cannon to the gut. This peashooter won't do anything to them."
The dragon watched Harihar through its fiery eye. It seemed to know. Harihar ignored Harding's cries of surprise, unhooked the rifle from his shoulder and took aim.
It was over almost immediately.
A keening shriek rent the air as the bullet plunged into the dragon's eye. Harding turned around in horror, only to be flung aside by the beast’s death throes. He hit the tree head-first and fell limp to the ground.
The dragon tore up strips of earth in its claws and spewed fire blindly into the air. When that gave it no respite from the pain burrowed into its brain, it lashed and thrashed its way through the troop’s tented camp, laying waste to the sepoys.
They would come for him once the beast was stilled, but Harihar wouldn’t be there. He nipped down the ridge to raid the fallen tents for rations before disappearing into what was left of the Khulna’s thickets, a new flame burning in his heart.
He would find Bose Babu’s army, he would join them, and then he would scour Bengal of those that would let the beautiful turn into hollow shells of waxen skin and brittle bones.
This obviously made-up story is based on the very real mishandling of the 1943 famine by the British colonial government occupying Bengal. The wartime policies of the colonial government and a blind faith in government non-intervention eventually resulted in two to three million deaths caused by the famine and its attendant evils. For additional reading on this perspective of the Bengal famine, you could try “Poverty and famines : an essay on entitlement and deprivation” by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen or “Late Victorian Holocausts” by the historian Mike Davis.
A note about language: some of it is an intentional pastiche of writings from that era, but the writer is open to editing it. Please mail admin@tfaun.com or leave a comment here for any changes to that effect.