Kololo Hill Read online

  Underneath each photo, there were neat handwritten notes about each man: ‘Richard Markham. Parachute Regiment, 1st battalion. 1944.’ The uniforms were different from those the Ugandan soldiers wore, thick formal jackets instead of short-sleeved green shirts, but Asha was back there, in those last terrible hours in Uganda. The gun tip tracing her neck, the soldier’s eyes watching her every move.

  ‘Hello,’ said a plump woman with fleshy arms and a froth of curls, as though someone had taken an eraser and softened all her edges away. Her heels clicked on the parquet floor. ‘Come in, welcome, welcome. I’m Mrs Boswell.’

  She shook hands, and as she came close, Asha caught the slight scent of cigarette smoke and talcum powder. Five more women stood in line ready to greet them, taking everyone’s details, checking them against their clipboards and allocating dormitory numbers.

  The new arrivals were shown around the barracks: first, the mess hall, with high ceilings, dark wood panels and long tables set up in rows. The sulphurous smell of boiled vegetables and onions hung heavy in the air.

  ‘Tea’s served every night from six o’clock to seven o’clock,’ said Mrs Boswell.

  ‘Tea? They only serve chai for dinner?’ mumbled one of the men behind Asha in Gujarati.

  A younger man translated back into English. ‘Excuse me. You only serve tea in the evening? There will be no food?’

  ‘Tea?’ Mrs Boswell’s look of confusion dissolved into a smile. ‘Oh no. What I mean is dinner. We use the word tea for dinner, you see. And we use the word tea for, well, tea. That you drink, with milk. Does that make sense, cherry?’

  ‘So there’ll be both tea and tea. One to eat and one to drink, no need to worry,’ said another of the ladies in the welcome party, pleased that she’d been able to clarify things further.

  The young man paused for a moment, deciding the best way to translate it back into Gujarati. ‘Yes, there’ll be dinner.’

  They moved on to the dormitories, where metal beds with blankets were lined up along the long walls. A few were already occupied by those who had arrived on previous flights from Uganda; they stared at the newcomers as they came in.

  ‘Here is one of the women’s rooms.’ Mrs Boswell paused, waiting for one of the party to translate from English into Gujarati and Hindi.

  ‘We have to sleep with other people in the room? With strangers?’ Jaya whispered.

  ‘It’s only temporary, Ba,’ Asha said.

  ‘We only have space for a few families to stay together, I’m afraid, those with babies and young children. Some of the other barracks have lots of family rooms but we just don’t have the space. I’m very sorry.’ Mrs Boswell led them out of the room, trying to ignore the murmurs of discontent.

  Next, they were taken to the shower and bathroom areas, which were stark but clean. ‘There’s hot water each morning. I’m afraid we can’t keep it on all day.’

  ‘This is like being back at school,’ a man behind them huffed.

  No, it’s like being in the army, Asha thought. But she didn’t care. They were safe, they had food and a bed, with no chance of being robbed or worse.

  ‘We’ve boiled some water over there for tonight, though, so you can have a wash before tea. I mean, dinner,’ said Mrs Boswell.

  They were too exhausted to eat. Vijay left for his own dormitory down the hallway. Asha helped Jaya, who had wanted to change into her indoor chumpul, the ones she usually wore inside the house. ‘I can’t wear the same shoes at home that I wear outside,’ Jaya said.

  ‘Don’t worry about all that here,’ said Asha. The floor was a dusty mix of brown English earth and the Ugandan red dirt they’d brought with them. This wasn’t a home, so why pretend?

  Jaya put the little carved wooden murti of Ganesha and a prayer book on a wooden chair that would serve as a bedside table.

  Asha went to the bathroom, desperately wanting to scrub all trace of the soldier from her skin, but as soon as she felt the icy flow from the basin tap, she knew it was too cold to stand under a shower. She washed herself as best she could with a cup of the boiled hot water – already tepid – that the welcoming party had provided, then went into a toilet cubicle to change into a salwar kameez and cardigan.

  Back in the room, Jaya was sitting on her bed, anxiously glancing around her new surroundings. ‘Do you need anything?’ she asked softly.

  Asha shook her head, too tired to speak. In the relative safety of the domitory, she realized how stiff her body had been since they’d left home. Her arms and hips still ached in the places the soldier had grabbed her; her shoulders hunched from the many weeks of worry and stress before the attack. She got into bed and pulled the coarse blanket over her body, tucking her head under the freezing white sheets. She closed her eyes tight, trying to shut out the voices that bounced around the room, the ghosts of Uganda.

  Sleep was fitful, flashes of a life abandoned and a strange new country, all tangled together.

  20

  Jaya

  ‘Ewe Uganda, the land of freedom.’

  A whispered song, soft Swahili.

  ‘Our love and labour we give.’

  Sounds of home, left behind.

  ‘And with neighbours all.’

  Grace, always humming. A memory slipping away.

  *

  Jaya opened her eyes. There was no mosquito net above her, no warm sunlight breaking through curtains. Instead, she woke to the murmured conversations of other women in the room, to the frigid air.

  She turned to see where the song had come from. Across the other side of the dormitory, a little girl sat on a chair, swinging her legs and singing the national anthem of Uganda. Her mother, dressed in a blue salwar kameez with embroidered flowers that traced the line of her collar, made the bed.

  The exhaustion weighed on Jaya’s body. The metal bed frame had squeaked whenever she’d turned in the night; the blanket, barely wide enough for the mattress, had slipped off. She slid out of bed. Despite the little electric heater by the wall that glowed bright orange, her bones were frozen. She scratched a mosquito bite on her shoulder, a furious red reminder of her old home.

  In the next bed, Asha was still sleeping, her body sunk into itself, curled up like a child, blanket pulled up to her chin.

  Jaya looked around the room. She was used to living with a large family, sharing homes as a child with aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and in-laws. Even though those around her now were strangers, she found it comforting to be around people. Anything to keep the silence out, the painful thoughts away.

  She took her wash bag into the bathroom, where two women were huddled in the corner. The older woman sobbed while the other, perhaps her daughter, slim with long curls of hair draped down her back, spoke in Hindi: ‘You’re safe now, put it out of your mind.’

  ‘I can’t stay here. I want to go back.’ The woman wiped her eyes. ‘Anything’s got to be better than this.’

  Jaya considered intervening but what good would it do? What could she say to comfort the woman when Jaya had no idea what lay ahead either? The daughter helped her mother out of the bathroom.

  The thought of Pran all on his own came back to her. December’s disappearance. No, this wouldn’t help. Thinking about them, giving in to all the loss. She would find out whether they could call Pran at home and then get through the day, that was all that mattered.

  Jaya braced herself for the challenge of the toilets, which were upright, like the ones at the airport. Used to squatting and hovering over the ground, she found these English toilets too high for her, even though they were the same height as an ordinary chair. Perhaps she could stand on top of them? No, she was twenty years too late to attempt that, and besides, it wouldn’t be fair to those who had to put their bottoms on the seat after her. She tugged at the thick green toilet paper that seemed to have the coarse texture of bricks, placed two long pieces of the paper around the sides of the seat and gingerly sat down.

  Next, she tackled bathing. Concrete cubicles stood s
ide by side, each with a fixed overhead shower. All her life, she’d filled a metal dhol and then used a cup to pour the water over her, the air cooling her damp skin each time she reached for another cupful, a brief and refreshing respite from the heat. After undressing in the cubicle, she turned the tap on the way Mrs Boswell had shown them all; the shower spluttered and icy water shot out over her head. Jaya gasped as she stepped back, pulling down the clean sari that she’d hung up over the door. She rushed to pick it up but half of it was already soaked. Shivering, she waited for the water to heat up, but it stubbornly remained tepid.

  She went back to the dormitory to find a clean sari and put on her petticoat. She tightened the cord around her waist – body thinned by grief and worry – and began to say her morning prayers. The little girl Jaya had heard singing early that morning was now talking to her mother on the other side of the barracks dormitory.

  ‘Alia,’ the mother called out. ‘Aaja, come, let me plait your hair.’

  The girl sat in a little camp she’d set up in the corner of the bedroom, a grey blanket draped over two wooden chairs to make a canopy. She was making funny faces, moving her feathery eyebrows up and down, filling her cheeks with air and then blowing it out in a raspberry. Too young to mourn her home, yet young enough to create a new life in a new country, to let her memories fade away.

  When she’d finished getting ready, Jaya went to wake Asha for breakfast.

  ‘Please, leave me to sleep,’ she whispered. A purple bruise and a crooked cut had formed on her cheek where the soldier had hit her.

  ‘You must eat, Asha.’

  No answer.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ she said, but again there was no response.

  Vijay came to the dormitory and they agreed it would be best to let Asha sleep a little longer. They queued for the telephone but when they tried to call Pran, the line was disconnected.

  ‘We’ll try again later. The lines are in chaos at the moment,’ said Vijay, reading the worry on Jaya’s face. ‘Let’s go eat something.’

  The mess hall was filled with the smell of cooked meat and toasting bread. The English volunteers waited at the counter with large metal trays of food in front of them.

  Vijay explained that the pink, shrivelled food drowning in fat was bacon. Jaya settled for toast, which was set out furthest away from the strange meat. She took a bowl of small crisps that were the colour of chickpeas, deciding they were safe because they looked like one of the ingredients that she usually mixed into chevro, her favourite fried snack.

  Jaya sat down opposite Vijay and crunched a little yellow crisp between her teeth. ‘There’s not enough salt on this,’ she said.

  ‘Ba, those are supposed to be eaten with milk,’ Vijay said.

  Jaya looked down at the bowl. ‘Is it not like chevro?’

  ‘No, they’re made of corn, Ba. Cornflakes.’

  Jaya resolved to stick to the toast.

  They spoke about their first night in the barracks, interrupted sleep and lukewarm showers. Vijay seemed to be coping well under the circumstances; at least he hadn’t lost his appetite. Like Jaya, he was more worried about Asha.

  ‘We can take her some food later, after she wakes up,’ said Vijay.

  ‘Yes, she needs to rest,’ said Jaya. ‘Not dwell on . . . what’s happened.’

  Vijay nodded, looking down at his plate. ‘I should have done something.’

  ‘Beta, there was nothing you could do.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘What d’you think happens now?’ He sipped his tea.

  Jaya looked around the room at the other people, tentatively navigating their way around things they weren’t used to: queuing up to eat, picking out unfamiliar foods, sharing their lives with strangers.

  ‘Hopefully they will tell us soon enough,’ said Jaya. ‘Try to make the most of all this free food while you can, Vijay.’

  There was so much to take in: where would they live, how would they earn money? And even the smaller things: what was beyond the barracks walls? Jaya had no idea where they were. How would she start all over again? Her life was like the lines on her hand: new paths, some that faded to nothing, others that were forged hard into her palm. Perhaps it was her destiny never to live one life through to the end, to keep beginning new ones, never belonging anywhere.

  Jaya tried to keep her mind off Pran. She told herself they’d get through on the phone later. Across from her, Vijay ate his food as though it was just another Kampala morning, sun streaming through the kitchen window, leaves of the banana trees rustling in the breeze outside. Jaya tried to ignore the unease in her chest. Getting a job was going to be difficult for everyone, but for Vijay, it would be even tougher. She couldn’t help but think of those first few moments after his birth in the hospital, the brief silence that fell across the room as the doctor and nurse whispered to each other. Jaya had been too exhausted to take it all in properly, grateful that the baby’s lungs were full of air, full of life as he cried. The baby was fine, that was all that mattered.

  Later, when she and Motichand had spoken to the doctor, Motichand had skirted around the questions, not daring to meet Jaya’s gaze. ‘And is there any . . . reason? I mean, why might this have . . . ?’

  ‘No one’s quite sure,’ said Doctor Shashtri. ‘These things happen sometimes,’ he said, as though they’d split some milk that needed mopping up.

  In those early days, even though Motichand never spoke of it with her again, Jaya worried too, wondering if it had somehow been her fault. Was it something she’d done, had she worked too hard? Should she have done something differently? Yet those concerns soon slipped away, for Jaya and for Motichand, as Vijay’s wide eyes gazed up at them, as his tiny fingers wrapped themselves around her finger, clutching on to her, clinging to life as tightly as he could. Jaya’s heart brimmed with love instead of worry.

  As Vijay grew older, Jaya knew he would face difficulties that others didn’t. She heard it in the occasional comments from children – and sometimes adults – in the street, and the times when Vijay came home crying because someone had teased him about his arm. She knew it was up to them to ensure he lived an independent life. Luckily, Vijay was the sort of child who threw himself into living, not wanting to miss out on a second of it, wanting to do everything that Pran did, including the times when Jaya or December had to pull him down from the tree in the yard that he’d climbed just like his older brother. As he reached his teens, Jaya felt certain that Vijay would make his own way in Uganda. But what now?

  ‘Don’t think much of these British holiday camps, Ba, do you?’ Vijay grinned.

  ‘What? Oh yes,’ she said. There was so much to work out, but as he smiled back at her, the only sounds around them the weary chatter and the clinking of plates and cutlery, Jaya was happy to sit with her son in peace for the first time in months.

  As they finished their breakfast, Alia came into the mess hall with her parents. The little girl stretched up onto her tiptoes, peeking to see the array of foods set out for service. Her eyes shone as she took in all the new and exciting things on offer. Once she’d taken some kind of chocolatey cereal and milk as well as jam and toast, her mother let her go and sit with some of the other children. Shy for a moment, she soon joined in their conversation.

  They went back to the admin office to use the telephone. This time Pran answered, his tone as anxious as her own.

  ‘You made it out safely?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, we are all here in England, beta.’ She blotted her tears with her handkerchief.

  ‘And Asha, can I speak to her?’ His voice was so full of hope Jaya could hardly speak. Now wasn’t the time to tell him about his wife’s ordeal.

  ‘She’s fine, she’s sleeping now. Your brother is well too,’ she said, trying to change the subject.

  ‘We’re all OK, don’t worry.’ Vijay moved towards the receiver and called out.

  But with the poor line and the high cost, they couldn’t talk for long. Jaya hu
rriedly gave Pran the camp address and wished him a safe journey to India. Then he was gone.

  A wave of fatigue hit her and when Vijay suggested that they should go back to bed and rest, she agreed. She put a plate of buttered toast next to Asha’s bed, then pulled her own covers over her head, praying that God would take care of her son.

  *

  As the days passed, more weary new arrivals joined them at the barracks. Jaya wanted to comfort them and help them settle in, but it meant enduring their stories, whispered in the dormitories and mess hall, of desperate, scavenging soldiers, wise to all the money-hiding tricks, who knew that their haul of Asian treasure would soon come to an end as the expulsion deadline approached. She heard the tales of those who’d left it late to buy tickets, spurred on by sheer optimism that Amin Dada might yet change his mind as he had about so many other of his decisions. They’d faced a scramble for the last overcrowded flights out of the country, in the last days and hours before the deadline.

  Yet there were others, those who’d arrived well before Jaya, who were already refusing to talk about Uganda, turning away, going silent at the mere mention of the curfews, the army, the looting, as though they’d never been there at all.

  She wanted to forget too, but she had to know everything that was going on in Uganda. Pran should have left the country by now, yet she caught hold of every bit of news, in case it provided a clue to her son’s journey out. They couldn’t be sure how long it would take for the Indian authorities to process Pran as a refugee or give him permission to stay with Jaya’s brother, but right now all she cared about was that he’d made it out safely.