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Queen Victoria gazed at the Lion of the Victoria Institution. Albert Ramanan was however so busy slapping Mohamed Ali, he did not realize that his Queen’s portrait had begun to tilt left on its own in mid-1941. It had never happened in the school’s history from 1893. Right-ward it might be a good omen, but was this sinister?

Ramanan, the Form One English master, was tall, dark and ‘hands on!’ Hands for slapping my misbehaving students’ cheeks and shaping their characters rather than for ‘hail and well met, shaking’. He strode into the school in his topi, closed coat, silver buttons, white long sleeves shirt and long trousers, starched till they seemed brittle. In his coat pocket were red, black and blue fountain pens and sharp pencils. Sharper than these was his temper, hot and deadlier than chili padi. His temper was hotter than the tropics when there had been no rain for weeks. He never loosened his collar even while perspiring under the overworked, creaking ceiling fans. As an old boy his students considered his conversion from student to teacher as a case worse than a smuggler turned customs officer.

He was a son of the enterprising offspring of Jaffna Tamils in Ceylon who crossed the seas in the late nineteenth century on the strength of a telegram ‘Work Arranged. Come.’ Armed with an English education, these work horses came and helped to develop this land of coconut milk, rubber-tree-milk, tin and tinned milk, buffaloes’ and cows’ milk. They manned the junior ranks of the Education service and Public Works, Railways and Telecommunications departments, for the honey of a regular salary, government housing, a pension that nourished pride more than the family.

Amongst colleagues in the staff room, Mr Ramanan was a man among men, a chap among chaps. He swapped stories with his headmaster, Dr Jones.

Ramanan told Dr Jones and his colleagues in the staff room about the colourful messages his father sent to his bosses in Kuala Lumpur. One cable:

“Rain so heavy stop! Whole district flooded stop! Bridge absconded full Stop!”

A second:

“Wife died stop. Request emergency leave to go to the crematorium to ‘fire her’ full stop.”

He requested boots for his department’s Malaria Eradication Programme. A British expatriate officer from the Federal Treasury sent the routine rejection:

“Does your department propose to stamp out malaria literally?”

Father then counter proposed:

“An eradication programme for sarcastic Treasury officials. They should be stamped out literally.”

He told them also about his father’s system for grading leaders. Well above average ones were ranked:

‘Able men.’

These Able Men were differentiated by the length the first vowel was stretched.

An Aable Man ranked higher than a mere Mr Able, thus starting the double AA rating above the A. An even more Able Man rated triple AAA as the first vowel was stretched to an ‘Aaable Man’. You lent emphasis by raising your eyebrows and head higher the more able the leader was. Among the triple AAAs there had to be one supreme one. Since there were no stop-watch recordings of which of the triple AAA Aaable Men this was, there was a unique title for him. The most of all aaable men was crowned:

A ‘cape—aaable man’.

On hearing this jones told Ramanan:

“I hereby dub you a capeaaable man. You are the best teacher in the school. Since I’m returning to England shortly you should have the privilege of buying my jaguar at a discount.”

Jones knew it was an offer the anglophile could not refuse. Ramanan’s entire savings sailed away in his principal’s steamer. Apart from the headmaster’s, his were the only hands that held its steering wheel. Driving the jaguar made him feel he was ‘headmaster on the road’ even though his purse leaked badly down to his toes on the accelerator. Although Mrs Ramanan could drive she had been allowed in the car only as a passenger.

The Victoria Institution sat on its throne at the top of Petaling Hill in Kuala Lumpur. Its headmasters were Oxford and Cambridge graduates. The melody of the school song was based entirely on Gaudeamus Igitur from Oxford. The VI’s crest however displayed both its origins and its ambitions for its pupils with the tasteful light and dark blues of both universities.

On the first day of school the whole class classified Ramanan as ‘fierce, to be approached with great caution, if at all’. He introduced his class to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (Tales Retold for Easy Reading). So grateful were the students that they nicknamed him Bill Sykes. Ramanan got wind of this but had no confirmation of it.

Among the normal run of essay topics designed to occupy, if not excite, the eager pupil, ‘My Holiday’ and ‘My Family’, Mr Ramanan one day offered ‘My Pet’.

Mohamed Ali, a Muslim, to whom dogs were anathema was nonetheless inspired.

“My pet is a dog named Bill Sykes,” he began.

That first sentence confirmed Ramanan’s suspicions about his nickname. The class sat fascinated, betting out of the sides of their mouths on whether Mr Ramanan’s collar button would burst before Mohamed Ali’s collar parted company with its shirt.

Mr Ramanan charged up to Mohamed Ali, as he lifted him bodily from his seat.

“Oohh your dog’s name is Bill Sykes! I’m going to your house straight after school today. I shall call out for Bill Sykes just once. If your dog does not dash out answering to that name. God help you. I shall give you a good flogging. We shall see whether you survive it. No criminal can survive my rattan cane.”

“No, Sir. The dog won’t. come out. Sir.”

“Why not?”

“He died last night, Sir.”

“Then show me where you buried him.”

“Cannot, Sir.”

‘And why not?’

“He is missing presumed dead, Sir.”

“A bit of a rogue you are.”

Ramauan twisted his ruler around the flesh on Mohamed Ali’s buttocks as Ali winced, veering away from him.

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen years. Sir.”

“Thirteen years of what?”

“Thirteen years of wasted life. Sir.”

The Lion was satisfied.

The nickname Bill Sykes died as promptly as the dog did, never to be heard again.

Queen Victoria contemplated her Lion’s victory with pride, if somewhat askew. The British empire marched on as Ramanan sat marking exam scripts in the classroom in the humid morning air, nodding approvingly at the neatly knotted string holding each script together, top left. But even the best regulated of empires was not without its insurrections. Index number 67 had knotted his answer script on the right so that Ramanan could not turn the page over. He asked his class monitor to locate the culprit. Several minutes later, index number 67 turned up from another class.

“Careless wretch, what’s your name?”

“Liew Fook Yew, Sir.”

Ramanan jumped up, kicking his own chair to amplify his rage. It was an act he had picked up from his wife.

“Are you scolding me or telling me your name?”

“No, Sir! Yes, Sir!”

“Make up your mind. Is it Yes or No?”

“No, Sir, I’m not scolding you, Sir. Yes, Sir, that’s my name, Sir.”

“Cross your arms, hold your ears and recite ‘tie knot on left hand’ while doing twenty squats and sit ups.”

“You can have the honour of bringing my chair back and then get lost.”

“Sorry, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

Ramanan knew better than to ask Liew to clarify his second double-barrel answer. Liew would have been a nightmare witness in court with his ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ answers. The Lion was content to send No. 67 packing while he continued with the lesson. Fook Yew, a VI teacher’s son, told his classmates later about his uncle with the same name.

“My uncle had brought out his own chopsticks when served spaghetti in a New York restaurant.”

“W’anna fork Sir?”

“Me Malayan. Eat first. Then fork.”

Ramanan told his students never to ask anyone which school they came from. If they were from VI, they would tell them on their own. If they were not, then they should not embarrass them. As a student he was told ‘you can tell a VI boy but you can’t tell him anything’. He improved on it now. ‘You can tell a VI teacher but you can’t tell him anything.’

The annual athletic sports meet was exceptional. The headmaster expected every boy except those with wooden legs or medical certificates to run in the qualifying rounds starting with the cross-country run.

“Your MC must come from a medical doctor. A certificate from our Dr Lim who has a PhD like mine won’t do.”

During the qualifying rounds a student collapsed and died on the athletic track. The next day Ramanan read out the regular circular about the athletic events for the day. The whole class responded in unison.

“Sure die 1ah.”

They paraphrased in chorus Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade which they had rehearsed the previous afternoon.

Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die
Mr Ramanan to right of them
Sports Master to left of them
Headmaster in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d.

Ramanan was unimpressed.

“You have heard of people dying in their sleep. So don’t go to bed tonight.”

All of them turned up for the athletic rounds that day and thereafter.

While the Victorians had many victories in sport there was one major defeat by the Methodists Boys’ School (MBS) attributed to an American teacher who introduced cheering Yankee-style.

The VI boys, brought up in the English tradition of understatement, cheered their team:

“Jolly good, good show, come on boys, well played.”

They were taken aback by the thundering yells that echoed round the football stadium:

“MBS! MBS!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
MBS! MBS!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
Zim! Boom! Bah!
Raaa—aah!”

The cheering went on relentlessly throughout the entire match. The MBS team was inspired. The gentlemanly VI team and its supporters were startled and demoralized. This even spilled over into the boys’ attitude to away matches. A small still voice in the assembly hall was heard to ask:

“Why did we travel third class? Because there was no fourth!”

The wit evoked a deserved laughter, but no upgrade in class of travel.

Ramanan grumbled to his wife about the VI’s defeat due to aggressive ungentlemanly behaviour and the students whining about travelling third class.

“Could it be a sign of worse things to come, Ayah?”

*  *  *  *  *

Mrs Vickneswari Ramanan was as fair as Ramanan was dark. They were called the kopi-susu couple. They had contrasting personalities. She applied talcum powder to her face as soon as she woke up. Since she woke up before the children did and went to bed after them, they wondered what she looked like without talcum powder. Fragrant white jasmine flowers ringed and perfumed the bun on her black hair. Ramanan whose grey hair was attributed to his wisdom called hers ‘Indian—ink hair with white border’. Vertically below the talcum powder were sarees or sarongs in riotous colour contrasting with Ramanan’s perpetual white-washed wear. She had such exquisitely beautiful hand writing that she became the calligraphic gladiator of the whole community. Relatives and neighbours sought her out to narrate their messages through her. She added her own garnishing, provoking laughter in the reader not intended by the narrator. However they avoided her at funerals. She kept a solemn face while whispering jokes about the participants including the mourners, making those near her guffaw.

“Look at those tears from our Sungei Klang crocodiles. They were fighting like roosters only last week.”

Some avoided direct eye contact with her because even then she could make them laugh from a distance with her mimicry.

When they left the house Ramanan walked briskly, Vickneswari followed six paces behind with the eldest child following six paces after her. In sixes the family Indian-filed following him on his outings.

His children were terrified of his temper. Vickneswari reassured them:

“Don’t worry if he loses his temper. I will find it for him. Then I’ll remind him not to be so careless the next time.”

Her passion was the Tamil film. She would grab anyone of her children nearest to her by the wrist after their lunch with her announcement:

“I am taking you for a treat at the cinema. Hurry, the film is starting.”

She could walk right into the middle of a Tamil film and tell instantly who her hero was as he would be dressed wholly in traditional Indian attire and spoke in Tamil only. He was the one most polite to his parents, particularly his mother. The paragon of human virtue, he was the first to offer his blood for transfusion, even for the chief villain. The latter, in contrast always sported Western suits even in the hottest midday sun, peppering his conversation with English words.

He smoked, he drank, he swore, he womanized, he smuggled, he robbed, he gambled and, of course, he cheated. One feature about him told you that he was the crook. He spoke to his Tamil-speaking parents in alien and rude English. The first time his parents said anything to him his reply would he:

“Shadaaap!”

The next time his parents had the audacity to address him while he was busy plotting several crimes to he executed simultaneously with his henchmen, his second reply would be:

“‘Yeee diat!”

If his parents dared address him a third time he would dismiss their remarks with a:

“Naarn sense!”

Should his parents feel compelled to communicate with him again he would point to the main door of the house with his gun and bark at them:

“Gettout yeeediat!”

“He was so Westernized, Ayah,” Vickneswari rubbed it in.

Ramanan teased her yet again. “Victoria if you are not reading world history or doing pooja, you’re at the cinema or you’re telling me the entire plot. Are you rehearsing to be a Tamil film actress?’

She grabbed at the opportunity:

“You have never seen a Tamil film. You Westernized rice Christians cannot appreciate our own culture. Your grandparents in Jaffna converted to fill their rice bowls and to get scholarships in Methodist mission schools in Ceylon. Although my parents named me Vickneswari and most people call me that or Vicki for short, you insist on calling me Victoria. You even speak Tamil with a nasal British accent. Do you want to be a karupu sutu vellai kaaran, Ayah?

Queen Victoria’s portrait hitched further left in late 1941 as the clouds of war gathered over the Pacific. Japanese armed forces moved through Siam. As their air force bombed strategic towns, their troops commandeered bicycles from Malayans and rode south, one of the few military invasions anywhere propelled by bicycles. The British had assumed that any external attack must come by sea in the south. Using lateral thinking the Japanese came by land from the north on 8 December 1941. By 12 January 1942 they had occupied Kuala Lumpur and by 15 February ‘impregnable’ Singapore.

School buildings in the towns were used by the Japanese military as barracks, stores, training centres and, in many cases, as the HQ for the kempeitai. With its attractive site on Petaling Hill above the commercial centre, the VI was an obvious choice. Queen Victoria’s portrait lurched left down to horizontal as Emperor Hirohito advanced right up to have his picture taken. Her spirit was not amused.

Mr Ramanan told his Victoria how Col. Watanabe Wataru had demanded that Malayans who had long submitted to British rule and ‘indulged in the hedonistic and materialistic way of Western life’ be taught seishin and be trained to endure hardship to get rid of this. Watanabe introduced Nippongo to replace English and Chinese which were abolished in schools. Every morning, every student and teacher had to stand at attention while facing east towards Tokyo and sing Kimigayo.

“May the Emperor’s reign last ten thousand years . . .”

At the kunrenjo from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. they breathed and lived seishin. Col. Watanabe had reminded the trainees that if they don’t have seishin they count for nothing in the world. They must never give up anything, no matter how difficult.

Mr Ramanan observed that “this period of subsistence on tapioca, cow herding and petty trading was the good news. The death railway in the north, the reign of terror with the kempeitai informers, spies, physical abuse, brutality, torture or imprisonment for a wide range of misdeeds (including the lesser ones of listening to the BBC, or failure to bow low enough at Japanese sentry points), shortages of food and the hyperinflation of their ‘banana’ currency which featured bananas on their notes, that was the bad news.”

“You thought the British would be here forever. They have retreated. One day the Japanese will also have to retreat. Until then, let us be flexible. Pretend to play along with them, until we are a free people. Don’t take them too seriously. We should outsmart them without their realizing it. Don’t be trapped in the past, my dinosaur Ayah.’

“Play along? For you it’s all play acting or a scene from a Tamil film. Why should I give in to these brutes?”

“I will fool the Japanese into thinking what I want them to think. I’m as miserable about the Japanese military occupation as you are. But instead of knocking my head on the wall, I’m concentrating on climbing over it.”

Ramanan continued giving private tuition classes in English secretly in his house.

“Be warned Ayah. Our neighbours say the Japanese are hunting down those who persist in teaching English. I am learning Japanese already. I even wear my home-made kimono every morning to create the right atmosphere.”

“Teaching English is what I do best and that’s the only thing I can do. Will you give up your saree and sarong for a kimono permanently?”

“The kimono is temporary like everything else in life. It is just maya. The British colonial period was maya as is the Japanese now. Life itself is an illusion but within it I create mini-illusions with my acting. You don’t have to be so rigid. That’s why I keep the old photographs and you hold the negatives. Those negatives are typical of the way you think. I have started making tapioca cakes for sale. The military certainly won’t mind. I might sell them some cakes or barter them for rice and sugar while wearing my kimono. The Asian bamboo bends with the wind and does not break. The trees that refuse to bend may crack in heavy storm. Like you refusing to learn Japanese and over-practising your British English.

“When we eat rice and curry on banana leaves, everyone else including the Chinese. Malay and European customers eat with their fingers but you stand out like a British stick-in-the-mud insisting on your fork and spoon. Your cousin Kuppusamy after spending a year in London calls himself Sam Cooper, BTE (Been to England). Could it be your influence Ayah? You expect me to walk at least six paces behind you to show the world that you are my superior, risking your life as you may step on a landmine first. While I carry the family photograph in my purse your wallet contains Queen Victoria’s photo. If you are consistent in your male chauvinism you should be carrying Prince Albert’s instead, Albert Ayah.”

“I hope you don’t become a white elephant like your jaguar camouflaged and hidden in our backyard. There’s no petrol available for us civilians but you don’t need petrol to change your fixed way of thinking.”

“You know, I have always been hard on myself. I believe that discipline like charity begins at home and I practise it daily. I start my day at 4 a.m. and I go on till I fall apart at night barely able to finish my dinner notwithstanding your great cooking skills. In spite of coming from a very poor family, I refused any form of dowry from your wealthy parents. I learnt to love the English language from all the story books I read as a child. I suppose in those formative days I could not escape identifying the English language with everything British. I still remember how you guffawed and teased me when my students tried to grow daffodils in their little gardens after I recited Wordsworth several times to them. You said I was destined to ‘wander lonely as a cloud’. This language has enabled my mind to travel freely from my very humble childhood home throughout the world and through time.

“The teachers in my English school not only taught me to read or write in English but to think in English. The language became my ‘window on the world’ as my teachers promised me it would. I not only think in English, I even see in English. It is too late for me to switch and think in another language. I have gone too far into the language and into English literature to even think of retreating or making U-turns. If it is a sin to teach English, I would rather remove my false teeth and start being speechless than pretend to be what I am not. I have more doubts than you have. One of the few things in my life that I do not have doubts about is how useful, even powerful, the English language can be to anyone who masters it. Not just for the British or those in their colonies but for every man or woman on this planet including both of us. You say it is the language of our colonial past. My father introduced English to me in his own quaint way. Your Tamil films make it the language of villains. Use it, abuse it or adapt it for our part of the world but you cannot ignore it. King Canute could not turn back the tide in the eleventh century. The tide of English will continue regardless of Japanese military might today or any other force tomorrow. The assertive Americans speak and cheer in English even though their spelling is funny. I see it as the tongue of the future for the whole world.

“You are fortunate in being a bit of a linguist. You are at home in Tamil, English, Malay and Cantonese and now you are expanding your skills to elementary spoken Japanese.

“Many people try to be good at many things. Some become jacks of all trades and masters of none. I tried to specialize and excel in one thing. That one thing was literature in English. You think of many things at the same time. You say I am one-track-minded. I like to think that I am being focussed. Why can’t we live and let live? Not only you and me but all of us, English—speaking, Japanese-speaking, Malay-, Tamil- and Chinese-speaking without the use of force on others.”

Ramanan cursed the darkness of the Japanese military period. Vickneswari struck a light for her pooja to Lord Ganesha as she spread thirunur across her forehead.

“If not for the Japanese we would not have realized what Asians can achieve. That’s what some nationalists in India are saying. During the British times we Asians were employed only in junior posts. The British colonialists kept us down in subtle ways. Now we have to bow physically to the Japanese but we can be promoted to senior positions. Look at what Hitler is doing to the Jews in Europe. War can turn armies into barbarians and savages. It is the war and the military you should curse, not the Japanese. The Japanese have opened the eyes of all Asians in spite of their brutal methods. Of course it is most risky to go out. You have to remember to pay respects to every sentry on duty, since they represent the Japanese Emperor.”

“I should know. If we are cycling anywhere and see a Japanese sentry post we have to leap off our bicycles and bow very low. Then we have to seek the sentry’s permission. If he grants it we have to bow very low to thank him. At any occasion if we did not bow low enough we would be punished. We would be required to stand in the blazing sun and hold a heavy stone over our heads for hours. If we slackened at this, our heads would be chopped off and stuck on top of a long pole for the entire local population to see. On seeing this skull, other cyclists and motorists would stop their bicycles or cars even further before reaching the sentry post. They would start bowing earlier and much lower, taking the maximum precautions to ensure they did not offend the prickly sentries.”

Vickneswari travelled by rickshaw to the market. The rickshaw pullers would jostle around her. She was their patron saint from the heavens of Court Hill, the only one in Kuala Lumpur who did not bargain over the fare. The rickshaw pullers wore rubber soles tied on one end to their ankles and the other end to their big toes. Fleet of foot, they whizzed through the streets of Kuala Lumpur in an era which knew nothing of traffic lights, speed limits and parking tickets. They roamed freely. They were there before the tramcar, the taxi and the bus. Their filling stations and petrol stations were the coffee shops and the itinerant hawkers. They were the major transport system of Kuala Lumpur during the Japanese occupation.

Late at night, when Ramanan and Vickneswari listened to the news over the radio, their children were posted in the drains along the boundary fences of their houses on look-out duty. They learnt to distinguish between the various sounds. These ranged from the clicks of the long swords on the tarmac to the distant sound of the soldiers’ boots.

Sometimes the soldiers came and rounded up the men to work on the ‘death’ railway in Burma. Some young men came back with no arms or no legs, scarred. psychologically and physically, with festering sores. Were they the lucky ones? The others never came back.

Arbitrary brutality was part of everyday life, often occasioned by no more than an accident or a misunderstanding. A dog barked at some Japanese soldiers. “The dog should have read Sherlock Holmes,” remarked Fook Yew, “then we’d all have been better off.” Fook Yew’s father made the mistake of politeness.

He shooed the dog away so that it would no longer disturb the serenity of the conqueror. The soldiers slapped and kicked him furiously. It was not his dog and he was just being a good Samaritan. They did not ask whose dog it was; they slapped first and never asked afterwards. Vickneswari who knew more Japanese than the rest of the neighbourhood clarified matters to them. It was not good enough. They barged into Fook Yew’s house and insisted that the dog be killed immediately before their eyes. Every man and boy (but not their dogs) went scouring throughout the entire neighbourhood for an hour in vain. Meanwhile, Vickneswari continued trying to pacify them in her best Japanese. They left only after warning them that they would be back to see personally that the dog was killed. All because a single dog which did not belong to Fook Yew did what dogs normally do, namely bark. Unlike Oliver Twist, no one asked for more.

Ramanan was walking once, when he saw a military truck filled with coconuts overtake him. It then stopped at the roundabout nearby. He froze and watched as a number of Japanese soldiers jumped out. The soldiers carried wooden stakes which they drove into the roundabout. Then they nailed planks on them to shape them into a ‘T’. Finally, they arranged the coconuts on the stakes. Flies were swarming round them. It was then that he realized that they were not coconuts.

They were decapitated heads.

He took a long time to recover from that trauma. It explained something else as well. Much later teachers in the VI would chide their students in exasperation on how they had tried to repeat their lessons to them.

“We have been trying to drill this into your coconuts for days,” they would exclaim as they threw their chalks and dusters at them. Yet the VI Lion was conspicuous in never referring to the students’ heads as ‘coconuts’.

As the years of the occupation passed, Ramanan continued to irritate his Victoria with his whining about Japanese military misdeeds.

“Victoria, did you know that trainees at these kunrenjos had to march in the hot sun with their entire military gear on their backs for almost forty miles? Of course there was no mercy shown. Even those who were down to their knees, exhausted, were forced to crawl the last few miles. At first we thought that the Japanese invaded our country to grab our rubber, tin and palm oil. Now I hear that they were dogs in the manger. They just wanted to make sure that they could prevent the Allies from having access to our economic wealth. The Japanese do not have enough ships to transport these raw materials to their industries at home.

“They thought they were very smart and tried to make petrol and oil from our rubber but the rubber particles choked up the engines. These barbarians cannibalized the dredges from our world-famous tin industry to grab machinery for their industries.

“The British eat bread and wheat products whereas the Japanese are rice eaters like us. Yet, under the Japanese, we have to import even more rice than ever before. We also have to import medicines, soap, all our cloth and clothings. They force our farmers to surrender their own crops. Now they have no choice but to look the other way when rice is smuggled from Siam or Burma. They have literally broken the very rice bowl of almost everyone in Malaya. As a matter of survival we are forced to grow our own root crops and to be grateful for tapioca, sweet potatoes and your rasa velli kelangu.

“During the British regime even the humble office boy in the VI had all the basic necessities from being able to eat rice at least for two meals a day to being able to brush his teeth everyday with toothbrush and toothpaste. Now all of us have to chew the ends of twigs which have fibre for our primitive toothbrushes. For toothpaste we are reduced to ground charcoal or salt. Look at the concoctions people are experimenting with, mixing ash, cinnamon bark, flowers, leaves, lime, palm oil and what not, just to produce a bar of soap.

“The price of a miserable sarong has rocketed from less than $2 to $1,000. An entire household has to share one sarong. If the wife has to go out, the poor husband has to stay home. Imagine that!

“I have heard that bodies were floating in the Sungei Gombak, tied with ropes; some were only heads, others were only legs.”

“But Ayah you have to admit that the reign of terror in the early days that you complained about has been replaced with black markets and boredom. No doubt there is still danger and deprivation but the terror is much less now and at worst only sporadic.”

Meanwhile, the Japanese military were on the lookout for coconuts, chickens, Chinese and English language teachers.

“Now we are hunting for two-legged dogs.”

Early one morning a Japanese military truck loaded with teachers en route to their death sentence stopped at Ramanan’s gate. He was on the Japanese military’s wanted list as an over-zealous English language teacher to be silenced permanently. A soldier approached the front door of his house while calling out for him. When Japanese soldiers approached Malayans they were accustomed to the latter retreating or at best freezing on the spot. Instead Vickneswari who was practising her Japanese wearing her kimono at that time ran out of the house towards him.

“Ohayoh gozaimasu,” she began with a low bow before her pre-emptive strike:

“I’d like to know where that useless man is too! He has abandoned me and all my children. If I find him I’ll peel his skin off just for a start. Then I’ll . . .’

She went on on the top of her voice and made several angry and melodramatic gestures about what she was going to do to her husband that a stepmother or mother-in-law in a Tamil film would be proud of.

“Let me go with you in your truck and we’ll search for him together. But I get to assault him first . . .”

The Japanese soldier had never seen a non-Japanese woman in a kimono in Malaya. Seeing Vickneswari in her unusual outfit charging towards him made him quite disoriented. For the first time since the Japanese invasion of Malaya, a Japanese soldier did something quite out of character. He retreated. Not merely that. He went so far with his truck he never came back again. He reckoned that the punishment that she planned to mete out to her husband was more severe than the mere death sentence he had on offer.

The Japanese military truck disappeared from view and from earshot completely. Long after that Ramanan who had been crouching in the garden behind the house emerged. Vickneswari felt he moved in even slower motion than the stars staging a fight or a romantic sequence in a Tamil film. He had removed his false teeth to make himself look much older. He had practised saying to the soldiers if he was caught:

“Ive rethireth anth am thoo olth tho theeth Englith.”

Ramanan began to say and to do things he had never ever done before. For the first time in his life he called his wife ‘My Queen’.

“You . . . literally saved my life. Forgive me . . . for underestimating you and not listening to you all these years.”

Yet again he did something else for the first time in his life. The Lion of the VI staff handed over the keys of his dearly loved Jaguar to the just-discovered Tigress of Asia.

His newly crowned ‘Queen’ gazed at the keys jangling in his erstwhile fearsome palm still shaking with fear. She turned to his pale and gaunt face without his false teeth for the first time, too.

“The British King nearly died . . . Long live the Asian Queen . . . eh?”

‘Queen’ Vickneswari R tilted her face upwards to the right. She was amused.