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ART E LITERATURE 35
They travelled through dense jungle, full of venomous snakes, poisonous spiders, voracious mosquitoes.
they could carry, and what they could carry diminished with each passing mile. They trudged forward on dirt roads that were at some points no more than vague tracks through the infinite jungle. For days at a time, they could not be sure if they were even going in the right direction. April is one of the hottest months of the year. During daytime it is over ninety degrees, the humidity near 100 percent. They travelled through dense jungle, full of venomous snakes, poisonous spiders, voracious mosquitoes. An old lady collapsed. She was still alive, but they left her where she fell. They had to keep walking; to lose the group was a potential death sentence for any who tarried. They marched on, crossing the Irrawaddy valley first, then the Chindwin River, then the Khankhadaung and finally the Mowdok Taung mountains, traversing the land of the Chin people. The Indians making the trek were urban people, unused to physical exertion, unskilled at surviving in the jungle. All they had to keep them going was terror behind them and the hope of the home ahead. As they wound upward into the hills, reaching elevations in the passes of 5,000 and even 8,000 feet, the sweltering heat of the day gave way to frigid temperatures at night for which the refugees were totally unprepared: they had no shawls, no blankets, no shelter. Their meagre supply of food ran out. There was no clean drinking water, sometimes no water at all. The children began to sicken.
Along the way, the flood of refugees pooled in exhausted, improvised camps. With no adequate sanitation, these tropical waysides became fetid fields of muck, breeding grounds for cholera, smallpox, malaria and dysentery. At the first sign of diarrhoea, children were abandoned so the contagion wouldn't spread. They were thrown into the rivers to drown so their death would be fast and they wouldn't linger, frightened and alone, to be the prey of animals that emerged from the dense jungle at night to feed on the dead and dying. For Indians, family is everything, filial duty, a sacrament, devotion to children, a
consuming joy. The headlong flight out of Burma wore people down to a point where they did the unimaginable - abandon along the trail the mother who'd so tenderly raised them, toss the small child clinging to its weary parents in terror into the river - in order to survive.
During the last weeks of the exodus, at the final refugee camp in Tamu, on the B urmese-Indian border and just a few miles from Imphal, India and safety, the pace of evacuation, rather tardily organised by the British, became frantic. Families were separated, the weakest left behind in the chaos of shouting truck drivers and the mass of desperate humanity madly scrambling for a place on one of the last vehicles out. By this time, 70 to 80 percent of the refugees were ill. They were hungry, their possessions reduced to the clothes on their backs - and some had even lost these. "A mob without discipline of any sort, with a complete absence of morale," according to a Brigadier Short, a senior British medical officer on the border. "Complete exhaustion, physical and mental, with disease superimposed, is the usual picture ... all social sense is lost... they suffer from bad nightmares and delirium in a babble of rivers and crossings, of mud and corpses."
Muljibhai Khara, my great-grandfather, was there. He saw all this, survived it, and told the story of what he saw to his children, who told it to their descendants, who told it to me. In all, approximately 450,000 Indian men, women and children made the trek from Burma overland to India. Between 50,000 and 100,000 perished in the attempt. Fewer than half the refugees who made it to India ever returned to Burma. Those who did return were soon forced to leave again, whatever properties they had recovered after the war stripped from them one final time.
Photo: Dinodio.com
low in the great muddy currents. From Mandalay, Muljibhai walked all the way to Manipur, India. It took him ten days. He travelled with a group of people of all ages. Men, women, the elderly, children and babies. Some had managed to drag a trunkful of belongings with them as far as Mandalay. This was possible when travelling by boat, but from Mandalay everyone had to walk. The trunks and all the treasures they contained were quickly discarded along the way. People continued with just what Jain Education International 2010_03
Mira Kamdar, 2000 Mira Kamdar is a writer and broadcaster based in Washington, USA. The above article is an edited extract from 'Motiba's Tattoos
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