A Spy Too Many
Nina Varghese
6 March 2008, 07:58The old man was a bit of a pain. But all the reporters gave him a lot of bhav, because he was a famous newspaperman in his day. He would turn up once a week and park himself in the reporters’ bay and relive his glory days. He loved to talk about old Madras. This time around, he was talking of how Madras was evacuated.
“I was at Christian at that time, you know, Madras Christian College, in Tambaram. There was such a mad rush for the trains, to get away. There was fear in the city that the Japanese would bomb the harbor. It became worse after the news of Japanese spies stealing trucks from the Air Force Base came out.”
I stopped pretending to work and listened to the old man. The last bit was family lore. After so many years, it was a wonder they still spoke of it.
It was in the summer of `44 that George joined Christian as a freshman. He plunged into college life with an abandon rarely seen these days. He reveled in the ragging and soon settled down to the riotous living inside the campus. Outside the college campus, George fell in with the boys in the Railway Colony for a chance to talk to the Anglo Indian girls, doffed his cap at the ladies from the Air Force base and above all was the visits to the city’s hot spots.
On one of their visits to the city, George and his buddy Madhavan dropped in at the Harrisons’ bar. Both the boys came from well-to-do families and their fathers had indulged them with well cut suits, which they wore that day. George even wore a gold wrist watch, of which he was very proud off. His father had been gifted the watch and found the gold plating, a little too ostentatious. That evening, the two lads walked into the bar, laughing over a joke. There was a sudden silence as all talk at the bar stopped. The English Army officers in battle fatigues looked at the two Indian lads with distaste. The boys were not overly concerned about this, as it happened all the time.
The college boys sat down on the bar stools, the men near those stools moved off.
“Bloody natives…” a red faced English captain muttered. Slowly, the chatter started again. The talk was about the war in Europe, which was slowly turning in favor of the Allied armies. But the news from South East Asia was not so good.
The boys listened to the talk around them. The popular opinion was that the Japanese would bomb Madras. There was also talk of Japanese spies in the city. When they finished their drink, the boys went out into warm muggy night.
George was very quiet on the train going back to college. Madhavan thought that he was upset with the behavior of the English officers at the bar. His sombre mood continued as they crossed the over bridge and as they drank their ritual lime juice before entering the college.
Back in his hall, George disappeared into his room after a brief good night. George was nowhere to be seen the next day. He bunked all his classes. Madhavan did not see George again for another two days. On the third day, he thought he spotted George on a cycle, pedaling towards the Air Force Base. A few days later, George took Madhavan into his confidence and outlined his rather bold plan to pinch trucks from the Air Force Base. This, he said, would teach the buggers a lesson.
The plan itself was simple, so simple it had to succeed. George had located a tailor in the city who stitched clothes for the English officers. It was here that he tailored two Air Force uniforms. Putting the rest of the uniform together took a couple of weeks. Air Force caps were particularly hard to get. Then one evening, they got lucky, a cap was found in the billiards room at the Railway Institute. The shoulder pips and another cap were lifted off two drunken air men, outside a bar in the city.
George and Madhavan were to enter the Base wearing the Air Force uniforms, they would march towards the trucks, hang around and talk awhile, keeping their eyes peeled for anyone watching them. Then, when they felt the coast was clear they would climb into a truck and drive away. The plan worked the first time with minor hiccups. This emboldened the culprits to repeat the escapade.
In College, life went on but there was no escaping the news of war. The authorities were looking for spies everywhere. The latest was that someone was stealing trucks from the Air Force camp in Tambaram. The purpose behind this was a mystery to both the City Police and the Military Intelligence, who were investigating the case. The fear was that enemy agents were infiltrating the Base.
Meanwhile at the Police Head Quarters things were taking a serious turn. Officers from the MI had come down from Delhi and they conferred with the local chaps. The City Police Commissioner chaired the meeting which had just only one item on the agenda, the stealing of trucks from the Air Force base. The immediate measures were to step up security at the base, issue identity cards to civilians visiting the Base and so on. The Commissioner, however, was not convinced about the spy theory; there was something amateurish about the operation. At the end of the meeting, the Commissioner was still skeptical, he had only one question.
“Do you really think that this is the work of Japanese spies?”
Then, late one evening, a couple of days after the meeting, the Commissioner’s office received a wireless message from the Air Force Base that a truck had been stolen during the air raid practice. The police set up a road block near the Race Club and were checking all the army trucks on the road, when an alert policeman noticed a truck pulling into a byline. By the time the police could give chase, the truck had disappeared. Some time later, it was found abandoned near the old railway siding.
The big find of the day was a ‘made in Japan’ Seiko gold watch. The theory of Japanese spies, again, gained ground. The Commissioner was not convinced but held his peace. After all the hullabaloo was over, he made a personal call to his cousin at Customs House. Along with his cousin, he scanned the Customs records. And sure enough the entry was there – two Seiko watches imported by the representatives of a Japanese fertilizer company as a gift for their agent in South India.
The Commissioner did not wait much longer, he picked up the telephone and called his old friend Thomas P John and asked him to come to Madras as fast as possible. The next morning, Thomas P John was at the Commissioner’s residence.
“Do you recognize this watch,” the Commissioner asked the fertilizer agent. John did not answer him.
“I can fob them off for a few more days. I sincerely suggest that you take your son away from Madras. The punishment for such crimes is very severe. Don’t forget, there is a war going on.”
The crime was never solved. Even today, there are people in Madras who talk about the Japanese spies who stole trucks from the Air Force Base in Tambaram.
George disappeared from college without a word and was not seen in Madras for a long while.
