The Banshee Wail

The sirens on the T V are weird, banshee-like wails, from the cities in Ukraine that are being attacked. The people under siege, crowd into the underground stations. A milling, jostling mass of women and children and a few men. The siren is a familiar sound, which started in Thalassery with the second World War, when Japan was threatening the British colonies in Asia. As it happened, Japan dropped a couple of bombs on the Madras coast and never came back. Events overtook them, such as being wiped out in the Pacific after America joined the war. Indians working in Burma, started the long trek home and many died on the way due to starvation and Japanese bombs. My uncle, a doctor working on rubber estates in Penang and Sungei Patani could not get out for four years. By the end of the war, his savings had been wiped out -- when the Japanese came, they had converted all assets to Japanese currency, now totally worthless. He had to start saving again for passages on steamer for his wife and himself. That took another year. He came home in 1947, with crisp bundles of Japanese money, which he gave to us children to play with. Children, yes. He had not seen his son and daughter, who were living with my father for a very long time, and attending school in Thalassery. They melded into our household and did not remember the parents much after the first year. Mani, my cousin, a few months older than me, occasionally talked about her mother’s food and clothes. Mymoon was a noodle dish, she mentioned – what did I know of noodles in Thalassery? Appuettan and Mani gradually became my father’s brood. They never quite trusted their parents after they returned to take charge. Every school holiday, they rushed back to us, like homing pigeons. Our house waited for them. The siren in Thalassery came from the Municipal Building, next to our College. The sound reached us two kilometres away at nine in the morning and six in the evening. At nine a m it reminded us to get dressed for school, and at 6 in the evening, the clarion call was time to wash and settle down to prayers, and then homework. There wasn’t a clock anywhere in our house, so the siren was useful. I wonder—is that siren still going on?