Free ELEPHANT MOON by John Sweeney

brown, yellow and only occasionally pinkish-white – but they would wave at the singing bus as it stuttered past, savouring a moment of surreal innocence, before returning to their real world of retreat without end, of killing, and being killed.
    Once a day, but every day, as dusk approached, Miss Furroughs let the girls have one song that wouldn’t improve their souls. Their favourite, much to her feigned annoyance, was ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’.
    Just Hollywood trickiness, exploiting homesickness yet bottled up in that song, was something real too – their longing for a true home, for any place where they could feel safe – and Grace was never able to listen to ‘Hants & Dorset’ croaking out ‘Over the Rainbow’ without her eyes brimming.
    They drove further and further from Rangoon, becoming more and more exhausted and crabby with each other as the journey seemed without end, past Gyobingank and Prome, Magwe and Taungdwingyi, into the Yenangyaung oilfield. The sun was falling and the ghostly nodding donkeys, the oil drills silhouetted by fading light, were a symbol of Burma’scurse – because without the oil, the Japanese might have thought the country not worth the candle.  As they drove on, the road became more clogged up with the walking refugees. They were nearly all Indians, only a few Chinese and Anglo-Burmans. The Burmese proper, of course, had little cause to run as they saw the invading army as liberators. Time was when the Indians, especially the money-lenders, had lorded it over the Burmese. These days the boot was on the other foot, and, at night especially, Burmese thugs robbed and killed the Indian refugees, hacking off the hands and feet of stragglers, showing no pity.
    For those who could walk, the road was the least dangerous place for the refugees, and on they trudged.
    The luckiest refugees sat on top of carts, pulled by ponies or by their menfolk, wielding an umbrella from the sun. A few travelled in hand-pulled rickshaws,  like lords of creation, but most walked, clutching prize possessions – buckets, pots, blankets – under their arms or yoked on a stick across  their shoulders. One man pushed a bicycle with only one wheel. The condition of the walking refugees grew worse, the shade of almost every other tree sheltering an emaciated form, the green verges by the road littered with yellow pats of diarrhoea.
    Cholera.
    Nothing they could do to help but gaze at lives draining away, as they drove on and on.
    A road sign, to Mandalay: thirty miles. Eyes locking on to the sign, staring down the length of the bus and out of the back windows, Grace saw, advancing on them, from behind, fast, a superior cloud of dust. Soon she could pick out four motor-cycle outriders and behind them a gleaming black Rolls Royce, its radiator so highly polished it mirrored the sun.
    An Indian refugee, gaunt, stick-limbed, saw the motorcade coming towards them too, and stepped out into the middle of the road, carrying a bundle containing a dirty white object in his coal-black hands, aloft.
    The motorcade kept pace but angled towards the far side of the road, kicking up dust, sweeping past the refugee with his bundle high in the air. The object, Grace realised, was a baby, long dead.
    The Rolls overtook the school bus and Grace recognised the wife of the Governor of Burma cupping her hands, her attention taken by a uniformed aide-de-camp sitting by her side lighting her cigarette. The far side wheels of the Rolls left the asphalt and bit into the rough ground at the edge of the road, and the grand party experienced a gentle bump, delaying the lighting of the cigarette for a second or two, and they turned a corner and were gone.
    How many dying refugees had Grace seen on the road? Thousands. She stood up in her seat to look back at the refugee with the bundle, but the bend in the road shut off her view. Collapsing in her seat with a jolt, she wondered, could a God of mercy order man’s affairs in this way?