The Death of a Pakistani Sodier

by Somnath Batabyal

  THE DEATH OF A PAKISTANI SOLDIER

  Somnath Batabyal

  Table of Contents

  The Death of a Pakistani Soldier

  An Afternoon at Rallis

  About the Author

  Read More by Somnath Batabyal

  Cover 2

  Sample Chapter

  Copyright

  The Death of a Pakistani Soldier

  Gaurav was certain that the sound had entered the room a while before he noticed it: a high-pitched feminine wail that overwhelmed the panic-stained prayers and loud bawdy jokes of soldiers in a war-room bunker.

  In whiskey-fuelled retellings, in nightmares that became routine, Gaurav would try to capture the long, searing nature of that cry. The first time he told the story, it was in the news magazine that employed him.

  It was the summer of 1999. On the slopes of the Himalayas, returning after a particularly harsh winter, the Indian army found enemy incursions. The Pakistani forces had sent in their soldiers—regulars and mercenaries—to occupy vantage positions earlier held by the Indians. Strategically, it was a brilliant move. Few men were needed to occupy mountaintops. To dislodge them, however, would cost Indian forces dearly.

  Gaurav was writing the story of his country’s army and air force attempting to rout enemy soldiers entrenched on treacherous peaks. He followed the developments from Dras, the highest inhabited place in the world. The action—men killing and shooting, fighter jets turning the mountaintops into a black, burning morass—was happening yet higher.

  The press briefings so far had led to sterile, loyal reports. This evening, however, promised to be different.

  The journalist was sitting next to Captain Samir Singh Rathore, leader of that roomful of men, sharing a cigarette. The captain’s eyes darted around the room as he tried to identify the source of the sound. His gaze settled on the radio transmitter at the corner of the bunker, near the entrance. The wireless operator had been fiddling with the frequency and had stumbled upon a conversation between a Pakistani commander and his wife.

  It was her cry, Gaurav wrote in the magazine, that had stunned the soldiers.

  There was much that Gaurav would not write. His first boss, Ganesh, had told him that a good reporter writes only one third of what is scribbled in his notebook and Gaurav Kapoor, by any standards, was good. At twenty-six, overcoming the challenges and anger of many of the senior correspondents, he had bagged the prime assignment to cover the war.

  He did not mention in his reports that he and Samir had spent three thoroughly enjoyable, youthful years together, sharing a ten-by-eight room at the University of Delhi. Gaurav would write his friend’s essays and, in turn, would be taken on holidays to the exotic locations to which Samir’s father, a brigadier in the Indian army, was posted. It had been Samir who, on hearing of his own deployment at Kargil, had called Gaurav promising him a glimpse of action.

  ‘None of those namby-pamby press briefings for you, my boy. Get yourself here and we will shoot a few Pakis.’

  Gaurav had used this, the promise of witnessing action, to leverage his way into the assignment.

  The wail from the radio was punctuated by the soft, reassuring voice of a man. The wireless operator was confident that it was coming from somewhere in the vicinity. Gaurav tried to focus on the words. They sounded familiar, yet beyond his grasp. A young soldier, crouching slightly to stand at attention, informed Samir that the man was speaking in Pashto. Without being prompted, he started to translate.

  The voice was indeed close. It came from the top of the peak they were preparing to attack. Word had reached the enemy, it seemed. A Pakistani commander, outnumbered and desolate, was saying goodbye to his wife.

  ‘Too much emotion in the story,’ Murthy, his boss at the magazine, told him. ‘Make it a news item. We do not want sympathy for the Pakistanis. No reader wants it. Even I don’t want it.’

  Gaurav thought of Samir. His friend, too, eschewed emotions. An army boy, he came from a family of men proud to be so. Not once during their years together in college had Samir expressed a desire to be anyone else. And yet, on that bitterly cold night, Captain Samir Singh Rathore had been unprofessional.

  For nearly an hour, Samir let the radio run as if physically unable to shut the enemy out. When the Pakistani commander finally switched off amidst the continuing lament of his wife, Samir got up quickly. Bending low, he ran to the wireless set and, picking up a bayonet, smashed it with ferocious energy. The dull glow of the bunker hid his face from Gaurav but there was no mistaking the clarity in his voice. Gaurav watched him turn to his shocked men. ‘You are upset?’ Samir started mockingly. ‘Upal Singh yaad hain, maderchodon? Did he get a chance to say goodbye to his wife? You want to mourn this man rather than think of your dead friends? Have they not left behind widows? Are their sons not orphans?’

  Samir kept up this tirade for several minutes, grabbing shoulders, shaking others, reminding them that Indian soldiers had been killed in a war not started by them. ‘This Paki will die because he came in, uninvited, to my house and killed my brothers. You lot can mourn him.’

  He stopped suddenly, and dropping the bayonet climbed out.

  Gaurav followed him into the starlit, chilly night. Samir sat huddled in the snow and, at his friend’s approach, spun around. Gaurav fleetingly spotted the pistol that had almost magically appeared in Samir’s palm. They sat together in the snow for a while before Samir spoke: ‘The bastard has made an easy job far more difficult. Really, I kind of understand this Indo-Pak bhai bhai bullshit now. Not very different from me, is he? All that crap about his son and wanting the bugger to be an army man. God knows I would want Shaurya to do the same. What is the chap’s name? I really need to know his name.’

  The unnamed Pakistani commander, Gaurav thought, as he re-wrote his story, indeed spoke of common concerns—concerns about his son and how the child would remember him, about pensions and life savings, the house he had wanted to build and the retirement plans that would now have to be set aside. But what Gaurav remembered most was the voice, its quietness and dignity in trying to soothe an inconsolable wife. She spoke not a single word throughout, made no sound but for that continuous cry, occasionally changing pitch, a fact so astounding that he and Samir would need to reconfirm this to each other over a period of several years.

  The moon reappeared. The snow glistened in the light and Samir, grabbing Gaurav by the hand, dragged him quickly to the safety of a boulder. It was not impossible for them to be spotted against the whiteness of the snow and become a target for a waiting sniper. They sat there for a few minutes—two friends, a man who would kill soon and another who would report it, each steeling himself for the task ahead.

  Captain Samir Singh Rathore hated displays of weakness. Re-entering the bunker that night, Samir ensured that he appeared focused. He called the junior commissioned officer Subedar Singh to take a final report on the weapons and ammunition.

  ‘Sahab, sab theekh hai na?’ Samir had asked, knowing that his hesitation would be perceived by this veteran soldier, if not by anyone else in the bunker.

  ‘Haan sir, sab theekh. Aur aap?’

  ‘Haan, haan, Sahab,’ Samir said brusquely. ‘We will move in half an hour. Get everyone ready.’

  Gaurav looked at his watch as he lit a cigarette and then passed it to Samir. He watched the tense faces of the men. His friend’s sudden, violent outpouring had had its effect. The soldiers who would follow Samir into the battlefield were now focused on their assault rifles and grenades and the task ahead. The conversations had slowed down to monosyllables.

  Was his friend’s job more difficult than his own, Gaurav wondered, as he jotted the evening’s happen
ings in his notepad, straining in the dim light of the bunker. Samir was trained to kill men. But could he, Gaurav Kapoor, murder truth in making him the hero of his story? War narratives demand heroes; they need villains.

  ‘She just kept on crying, didn’t she?’ Samir muttered quietly. ‘Fucking woman just kept wailing. Not a bloody word the whole bloody time. I swear he is better off dead than married to her,’ he said, getting up. ‘See you in a while. I will send someone to get you.’

  ‘“Make sure my son grows up to be an army man, Tasreen”—that’s what he said,’ Gaurav, now alone in the bunker, wrote. ‘That was very important to him and he would repeat it several times during the conversation. He signed off saying, “Tasreen, know that I love you. By everything that I hold dear, in the name of the Allah I am soon destined to meet, know that I have always loved you. But I love Pakistan above everything else, jaana. I hope you can forgive me.’

  The next day, the Indian papers reported another victory in the Kargil War.

  Epilogue

  Captain Rathore was awarded the Sena Medal for his services. His commander, in his recommendation, mentioned that the ‘young soldier had gone beyond his call of duty in honouring the enemy and attempting to send back to Pakistan bodies of enemy officers’.

  Pakistan, refusing to accept that their army was involved in the incursions, did not take back most of the bodies of its soldiers. Several of the dead were buried in the Kargil mountains, a few kilometres from the country they loved and served.

  An Afternoon at Rallis

  Shantum loved the September mornings in Kolkata. He always preferred to call the city that. Even before the official name change, ‘Calcutta’ never really appealed to Shantum. The city brought out his ‘bangaliana’ his father would say, laughing at his sudden interest in kurta pyjamas and Bengali women. For the rest of the year, he and his friends listened to Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead in school.

  He smiled at the memories as he walked past Lake Market. Seven in the morning, with a week left to go for Durga Puja, the place was already teeming with buyers and sellers. The smell of rajnigandha, fresh rose, jasmine—he loved the flower market here. I should buy some for Shumona, he thought. She will be surprised. He could not remember the last time he had tried to woo his wife of eight years.

  ‘Koto kore?’ he asked, pointing at the rajnigandhas.

  ‘Seventy rupees for twelve sticks.’

  I wouldn’t get a packet of biscuits for that in London, thought Shantum. ‘Diye dao,’ he said to the surprised boy who was anticipating a bargain. Seeming deprived of a fight, the boy sullenly packed the sticks in a sheet of newspaper, before tying it with a white thread.

  The stretch from Lake Market through Gariahat to Ballygunge station was Shantum’s favourite part of Kolkata. As a schoolboy, every summer when he came to visit his grandparents, he would take this walk in the mid-morning heat, before taking the metro from Rash Behari to Park Street. He remembered how gratefully he would climb down the steps of Kalighat metro station, escaping the sun and welcoming the shafts of wind, which every corner of the underground seemed to unleash. In London, people cower against the drafts, the icy wind chilling the bone and soul, penetrating clothes and mind. In this city, the underground tunnel was nature’s way of lending a helping hand when you could not afford air conditioning.

  Now, as he walked on the familiar footpaths yet to succumb to the hawkers’ cries, past the known signboards of Priya Cinema and Deshapriya Park, Shantum was filled with an immense urge to share this with his five-year-old son.

  Today I should take Arghya out, he thought; the same walk, the same restaurant, the kulfi faluda at Rallis on Esplanade. It’s not very hot this time of the year. Arghya loves the sun. Deprived of it in London, the boy spends hours happily in the second-floor balcony of their Ballygunge house, basking in the late afternoon glow with his grandmother.

  Ma refuses to leave Kolkata. Even five years after Father’s death, she clings to the house. ‘Come with me, Ma. We can look after you in London,’ Shantum had pleaded. But she wouldn’t budge.

  She was never this stubborn, thought Shantum as he stepped over the tramlines and turned on to Ballygunge Station Road. In fact, she had been the easygoing one in the family, the one who always smelt of good food and love, sweat and joy. Her behaviour was completely out of character, he thought as he walked past the teashops lining the railway station. Shantum looked at his watch. Twenty to eight—he had time.

  ‘Come, come,’ a man waved at Shantum, seeing him look around. Two others made space for him on a bench.

  ‘Ekta cha,’ he said, sitting down. He overheard snatches of conversation: cricket, the non-inclusion of the Bengali captain in the national team, the coming state elections.

  ‘Cigarette cholbe?’ the man asked, extending a glass. Why not, Shantum thought, and smiled his assent. He hadn’t smoked in several months now, part of the strict diet he had been put on by his doctor and his wife.

  Why had Ma become so obstinate? It made him feel guilty to leave her here.

  ‘I can’t come to London to lessen your guilt, Shontu,’ she had told him last night and there the matter ended.

  It was perhaps in the way she had got the house, he thought, and reclaimed her space in Kolkata. Ma had stayed away from the city far too long for her to move again. Not that Shantum wanted to sell the place. He liked it: its decrepit oldness, the large, airy rooms with their high ceilings, and windows that looked down on a delightfully unplanned garden.

  He had grown up in two small rooms with his parents and sister in a town indistinguishable from the hundreds that people cross on trains on their way to somewhere else. He remembered the constant fights of the neighbours, the slum across the window, Ma’s tired face. Privacy came at a premium: hiding on the terrace amongst old, worn-out furniture and other castaways.

  That terrace was his space. There a mat could be spread and the entire sky became instantly accessible. Watching Star Trek serials, Shantum had wanted to be an astronaut, crisscrossing across the Milky Way. On summer evenings, sitting alongside him, his father told him stories of impossible daring, of romances that stretched across the seven seas and thirteen rivers.

  But reality refused to fade. The two rooms, the incessant noise, the bickering of family—they clawed back. His friends now tell him that most memories of their childhood were inflated, made bigger as time passed. He thought of Anton, his Greek colleague who laughs every time he speaks of his father’s boat, which, as a child seemed bigger to him than the Titanic. Seeing the same boat thirteen years later, after the ship had been firmly etched in his memory, courtesy Hollywood, Anton had been shocked at its smallness. I had no such luxury, thought Shantum. Everything I knew was small, or short, or tiny.

  Thus his craze for space. He remembered how much he loved the Enid Blyton stories. George of the Famous Five series had an entire island to herself. She and her cousins went to beaches and solved mysteries in lighthouses on stormy nights. Every time he sees a lighthouse, he still thinks of sinister smugglers.

  He laughed, shaking the glass. The hot liquid spilt onto his hand, making him wince. Stubbing the cigarette, he stood up.

  ‘One more?’ the man behind the stove asked.

  ‘No, not today.’ It was getting late. Shumona would be up and Ma would soon be leaving for school. He paid and started walking briskly homewards.

  It has been four years since Ma retired from the neighbourhood school. But she still goes there twice a week to teach the students music. The staff doesn’t mind, and the children love her. Sixty-nine this year and she hasn’t lost a bit of the old melody.

  Baba called Ma his nightingale. Her voice filled the house, and somehow pushed back the walls and widened their universe. Even the neighbours stopped their quibbling. Baba had many stories of her singing. He insisted that Ma had wooed him in college by singing Hindi film songs. Baba was a sucker for old romantic duets.

  Shantum smiled as he stepped into the by-lane leadin
g to their home.

  ‘We always went out in groups, you know,’ Baba would say. ‘None of this modern dating for us. But when your mother sang, I knew she sang for me.’ Ma would laugh and say never; it was Arijit whom she fancied.

  ‘Bloody capitalist,’ Baba would retort of Arijit kaku. Baba loved his communist pretensions, along with his love for the English and Nirad C. Chaudhuri. ‘More English than the English, you know,’ Baba would say admiringly of Chaudhuri.

  ‘That was a long walk. Ma just left,’ Shumona reproached as he came in through the door. ‘I know; I had crossed the Milky Way to get you these,’ he said handing the flowers to his surprised wife.

  ‘Over the top, as always,’ she laughed, unable to hide her pleasure.

  A trait I have got from my father, thought Shantum, as he went into the shower.

  ‘I am taking Arghya out today. We will go and have a kulfi at Rallis,’ he shouted to Shumona through the bathroom door. She was going to her sister’s place in Howrah for the day. A father and son excursion, thought Shantum happily.

  The water was refreshingly cool after the long walk and he closed his eyes. Yes, Baba always overstated, he thought. Even the small things had to be magnified, oversold. The same excursion he was about to undertake with his son—his baba and he, they had done the same. How many years ago was it? He must have been around Arghya’s age. Thirty-four years.

  He recalled his baba telling him about the size of the kulfi. ‘This big,’ Baba had said, hands at least a foot apart. ‘Do not eat too much breakfast. Otherwise you will not be able to finish it.’

  Shantum had steadfastly refused the delicious luchis and aloor dum his aunt served the rest of the family in the morning. He really wanted to finish the kulfi. Baba had promised it was heaven.

  Kolkatans in those days were yet to experience the pleasures of underground travel. After more than two hours on the bus, when they finally reached Esplanade and weaved their way through the teeming crowds to Rallis, the place was packed to the point of bursting. They waited in line to be seated.