Manek was then still stuck in Peshawar, living out an endless yawn. In the mess, much of the conversation turned on the question of why they policed the Pashtuns at all. Some of the Indian pilots, the more political sort, believed that the Frontier was kept deliberately tense, and that the tribal khels were clay pigeons periodically set off to give them target practice. To Manek this seemed idle talk, the froth of idle hours.
Their cantonment was as mannered as every cantonment in India, and the walled city was out of bounds. In Peshawar the bloody chivalry of the Pathans overlapped with the mass politics of Gandhi’s Congress, giving rise to something the Congress could barely control any more than the government.5
Manek was delirious with impatience before his turn came to join the duty wing. But he was there, in November, on a day that the telephone rang in the office of the Miranshah station commander, and a captain took the handset, listened for a moment and set it back in its cradle. Then he lifted it again to dial a number.
Aspy appeared in the door. ‘XX?’ he asked.
That was the code for an emergency flight. The captain shook his head. ‘Just proscription.’
Years of regular imperial air control had culminated in the proscription bombing policy, with warnings delivered ahead of time, to minimise civilian casualties. One plane would go out and drop pamphlets over the target area, ordering the evacuation of women and children from certain villages; the next day, anything or anyone that remained – people, livestock, buildings – became a sanctioned target.6
Manek and the other pilots had until late morning to gather for the briefing, around a table covered with indexed maps and catalogued photographs. Soon they would go over their grid references, approaches, ordnance and the colours of the day with Aspy, but first they were addressed by the political agent, a quiet man Manek had seen flitting in and out of Miranshah wearing a captain’s pips and speaking mainly to his driver in fluent Pashto. He began by describing the high pastoral villages and cave dwellings of the target area. Four days of bombing would be sufficient to bring their leaders to the jirga, where he would negotiate their compliance, confiscate arms and ‘make sure they understand the good intentions of the government’. He didn’t say with what the tribesmen were being asked to comply. In the stick-and-carrot strategy of India’s government, they were the stick; their concern was only where to strike and how hard.
Manek wrote to Kosh of his excitement, and told her he’d be carrying her photo in his pocket. It was folded up with his blood chit, which the pilots called a ‘goolie chit’ because it promised in three languages a reward to anyone who helped an injured pilot return to base with all his bits intact. Kosh wasn’t to worry, though: the Pashtun weapons were mostly old Lee-Enfields and Italian Martinis, and rifles built on British patterns in their own workshops. The pilots were never in range. He’d be in no danger.
He hadn’t promised not to freeze to death, though, Manek thought as he pulled the Audax into the air. It was a slow plane but its cockpits were open. It was winter now: the snow caps had grown on the further peaks of the Hindu Kush, and the Audax swam through their icy breath. Manek and his observer wore hooded, fur-lined jackets, inverted-leather boots and gloves, with fur on the inner lining. He felt like a yak flipped inside out.
All about him the aircraft’s Kestrel IIB engines throbbed and the atmosphere hummed tunes in the plane’s wires. They were navigating by the line of a valley, centred on a pink vein of soft river bed. Before the days of the air force, this mission would have required at least a battalion on the march, a long, exposed train of followers, mules, field ambulance and remount staff trudging up the valley. The sergeant had told Manek how such missions went. How there came an echoing report from high above and disorder spread in the column, noses slamming into the packs in front of them. A man falls, or two, with panting screams. Machine guns are pulled off the mules and sections form up, some covering the hilltops as others climb, hot acid in their legs. A hundred yards from the top, they fix bayonets, pump their calf muscles with their hands, and charge. On top of the hill they find nothing but sky. In the next valley the rifles sing out again, more men fall; again the hill is bare. So, again and again, until the regiment reaches some settlement of goats and grandmothers, and smashes it until their rage and the village are levelled.
That was the punitive strategy of the previous century, referred to as ‘Butcher and Bolt’. Now the Audax served the same end in a matter of hours, and they called it ‘Watch and Ward’.
Manek straightened in his pilot’s seat and raised his face into the slipstream. The formation slowed in the air and climbed down to pinpoint their target. He signalled bombardier mode to the cockpit behind him, and his navigator sank onto his knees, to stretch out prone beneath Manek’s seat and access a hatch and a bombsight in the floor. The flight passed over and banked. Manek was the last to go, and he watched as one by one the other planes dropped low, and he saw the rips of light open and close, doing invisible damage among the dirt houses. Tiny figures scattered out beyond the village wall.
His mind passed over Arjan Singh’s crash. It passed over his parachute harness. It passed over the photograph in his pocket. He pushed down the stick, read the ground and target as if they were part of his instrument deck, and felt his engine sigh at the load’s release. Behind him, the shaggy head of the explosions rose from the ground. Above, the other aircraft dallied, innocent as doves. He rejoined them and turned back to Miranshah, at a loss for feeling.
His fight had begun at last. Against whom, he wasn’t certain.
4
The Centre of the World
Madras, February 1942
The defence of India – or the first visible sign of it in Guindy – was a fence raised by a gang of workers using a batch of defective propeller blades as fence posts. It was at the back of the Guindy campus, against the fields, where the army had built a new R&R centre for troops behind a sign that read ‘Holiday Homes’. British soldiers had already moved in, and soon they were crowding the edge of the college football field, smoking cigarettes and hailing nervous students to come play a game.
The war was headed to India, and not from the direction anybody had anticipated. There was meant to be fighting in Europe, fighting in Africa, and war on and under the sea. Indian divisions were splayed out from the North-West Frontier through Iraq and up to Libya, holding back an enemy in the west. But nobody was prepared for war to reach Madras, and from Japan.
Only when the time came to start cramming did Bobby realise how loud the noises of war had grown. They weren’t the noises he had expected. The suburban soundtrack of a distant hammer knocking became ten hammers sounding all around the students’ heads. Glass panes came out of all the windows and were piled into sea-green slabs as the college handymen boarded the holes over with ply. Air-raid precautions had been ordered, and the campus juddered with construction: a pair of concrete tanks was sunk to store water for fire-fighting; a block of congested rooms was built to house air force mechanics on emergency training. Contractors yelled at men high up on scaffolding. Cement mixers gargled gravel through the night, drowning the murmur of the waves all the way from Elliot’s Beach.
Nobody could study. Nobody tried. It was urgent and necessary to talk all the time, assuring each other that they too could not focus, and acknowledging that their entire class was doomed in its exams. It was their final year, and of course there had never been a class that finished at Guindy without sensing, in that end, the end of all things. The previous year, the college had set an accelerated three-year syllabus to produce more engineers for the Army; the year before that, it had admitted women.1 But arguably, with the advent of a world war, Bobby’s year had the winning hand.
That the new belligerence came from Japan was not in itself a surprise. The nation had spent decades bridling inside a thicket of European colonies and seething over the dilemma of a late-modernising power: for its population and imperial reach to grow, Japan needed food, oil and resourc
es, but to gain those resources, it needed to expand its empire.2 In 1936 the military government had seized some territory from the crumbling state in China. It was instantly condemned by Western countries that had themselves spent a century exploiting China, and the USA began to supply the Chinese resistance with goods and weapons, routed through India and Burma.
It wasn’t until the West fell back into war, however, that Japan saw its destiny unclouded. By late 1941, European powers had spent more than two years at each other’s throats. In the last world war, Japan had protected British shipping from the Germans. Now it was willing to try the reverse. On 8 December, hours before its navy bombed the US fleet in Pearl Harbor, Japan landed an army at Kota Bahru, at the northern end of British Malaya. Two days later, off the Malayan coast, its air force sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the proudest battleships of the Royal Navy. With appalling suddenness, as the United States was lamed in the Pacific, Britannia ceased to rule the waves in the Indian Ocean. Japan lunged at the colonial sprawl. Its troops crossed from French Indo-China into British Malaya, captured the island of Hong Kong, took the Dutch East Indies and the American-controlled Philippines, and advanced on the fortress of Singapore. If it could hold back the West just long enough to exploit those colonies – of their oil, rubber, timber, grain, minerals and men – it could supply its own defence against the West’s inevitable retaliation. Calling itself the liberator of each new colony, it accumulated, in haste, one of history’s largest empires.
Each advance through Asia was announced with a bombardment, and refugees arrived in India each day to describe it. In Penang, naive crowds had filled the market rows, waving at the Mitsubishis passing high above the town. The formations passed again and again, inscrutable, until they flew low and shredded the crowds with their machine guns. Fire spread in the native town, and European residents received quiet orders to evacuate; at the docks, while they poured into ships for Singapore, armed volunteers held back the terrified Asians. The city was surrendered without any effort at defence.
The bombers reached Burma as early as December 1941. In Rangoon, 150 aircraft appeared all at once in the clear winter sky. Incendiary bombs began to fall in the labour settlements; built from cheap materials, they burned like tinder. It was Indians, most of them Tamils, who made up the labour in the town and the rubber plantations of Burma. They had been the first to migrate and work beneath the scaffold of the British Empire, taking orders from Malayali contractors a few rungs up, who took theirs from the White men at the top. The Japanese army blew through that scaffold like a gale; the British ruling class was the first to abandon it, and the Indian labourers were the most exposed as the structure collapsed. Migrant Chinese, whose anti-Japanese activism had been recorded by spies, were at great risk of reprisals, but their civic organisations supported them through escape or occupation. The Indians scattered and flew, blown like chaff before the brewing storm.
As in Penang, they poured into the streets, and the Mitsubishi Zeros flew in low to maul them. Two thousand were killed in Rangoon the first day, and the homes left standing were festooned with human gristle. Hundreds of thousands prepared to flee from the southern provinces toward Mandalay and the ports on the Bay of Bengal, obstructing (as the Japanese intended) Army traffic and government logistics.
The good news was that Manek’s squadron had been ordered back from the Frontier, scrambled to the defence of the Indian coast. For a few weeks, the Winged Arrows held to their old routine, dropping their bombs at one end of India while they listened for the sound of bombs falling at the other. Manek sat by the radio, rapt, contemplating for the first time an opponent who had aeroplanes too, and more of them, and better.
The aerial defence of south India was tissue-thin. The country still relied on a volunteer reserve to patrol the coast, and the Public Works Department had only just thrown itself into building airfields in the south: sixteen in the Madras Presidency alone. The No. 1 Squadron was already in Rangoon, and now, at last, the No. 2 returned from the Frontier. The groundcrew caught the train at Peshawar: Indian officers swaggering into the first-class carriages, behaving like overgrown schoolboys, the sullen British NCOs in second, and the native NCOs in third. After watching them pull away, each group scowling at the one ahead of it, Manek was glad to sail back in exquisite solitude, high above the human fray.
By the end of February, he was in Secunderabad, in the Madras Presidency, and any time Kosh heard a plane drone past overhead, she ran into the garden waving both her hands and shouting, ‘It’s Manek, come to see me!’ The war, now rising on both sides of them, still seemed a mirage, difficult to believe. But they felt like heroes already.
In Guindy, on another morning, Bobby passed a crew of painters at work in the halls, putting up fat yellow letters on the building’s pink brick – ‘E4, LCE3, E3, LCE2’ – each followed by a dripping yellow arrow. What the cipher meant was clear, but even so his professor began class by reading out from a circular about how, in the event of an aerial attack, students should proceed to the slit trenches being dug around the college grounds. ‘Please commit to memory,’ he droned, ‘ahead of time, the assigned portion of trench according to your course and year.’
He was interrupted by the head of the department, Dr S. Paul, who commanded the engineers’ company of the local University Training Corps, and had been put in charge of Guindy’s air-raid precautions. After glowering at the students for a minute, Dr Paul began once again to inform them that Guindy College would very probably be a bombing target. In the absence of any plausible defences, their lives would depend on their taking ARP seriously.
‘And so,’ he said, ‘if there is going to be an air raid, you are sure to know what to do?’
‘Yes sir,’ the class mumbled, not at all sure.
‘You, Mugaseth – you know what to do?’
‘Yes, sir!’ Bobby sang.
‘So what will you do if they come?’
‘This,’ said Bobby, and he sprang to his feet, moved lightly to the window of the ground-floor classroom, and leapt out of it. He ran out into the campus, shouting ‘Boom!’ at every classmate he passed, and he didn’t stop running till he was back at his room.
‘Boom!’ he yelled at Mukundan, as he burst through the door. ‘Everybody take cover!’
Then he got under the covers and took a long nap.
At lunchtime, Bobby walked onto the grounds to watch the trenches being dug: zigzag gutters, each ten feet long, two wide and three deep. The hard soil thrown up on the sides was already dancing, grain by grain, back down to its bed. A group of radical students stood nearby, under the lone Indian beech that was called the Unity Tree.
They were seething, Bobby could tell, at the pathetic sight: the whole college preparing to crawl into its own shallow grave, to await the blows of an imperialist war that had already set three continents on fire. He heard them arguing, their rage newly stoked. He wondered if they meant to rush the trenches themselves. Perhaps he’d be expected to resist them, here on the orange grounds of Guindy, a new front of the world war; driving the points of their setsquares into each other’s eyes.
One after the other, the great Eastern metropolises filled with fire and emptied of Europeans. Native staff were left to save themselves, and native officials to organise basic services and manage their surrender. In Malaya, soldiers were ordered to enact the ‘policy of denial’, a scorched-earth retreat, which meant demolishing ports, power plants and oil facilities, tearing out railroad and telegraph lines; leaving in ruins every modern installation the Empire had built and held up as the proof of its greatness.
In the jungle the Japanese were like muggers in the water. They scissored through terrain the British had considered impassable, their squadrons moving by bicycle, and patrols on elephant-back. A garrison remained in Malaya to oppose them: British, Australians and Indians. The Indians outnumbered the other two combined, but they belonged to an army still held in the amber of another era, of pack mules and breech-load
ing rifles. Most had never seen a tank, and now were scattered before Japan’s armoured advance. The Rajputs and Pathans of the 45th Indian Brigade, just trained for desert fighting, were turned mid-passage and unloaded on the jungled peninsula. They were outflanked, outfought, bewildered by the failures of their command and the sheer superiority of the enemy. They began a fighting retreat, over ten miles each day for two months, toward Singapore, the bastion of the eastern defence. The 22nd Indian Brigade – numbering more than 3,000 men – was hewn down to sixty-three fleeing survivors. As they fought their desperate rearguard battles, military lorries rolled south rescuing golf clubs and porch furniture.
A pincer movement half the span of the planet was closing in around India. The grand strategy was laid plain in February by George Orwell, then working for the BBC: ‘The general plan is for the Germans to break through by land so as to reach the Persian Gulf, while the Japanese gain mastery of the Indian Ocean … The Germans and Japanese have evidently staked everything on this manoeuvre, in the confidence that if they can bring it off, it will have won them the war … If Singapore is lost, India becomes for the time being the centre of the war, one might say the centre of the world.’3
Nugs knew someone in Singapore, Lakshmi Swaminathan, a friend from college. The Swaminathans were from Malabar too, where they were thought of as radicals. As a result, the girls never met until Nugs arrived at Queen Mary’s, where Lakshmi was two years ahead. She wasn’t a banshee wearing a homespun sari hitched up above her knees, as Nugs might have expected, just a sort of prettier, communist version of Nugs herself, neither of which was as offensive as Nugs might have expected. A girl had to have both delicacy and grit, Nugs knew, but she had never seen those virtues twinned quite this way. Lakshmi, unimpeachably gentle in college, could go to marches and return all bruised by men’s elbows. She preceded Nugs to medical school, where she married a man from a different caste, with no fuss.4 In 1940, Lakshmi left Madras to start a practice in Singapore.
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