Where the railway ended, beneath the walls of Thal, was another planet. Nugs was not Ganny’s wife, so would have to be the guest of an understanding higher officer, Captain Banerjee. Her own life, of sweltering commutes, obstetrics manuals and Malayali nursing sisters, had never felt so distant or so dear as in her first days in the alien fortress, which she spent trying to improve Ganny’s dreary quarters, or avoiding Mrs Banerjee whose eyes were perpetually wandering over the slight swell inside Nugs’s sari. Ganny was on duty all the time, at least until the morning that Nugs found him bowed over in bed, coughing to tear his lungs out. At least she was there to nurse him, to clean up and talk him through the pain, and to administer a course of M&B 693,6 which slowly undid the infection. But right away there was another letter, directing him to the OTS at Mhow, and Ganny got out of bed only to begin packing again.
They travelled together as far as Kohat, and it was here, on 4 August, that they broke their journey to be wed by Sheikh Mahbub Ali Khan, OBE, the District Registrar of Marriages. As they held each other, he stroked her belly in enduring surprise. She listened at his chest out of habit. Then she stepped onto her train back south, and departed on her own.
By the time the engine found its pace, Nugs was so frightened about leaving Ganny that her heart was kicking like a racehorse. She couldn’t make it stop, or rein in her disbelief that they were married, having waited for it for so long, and were already forced apart. She had left him sick and alone, wheeling through the furthest, coldest orbit of what was called India. And she was alone, too, surrounded by cold material, refused any reassurance by the vulcanised rubber berth under her hands, the twisted-iron window bars, or the cold steel rails on which she slid away from her husband. She held her belly instead, and warm tears came to her relief. For a long while she slept.
When she awoke, her panic seemed to have infected the air. The monsoon pitched a silver-seamed tent of grey over the country and rain drummed nervously on the carriage’s metal roof. Passengers emptied out at their stations and no one replaced them. Beyond the Punjab, there were soldiers on every platform – Gurkhas mainly, short men with impassive eyes. At some stations, the train did not stop but sped up, passing through blurs of pale dusty kurtas and fighting voices.
On the fourth day, the ticket collector came in and asked if she had people at any of the stops along the way? She thought he was being polite because she looked lonely. But he was suggesting she get off. It was on the radio, he said, the news from the Congress session in Bombay. There could be trouble, and trains were most dangerous: they were the easiest targets. Troops could not be spared to patrol all the lines. There had already been some derailings, rumours of Anglo-Indian engine drivers set alight on the footplate. Up and down the country, even where the terrorists were not yet at work, subversives were pulling the stop chains, creating chaos on the network. At night, Nugs lay in her vulcanised berth, sleepless as her carriage moaned to a halt again and again.
In Bombay, the Congress, which had never done more than tug at the tablecloth of Empire and rattle its silver, had suddenly raised an axe over the whole affair. It was an ultimatum. Britain had allowed a war to reach India’s doorstep without strengthening India to fight it. After the failure of the Cripps Mission, the squandering of Indian lives at Singapore and Tobruk, Gandhi was done waiting. A free India would ably and willingly join the war effort, but an India that remained subjugated would be unable and unwilling, as Gandhi intended to prove: ‘I want freedom immediately, this very night – before dawn if it can be had. Freedom cannot wait for the realisation of communal unity … Here is a mantra, a short one I give you,’ he said. ‘Do or die. Take a pledge with God and your own conscience as witness, that you will no longer rest till freedom is achieved and will be prepared to lay down your lives to achieve it.’
An instruction followed: if their leaders were unavailable, every man ‘must be his own guide, urging him along the hard road where there is no resting place’. By the next evening, the Congress leadership was indeed unavailable, jailed to a man.
An uprising began in the mood of anarchy licensed by Gandhi’s words. With its national leadership under arrest, the rank and file were mobbing the machinery of the wartime colony. In the west, factories and steel mills were crippled by labour strikes. In Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s bastion, some mill owners paid their own striking workers to help sustain them. In Bombay, terrorists set off more than 400 bombs. In the east, entire towns and districts were plucked from state authority. Radicals there had been emboldened when they saw, with their own eyes, the battered 17th Division coming out of Burma. The Empire had collapsed, like a row of rotten tenements, up to India’s doorstep. One good kick should bring it down in India as well.
The government was enraged by this turn to treachery, just when its fortunes were at their lowest in the war. It pulled troops off their embarkation schedule and marched them into bazaars, chowks and train stations across the country. Fifty-seven Army battalions were redirected to give ‘aid to the civil power’.
At Arakkonam airfield, Manek’s squadron was busy enacting coastal invasion scenarios. No. 1 Squadron was ‘India’; the Winged Arrows were ‘Enemy’ and conducted sorties to ‘bomb’ the Madras aerodrome. Their exercise, codenamed Clive, was conducted in deadly earnest: when a pilot from No. 2 Squadron landed in Madras to pick up routine information about unserviceable aircraft, he was arrested at the point of a bayonet.
Naturally there was some confusion when a local army commander approached the leader of No. 1 Squadron, S. N. Goyal, to engage an actual target. Some stubborn nationalists had blocked a military train by lying on the tracks. ‘Would you … fly low over those bastards? Just frighten them to hell, so they get out of the way and the train can move on?’ the army man asked. ‘If it’s necessary, you can fire on the side of the tracks. But don’t go about hurting anybody.’
Goyal, a typical IAF maverick, thought about it.
‘Would you do that in England?’ he asked. ‘If it happened there?’
The commander drooped. ‘Well, no,’ he replied, ‘no … That’s okay, then,’ and saw himself out.
The picture elsewhere was less benign. By 15 August, ‘machine-gunning from the air’ was authorised by the Viceroy for the first time anywhere in India beyond the North-West Frontier. RAF planes fired into crowds in Bhagalpur and Monghyr in Bihar, in Nadia and Tamluk in Bengal, and in Talcher in Orissa. One plane crashed and a mob burned the British pilot alive. The uprising in the towns was repressed, pushing mutinous factions out into the country. Entire villages rebelled, many of them villages where land had been seized to build airfields. Revolutionary districts in the east sank into an inferno of public floggings, private torture, and villages put to flames. The Japanese had not come, but it was like war all the same.
In Madras, the radicals were better behaved. The unions of the South Indian Railway were run by closet communists, who had been on board with the war effort ever since Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Rajaji too had opposed the Bombay resolution, calling its outcome ‘nothing but pure violence’.7 The worst of the trouble was around Coimbatore, where one gang vandalising garages on the Sulur airfield mistakenly burned three drivers alive.8
Nugs arrived in the city to find everyone talking about Lakshmi Swaminathan. Lakshmi’s voice had crackled up briefly on Radio Syonon, which transmitted from occupied Singapore, saying that she was safe, that Indians were being treated well, and then suddenly to urge her countrymen to sabotage the British war effort. Here was new trouble: a force of Indian soldiers who had surrendered at Singapore had been turned and mustered to fight alongside the Japanese. Lakshmi had volunteered, and been made an officer. Nugs should have guessed.
Similarly, in Berlin, a man was beguiling Indian prisoners of war into a regiment under German command, the Legion Freies Indien. Subhas Chandra Bose had been a misfit in the Congress movement, growing ever more impatient with Gandhi, and fascinated with Britain’s enemies. ‘If at that time India had bee
n anything like Italy or Germany,’ a close associate, his brother’s secretary, said about him, ‘Subhas Bose would have been the counterpart of Mussolini or Hitler.’9 Bose had escaped house arrest in Calcutta, and now popped up in the German capital aiming to meet Hitler and forge an alliance between Germans and incipient free Indians, of whom the closest at hand were POWs captured in the Libyan desert. The fifth column, which the British had spent so long fearing, was at last materialising, at home and on both fronts.
Nugs went back to work, waiting for letters. Mhow was the worst officer training school, Ganny said, lacking the climate or the good trim of Bangalore or Belgaum, and the medical wing especially was the least of anyone’s concern. Cadets talked a lot about the war bulletins, realising they would be at the front lines soon. Germany and Japan were winning everywhere. They should both be glad he was stuck out in Thal.
She wrote back, about Calicut, and about watching their news splash into her parents’ faces. It had been slightly surreal, but she had seen it all before. Subur had had it worse: she had faced disbelief, where Nugs was believed too well. Subur had had it better: her fiancé was a Brahmin, from a distinguished family. Kodavas were tribals who prayed over rifles. The Parsis were the most civilian of communities, even if its young men made eager soldiers; the Kodavas the most martial, even though Ganny was only a soldier under duress. Nothing made any difference. Nugs cried only when she faced her mother, before she left, and Tehmina refused to bless her. So be it. She would go, and have her own home, and once she did she would never force anyone to leave it.
Though he didn’t say it, she knew that it was even harder on Ganny. She could feel his anxiety – about her, on her own, and their child, and about himself, too – and his despair at his family’s rejection. There were two wars in his life now. The smaller one was more frightening; every shot in it was fired at the heart.
Outside her window, the younger generation still marched, and Nugs could hear them, blocking traffic on the Poonamallee High Road. A slogan rose and crashed back into the general din, something about unity and readiness for freedom. As the words crested, again and again, she heard in their demand something in common with her own: to no longer fear an old, contemptuous system that expected obedience and order; to govern yourself, and follow your own will, even if it led to your own ruin. Never turn your back on it – they chanted through her window – however hard the fight, however weak you are at the end of it, and at the beginning of your freedom.
October came, and back in Thal, Khade-Makh shed its thin upholstery. The work at the hospital was routine: the Fakir of Ipi had lately gone underground, and it was rare that Ganny treated a combat wound, unless the patient was a Pashtun. They often were admitted at the Combined Military Hospital as payment for a clan’s good behaviour. Inside Thal, they were diffident, slow to speak and keen to leave; not unlike Ganny himself.
Ganny did not want to be there a minute longer, in a mud fort teetering at the world’s edge. Thal frightened him, and Pashtuns had nothing to do with it. The fort was meant to be solid and withstanding, but to Ganny it seemed perilous, like a construction of planks over a dark drop, where any step could be off the edge. To keep him from falling, all he had were the provisions of the Army, which seemed to obey the principles of the land here: to be stern, dry and denying.
Just a few years earlier, the Indian battalions stationed in Thal had found their barracks being wired for electricity. This turned out to be the result of an administrative error, so the work was left unfinished, the curls of wire sprung from the mud walls. After waiting a few weeks, the soldiers conferred and decided they ought to buy bulbs themselves, pay their own meter charges and light up the gloom. Their request reached the garrison engineer, who apologised for the mistake and explained that Indian troops were ‘not entitled to electricity’. An appeal went to the Assistant Director of Medical Services. Within two weeks, workmen arrived and stripped the errant wiring out of the walls. The men went on with kerosene and wicks. Above them the windows of the officers’ quarters shone in bright, deep shapes.
The night air was crushed glass now, and in the mornings Ganny broke a skin of ice in his basin. His ward roster tilted from summer maladies – malaria, Delhi belly, septic sores – toward influenza and pneumonia. It was open season on lungs. Winter’s winds had come in from the north, and with them came knocking that doctor’s nightmare – of becoming the patient, the one in the bed instead of at the bedside. At sundown, as shadows spread and chilled the walls, Ganny stopped work to take deep breaths, and listen to the string quartet tuning up in his chest.
8
The King’s Own
Roorkee, August–December 1942
The great tent, already thick with the smoke and crackle of lit torches, now filled with silent hillmen and the rustle of their loose raiment. The lieutenant with the 41 Bengal Lancers sat in a chair before a table, and his comrade stood behind him, with the stone hand of an Afridi guard on his shoulder and a rifle nosing into his ribs. Strips of sharpened bamboo were laid on the table top, awaiting the chieftain. The tent flap flew open, and Mohammed Khan entered, resplendent as a rajah in an embroidered silk gown and a plumed turban set with a stunning diamond. The lieutenant breathed fearfully. The Khan was as sanguine as only a Pashtun could be while preparing the tools of torture. Fingering the point of a bamboo stake, he said: ‘We have ways of making men talk …’
A gust of wind came and blew the Khan and the lieutenant up and sideways, folding their bodies into a billow of white and grey. The regiment broke out in howls and hoots, and a figure ran over to the fabric screen and grabbed at the guy rope flying loose. The corner of the screen billowed up again, and for a second Bobby could see the men on the other side, laughing at the sudden intermission, their white teeth and undershirts visible though their dark skins merged with their prickly brown blankets. This was the cinema at the Roorkee Cantonment – a weighted sheet raised on poles in the drill ground, with British men watching from one side of the screen, and Indians on the other.
So it was, up and down through every level of the British Indian Army: there were lines, and central to the decorum and discipline of being in the Army was knowing on which side you stood, to keep things in balance. The constitution of the Army of India was all precise ethnic formulae, designed to hold its groups and identities in balance.1 By design, the men of its ranks only served in regiments with others of their own faith and province, which allowed ‘that Sikh might fire into Hindu; Gurkha into either, without any scruple in case of need’.2
This evening’s picture was a new cantonment favourite, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Gary Cooper at his best and Douglas Dumbrille as the Khan.3 Plenty of the men in the audience, NCOs especially, had served in the Grim. Some had returned the worse for wear. But any time ‘the hall’ played one of Hollywood’s Frontier daydreams, they all showed up, British and Indian, to cheer and slouch and criticise in many languages.
Since his arrival, Bobby had watched all the pictures, especially the ones that helped his Urdu, the official lingua franca of the Indian Army. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer didn’t have much Urdu, but he watched it with a degree of serious inquiry about service in the North-West Frontier. The movie it had elbowed out of top billing, Gunga Din, was just the running babble of Douglas Fairbanks and Cary Grant as they fought a cult of Frontier Thuggees – led by a crazed fakir, of course, inside a temple of gold. Bobby sifted even that delirious nonsense for glints of reality.
Throughout his officer training, he hoped that hints to the adjutant might quickly land him with a company on the Frontier: Manek’s base, then Ganny’s, with every chance that Manek would return, and that Bobby would join them. They would share the Grim passage, and afterward tell stories about wild Waziris and phantom fakirs, as told by officers of the Indian Army for a hundred years. But that was before. Now he couldn’t stand to watch, and he got to his feet and slipped away in the half-light.
Bobby had arrived here in August, a cadet
enrolled at the training school for engineer-officers.4 Roorkee was located where the dusty floor of north India hit the staircase into the Himalayas, where the air was hot but the water of the Ganga still cold. The town was dominated by its cantonment: the home and headquarters of his new regiment. Its acres of bungalow and grounds were bisected by ruler-straight roads and whitewashed kerbs, punctuated by boxes of pastel blooms and stubby ceremonial cannon. Everything was there, and had its place, as in a tidy, toy world arranged by a child.
At once, Bobby felt the passive, perspiring air of the previous decade lifting. Great events rose before him: blurred in detail but exalted, like the parade of the Himalayas seen from the hills nearby, their lower slopes cloaked in sky blue but their white cavalry helmets shining. On his shoulders Bobby wore two grey chevrons which sent a charge across his ribs, buzzing in his sternum. This current of belonging he had never felt before, but he felt it connecting him, as far up as the King in his jewels, and down to the sapper recruit, and outward to his brothers, Manek and Ganny. All nodes on a humming grid that held India together – but which might also, they now learned, be fused, any day, by rebellion and mutiny.
It had been easy, during the first civil disobedience, for eleven-year-old Bobby to cheer both sides. In 1942, it was impossible. Gandhi had fallen to blackmail, and the Congress had kicked Britain in the teeth at its weakest moment in the war. In the same month, Bobby began his officer training and felt a new and lucid sense of duty to the bedevilled Empire coming over him. The British order was an order of responsibility. This was what Bobby realised, as he prepared for the responsibility of command – and this was what the Congress could never stomach, that their right to govern India must follow from their ability to do so.
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