Still, Manek did not dwell on doubts about his purpose there, particularly not after what happened on the riverbank. At the end of one day’s reconnaissance, he and his wingman were flying homeward, longing for the sight of Chindwin’s broad trunk and glittering bark. The forest cover opened out onto the flat bank, suddenly revealing a pitched battle beneath them. A band of Gurkhas raced across the long, silted plain, pursued by at least thirty Japanese soldiers. Drained and desperate, the guerrillas had broken up and some had fallen. One man lay on his side, holding off ten cautious Japanese with the storied tenacity that never deserted Gurkha fighters. He fired his Tommy gun, dropped it to drag his legs by inches toward the water, then raised it and fired again.
As the Hurricanes sped past above him, Manek saw the small upturned face, and felt his throat catch. The brave, brown fellow was going to die at Japanese hands. A long second passed as the planes shot over the water, and then the weaver pilot signalled Manek and tore off into a steep banking turn. Manek was right behind him, practically pirouetting on the water, until the scene opened up before them again. The Gurkha was still pushing himself back, and now flailing his arms for help, and the Japanese were crouched to spring. They fell flat as the first Hurricane roared over blasting its cannons, then bolted while Manek opened his throttle, tearing down the same path and raising a wall of noise and lead in front of the wounded man. Like parent birds of prey, the Hurricanes swung around again and again, until the Gurkha platoon recovered the lame man and the attackers disappeared into deep cover. Then their fuel gauges gave warning, and they swung out over the river and back to Imphal.
That was that, it seemed, until an evening weeks later, when they dropped from their planes to the earth and the groundcrew nodded toward a couple of figures by the airfield’s edge. The two pilots crossed the tarmac, pulling off their helmets and masks, their eyes slowly widening at the sight of a tall White lieutenant colonel waiting beside a short Nepali man on crutches. The Gurkha stood expressionless while the officer did the talking, but once the formal thanks had been made he swung forward on his good leg. Reaching into his coat, he took out a ceremonial kukri, the sort that passed as heirlooms in Gurkha families, and placed it in the hands of Manek’s colleague. Then the four men saluted each other, with nothing more to be said.3
The wounded man was evacuated down to Assam, and they would never meet him again. The kukri would fly into battle in the cockpit of an IAF Hurricane, until the last of the men who could make it home to India had done so.
14
No Heroes
Madras, May–June 1943
After the deserts of Libya and Iraq, and lately a week on the Arabian Sea, the men of 2nd Field Company had seen enough mirages to doubt the bright, blocky crust accreting on the horizon. In hours, though, the channel grew busy with ships, and then there was no doubting the stench of fish and civilisation. Men crowded the bows of the Nevasa as she slipped past the Elysium of Bombay, the Gateway of India and the Hotel Taj Mahal, and returned to the dock from which the company had departed nearly a thousand days before.
As the ship berthed a brass band struck up behind the crimson carousel of coolies’ dhotis. Its tooting and bumping were drowned out by the clamour of the troops as they rushed up from below and frothed on the deck. For more than an hour they lay tied up without orders to disembark. Hindi in the dialects of Rajputana and Urdu in the brogue of Wales mingled over softer conferences in Tamil and Garhwali. In content, however, the talk was all the same: the cause of the hold-up before their summer furlough.
At last four jeeps drove onto the quayside, and a hush descended as some very heavy gold braid stepped out. Then the ship erupted in whoops and whistles, not for the Major-General Commandant of Bombay, or the commander of the 5th Division, but for the third man to emerge: the handsome slab of chin and the trim blond moustache that were unmistakably General Claude Auchinleck.
The Auk looked a little diminished from his photographs of 1941, when he had commanded the entire Middle Eastern theatre. After being relieved in Cairo he had spent a year unassigned, the punishment for his many contretemps with Churchill. His chest had sunk, and he clasped his hands behind his back. His great chin rested nearly on his sternum, but a smile played above it, sending wrinkles to his small enquiring eyes. Perhaps he knew that he would soon be re-appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India, the force to which he had always been most devoted. But his present news was even greater. It was exchanged on the quayside with the brigade staff, and ran like a sparking fuse up the gangway to explode on the deck where Bobby stood. Tunis had fallen, the Afrika Korps was defeated. The 4th Indian Division had accepted the surrender of General von Arnim, Rommel’s successor and the supreme commander of Axis forces in Africa.1 The news was bittersweet, for both Auchinleck and the 5th Division. Neither had seen the campaign through to its end: the general had been fired from his command just before the final turn, and the division had been sent east after paying for the victory with the lives of thousands.
A few days later, there were more pipes and drums at the platform of Roorkee station, as 2nd Field was paraded through the town, representing all the Bengal Sappers still overseas. Europeans, loyalists, cantonment staff and children came out to cheer for them, the victors of North Africa; pi-dogs yapped and scampered. At Roorkee parade ground the commandant announced decorations and promotions. Asanandan Singh went up to be promoted subedar and receive the Indian Order of Merit for his ‘continuous courage and disregard of personal danger’ at Keren and the Falaja Pass.2 He, with seventy-five other Indians and one British officer, Major Scott, had been in the field from 6 September 1940 to that day, 21 May 1943. They could now go home.
As his train jerked into motion, Bobby sensed a country in motion as well. The atmosphere in India had changed completely from the summer before. The mayhem of ‘Do or Die’ and the suppression of the Congress had helped India forget how close the Japanese still prowled to its back gate. Relieved of naval invaders3 and nationalist crusaders, and all that existential bother, the country had settled in to win a war.
In 1943, India’s ‘phoney war’ was at its peak, and all were doing well from it. The vision held by Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, of a colony ‘humming from end to end with activity in munitions and supply production … the bustle of men training for active service’, had become real. Everything was in demand, and India could supply: jute from the east for sandbags, wool from the north for blankets, coir from the south for rope; timber, tea, leather, coal; beans, bullets, ghee, glass, chemicals and compass parts. The industries of the Bombay Presidency, long fettered by the Raj, manufactured steel, ball-bearings and motor tools. The government purchased materiel with loans from India, and India turned from its master’s debtor into its creditor. The mints worked overtime, issuing rupees to finance India’s spending. Prices spiralled, but the wealthy lived better than ever before, flush with new profit.4
In Calicut, the saw mills ran day and night, cutting sleepers for railroads in Egypt and Persia, while in Delhi’s Connaught Circus, lavish cabarets kept the same hours, fed by the salaries of US airmen.5 In Madras, the port would be busier than it had ever been, receiving American ships whose draft did not permit them to sail up the Hooghly to Calcutta. The city would be turning as a happy cog in the newly oiled mechanism of India’s war.
As he crossed India’s midriff, Bobby passed through a belt of new and wildly disordered complexion. In Bombay, solitary girls from Ukraine sold sex to survive outside the Reich’s new reach, and Polish orphans played in Bandra gardens, innocent of the fate of the families they’d left behind. To the east, in the hinterlands of Nagpur, West African soldiers toiled and trained, and in Delawari, Italian POWs built churches and joined the locals in praying for rain. Pale Cockneys of the Queen’s Regiment turned Mowglies in the Seoni Forest. Further east, in Ramgarh, bare-chested Kentishmen marched between bare-breasted Santal women breaking rocks by the roadside. Chinese sappers flattened termite hills to exp
and training camps for 30,000 Chinese soldiers. Further east again was Calcutta, where US airmen, white-skinned boy-kings, swallowed inhuman quantities of ice cream; and then Assam, where Black engineers from Dixie built a new road to China, directing black labour from Travancore. At last, at India’s furthest extent, Japanese patrols moved in stealth along the border, awaiting their own entrance to the play.6
In the middle of them all, and not the least strange, was Bobby himself. By officers’ privilege, he travelled first class. The singed air billowed into his face, and sent him into a reverie of how much had changed and how fast. In the very same season, two years before, he and Mukundan would have been going home on hols. They only ever travelled third class back then. They wore sleeveless vests and lungis in the Maplah fashion, a week’s scruff on their necks and the pungent reek of summer in their hair. As the engine hauled its heavy tail over the Ghats, Bobby chafed on the bare wooden berths yet felt like the king of train and track.
Once, when they hissed into a minor station, Bobby had peered into the stationary bogey on the next track. The berths there were upholstered in leather, and a fan whirred: second class.
Bobby looked on until a face appeared at the window. It was a second-class face, too, covered in even softer padding than the berths.
‘Edoh … Psst,’ Bobby said. ‘Edoh!’
The middle-aged gentleman glanced over, then firmly away.
‘Edoh!’ Bobby insisted. ‘Hey. Look here, da …’
The man looked.
‘I can tell that you haven’t bought a ticket either, right?’ Bobby said, in gutter Malayalam, and winked. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry. Just watch out for the ticket collector at Gudalur, and you’ll be okay.’
The stranger’s mouth slackened, but whatever he snapped back was lost in Bobby and Mukundan’s hooting at the thrill of their reverse snobbery.
Well, the old Seth could get back at Bobby now. Here he was, travelling in first class – not even second. What did that make him? An army officer, of course. A sahib? Parsis were already semi-sahibs. No surprise they made good lieutenants; that was their shelf. Bobby, the Parsi-Madrassi lootnant-sahib of George’s Own Bengalis, back from Iraq! Whatever he was, from the next track over, it must look pretty funny.
Maybe he wasn’t anything at all. Not native or White, not Hindu or Muslim, pledged neither to his King nor his countrymen. He was no-land’s man, a narrow strip of ground between all those clear-drawn lines. Maybe the whole country was like that: split between loyalty and liberty, subordination and treason. By being neither one thing nor the other, Bobby might be the most Indian of all.
He was still waiting to reach the fight, to see on which side he’d actually fall. Because he wasn’t yet a real soldier, either. He had his first-class ticket, but he hadn’t paid its true price. The only foes he had faced were flies and thieves. The 2nd Field Company had earned its victor’s parade, many times over: at Barentu, at Keren, on the torn Massawa Road, up in Amba Alagi, down in the hell of Gazala, at Alam el Halfa and on the Ruweisat Ridge. When all that was over, Bobby marched with them, but mentally he demurred. Ungli katvaake shaheedon mein shaamil ho gaya, he thought – just a cut on the finger but in the ranks of the martyrs. What Bobby had to prove would be proved after this summer. Until then, the honours belonged to John Wright and Asanandan Singh. And Ganny, rest his soul. And Manek, who even now must be snapping on his flight goggles, taxiing out through curtains of rain toward Burma, where Bobby was in haste to join him.
The telegram arrived at the Mugaseth house the day before Bobby did, informing them of the crash. Manek had been returning to base through extreme low visibility due to monsoon cloud and had flown into a hill inside Indian lines. He’d been carrying Kosh’s photograph in his pocket, where they had found it, folded into his maps. He was pronounced dead and buried in Imphal. The telegram thanked them for their sacrifice.
That was it. It was no enemy’s doing, and no one’s responsibility. Manek had just slipped from God’s palm, and gone.
In those weeks, in that house, nothing could be clearly seen from the outside – nor could anyone, decades later, presume to describe it. There were just bare facts. Two boys had departed, Khodadad and Tehmina were back. And there was one more: Nugs and Ganny’s baby daughter, not yet six months old. New death becoming known with new life. Wails of the newborn and the newly bereft. Also tears, breastmilk, urine, and of course – it was Madras and summer – ripe sweat.
Kosh was inconsolable, her pretty features twisted into ugly shapes. Nugs helped Khodadad and Tehmina receive their murmuring visitors, including the old Parsis who hadn’t visited when her own husband died, and now met her with their excuses. There was little else to do. They did not have Manek’s body to wash, or to soothe with the smoke of frankincense, or to follow in pairs down to the Tower of Silence.
All summer, the air stayed swollen and tender. Bobby’s family had fallen apart once again – and once again it was rebuilt, but with its original members, as it had been in Calicut. Quietly they knitted back together, and in still moments, when the baby had her breast, Nugs told Bobby about her own journey home.
In December, in Thal, after the warmth left Ganny’s body, and the cinders cooled in his petrol-smelling pyre, she had to execute the long, solitary return from the frosted plane of the Frontier, back to Madras and the world of the living. Six nights on a train, empty as Orpheus, with only her full belly and a full urn of ashes, before she stepped onto the sun-blasted platform and into the arms of her sisters.
They tried to keep her calm through the last two weeks of her pregnancy. She went into labour on New Year’s Eve, and they hurried to the Women and Children’s Hospital where she worked. Ganny’s sister worked there as well, and was on duty that night, but refused to come to Nugs’s bedside. Instead the nurses cared for her as if she was family. On the morning of the new year, her daughter was born.
New child and new mother went to Subur’s, where early the next day Khodadad and Tehmina arrived at the door. ‘You didn’t bless our wedding,’ Nugs screamed when she saw them, and then she fell into her mother’s arms, and later they talked. Though unable to forgive Nugs and her husband, Khodadad and Tehmina were unable to forsake Nugs on her own. Once they saw the baby they were reconciled to her trail of mistakes. They would move to Madras to rejoin their daughters, eventually selling the house in Calicut, and recovering what they could of their family.
Nugs had to function, even as she groped for her sanity, so she managed both. The exertions of maternity had her on her feet from dawn. Then dusk returned, and on the beat of patting the baby to sleep, she counted the toll of consequences on her young life – become a wife, become an orphan; become a widow, become a mother – when all she’d ever felt ready to become was a doctor.
Tehmina ran the household, and though nobody could find an appetite, the table was covered as well as ever. Meat, fish, fruits and butter, and blessedly, eggs, were exempt from India’s wartime controls. There were dhansaks of eight dals and eight vegetables for dinner. In all this only Khodadad was visibly improved. At the slightest opportunity he bundled the family into the car and dragged them out to the Cosmopolitan Club. His daughters’ double losses had given him what his own doubling profits never had: a role, unavoidable, in the world of his children.
Outside, the blistering city (why was it always summer?) mopped its brow and hurried on, missing nobody. Shopkeepers broke from reading aloud from Japan Varuvaana7 to fan themselves with its pages. Weeks became months. Already Manek had begun to fade. His plane had entered a cloud and flown into an invisible hillside. From that invisibility he never re-emerged, not even as a dead man. The pages of the squadron diary which documented the Imphal mission would be lost, and with them the record of Manek’s last flight; in time, his name would disappear from the surviving rolls of the squadron’s dead. Around the house too, Bobby noticed the gradual disappearance of Manek and Ganny’s effects – a tin of hair cream, a stack of visiting cards – as n
oiseless hands packed them away. Already they were diminishing, their lives shrinking from the run of a subcontinent to the handspan of a photo frame.
Bobby was left alone to contemplate what lay ahead. Grief was grief, with its own authority. But grief was also a pretext to stay silent as the passing days pulled Bobby away from the family and into the company awaiting, which were still embodied for him by the two dead men. The war meant much less to him now, but he was indentured to it, and his real labour was just beginning. It was going to be a sappers’ war. The Army planned a full offensive at last, rather than more glamorous folly of Wingate’s sort, the sort that had cost Manek his life. A full offensive meant tanks and artillery, and full divisions of infantry well equipped. Out on the slopes of tropical mountains, through knotty forests of bamboo and orchids, their greatest military asset would be a decent road, and Bobby would have to build it.
15
Fascines and Gabions
Calcutta, October 1943
Slow, great and a year too late, like an elephant loosed from its chains, the Indian Army turned from the enemy it fought on orders to the enemy it had to fight for survival. In 1942 the country had faced Japan’s carrier groups with fake guns made of tarred coconut stems. By 1944, it would have to beat the Japanese hand-to-hand. In the pivotal year of 1943, however, the Indian Army had new champions, bent on delivering better training, better weapons, provisions and a better chance.
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