Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  Bobby saw no more of the Nagas, who were missed, because the plain of Imphal was occupied by Meiteis, a people more settled, less guileless, more political and far less supportive of Britain’s war. Outside Kohima, on top of what would later be called Congress Ridge, the JIFs had raised a fluttering tricolour, green, white and saffron, stamped with Bose’s leaping tiger. It was simple, then: an enemy device, a challenger to be overcome.

  Now, on the Imphal Plain, they found it was the JIFs who stood in the light. They had evangelised in every village taken by the Japanese: the same villages where Bengal Sappers had destroyed private rice stores as they made their retreat.4 In the town of Moirang, the renegades had flown another tricolour, and young Meiteis lined up to join Bose’s army. The JIFs had lost, and badly, but the future was on their side. Bobby’s army had won, but it had fought on the side of the past.

  Orders arrived sooner than expected. Abandoning two years’ precedent, General Slim decided to fight through the monsoon. He would press his advantage and beat the enemy back south into Burma. The Japanese 33rd Division, astride the southern road, was the last of the three invading forces still retreating in good order. The 5th Indian Division would pursue them across the Manipur river, up the perilous ascents called the Ladder and the Chocolate Staircase, to the town of Tiddim where the last massif of the Chin Hills dropped away to the plain of Mandalay. There the recoiling Japanese would turn and face them, and would have to be defeated before they could all go home.

  Through the ruined paddy and the marshes by Loktak Lake, and on the high dewy pastures above Bishenupur, the two divisions grappled and crashed south away from Imphal. In September they crossed into Burma, and into areas that had no map names, only figures. The 161st Brigade moved into the lead now, and 2nd Field Company with it. The hills massed in, wooded and ravined, mounting so far overhead that Bobby could crane his neck and see sun-bright slopes above, a mirage afloat in the sky.

  The quality of the Tiddim Road reflected the nature of the war on it: pathetic and physically brutal. Wrecked once in the British retreat in March, the road was newly cratered and collapsed by the Japanese. Each downpour or bomb fumbled from a passing Hurricane could loose tons of waterlogged clay onto it. As a later account had it, ‘moving streams of shale and mud, trees and boulders, flowed across the road like lava from some volcano’.

  Vehicles bogged down had to be winched out, or towed free by elephants. Early on a convoy of Bailey bridge trucks sank into the mud, and sat immovable for four days until a spell of sunshine hardened the surface. All along, the road was rutted so deep that the lorries churning down it keeled from one violent angle to another. The men inside flew around as if the tent pegs of gravity had come out, and they reached the front bone-weary and nauseous.

  The sappers pressed on, splitting through hardwood and hillside, using explosives, earth-movers and teams of pick-and-shovel. At the close of one day, the subedar of 2nd Field announced they had moved ‘at least half of Assam’. There were smaller, lateral tracks that could collapse into spear pits, concealed in the ground and caked with septic human dung. Also under foot was the ghastly debris of the retreating division, bodies disinterred by the sapper work. The Japanese survivors still fought, with the supreme tenacity for which they were legend. Their officers, out of ammo, drew their sabres and fell under the Rajputs’ rifles. An Indian lieutenant of another company of Bengal Sappers described a Japanese officer with part of his arm missing, maggots crawling over him, but fighting still.

  It was harder now to hate the enemy than to pity them. At times the only difference Bobby saw between the Indians and the Japs was what grew on them: fungus on the winners, maggots on the losers. Death felt common after Kohima, and unexalted, dealt as easily by a crate of tinned peaches swinging from a snared parachute as by a hostile bullet. There was no fascination any more, no feeling, in seeing the precious red secrets of a human skull ransacked and spilt on the ground. It was left to distant adjutants to write citations describing the victim’s valour and high purpose. Here there was only going on, or not.

  The noises of the forest seemed to absorb all the blood and grow more bloated. The heat and the nerves and the gulp of water began to make Bobby ill. He shook with fever, and there were longer and longer periods he could not remember, pure blanks in his mind. His OC ordered him back to be treated for malaria at the divisional hospital. Death was even louder there, and packed in. Scrub typhus, septic sores, malaria, dengue fever, jaundice and jungle rot gnawed on men’s bodies beneath their stained sheets; that was not counting combat wounds. Bobby stared out the window of his ward, watching taut cables turn slack and bowed by the rain. Every length glistened with water, and dripped in perfect order and time, like men on the march. Each drop, advancing down its narrow black road, grew from an intrepid bulge to a shining half-pearl. Then it reached the bottom of its arc, and cut, and fell – a hundred a minute, from a hundred cables, in identical discipline – to break on earth already so sodden that not a shadow of any one remained.

  Bobby was discharged and returned to the brigade to find a pinpoint of cheer on the landscape: their new pet, an elephant adopted by the 1/1st Punjab. Wright had been with the Punjabi patrol when they followed the tinkling of bells up a cloud-shrouded spur. There they discovered three nervous, abandoned elephants – remnants of the fleet the Japanese had used to pull guns into India. Wright made bold and stepped up to one of them. He was only yards away when it flung its trunk up and screamed in his face. It felt as if someone had lifted him off his feet and shaken him. He turned on his heels and ran.

  Fortunately, the orderly to Daddy Warren had once worked as a mahout, and he arrived in time to collect the gentlest of the three. Thereafter the orderly spent more time attending to the beast than the brigadier, commandeering enough chapatis to meet its great appetite, as well as a dugout made for a three-ton lorry, to which the animal learned to hurry at the sound of falling artillery. It became a brief mascot of the 161st Brigade, especially beloved of the Punjabis who had an elephant on their regimental badge. For a while, there was no sight as soothing as the creature bearing the piled laundry of brigade headquarters down to the river, where it lay in the water and consented to let the dhobis use its rumpled skin as a scrubbing board, and to smack drenched uniforms on its legs. Then it was led away back to India, to join the stables of the Raja of Cooch Behar, while the brigade turned back to its road.

  From five miles away, they heard the Manipur river. ‘Its roar,’ Slim wrote, ‘was like that of a great football crowd.’5 The river was in monsoon spate, whirlpooling and wild, and would suffer nobody to cross. Brigade and sapper officers conferred on the banks, shouting to be audible. Second Field Company had a new OC who was keen to prove his mettle by making the first crossing. He called up an assault boat – a collapsible canvas tub powered by an outboard motor – and pushed off into the stream. It covered about five yards before the river lifted the boat and flung it in the air, dispersing the sappers like spray. All were saved, thanks to Jemadar Jehan Dad6 who had sidled off downstream ahead of time, and then plunged into the water to drag out the drowning men.

  It was two days before they got a rope across, by clamping it to a dummy mortar round and firing it over the water. Once a heavier cable was pulled through, the sappers hitched up a ‘flying ferry’, a pontoon raft attached to a traveller on the cable, which would be propelled to the far bank by the river’s own force. Worn-out units turned back at the river, and a thinned division began to cross. By now the current had risen from twelve to seventeen feet per second, and the truculent river hurled debris and timber against the sides of the inflated raft. Each day a pontoon burst or a bollard was ripped off. On 5 October alone, five sappers drowned: Bhan Singh, Chanan Singh, Keshar Singh, Sardara Singh, Surjan Singh; sons of faraway Ludhiana, Patiala, Jullundhur. Still the sappers ran the crossing through the days and into the nights, under the shelling of the Japanese 105mm guns. By mid-October they had ferried across the larger part of the
division with its supplies and equipment, as well as two hospital units and six Lee-Grant tanks, at the cost of ten sappers’ lives.

  Ahead was the Chocolate Staircase, a muddy track that climbed thirty-eight bends, writhing and twisting like a snake with a broken spine. From there on, it was impossible to maintain the full route, and they let the road close over behind them. They would rely on air supply, as the Chindits had; they would carry their wounded with them, and not think about the way back.

  Men kept dying – blown up by a landmine, killed by gangrene after a foot was chewed up in a bulldozer’s tread. The weight of one tank broke the road into the ravine below, and it plunged out of sight, taking a sapper with it. Near Tiddim a rockface leaned heavily over the road, and the ground on the other side fell away in a sheer drop of five hundred feet. Clinging to the rock, Sappers Karam Singh and Santokh Singh bored holes that could take explosive charges and bring the rockface down. It collapsed as they worked, burying them four feet deep. Shale gushed down along the length of the track, spilling off the cliff’s edge. Still the other sappers ran in to dig the fallen men out. Karam Singh was dead. Santokh Singh was pulled out with a broken arm and a fractured skull. There was no way he could be evacuated, and Bobby could barely watch as he was dragged along on the juddering bed of a jeep.

  The mules suffered too, toiling hock-deep in the mud while their loads chafed their hides and gradually exposed the warm pink dermis of their flanks. The sappers hacked mule paths through the steaming verdure, over forest floors flowing like gutters, to get rifle companies around the enemy flank. Blinking up at the trails, Bobby couldn’t always tell if he was looking at men climbing hand and foot, or animals; now they were men, now mules, and now they and their drivers were joined into crawling six-legged creatures with trembling sinews holding one half to the other.

  A memo arrived from Daddy Warren, their former brigadier now promoted to command the whole of 5th Division. ‘So far the major burden of the advance has fallen on the engineers,’ he wrote; ‘I fully realise that, with the equipment available, it has been next door to a miracle to pass a Division down this road and across the Manipur river in the time in which you have done it …’ Bobby read down the letter, but the words skimmed like water bugs on the film on his eye. He set it down before reaching the end.

  Warren’s appreciation would not make the world know the men who died here; even those living called themselves ‘the Forgotten Army’. By now the 4th Indian Division had lunged up the boot laces of Italy: heroes in everyone’s sight. The Americans had liberated Paris, and the Soviets were in Germany. They believed they would end the war in Europe by Christmas, and those who did not make it back would be remembered for it.

  Their combat through the sacred cities of Western civilisation made Bobby’s army look like ants disputing anthills. Second Field Company had been ordered all around the weedy edge of the Empire, farm boys toiling from acre to distant acre, until they reached here, the final field but one. Their greatest campaign was this feral fight in a place far from everywhere, a place that turned men into animals to blunder and maul and die on the banks of shit-filled chaungs.

  When the slaughter of Whites by Whites was over, who among them would remember the Black men they sent running and shooting in the jungle? The Empire was ending and they were too late to find a place in that epic. In India how many would know, as Bobby did, the cost in boys’ lives? A new nation was forming, and they were too early to belong in its story. Those who had fallen like Manek and Ganny had fallen in the middle, and Bobby felt himself wanting to fall too.

  One afternoon Daddy Warren, on his way back from the front, drove over to the company in person. His jeep passed by Wright where he sat atop a bridging vehicle, and he called Wright over.

  ‘We’ve had dead mules, and dead Japs,’ the general said. ‘But please, lieutenant – when you see this elephant we’re following, do dissuade the tank people from killing it?’ Wright now had an ironic reputation for his courage facing elephants. He hadn’t realised it had travelled as far as the divisional commander. He returned a stiff salute.

  Wright was sent forward the next morning to examine the dead elephant. It had been gunned down but by a Hurricane pilot, who must have taken it for an animal still in Japanese employ. The elephant had bled to death, with a minimum of mess. Wright phoned back to the company to ask for someone to deal with it.

  Bobby arrived soon afterwards with a detonation kit and a bag of ammonal. He approached the elephant with a detachment equal to the task of disposing of it. It was very large and very still, and it hadn’t yet begun to bloat or to stink. Within two days it would soften into a giant, diseased mushroom dribbling its stench down the cliff road. This was really a situation that required a bulldozer, but the machines were few and constantly occupied with the avalanche of clay and rock. This smaller avalanche of flesh would have to be dealt with using explosives.

  Bobby stepped in closer and placed a hand on the elephant’s firm hide. He had never blown up an elephant. He edged around the carcass, examining how it lay, taking in its matted tuft of tail, its violent expulsion of dung, the sagging belly stained black from exit wounds and the head streaked black with tears. He put his hand on the bristled brow, and for a moment he felt like he had travelled in the company of this creature for a long time, from Calicut where it was chained and fed holy offerings, through the dumb toil and idleness of Roorkee, turning with it west to east until Burma, and the labours and terrors on the Tiddim Road.

  He moved around the elephant again and his hands worked on their own, tucking charges under the folds of the belly skin and the loose flap of lip. Bobby’s mind was on the single, long-lashed eye, half-drowned in its pool of black wrinkles. Sorrow welled up in him at the thought of what had raced through that eye in the elephant’s last days and hours: turning and turning again, not knowing its master, bewildered and blundering on the Tiddim Road, until shot down at last by who-knows-which side, and blown out of the way by a man as bewildered as itself.

  His hand fired the fuse and he stepped away. The ammonal detonated with its deep whoomp, but the carcass did not lift or land clear of the road as it was meant to. The elephant exploded. It rose for an instant and then burst, separating into a million strands of wayward gut and muscle, which snagged in the high branches by the roadside and rushed as a pink mist into Bobby’s glazed eyes.

  20

  The Road Ahead

  Madras, November 1945

  Khodadad observed that he could snap the morning newspaper out of its fold – it wasn’t yet humid, it must be November. Then he did it. They smiled around the table, as they seldom had that year. Then he vanished into its private corner, and all that emerged for a while was the rustle of pages passing steadily from right hand to left.

  Nugs tried to chart out her day in her mind. She was back on call now at the obstetrics department, but she had today off to manage the house. This house, on Montieth Road, was her own; she had bought it and found ways to fill it: with the remains of her family, and their old retainers from Calicut, and their families, with icons of Zarathustra and other prophets on the walls, with two Dalmatians, and on most days, a constant ringing of guests and friends. And all of that together did not fill Nugs’s home as much as her daughter, who was nearly three. Already she had turned from a plump puzzle of flesh into a small person. If the Mugaseth family had survived, it was because she had saved them. Nineteen forty-two, ’43, ’44: every year had hollowed the house, but the growing child filled it, and brought youth to a family that had aged quicker than time.

  Nugs was staring down at her scrambled eggs when she sensed it coming. She didn’t need warning. She could feel the blow coming, and the memories rising beneath it like a bruise. Khodadad began to read aloud: ‘Indian Troops Smash Indonesian Attacks. The fighting at Surabaya has only just reached its full intensity …’ He browsed quietly for a moment. ‘The latest reports indicate no slackening of Indonesian resistance …’

  It was
news from Bobby’s division – or what had been Bobby’s division. Three months had passed since The Bomb and Japan’s surrender. Down the arc of South-East Asia its soldiers stood in disbelief as their godly empire vanished into thin air. Thanks to Khodadad, she knew that the 5th Indian Division, then in Burma, had sailed out to accept the surrender of Singapore, an honour for its troops. Then it sailed for Java to start to fight again.

  The war hadn’t ended, even though it had. The winners were now fighting over who got what. None of it mattered to Nugs any longer, though it did to her father. He wouldn’t let the war end either, because once the war was over, it was the end of the story. Then they would never learn the truth of what had happened to Bobby.

  The family knew little more than what they’d read when the telegram came last November. Official records were mum too – even the diary of 2nd Field Company, on the date of 4 November 1944, merely said: ‘Lieut Mugaseth G Kh IE admitted to hosp.’ Nugs could only brood over the final photograph he’d sent her, around the time that his company prepared to leave Imphal: a picture she had looked at and failed, at first, to recognise. Bobby was transformed. The shirt he wore was unbuttoned, its collar askew and his lieutenant’s pips seemed to droop from his shoulders. His face was drawn and dark, suddenly like an Indian’s, but also like a stranger’s. The smooth cheeks were carved away, and that teasing, translucent expression was gone. His once sappy eyes were hard under new shadows.