Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  It was not a picture she wanted to look at again, so she hid it in the back of the silver photo frame: behind the younger, truer portrait of Bobby which had joined the other two on the sitting-room table. What Nugs had to do now was forget. She had spent too long lost in the corridors of grief, where each door led on to new halls but the way overall led only from wholeness to emptiness. She couldn’t afford to go there any more. The only victory for Nugs in 1945 was the cumulative moments she spent in possession of her own life, not pierced by memories of the dead.

  Yet Khodadad was adamant. His dolorous keystrokes produced letter after letter, which were posted to new offices and authorities, seemingly pushed under every door of the Indian Army. He had to have a better accounting for the loss of his son; as if any story would help them endure it. It was futile. There were no longer any replies. A year had passed since the telegram, and everyone else already had their versions, or at least their bare theories, of what had happened to Bobby. Each was brief and hard as a seed, but grew into a kind of memory of what they had never known in the first place.

  The gun went off in error, most of them said. It was the merciful consensus, offered to the Mugaseths by every visitor who came with condolences. It happened on the front, where the rain and muck ran constantly into gunpowder, and sidearms were drenched in the wading of streams. At the time it happened, the 161st Brigade wasn’t even on the road, but cutting a jungle track south of Tiddim, to hook around enemy positions on Kennedy Peak.

  Imagine: it was dawn, and the air was patterned with arabesques of noisy birdsong. Around the clearing, men rose out of warm envelopes of sleep into the chill of the battlefront. Wearing sweaters over their battledress, fumbling with stiff fingers, they moved to strike camp. Bobby must have stood, facing east for the light, scraping his cheeks with a razor while his orderly folded clothes behind him. The sky was quicksilver running to gold behind the outline of Mount Kennedy. It was beautiful. His orderly handed him a stack of clothes and kit, and went to bring tea. Bobby dropped the pile onto the ground. A shot rang out. Bobby fell. It was quick. He did nothing wrong.

  That story probably wasn’t true at all. The people who believed it didn’t know Bobby, not the way the boys in Madras did – Mukundan and Kurien and Sankaran Nair. They knew that fate did not sneak up on Bobby; he pursued it. That’s how they would always think of him, through his youthful caprices and his impulse to roll the dice. Well, he couldn’t have meant for it to happen, but he must have asked for it.

  Deep in the killing fields of Burma, life was cheap, maybe even cheap enough to play with. The war made men crazy. The mepacrine dosage made some men psychotic, giving them strange waking dreams and manic rages, and whispering voices in their ears that caused them to stagger out alone into the jungle. Besides, everyone drank hard, and harder as a campaign ran on, as the monotony of army scale and their physical ordeal wore them down. Air-dropped rations kept them moving, and even when the division had barely enough to eat, the quartermasters in Imphal made sure they had plenty to drink.

  The way Sankaran Nair told it, it was dusk, and the air had filled with the screaming of the woods. ‘Returning from a jungle patrol, he went for his bath after ordering his batman to empty and clean his revolver,’ Nair would say. ‘Later he picked up the revolver, and went to the mess.’

  John Wright and his platoon were elsewhere, and the other British officers sat together, playing cards around a gas lamp. They had risked their lives too much that month, and the rum ration was their only consolation.

  The officers’ mess tent was tattered and sewn up again, and it didn’t keep out the night wind. Bobby drank until the liquor rocked in his head. ‘Then,’ Nair said, ‘he dared his British brother officers to play a game of Russian roulette. They asked him not to be stupid, and to continue drinking. He ribbed them for being funks and said he would demonstrate the game.’ He couldn’t remember the words he’d just spoken which brought his hand to his holster. The Webley .455 was heavy, but not as heavy as it would be loaded, it was heavier then. The iron finger tapped hard on his skull. He forced himself to laugh as he pulled the trigger.

  ‘The batman had left one round in the gun …’ Nair said. ‘Fate had engraved Bobby’s name on this cartridge.’1

  Nugs closed her eyes and her mind to the horror of that thought, as she had learned to do from constant practice in the last three years. She never believed the ghastly fancies of Bobby’s friends, that he had died like a lunatic spinning a revolver’s chambers. After all their family had suffered, he would never have sold his life so cheap. She didn’t accept either that he died by accident, hit by a dart of chance.

  The truth was that she would never know what took away their last boy, her little brother. Nugs didn’t know, beyond what she read in the papers, about the lives and deaths on the Tiddim Road. She only knew that the men there called themselves the Forgotten Army, and it must have been intolerable to feel forgotten. They had fought the most savage battles of the Empire’s war, but the world looked elsewhere, and already they were closed out of its memory. Maybe Bobby thought he was forgotten, too, out there where death was in bloom and bodies fell by the thousand, dropped from the boughs by the rain. Or maybe, as the thick bamboo crossed out the road behind him, he did the forgetting – lost sight of his far-off life and family, and of Nugs – and surrendered to the loneliness of those awesome, empty valleys.

  A grooved, leaden instrument rested in his lap.

  Perhaps Bobby looked down the long road, past his own death, to where he was but a memory, a brief exposure on the minds of a few who survived, before that too dimmed and disappeared. Ganny and Manek had gone this way ahead of him, into the field from which no one returned. And even after death there was a field, the farthest field: it was where you went when even the memory of your name was gone, and you were forgotten completely.

  A puckered steel mouth was breathing at his temple.

  Before him, the rutted track ran toward the mountain. And Bobby saw it darkly, beyond the peak, the farthest field, and he prepared to cross.

  When it was too late, but before the end, perhaps he remembered.

  In the moment that remained after the revolver’s roar, he felt warm liquid coming down his cheek and ears, like the bath of milk his sisters gave him on his birthdays. He looked down at his arms and saw the rose petals landing, one after another, until they covered everything.

  Nugs raised her head and blinked her eyes. The family was watching her from around the table. She had wandered off again, and hadn’t heard her daughter calling from the top of the stairway. Her chair fell back and Nugs fled up the steps. Her day was just beginning.

  Epilogue

  The 161st Indian Infantry Brigade was airlifted out of Kalemyo, at the end of the Tiddim Road, on 28 November, 1944: less than three weeks after Bobby’s death. They had spent fourteen months at the front. The brigade remained a part of 5th Indian Division through the campaign to reconquer Burma, the formal surrender of Singapore, and the pacification of the Dutch East Indies.

  A Dutch colonial administration waited to be restored to power in the East Indies, even though the Netherlands itself had only been liberated six months before. Indonesian partisans had a different view: they had opposed the Dutch before, and then the Japanese, and they did not intend to stand and watch as the Dutch returned, after a three-year absence, to rule them again. The vanquished Japanese Army had accepted the terms of the surrender: including the bitter condition that they would now help restore Asian colonies to their old European masters. But some Japanese commanders were more inclined to surrender their arms to natives than to Allied victors. The partisans were well established on the islands, and now, besides their guerrillas’ rifles, swords and bamboo spears, they had armoured cars, machine guns and tanks.

  The Ball of Fire, celebrating in the streets in Singapore, was made to arm and sail for Java. Pending the arrival of competent Dutch troops and administration, it was to secure the island against a partisa
n takeover. In the town of Surabaya, a fragile truce with the nationalists cracked under the strain of Britain’s ambiguous intentions; fighting spread across the city, and had to be suppressed street by street. So began the inevitable final act of the 5th Division’s five years of war. Indonesians, armed by the Japanese, would fight Indians, commanded by the British, on behalf of the Dutch.

  The 161st Indian Infantry Brigade remained in Java well into 1946, aiding in ‘the systematic disposal of extremist elements’. Through two operations, named ‘Pounce’ and ‘Purge’, the 1/1st Punjab cordoned off towns, turning back residents who attempted to leave, while a vengeful Dutch police force ‘swept from south to north on a wide front, and destroyed all extremist elements discovered’. On 31 January, between operations, the battalion were added to a ceremonial parade in Batavia to celebrate the birthday of Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands.

  In 1947, the 2nd Field Company, Bengal Sappers, was reorganised as an entirely Mussalman unit. Along with its former brigade-mate, the 1/1st Punjab, it became part of the army of the new state of Pakistan.

  Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck retained his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of India until the date of Independence. On 14 August 1947, he issued the final military command of the British Raj: ‘This is the last Army Order.’ After presiding over the division of the Indian armed forces, he spent most of his retired life in Marrakesh, Morocco.

  Aspy Engineer and Arjan Singh, Manek’s superior officers in No. 2 Squadron in 1941, would both rise to the rank of air marshal and between them head the Indian Air Force through most of the 1960s. Arjan Singh retained the facial scar from his crash in the rivulet at Asad Khel for the rest of his life.

  Asanandan Singh won an Indian Order of Merit and survived the rest of the war as a subedar. No further record of his life could be found.

  John Walker Wright won the Military Cross for his courage in Kohima, and was promoted captain before the war’s end. Afterwards, he returned to Cambridge to finish his degree, and then worked as a civil engineer at postings around the world, including back in India in the 1990s. He retired to the village of Bisley, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, where he died in 2002. A diorama showing him and Lance-Naik Abdul Majid blowing the door off the bakery in Kohima has pride of place at the museum of the Royal Engineers in Gillingham, Kent.

  Verghese Kurien, Bobby’s classmate at Guindy who was offered an army commission but forbidden from joining by his mother, accepted a government job to run a milk-processing unit in the village of Anand in Gujarat. Eventually he built Amul, a cooperative organisation that revolutionised milk production in India, and still provides dairy goods for half the country. I met him a few months before his death in 2012, when he gave me one account of Bobby’s life and death.

  Sankaran Nair became the first chief of India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing. His memoir, Inside I.B. and R.A.W.: A Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss, provides another version of Bobby’s death.

  P. Mukundan left the Army and became an officer with Indian Telephone Industries and the national telegraph service. Through his retirement, he lived in Palghat, in the hills midway between Madras and Calicut.

  After the war, Subur and GP thrived in the service of a newly self-governing country. GP left The Hindu to enter Nehru’s diplomatic corps, in which he rose swiftly to become India’s ambassador to Indonesia, to the People’s Republic of China, to Pakistan, and finally to the United Nations. Subur’s academic career earned her an appointment as a Member of Parliament in the upper house. She died in New York City in 1966.

  Manek’s death, on a hillside behind Indian lines on 25 May 1943, occurred on the final day of the squadron’s mission in Imphal. He was twenty-four years old. His younger brother, a pilot with No 7. Squadron, died in the Imphal area a year later, while Bobby was on the ground there. On 1 April 1944, Edul Dadabhoy flew into bad weather and ordered his navigator, J. E. Dordi, to bail out. Dordi survived a parachute landing twenty-five miles behind enemy lines and made it back to a British unit with the help of Naga tribesmen. Edul died attempting a forced landing. Both Manek and Edul are commemorated at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Singapore.

  In 1948, Kosh was married again – to Ganny’s younger brother, Kodandera Thimayya, thus completing the serial self-exile of the Mugaseth sisters from the Parsi fold. They had two sons, divorced, and she spent the rest of her life with Nugs. Kosh died in 2008.

  Ganny’s death, in Thal on 10 December 1942, was attributed to asthmatic bronchitis. He was twenty-six years old. He is commemorated at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in New Delhi.

  Nugs never remarried. She continued working in the government health service in Madras and raised her daughter – my mother – while never speaking about the war years and what they took from her. She kept a large house full of staff, guests, and dogs: a house from which, people would say, no one was ever asked to leave. She died in Madras in 1998, with her daughter by her side.

  Bobby Mugaseth was declared dead on 11 November 1944. He was later buried at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Imphal, where his epitaph reads:

  Lieutenant Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth

  King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners

  He lived as he died, everybody’s friend.

  May his beloved soul rest in peace.

  Afterword

  History is written by the victors, but not by all of them. As a part of the British Empire, India had won its war. Then, ceasing to be a part of the Empire, it won its independence. To a large extent, one was born of the other, yet India’s part in the world war is absent from its own history. The lives and deaths of those who fought in it are stories mislaid, and which now, seven decades later, are about to be lost for ever.

  In a way, it is amazing. No war has ever been committed more seriously to the conscience of memory. The years 1939–45 might be the most revered, deplored and replayed period in the history of the modern world. Although India was spared the devastation of a war on its soil, it was profoundly and permanently changed; the course of the war accelerated the end of the Raj, and dictated what would follow it.

  The fall of the British Empire in South-East Asia, and the disgrace of its White ruling class, deepened the nationalist mood in India in ways that activism may never have achieved on its own. The general military crisis of 1942 – the squander of Indian forces in the East, the defeats in the West, and the dreaded invasion of India’s coast – heightened the stakes in the Congress bid for independence, to the point of ultimatum in August of that year. Gandhi never intended for the Quit India Movement to burst into mass violence and reprisals, but it did, and the Congress paid the price of being banned until the end of the war. The more acquiescent Muslim League used those years to deepen its hold on Indian Muslims. By the time Congress leaders emerged from their jails, India’s partition was written on its forehead.

  Even as the war tilted Indians toward nationalism, it drew many others to the urgent cause of the British Empire. By their good fortune, most Indians who were touched by the war were involved in carrying goods to the fight nearby; not like Gunga Din, but with real dividends for the economy of the country. Millions contributed to the war effort, if only by putting their labour into the burgeoning industries that supplied the empire’s mobilisation. The industrialist G. D. Birla, even as he financed the Congress through 1942, simultaneously established Hindustan Motors, and his assets grew sixfold during the war.1 J. R. D. Tata established Tata Chemicals, as well as the Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company in those years. The war secured a measure of financial health for free India, which saw its entire debt to Britain liquidated against war purchases, and then grown to a £1 billion sterling balance.2

  Above all, Indians in the armed forces, eventually numbering 2.5 million, formed the largest volunteer force in the war (larger armies relied on conscription). India lent its manpower to practically every theatre of war in which Britain was engaged, from the mule lines in Dunki
rk to the garrison of Diego Garcia, from the snowfields of the Apennines to policing pipelines in Persia or suppressing communist partisans in liberated Greece. Around 36,000 Indians were killed or went missing in action, and more than 64,000 were wounded. They fought on three continents, facing every Axis adversary: Italians, Germans, the colonial troops of the Vichy French, the Japanese, and of course, other Indians.

  Just as the uprising of 1857 dictated the form of the Army of the Raj, the Second World War dictated the form of the modern Indian Army, which it retains today. For ninety years, a weak colonial army, held back in the past, had been preferable to a volatile one armed for the present. The world war forced the change.

  India’s Army entered the Second World War as a mildewed ‘mercenary’ service of 200,000, in a pact with select races of the country’s north-west. It emerged as a huge, modernised and vaguely universalised army, marbled with diverse ethnicities.3 It possessed new weapons and new esprit de corps. After Kohima, Indian battalions fought so well that they were used to stiffen the morale of British troops, reversing a century-old equation. By 1945, Auchinleck wrote to the Viceroy: some high commanders ‘actually asked that British units should be replaced by Indian’.4 The reconquest of Burma was the Japanese land army’s most conclusive defeat, and the Indian Army’s prize.

  In this new army, Indian officers now numbered over 8,000, including scores of battalion commanders and four brigadiers. The first Indian to lead a brigade was ‘Timmy’ Thimayya, the Kodava officer who had been told by his CO that ‘you people just don’t have it in you’. Watching his army’s transformation, Thimayya likened it to ‘the reincarnation of Lord Krishna’, the god who drove the chariot of the victorious hero in the final battle of the Mahabharata.