Kitabı oku: «Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War»

PART ONE

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1

Everybody’s Friend

Calicut, 1936–39

It is said that the news of the world war reached Calicut along with the morning eggs. Perhaps that isn’t true at all. Perhaps it’s only true that the price of eggs was the first the Calicut Parsis saw of the costs of war; the first of many. Maybe they remembered what happened to the price of eggs, even years and years later, because they wanted to forget what happened to the boys.

If, however, it is true, then it must have begun with a commotion at the Marshall house, nearest the pier. The noise would have been swallowed by the rowdy waves of dawn, on a sea swollen by the late monsoon. If Bobby had been in Calicut, he would have been there in an instant. Rounding the corner to the beach road, he would have spotted the egg boy cowering behind his bicycle; then the Marshalls’ cook, aggrieved, wiping his neck with the tail of his checked-cotton mundu; then Keki Marshall, hollering as though he meant to argue the sun back into its bed. He would bloody well not pay four annas a dozen. Not for eggs. Whatever conspiracy of grocers, hoarders and bastards thought they could double the price of eggs overnight, they were going to learn differently from him, war or no war.

But did someone say war?

The egg boy may have been told that rationing and shortages were expected, and eggs would be priced up as a precaution. But he couldn’t have explained about the Panzers in Poland, the craven declaration from London, or the Viceroy in Delhi already committing India and Indians to the fray. Instead the egg boy fled. He wobbled his bicycle a safe distance from the gate and rested a moment, calming himself down. Ahead of him was a full street of Parsi homes. He knew precisely how many eggs they took. He knew he was going to catch hell at each doorstep. He couldn’t imagine the hell he was going to leave there.

News, like almost everything, travelled slowly to Calicut, though it was the largest town in Malabar. The province lay in the narrow lap of the western coast, with its head leaned up against the high range of the Western Ghats, and its feet dipped in the Indian Ocean. The town was a minor entrepôt for timber, pepper and cashew coming down to the sea, and fish, petrol, shop goods, and the post going back up. Once it had mattered more. It had been the seat of the Zamorin of Malabar, whose rule extended south as far as Cochin, and it was here that Europe first trod on India’s soil, when Vasco Da Gama scraped up on the beach at Kappad.

The centuries since had left Calicut to turn in its own slow eddy of trade.1 Its provincialism concealed the scale of its wealth and commerce, and the rhythms of the town played like a drowsy accompanist behind the full-lunged score of the sea. Arab dhows rode at anchor, waiting to unload sacks of dried fruit from Yemen, then raised their sails and blew away like kites on the horizon’s glittering string. Coconut trees crowded the shore, and further inland all was covered in layers of matted green. Pink lotus wilted in the temple pond, and in the courtyards stood elephants, black and mottled and as brilliantly daubed as the lingam within. At the market, Maplah wives in long-sleeved blouses and headscarves mingled with bare-breasted Ezhava women selling clams and jackfruit. The town had no garrison, no real port. So Calicut concerned nobody but the sahibs who owned plantations on the Wynaad Plateau, the many local castes and creeds, and the Parsis.

The Parsis: pale as scalps, mad as coots, noses like commas on the page. They were devoutly civilised, consummately lawful, and still abided by the spirit of the first contract they made in India,2 as refugees shin-deep in the surf. Parsi: it meant from Persia, and the label never peeled away; the centuries only stiffened their pose, polite and helpful, as India’s permanent houseguests.

They were friends to all, up to the King and down to the cobbler, and while they could be silly buggers, there was always a politesse, acceptance of the King’s law, distaste for conversion or preaching aloud. They were sporting in business, and businesslike at sport. What Gurkhas were in the Army, Parsis were in civilian life – the exemplary race, making the best of British command without any desire to usurp it. So they retained the state of public grace that best served private wealth. Humata, hukhta, huvrastha: Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

Bombay was their metropole, Karachi too; further south they got a bit native. In Malabar the men all spoke Malayalam, could gallop it in their mouths, but the women were not exposed too much, for the sake of their complexion, and their accents remained. Women wore saris but the men wore shoes indoors. Like Anglo-Indians, they were attentive to cutlery; unlike Anglo-Indians, they were content – a creed of Oneness had chased them out of Persia, and a creed of Innumerables had received them, and they had prospered, most major of minorities. At the beginning of the new war they were as numerous as they would ever be, and that was only 100,000, a homeopathic dose for India: a thimble of sweet milk set down beside its vats of steaming oils and syrups.

Away from the pier, near the Heerjees’ soda factory, was the house in which Bobby Mugaseth grew up with his three sisters. The pier was where Bobby staged one of his classic pranks: going down at dawn, when the boats knocked against it like toddy-drunks clutching at a rail, and dropping into the water for a swim, against his father’s rules. Afterward he splashed up the beach to circle the Marshall house, tapping at the louvred windows until Bacha Aunty suffered him coming in to bathe.

Bobby, properly Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth, did believe himself a good Parsi. If his hand was easily turned to mischief, that was not necessarily un-Parsi-like – only unlike the paragons of Parsi merit who occupied the nearer branches of his family tree.

His grandfather Dhanjibhoy had arrived in Malabar in the 1850s, and quickly transformed from a sunken-cheeked boxwallah into the very Moses of Parsi society there. On the broad Beypore he had built Malabar’s first steam-powered sawmill, turning its estuary into one of the busiest timber yards in the world, and himself into the patron of Calicut’s industrial and civic life.

Bobby was relieved to have never known him, and to encounter him principally through the clipping books in which his obituaries were preserved. He was a ‘sincere admirer of British rule and British institutions’ (the Statesman) ‘held in high esteem among a very wide circle of European friends and admirers’. He was ‘the Grand Old Man of Calicut’ (the Spectator). Yet the most captivating image of his grandfather was from the story, gleaned from these admiring reports, of a single spectacular failure.

The coffee-planters of Wynaad had long struggled with transport between plantation and coast. Dhanjibhoy had an inspired solution: a camel caravan. He purchased a herd from the Rann of Kutch, had it transported by boat and equipped in Calicut. But there his animals perished, unable to tolerate the tropical climate. Nothing could displace the picture in Bobby’s mind of a silver-bearded prophet, brow shining with sweat, struggling up the slick incline to the promised plateau, followed by a train of damp, doomed camels.

Young eyes primed for slights, Bobby noticed that every obituary tipped its hat to Dhanjibhoy’s older surviving son, his Uncle Kobad. None bothered to name the younger son, Bobby’s father Khodadad. Kobad, a doctor, had both retained ‘a large practice among the European community’ and ‘nobly maintained the traditional charity of his honoured and esteemed father’. He was in a big book called Who’s Who, and was the sole Indian member of the Whites-only Malabar Club. Nothing persuaded the British to embrace an Indian as warmly as when the Indian could treat a baby that had squalled through the night.

Kobad served the Empire directly, too. The Great War had ended the year before Bobby was born. In Europe they said there’d be no war ever again, but in Asia it started at once: in the Arab states, in Afghanistan, and eventually in Malabar. The Maplah Muslims, many of them soldiers demobilised after 1918, rose in rebellion and took the districts around Calicut hostage. Thousands were killed, even British soldiers, before order was restored. Afterwards, hundreds of Maplahs were sent to penal settlements in the Andaman Islands. When an Indian delegation was sent to check on their welfare, Kobad was asked to join. The other delegates reported that the convicts were half-dead, but Kobad authored a minority report, insisting that ‘the Maplah had proved himself to be an ideal colonist and pioneer’. For this – for recognising the humane intentions of the Maplah Colonisation Scheme – he was specially thanked by the Excellency-in-Council in Madras.

Britain was their good master. Dhanjibhoy’s early career had been testament to how the colonial economy rewarded enterprise, and his later life showed how the government rewarded loyalty. The family firm was given a monopoly contract to supply salt to all of Malabar. They had, even in a literal sense, accepted the salt of the Raj.3

They were happily out of the salt trade by 1930, when Gandhi rallied against the monopoly, leading his long march to lift a clump of slimy salt at Dandi.4 Inspired, the local Congressmen planned their own salt satyagraha, to start out on the Calicut beach and end up at Payyanur. But the police let them have it, right there in front of the Cosmopolitan Club. Bobby could hear the cries from his house, and drew a picture of the thin men being knocked one way and the other by the arcing lathis and the curl of the morning waves. Some left on stretchers.

School reopened, and while the Civil Disobedience Movement ran its course, eleven-year-old Bobby led a thrilling double life. The Congress was demanding purna swaraj, complete independence. He was swept up in the boys’ talk of boycott and bonfires, and their ardent horror at the convulsions in the furthest reaches of the country: revolt in Chittagong and massacre in Peshawar. At home there was only contempt for Gandhi and his eruptions; Bobby’s father was no less loyal to the British order than his father before him.

Khodadad had always been bright, but had achieved nothing to the hurricane lamp of his brother’s success. What made it worse was that when a certain kind of Calicut conversation came up about Uncle Kobad, it drifted into a vague and unnecessary reproach of Bobby’s father. Khodadad ran the firm, chased shipments at the Harbour Works, and managed the increase of a venture that was already big. He built up accounting successes that interested nobody. His disappointment did not move him to draw his family closer. Instead he pressed his affections like flowers between the pages of two books: his Avesta and his accounts ledger.

He began to assume a pious scrutiny of the community: a prerogative recognised mainly by himself. During Sunday service at the dharamsala, a building built by his father, Khodadad would clear his throat if the dastur misspoke a prayer, to embarrass him into repeating it. When Khodadad came down the street, kids scattered, abandoning their game. By the time they were teenagers, Khodadad only seemed to notice his children when he carried the aferghaniyu, swinging it on its thin, squeaking chains and puffing sweet smoke into every room of the house. He’d present it to each child, and watch from behind a veil of smoke as each one added a piece of frankincense to earn its benediction.

While the country fought for freedom, it was his sisters who first showed Bobby what that might mean. There were four children – one every four years, like clockwork. Bobby was third; the only boy. The oldest, Subur, was eight when Bobby was born and featured in his life mainly as an exemplar of good schoolwork, which never struck him as much of an identity. Subur was a regular bluestocking, and her academic career was for a while the light of Khodadad’s eyes.

Nurgesh, the next sister, was clever too, but her nature was tempered by her strident and overbroad compassion. ‘Nugs’ was the one who sighed and worried about the ribbed creatures, man or horse, that pulled the family around Calicut on rickshaws and tongas. To the world she turned a bright and stubborn face, though on her own she was prayerful and nervous about the hard work it took to be a woman, and furthermore, a doctor, which was her intention. Khorshed – ‘Kosh’ – four years younger than Bobby, was spoilt and a baby. She had looted the family’s share of good looks, with an oval face and delicate nose, and without the wide mouth that made them look so Parsi. People said she looked like a movie star – like Ingrid Bergman, they would say later on. Bobby said that was ridiculous.

When Khodadad had a photographer come to take family portraits (always at home, never with backdrops, though it pleased him to have a mat printed with a lion at his feet), the girls behaved but their faces gave much away. Subur wore the faint beginning of a smirk, Nugs alone would be smiling; Kosh had her cheek and her neck turned just so. Bobby’s expression was the most elusive. His face was a good one, with large, somnolent eyes under dark brows, smooth cheeks, and a bundle of dark hair with the slightest widow’s peak. He could easily make himself look both handsome and sincere, which was useful for a young man so capricious. But in every photograph his expression was slightly translucent, as if he meant to defy the picture, or anyone looking at it, to record what he really was.

The house belonged to the women. Every room was a warehouse of lace and muslin, light sadras and blouse pieces and petticoats, nighties and Chinese borders and vials of rose water. It was the girls who paid the real price of Khodadad’s piety, however. Trapped at home, confined for five or six days each month to a dim room that held nothing but an iron bedstead, and kept from going to the cinema – even when the Crown and Coronation showed pictures that would be the summer’s sole conversation.

Their freedom movement began with Subur, who won a scholarship to Oxford in 1932, before Khodadad knew women could even go to Oxford. Yet off she went, past the horizon of his control, to dilate on the poetry of the contemporaries of Alexander Pope. For four years she was reduced to a monthly telegram that reported her successes in exams and Society. Then Subur cabled from Marseilles, to say she was about to board the HMS Strathaird and come home. She was not returning alone, but with a man she planned to marry: Gopalaswami Parthasarathi. The Iyengar name hit Khodadad like a lead weight, and left the rest of the boy’s identity (… a double blue at Wadham, son of a distinguished civil servant …) barely ringing in his ears.

It was betrayal. The pure blood in their veins had been poured carefully from the cup of one generation into the cup of the next through centuries, without admitting a drop of pollution. Subur was allowing a Hindu’s spit in it. A Parsi woman who married a non-Parsi lost her religion and her community. She could never enter a fire temple, not even for her parents’ last rites. That Khodadad, whose distinction in Calicut was his religious excellence, had to watch his favourite daughter stray from the faith was vandalism – not only of her soul but of his. A carriage came to the gate one evening and Subur was in it. Her parents had not seen her in four years, and now they would not. Khodadad sat by the door, curled and tense and hard as a scorpion to see that she wasn’t let in. Out front, Nugs and Subur hugged each other’s heads through the carriage window and sobbed.

Those were hot months, mingling too many tears in the sweat of the coastal summer. Bobby watched from the sidelines, ready to run away into the street and ripen his Malayalam in the sun. The house weighed less heavily on him, except that he was the only boy. He must inherit the town’s most eminent trading concern, to manage in his turn. Sons turn into their fathers, Bobby knew, but an end so inevitable could only be treated as impossible: same as death. The picture playing on the screen in Bobby’s head was different. Its action would not be caught in the stifling funnel of the southern coasts, between that seaward gate of the Calicut customs office and the cargo bay of the Madras docks. His story would take him further, though he could not yet imagine how far.

He went hunting with the Heerjee boys and daydreamed down his barrel. Out on the estuary were the only decent summer game – fat, mean muggers lying still and inconspicuous by the water’s edge, looking like sunbaked cowpats unless one had its jaws open. As long as they were sunbathing, the advantage was yours. Once the crocodiles entered the water, it was theirs. You had to get a mugger at the base of its neck, where the scales weren’t armour-hard. If you missed, they were in the water in an instant. They could overturn a boat and slide a child down their throats as if it were a prawn. Or so he’d been told, when he was a child. In the bellies of the oldest muggers there was royal treasure, silver nose-rings and anklets, intact long after the princesses who wore them had been digested.

The moss-mirror surface of the Beypore gave him no foreboding of what lay ahead; bridges on the Ganga, pontoons on the Euphrates or the ferry across the boiling waters of the Manipur. The decade already hastened towards war, but it was someone else’s war, very far away. Bobby never imagined, any more than the egg boy, how the war would rise up around India, or how it would divide the country, divide the army that enlisted him, and even divide Bobby against himself. Or that he, his sisters and new-found brothers, his countrymen and men from all over the Empire, would be drawn out onto roads that led very far from home, and did not all lead back.

If he had known, he might not have been in such a hurry to leave. But nothing was changing yet in Calicut. Every year on his birthday, his family bathed him in milk and rose petals. Every year he protested, letting only his mother Tehmina do it, and every year his sisters would break in, shrieking, to fling the petals at him before he even had his pants on. In his teens, his long face revealed a strong jawline, to balance the effect of the sweet mouth and eyes. As soon as he could, he wore the sharp moustache that was in fashion, like Errol Flynn’s – two sabres crossed on his lip. He was seventeen. It was time to get moving.

2

Hukm Hai

Madras, 1939–40

Time to get moving.

Bobby’s eyes opened and passed over the area. No room for error now – this was where it got dangerous. He surveyed obstacles and alternative escapes, in the event that the exit was blocked. To his left, the elderly owner of the Irani café dozed at his desk, his head drooping forward and jerking back. His son, the manager, thick-armed but mild, hid behind a rustling headline: ‘KEEP THE ENEMY AWAY FROM INDIA: Contribute again to the Governor’s War Fund’. A Tamil bus boy moved between tables, clattering thick china plates and steel forks into a tub.

Bobby pinched the last saffron streaks from the plate, licked his fingers, and moved into action. He stretched out wide, wincing with satisfaction. As his left arm reached into the air, his right hand danced the plate across the table, ringing out the signal he was finished. Smooth as a top, the bus boy turned toward him, and Bobby rose and strolled to the desk.

‘What you had, beta?’

‘Two plates dhansak, uncle,’ he answered, beaming. ‘But I don’t have any money to pay.’

‘Suu? What?’ The drooping spectacles marched up the length of nose.

Bobby pursed his lips, contrite. The idea was to keep the volume down.

‘Bloody bugger!’ the old man shouted, rising to his feet. So much for the volume. ‘Who the hell are you that I should feed you for nothing? Heh?’

‘Uncle, what can I say. I’m a Parsi.’

‘What Parsi! Who’s a Parsi! I never saw a Parsi giving … to not pay for his food! What behaviour? You rascal, you don’t … You are not a Parsi!’

Bobby stumbled backward into a chair, aghast. A soda fell over and fizzed in somebody’s rice. His expression wobbled from the wound, and he turned his palms out to the wrathful Irani. ‘Me, not a Parsi? Uncle, say anything, but don’t question my ancestry …’

‘You are never a Parsi!’

Bobby swung his head in fierce reproach. The son was now trotting across the shop, wagging his index fingers to call for peace, but Bobby had changed gear. His fingers flew down the buttons of his shirt, and pulled it open. Clutching his white undershirt like a loose cotton skin of his heart, he said, ‘Sadra!’ Without lifting his eyes from the Irani’s refracted glare, he reached back for a chair, and clambered onto it to stand above the room.

All eyes were pinned on him.

‘Daddy, for God’s sake what –’ said the son.

Bobby chanted:

Yatha ahuvariyo

Atha ratush ashat chit hacha,

Vangheush dazda manangho –

(‘As the Lord is chosen,

So is judgement chosen

In accordance with truth –’)

‘Get out!’ the old Irani screamed. ‘You – just get out right now!’

Bobby dropped off the chair and was out the door. As he ran down the street, he squeezed his trouser pocket, checking for the change he would need to get back to Guindy, the suburb down the shore from Madras. His leather soles clapped against the asphalt, applauding his daring and his escape.

Madras was a city that, if not on the boil, was at least kept simmering. Its skyline bubbled with domes, each bunch marking a grand institution beneath: a court, a college, a church of any faith. The older domes were Gothic fruit, and the newer domes raised in this century were called Saracenic: white hemispheres with brims like sola topis, sly effigies of the White men who built them. They had some opposition from the baroque gopurams of the city temples, and the rustling ficus trees. But Madras was the founding British city in India, the first to be lit up by the bulbs of modernity, and it was the domes that drew young men and women from a hundred peninsular towns, especially at the start of an academic year.

To say that Bobby arrived here, in 1936, to go to college would be misleading. He did attend the Loyola College, a new Jesuit institute at the edge of the city, and did matriculate in two years. But he was enrolled more seriously in a programme of unlearning than of learning; specifically, unlearning the habits of his upbringing. One new friend, Sankaran Nair, had the pleasure of walking into Bobby’s room and finding him on his bed stark naked, knees splayed out, trimming his toenails with his teeth. The joke became that Bobby, ‘while at his pedicure’, had gone wide and ‘made himself a Muslim’. If anyone asked, he said, sure, he could prove it.

He had a good length of leash in his head, and sometimes he would just run to its end, to see how far he went. He stood outside his chemistry lecture hall once, poised until he had thrown a brick through the window – just to see if his arm had the nerves to do it, to let fly – and then he appeared in the doorway, while the curses and the clear solutions were still rolling off the table tops, and the lecturer’s eyes fell on him as though Bobby had sacked a temple, and Bobby said, ‘Spot of fun …’

You didn’t forget a guy like that. Nair would later write about his two Parsi friends, Bobby Mugaseth and Manek Dadabhoy, ‘There is a belief that Parsis are weirdos in some way, perhaps due to inbreeding. These two did exhibit some craziness occasionally. It only added to their charm.’1 Bobby looked up to Manek: he was the type of Parsi brimming with dash and confidence, which came from growing up in the big city. He was shorter than Bobby and broader – square in the shoulders, square in the jaw, with a heavy brow, and he looked you square in the eye. Nobody called Manek lovely, or cooed over his features as they did to Bobby, but girls did call out when they saw him on the street.

He had ‘a craze for suicidal speeding’, Nair found, on the day he borrowed his uncle’s brand-new motorbike, a 350cc Ariel Red Hunter. Manek swiped it whenever he could. They rode it out along the sweltering Cooum river, or idled by the gates of the Women’s Christian College, gunning the engine for looks. On the sweep of College Road the boys did stunts, opening up the throttle and trying to pull a 180-degree turn without crashing. Only Manek could. In fact, he could pull out of an awful, squealing, imminent catastrophe, rebalance, and ride back with his hands off the handlebars, patting his pockets for his Hohner harmonica and puffing out a tune just as he sliced back through the group.

For their generation, raised in the doldrums of the Depression, the motorcycle was a promise of a new decade of speed. For Manek it was more: a simulation of his real dream, which was to join India’s new air force. In the Hunter’s skid and turn, he played at dives and spins and open sky. In the college canteen he was a one-man recruitment centre, reading IAF ads aloud from the papers. ‘Be a Leader Among Men,’ he hollered. ‘High up in the sky, you are in independent command, monarch of all you survey!’

Parsi boys were mad about flying, anyway: the gadgetry, the gallantry, the gymnastic possibilities of the open sky.2 Even Manek’s little brother, Edul, was itching to sign up. The Indian Air Force was a new thing in the world, budding and flexible and deadly glamorous. But military aviation relied on advanced technology, and there was scepticism, especially within the RAF, of Indians’ ability to handle it. That scepticism was a headwind, creating both impedance and lift. It made the IAF a service for daredevils. Manek would go.

Organised in alphabetical order, Bobby Mugaseth’s room-mate at college was P. Mukundan, whose family was from Calicut too. The Mukundans were Thiyyas, a caste deliberately advanced by the British to counter the strength of Brahmins and Maplahs. They were loyal in return, and around the Cannanore Cantonment, they had grown noticeably lighter-skinned, the wages of their hospitality to British soldiers. Mukundan taught Bobby bits of political doggerel – ‘Gandhi sanyasi, India maanthi punn’aki …’ – ‘Gandhi the sanyasi tears at India and opens its sores’ – with which they mocked the Congresswalas, boys who rose early in the mornings to struggle with cotton tufts and turning spindles.

It was nothing personal, and in any case, things had been pretty quiet since Bobby had arrived in Madras. A new constitution had been introduced in 1935, and nationalist parties had agreed to join elections to form provincial governments. The Congress had done very well, and in 1937 it formed a ministry in Madras under the moderate premier Rajagopalachari, who was fondly called ‘Rajaji’. A few protests took place, but it was less easy to protest the government now that they were part of it.

In the spring of ’38, Bobby and his friends finished at Loyola, and prepared to go their separate ways. It turned out that none of the ways led very far from Madras. Through most of the 1930s, a middle-class young man could expect to finish his education and find nothing to do, only irritating his family, squandering his eligibility and beating the air with superfluous certificates. Bobby and Mukundan enrolled together in the College of Engineering in Guindy, and Bobby saw plenty of Manek; in fact, he had to keep an eye on him.

Manek’s magnetism had an opposite pole: Bobby’s sister, Khorshed Mugaseth, who had arrived in Madras in her turn. As with any risky manoeuvre, Manek was a dab hand at courtship. He found a sudden passion for the opera, and then the boys were over listening to La Traviata, and Kosh came along.

Bobby had a theory that he had put to Nugs and Subur: that after Calicut, they had studied literature and medicine as the two most direct ways to learn about men. Kosh went and got herself a real one. Manek would pick her up at the hostel, and she ran out to the gates while her girlfriends catcalled from the verandah. Queen Mary’s College sat plumb on Marina Beach, so if he didn’t have the motorcycle they walked, eating puffed rice, and her pallu billowed in the breeze to run over his hands and face.

At the end of her first year Kosh dropped out of college, and she and Manek were married. Kosh was young and out of turn, and should have let Nugs marry first. But Manek was a Parsi, and after Subur’s elopement the couple was harassed by the blessings of priests and parents. Their wedding day was a profound vindication for Khodadad, fitting with his new opinion on the proper schedule of education and matrimony for young women. Often he looked over at Nurgesh, expecting her confirmation that all was in order in the family, and nothing would happen again to upset him so dreadfully. But Nugs was not herself. To the guests who noticed, she explained that she was harried by all the organising, which they took to mean that she was dismayed at her much younger sister beating her to the altar. Bobby knew better.

It was in Subur’s home that Bobby first saw him, apparently trying to hide beneath a towel. He sat on a chair with his head between his knees. The towel hung off his rounded back and fell like a curtain to his toes.

Bobby knew that Gopalaswami Parthasarathi – GP – had a lot of socialist friends from London, and that even now he and Subur sometimes harboured young Tamil communists while they hid from the police. For a moment, Bobby wondered if that might be what this man was doing. But of course it wasn’t.

‘You’re … Ganapathy?’ Bobby asked the mound. It straightened, and the towel was pulled aside. Ganapathy’s face emerged with a puff of steam, like a conjuror’s trick. A bucket of just-boiled water was between his feet, and his face was glazed with condensation. ‘Yes,’ he wheezed, ‘Hullo. Sorry about …’ and wiped his forehead with the towel. ‘It’s my asthma. Your sister has been …’ he wheezed.

‘Don’t talk, then,’ Bobby said, and sat.

The man nodded. He touched his chest and said, ‘Ganny’.

Looking him over, Bobby must have thought: typical. Nugs would always choose the sick puppy. Sick, though really quite well built and evidently well treated by life. His face had a residual roundness, and a tidy moustache held within the bound of his lips made the curve of his cheek look fuller. A face like that made a person look trusting, even without its being steamed pink. Nugs obviously trusted it in return. Something between them made them allies against the rough tendencies of the world. The truth was the reverse, though. It was their alliance that would make the world cruel.

Bobby had heard through collegiate chatter how much time his sister spent in ‘joint revisions’ with a fellow, not a Parsi, as his name made clear. Kodandera Ganapathy was a Kodava, of the arrogant tribe from the densely timbered, isolated hills north-east of Malabar. Those hills had bred a martial race, not one recognised by the Army, but definitely by their neighbours in Canara and Mangalore, who considered them dagger-bearing, boar-spearing, maiden-stealing terrors; worshippers of rifles, or of ancestors to whom they made offerings in arrack. Which was fairly accurate.

By the twentieth century, however, the Kodavas had been tamed by the Raj, and their wealthier clans sent sons into the police and forest services. Ganny’s father had been Deputy Conservator of Forests, so Ganny was raised in civilised postings across the Presidency. Fourth in a household that had six children and zero privacy, he had grown into a shy, asthmatic young man, reluctant to make easy friendships but devoted to the ones he had.

Nugs and Ganny were in love, and for four years they had found no way of ending it. The Kodavas took endogamy seriously, and were even better than Parsis at enforcing it. One distant aunt had promised to set herself on fire if her son married a Telugu girl; when he went ahead, she did too. Ganny’s family was above that, he knew, which only meant that it was the family that would face the ire of the clan. He would be long gone: a limb infected by romantic insolence, so cut off.

Thanks to Subur, Nugs had seen what she was in for if she married Ganny. The scales could never settle when she weighed young love against the old bond of family. To marry Ganny would mean a fugitive existence, and already, at least until they finished medical school, it meant lying low. They spent their summers apart, pretending the other didn’t exist. He carried a fountain pen in his breast pocket, and in its cap, in a tight scroll, he kept her photograph.

Their lives in Madras were their own, however, and the Mugaseth siblings met the new additions with happiness and curiosity. Soon they saw less of Subur and GP, whose lives were helter-skelter between a new baby and his job at the national newspaper, The Hindu, and their trips to Kashmir, where his father was Dewan to the Maharaja. When they did meet, they only quarrelled with Manek about the war.

It was the other five who learned to laugh at and tease one another, the way Kosh teased Ganny about the mole – the chic ‘beauty spot’ he had on his lip. She pretended to pinch it off and place it on her own.

‘Can’t I have it, Ganny?’ she said.

‘You’re pretty enough already,’ he replied. ‘But you can have it if Nugs says so.’

Like children in a treehouse, out of reach of their parents, they formed a new unit in Madras, with new rules of membership. Through his sisters, Bobby was bound to new brothers, and they built themselves, half-unawares, a new family. It was his sisters who poured the milk and roses down his neck on his twentieth birthday. The boys dressed their hair after Ganny’s instruction, with rich pomade and many pulls of the combs they kept in their pockets, whisking the hair grown long on top into victory rolls. They learned new dances and how to drive, had brandy evenings and gramophone nights. They let their days slip from the clutch of memory into the quickening stream of the decade.

A month after Kosh’s wedding, far away in the west, the war began. Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland, and from Whitehall, a morose Neville Chamberlain informed the world that he had waited until a quarter past eleven, giving Hitler an extra fifteen minutes, but was compelled at last to declare war. The next day, the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared for India.

Indians, who had spent two decades entering the river of nationalist sentiment, now found its flow violently reversed or eddying in confusion. The freedom struggle was a diversion from the fight against fascism, or vice versa. The word ‘freedom’ pulled one way and then the other. It meant freedom for the men of Europe. It meant freedom from the men of Europe. Likewise ‘victory’: frowning black Vs appeared amidst the newsprint and on walls, everywhere, demanding that the populace believe the war their own.

Beneath the turbulence of ideology, the tow of opportunity pulled as hard and also in many directions. Khodadad, like most Parsis, supported the war. It was almost tradition that, when the Empire got into fights, the Parsis were entitled to what spilled from its pockets. War in Europe and Africa would mean a tidal rise in industrial orders, without any risk to Indian property. As leaders of Indian capitalism, the Parsis could appreciate how the economy would be fattened up by military salaries and rising commodity prices. Where Congress ministries had failed to bring about import substitution, German U-boats would succeed. Europe’s combustion was a genuine concern, but also an opportunity.

The princes were similarly aligned. They raised funds and regiments, and freed up land for new airfields: favours they hoped to redeem whenever decisions were made about the fate of the princely states in free India. The Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and other parties of the right were happy, too, to trade global support for domestic credit.

The communists and socialists called Nazi tyranny no different from British tyranny and disdained the war effort. In the main recruitment districts in Punjab, they chanted, ‘Na ek pai! Na ek bhai!’ – Not one penny, not one man. Before long, however, Germany would invade the Soviet Union, and the tow would reverse. The survival of the communist hope was more important than India’s transition to bourgeois self-rule. The college comrades then rose from their picket lines to line up instead at the recruitment centres. At the same time, the insurgent Bengalis of the Forward Bloc, friends with whoever opposed the British Empire, gave rapturous speeches comparing Hitler to Lord Vishnu, and spread implausible tales about Panzer tanks in France flying the Kapi Dhwaj, the standard of the chariot of the mythic hero Arjuna.3

It was the Congress, the party that would speak for the nation, which remained perplexed. Through the thirties it had opposed fascist aggression: much more so than the British government. ‘In India there are no fascists,’ Gandhi’s protégé, Nehru, told a Czech journalist in 1938. ‘We are very well aware of what Berlin, Rome and Tokyo want but we shall never allow the forces of our national anti-imperialist movement to be harnessed to their carriage … They want to drown the world in blood.’

With the war begun, however, Nehru could not accept that Indian soldiers would die for the freedom of a nation which denied that very freedom to India; or that Indian taxes would pay to maintain those troops. Above all, the Congress leaders were appalled by the arrogance with which the Viceroy had committed India to war, without even consulting them.4 Linlithgow had met Gandhi, whose first reaction was keen anguish at what violence lay ahead. Gandhi expressed his sympathy for Britain’s heavy task. During the Great War he had personally recruited ambulance teams for the British side. Afterwards he had felt betrayed, as Britain would not repay India’s sacrifices with freedom. Now he would write letters to Hitler imploring him to ‘shun the method of war’. But he could not endorse a violent reply to the blitzkrieg.

Nehru, though an ardent Anglophile and anti-fascist, took a stronger position. If some Indians saw their private opportunity in supporting the war, Nehru saw all of India’s best chance in opposing it. After meeting in council, the Congress leaders offered support for the war effort in exchange for Indian independence at the war’s end. It was declined. In October 1939 all the Congress’s provincial ministries resigned. They had governed since 1937 and grown complacent with petty powers. Now the movement could be re-energised as a true opposition, though its first agitations did not strike much of a chord.

The war was far away. There was no chance of dissuading new Indian volunteers. Their rural homes in Garhwal and Rajputana were as removed from the havoc as they would have been at the top of Kanchenjunga. It was still the year of the ‘phoney war’, when Britain only scowled at the fascists from across the English Channel. Around the world, the belligerent states chewed on their new possessions – Eastern Europe and Manchuria – in their respective backyards. India was safe, and its confident army sailed abroad to distant campaigns.

No place felt further from the action than Guindy. The college was a handsome one, the oldest school in India for training engineers, a monumental pile of pink brick and granite crowned by another sola-topi dome, and skirted by a cool arcade. Students sat in the archways, cross-legged over diagrams, the Brahmins tugging at top-knots which would be gone by their third year.

On the morning before his lunch escapade, Bobby had burst into the room where Verghese Kurien was spreading textbooks open on a mat on the floor. ‘Kurien!’ Bobby implored, pushing pinched fingers into Kurien’s face. ‘One rupee. One rupee. One rupee … Please?’

He got the rupee.

‘Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you –’ and he was gone. His day was in motion. The ticket at the New Elphinstone, nine annas; a cool drink at the soda fountain, one. Nobody would bring him back to Guindy for less than four annas, so his lunch had needed to be free.

That evening, he went searching for Kurien again. He found him at the Non-Veg Mess (D),5 where they were both invariably drawn by sizzle of pepper and coconut oil. Bobby wasn’t about to pay Kurien back yet, only to reassure him how well his rupee had been spent. Kurien was from Calicut too; in fact, he had been brought into the world by Kobad’s hands, and for that service, Bobby thought, it was fair to still be charging twenty years later.

Some alarm entered Kurien’s eyes as he listened to Bobby breathlessly brag about his complimentary lunch. He finally told him: ‘Mugaseth – I think you had better join the Army.’

Bobby thought so, too.

At Guindy, both boys were enrolled in the University Training Corps, the voluntary training unit for potential army officers. Early every Saturday, before the sun poured its jellied heat over Madras, they lined up at the Allen Grounds, occasionally for some riflery but mainly for endless parade. Kurien was hopeless. Ordered to shoulder arms, he’d get his rifle stuck in the next man’s shirt-cuff, and drop it onto the ground. ‘Pick up your damned rifle, you butter-fingered idiot!’ a sergeant shouted down the line, in some terrifying English Midlands accent. Bobby, with callous lack of effort, made the top student rank. He could out-shoot some of the NCOs at the rifle butts. Though the discipline never pleased him, every week his officers clapped him on his shoulder, and told him to put some stripes on it.

The Indian Army was the world’s largest mercenary organisation; though it did not regard itself as such, its critics did not hesitate to. It was a force of paid soldiers who upheld the foreign occupation of their own land, and other people’s lands as well. The Army was older than the Raj itself, and it had filled with the silt of centuries, out of which grew all its pomp and folly.

But the period between the wars had stirred that sediment. The first principle of the Indian Army had always been European command. The officer’s commission, a King’s Commission, was the privilege of White men. It brought moral order to the quarrelling castes and creeds in the other ranks, the natives whom Kipling had depicted in ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ as a conference of mules, bullocks, horse and elephant, united only by the animal grunt of ‘Hukm hai!’ – It is an order! – ‘Hukm hai!’

After the Great War, so many British men lay in the ground that the government began to wonder how in the future it could staff its armies in Britain as well as in the colonies. The Congress, too, was insisting on a plan of ‘Indianisation’ of state personnel, including military brass. The year Bobby was born, native officers were cautiously commissioned into seven Indianised battalions. By 1932, an Indian Military Academy was opened at Dehra Dun, and established the right of Indians to join the army command. The numbers admitted were small, and the men selected were practically, and often literally, princelings.

Facing a new world war, with its allies under German occupation, Britain needed the strength of its colonies and dominions. It needed to expand their armies and – an unnerving thought for leaders like Churchill – their corps of native officers. A gate that had creaked open an inch in two decades suddenly flew wide. In came the newest martial caste of the British Raj: the Indian middle class. With an Emergency Commission, an Indian would be trained and paid on a par with White officers, and would receive his pips in just six months, instead of thirty. On college grounds across India, young men traded one uniform for the other, khadi for khaki.

This new war would not be like the Great War. In 1914, it was said the mud in Ypres was only brown because so many Indian jawans lay in it. While they had filed into the trenches of an alien continent, to die of gangrene, disease or the cold, the Army had sententiously debated whether it was alright for black Indians to kill White Germans, or even to have their wounds treated by White nurses. But Indians were not for crawling any more. They would not rank with dumb animals, only good for taking orders. They would be the sahibs now, saluted by subordinates of every race.

As for the mud, by the end of 1940, no war front remained on the continent. They would sail out to the far fields of the Empire, into the jang-e-azam, the war of the world, to perform deeds that would never be forgotten.