DIVERSIONS AT BANGALORE
Shams, Varun, Dolly, and I spent forty-eight hours cooped up in three different railway compartments to reach Bangalore; first from Chandigarh to Delhi, then to Madras, and finally to Bangalore. The two days were rather interesting. As the train would steam into a new station a different dialect could be heard from the platform but the intensity of noise seldom varied. We spent our time reading, chatting, and eating. But it was when the night fell and I retired to my upper berth that I felt like being subtracted from the usual world. Non-existent, yet perversely made aware of not existing by the noise of moving wagon wheels, by the whistling from the engine, and sometimes by the appearance of a celestial half moon which caused the fields and the trees to turn black or silver, I would imagine myself peacefully in limbo and wish the train would never stop and keep going and going and going into eternity. Meanwhile, in the train I practised being nothing; and achieved for quite a long time the perfection of the naught, the zero. My Hindu ancestors, who invented the zero would have been proud of me.
When the train did stop at Bangalore, it was a cloudy July morning in 1969 and Shams insisted that we first go to her mother’s house, even though we were expected to be at a Nissen hut in the officers mess which was to be our temporary abode till a house was found for us. A bewildered Apama and a delighted Fairy received our retinue. After a cup of tea, I announced that it was time for us to leave for the mess, Apama looked to the heavens, heaved a sigh of relief, and in a rare mood of magnanimity towards me, encouraged her daughter to cooperate with me. How fitting that the first act of Apama should be to see that her daughter did not stay in her house when in Bangalore. The last act of Apama’s life was also to ensure that Shams did not stay in that Bangalore house – she sold the house twice over! To the end of Apama’s days she remained a riddling sphinx to her own daughter without revealing herself fully.
On reporting for duty, I found that the commandant, Colonel C B Sreedharan, was on leave and my old antithesis, Lieutenant Colonel Rama Rao was officiating. He was delighted to assassinate me by condemning me to the command of Depot Battalion – a unit which just catered for the men who were proceeding on retirement – or worse, awaiting disciplinary action. I moaned that perhaps my qualifications and experience could be better utilised in one of the training battalions for training the men. The officiating God gave me a patronising smile and said the secret of high morale was to ensure that the final rites of men on their way out of the army were performed with speed and decorum. Had I not been aware of army decorum, I would have withdrawn in reverse order from the officiating God’s presence!
From CHAPTER XXXVIII HER MOTHER'S ADVICE
One hot summer evening I detrained at Sagar railway station, got a jeep from 13 Engineer Regiment to pick me up, reached the block of apartments where our nest was, and quietly started ascending the steps of the staircase. But all my determination to give Usham a surprise by knocking at the entrance out of the blue evaporated when I came across four-year-old Dolly sitting and munching nuts on the landing of the staircase. As I picked her up to kiss and hug, she screamed, ‘My daddy, My daddy,’ and her voice carried to Usham. Not bothering to look for her thick spectacles, which she usually wore, she rushed out to the corridor to meet Dolly’s daddy. The surprise was complete.
Meanwhile, the jeep driver took out my bags, overtook Dolly and me, and proceeded towards our apartment. I, with Dolly in my arms, followed him. Unable to make out any thing beyond her nose, Usham ran towards the sound of marching boots. With me watching helplessly, she was about to hug him when the driver screamed, ‘The colonel is behind,’ and executed the smartest about turn that I have seen in my life, and saved the day. With the route of my advance now clear I took a few steps and my embarrassed star was in my grasp. That evening we all chatted well into the night, with Shams (that is what I called Usham now), Varun, and Dolly alternately wanting to hear about my regiment and to tell their own tales.
No wonder, next morning as dawn broke they were all fast asleep when my eyes opened expecting my orderly to bring a cup of tea for me as was usual in Rangiya. When reality descended over me, I tried to wake up Shams to do the honours for me. But she was in deep and restful slumber. Unable to stay in bed any more, I tiptoed my way to the kitchen, lighted the stove, and put some water to boil. While waiting, the idea of surprising Shams again, struck me. This time I thought serving her breakfast in bed, though by doing so I also intended to convey some sarcasm. I quickly fried two eggs, made a couple of toasts, put them together with the teapot, milk, and sugar in a tray and gently woke my wife for her breakfast in bed. Now it has always been very easy for me to please Shams as she appreciates genuinely any small thing done for her. Breakfast in bed from her generally absent husband, therefore, was to her really manna from heaven.
While enjoying her breakfast, Usham constantly dwelled on the fact of how right she was to disregard her mother’s advice in marrying the man she loved and who is so brave and so loving. I smiled, as I often smile, at the statements made to me based on incomplete knowledge. But she was savouring the moment and I did not let this small matter distract her. She went on to say how empty her life would have been without me and how she could have never married any other man in the whole world.
When she finished her breakfast, I picked up the tray and left the room for the kitchen. I paused at the door of our bedroom, turned to her, and wickedly remarked, ‘By the way this is how I expect my breakfast to be served to me from tomorrow.’
All hell broke loose at the end of what I thought was a witty remark. ‘You unfeeling man, what do you think this place is? Your regiment. You do not have any delicacy of feelings and are fit only for rough army service in the hills of NEFA. I really should have never married you,’ she concluded, ‘and listened to my mother’s advice.’
When I saw her for the first time at the officers mess I was almost bewildered with Vidushi’s smiling, animated, fair and handsome face and graceful movement of her hands and wide eyes. She was so easy to get on with that within a few days all the officers of the regiment had become her devotees. And she had a zest for life; she would play cards with the young officers, laugh vivaciously at the army jokes, and would be the life of picnics and parties. When you conversed with her she paid so much concentrated attention and respect to you as if you were the only man in her life. In no time she became the life of the regiment.
In such a world even the annual inspection of the regiment by the chief engineer of 4 Corps became a pleasurable event. That the chief engineer was none other than the delightful person under whom I had already served twice, Brigadier Madhi Rao, helped. He was to spend three days with us for the inspection and to make his stay comfortable I moved out from my two-room hut and made it available to him. I also saw to it that a Telegu-speaking orderly (Telegu being the brigadier’s mother tongue) was there to serve him.
Accustomed to hearing his accolades, at breakfast next morning I expected a good word from him for my thoughtfulness. Instead, he accused me of forcing him to do some unwanted exercise in a rather awkward posture. Apparently a picture, which decorated the wall in front of the thunder box in my bathroom, was the cause of this discomfort. When he settled down for his morning job his eyes fell on the picture that was turned over and hanging on the opposite wall. Knowing me, he did not take long to figure out what it would be; but he was still curious to see whether it was Marilyn Monroe or Raquel Welch. He therefore had to interrupt his operations to turn the picture around and enjoy my choice of nude art. And when he was about to leave the bathroom it occurred to him that the orderly definitely graded the brigadier’s morals higher than his regimental commander’s, and not to jeopardise the former’s standing with the orderly he had to turn the picture around once again to cover the trace of his trespass!
As soon as the brigadier and I entered my office together to go through the programme of the three-day inspection, he stopped me in my steps and told me that he wished to get through the most serious business of inspection straightaway. I presumed he meant testing the capabilities of the field companies to mobilise for minefield or bridge construction operations and picked up the phone to give appropriate instructions. Once again he stopped me and corrected that the most serious business of inspection was writing the inspection report. Since the report had to be written in his own hand he entrusted me with the job of dictating the report. And this I did with relish for the next two hours. When the report was signed by him and readied for dispatch to my GOC and to the chief engineer, Eastern Command, well might I dream of my next promotion!
When later we called on him, the GOC Rajendra Prasad was only too happy to hear from the brigadier that the regiment was in great shape. With friends like Madhi Rao who needed to be a military genius to advance in the army.
Never to be outdone, I organised a demonstration of a ferry crossing of the River Brahamaputra on a vessel of 235 Inland Water Transport Company next day with both of us on the deck. And at lunchtime we docked at Guwahati to pick up a detachment of our officers mess, all the officers and – nymph like Vidushi. Even the brigadier was staggered on seeing her. But I am happy to report that once again in my life the rank of brigadier failed to wean away affections (ever so slight) from the object of my admiration.
From Chapter XLI - PYGMALION IN CHANDIGARH
Our regiment was now to operate under 474 Engineer Brigade, which had two other regiments under its command – 269 of Bombay Sappers and 235 of Bengal Sappers. The former was then being commanded temporarily by my coursemate and whole-time alcoholic Major V E Koshy and the latter by the part-time alcoholic and holder of a royal title, Lieutenant Colonel Ajit Pershad. I could, therefore, understand – though did not deserve – the partiality shown towards me by Colonel Jagdev Singh, the brigade commander. This gave me renewed confidence and strength in commanding the regiment. The colonel perceived me to be so efficient in my work that he had no trouble in naming me to represent him at all official occasions which he could not or would not attend.
Of course, this was the result of a clinical error on the part of the colonel. While others, understandably, were envious of this relationship, I myself could not believe this had happened, least of all at a time in my life when I was considering trotting up a different bridle path.
To explore this path I fixed up an appointment to see the head of the Ramakrishna Mission at Chandigarh one Sunday morning. Shams and children insisted on coming with me for a drive. Leaving them in the car, I went up to the monk’s office and expressed my yearning to join their order. He asked for my reasons; I gave him all the right answers – lack of worldly ambitions, detachment from life, seeking the love of God, and above all the desirability of spending the rest of my life in serving the wretched and the poor. The monk agreed to take me on as a trainee for a couple of months during my annual leave and came out to see me off. No sooner had he seen Shams, Varun, and Dolly that he changed his mind. He dismissed me with the exhortation that my greatest religious duty was to take care of my wife and to ensure that the children were given a good education and brought up as good citizens and I should continue serving the army. I drove straight to the regiment at Panchkula.
On alighting at the officers mess I looked at my tented regiment and I looked at my family in the car. This will remain my world, I said to myself, the helpless, oppressive and at the same time very lovable and very loving world that God had provided for me, and I was responsible to it. And it was in my power to do what I wanted to do with it. I resolved to take it to the greatest height possible.
Soon, Bungalow No. 71 at Sector 19A of Chandigarh was allotted
to me for my family. It was a spacious house with lawns outside as well as in
the centre of the house, an outdoor platform to relax, and a hollow square of a
corridor that connected the study, the bedrooms, the drawing and dining room
and the kitchen. Four-year-old Dolly was so fascinated by the house that she
wished she could have a doll’s house which was a replica of that house. That
was one time I could not help utilising the workshop of my regiment to make her
dream come true. The doll’s house came fully furnished and electrified and
Dolly made sure it remained with her wherever we were posted in
Meanwhile the confidence of the brigade commander in the regiment spurred it to excel in every field of endeavour. It won boxing championship thanks to Havildar Subramaniam, who was a one-time national lightweight champion. It excelled in care of equipment and stores during the brigade commander’s inspection due to the tireless efforts of Captain Bakshish Singh, the man in charge. It did wonders in bridging training at Doraha Camp due to the wizardry of the bridging expert in the regiment, Major Harish Chandra. With company commanders like Sulaiman Kumar, Govil, and Balvinder Guraya, and adjutant Daulat Ram Johur, the regiment carried out impossible tasks immediately, for miracles it took a little longer. The regiment excelled in drill and ceremonial parades under its company commanders and the brigade commander embarrassed me by asking me to take the salute, while the other regiments commanded by their commanders marched past me, and grade them! I had to plead guilty, as charged by the other regimental commanders, for being a traitor in supporting Colonel Jagdev Singh whom they disliked intensely, for always censuring them and comparing them unfavourably with my regiment.
The finest hour of the regiment arrived with
the XI Corps full-scale exercise ‘Spring Fever’ in April 1969. The corps
commander, Lieutenant General Bhagat, himself a Bombay Sapper, had planned this
exercise to test his corps for offensive operations against
Undeterred by the magnitude of the task, recce teams of the regiment spent the two nights, that were allowed to us, in compiling data of the water gap (its width, depth, bank heights, and water velocity), the approaches (lengths to be built on home and the enemy side, load-bearing capacity of the soil, and types of soil), and any possible sites where the river could be forded. The plan that was made out with the help of the company commanders was unique. Against the normal teaching, it was decided to launch the 32 Field Company of Guraya to move first, ford the river with materials, to lay tracks on the enemy side. Govil’s 56 Field Company would follow next and commence work on laying tracks on the home approach, while Kumar’s 13 Field Company would assemble Kruppman floats on sledges at the sledge marshalling harbour, tow them by bulldozers to the water line, and then launch them in the water from the sledges by the amphibian PT 76 tanks. The floats would then be connected to form the bridge. Floodlights would be used to light up the area to speed up the work.
The evening before, General Bhagat and Colonel Jagdev Singh visited all the bridge sites to assess the preparations and when they came to our site I could discern mocking smiles on their faces as if to say that my regiment was taking a trip to the Arabian Sea through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans while the other regiments were slipping through the Suez Canal. I responded by smiling wryly. With that the great men departed and I got busy in moving the regiment’s task forces to the engineer assembly area, the bridge marshalling harbour and then to the vehicle waiting areas respectively.
My final verbal orders to the company commanders ended with words borrowed from Frederick the Great. He had addressed his officers before the battle of Leuthen thus, ‘The enemy stands behind his entrenchments armed to the teeth. We must attack him and win, or else perish.’ Ending my address with, ‘The enemy will subject our bridging operations to artillery and machine gun fire tonight. We must build the bridge on the Sutlej as quickly as possible, during the night, and approaches to it before daybreak, or else let our blood flow in the river.’ I was amazed at the effect these borrowed words had on the company commanders even though they were taking part only in an exercise.
With grim determination and concurring smiles they left me while I moved to a vantage point with my radio operator to watch and monitor the progress of the operations. As if the whole bridging site had become a Ford assembly plant, the Kruppman rafts were built and towed to the riverbank. Simultaneously, steel wire mesh tracks and hardboards were laid to connect the existing road to the home bank of the river to provide an approach to the bridge. When I got a radio report from Guraya that all his vehicles had forded the river and started laying tracks on the enemy side, I knew we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
It was only midnight and our bridge, which was scheduled for completion at first light, was already being given the final touches before it could be opened for traffic. I asked the armoured brigade commander to start moving to cross the bridge now and surprise the enemy, radioed the progress to the brigade commander, and moved myself to the completed bridge. Great was the commotion that greeted me there.
First came my adjutant with the supplies to celebrate the event in the way which he knew I would like to celebrate – with a couple of bottles of Dimple Scotch. His offer was accepted and the scotch started flowing. Next came my namesake, Brigadier Satish Mathur, commander of the armoured brigade to request me to close the bridge as his tanks were not ready and he, apparently, did not wish to be considered incapable of taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity. His suggestion was rejected and the brigadier went away fuming. Colonel Jagdev Singh then appeared with the tidings that the other two regiments had not been able to complete their bridges due to the high velocity of water at their sites and a couple of rafts had even floated away. Though he congratulated me for the completion of the bridge he resented my drinking Scotch at the work site while the exercise was still on. He mentioned something about all his regimental commanders suffering from some genetic inferiority.
The situation was saved by the arrival of the corps commander himself at the site. By that time my comfortable circumstance was reduced to the timidity of a novice and with a glass of scotch in my hand, I risked a superficial offer of a drink to the great man. But General Bhagat was not an addict to the indecency of official protocol. I remember a sign on the urinal near his tent at his headquarters; it was, step up, it is not as long as you think it is. But while enjoying my Scotch he also asked me to write a top-secret report for him on the technique of constructing the floating Kruppman Bridges. After his departure I collected all the senior officers of the regiment and individually congratulated them on their great deeds and their faces reflected pride which was similar to the pride that must have glowed on those who helped in crossing the Rhine in World War II.
Writing the report on the bridge construction took a little longer. After the exercise I collected all the relevant data and then wrote a detailed report on the equipment, construction drill, and assembly procedures. Four numbered copies, classified top secret, were then sent to the corps headquarters. To me it was like cutting chicken pieces, marinating them in a mixture of yogurt, tandoori powder, soya sauce, lime juice, salt, and chopped garlic, baking them in an oven, and finally serving tender chicken to my treasured guests. Alas, there is sometimes an uninvited guest on such occasions. And so it was with the top-secret report.
The very nature of its classification ensured
that a copy of the top-secret report would reach
From CHAPTER XLII - DIVERSIONS AT BANGALORE
Shams, Varun, Dolly, and I spent forty-eight hours cooped up in three different railway compartments to reach Bangalore; first from Chandigarh to Delhi, then to Madras, and finally to Bangalore. The two days were rather interesting. As the train would steam into a new station a different dialect could be heard from the platform but the intensity of noise seldom varied. We spent our time reading, chatting, and eating. But it was when the night fell and I retired to my upper berth that I felt like being subtracted from the usual world. Non-existent, yet perversely made aware of not existing by the noise of moving wagon wheels, by the whistling from the engine, and sometimes by the appearance of a celestial half moon which caused the fields and the trees to turn black or silver, I would imagine myself peacefully in limbo and wish the train would never stop and keep going and going and going into eternity. Meanwhile, in the train I practised being nothing; and achieved for quite a long time the perfection of the naught, the zero. My Hindu ancestors, who invented the zero would have been proud of me.
When the train did stop at Bangalore, it was a cloudy July morning in 1969 and Shams insisted that we first go to her mother’s house, even though we were expected to be at a Nissen hut in the officers mess which was to be our temporary abode till a house was found for us. A bewildered Apama and a delighted Fairy received our retinue. After a cup of tea, I announced that it was time for us to leave for the mess, Apama looked to the heavens, heaved a sigh of relief, and in a rare mood of magnanimity towards me, encouraged her daughter to cooperate with me. How fitting that the first act of Apama should be to see that her daughter did not stay in her house when in Bangalore. The last act of Apama’s life was also to ensure that Shams did not stay in that Bangalore house – she sold the house twice over! To the end of Apama’s days she remained a riddling sphinx to her own daughter without revealing herself fully.
On reporting for duty, I found that the commandant, Colonel C B Sreedharan, was on leave and my old antithesis, Lieutenant Colonel Rama Rao was officiating. He was delighted to assassinate me by condemning me to the command of Depot Battalion – a unit which just catered for the men who were proceeding on retirement – or worse, awaiting disciplinary action. I moaned that perhaps my qualifications and experience could be better utilised in one of the training battalions for training the men. The officiating God gave me a patronising smile and said the secret of high morale was to ensure that the final rites of men on their way out of the army were performed with speed and decorum. Had I not been aware of army decorum, I would have withdrawn in reverse order from the officiating God’s presence!
From XLIII START OF THE FEVERISH SEVENTIES
Commander of the Faculty of Engineering was
one Colonel P M Bhatia who was from the first graduates’ course of the
During discussions in the classroom, if a student made an unsatisfactory statement I would be asked to ‘correct’ him. If a student asked some intricate question and if the directing staff was not sure of the answer, I would be looked upon to provide words of wisdom. When it was my turn to make a presentation or give a talk, all the bigwigs of the CME would come to listen. When a Tactical Exercise Without Troops (TEWT) was held I was made the regimental commander, I strutted about like a Roman proconsul – against the grain of my personality, I might add – and gave orders on telephone in a manner of which General Rajendra Prasad would have been proud. Towards the end of the course the class was divided into four groups each of which had to write an exercise. When it was time for presentation of the exercise, it was my group that was selected. In spite of my protests I was selected to be its leader. Having no inclination to work hard I created scenes filled with humour – borrowed from some recent Hollywood films like Patton and MacArthur – rather than great technical or tactical wisdom. Lo and behold, the presentation was regarded as the best in recent times. When the course ended, to nobody’s surprise – but to my bewilderment – I received the top grading.
From CHAPTER XLIV - STUDIES IN MILITARY SCIENCE
By November, nearly nine million refugees from
East Pakistan were on Indian soil, a majority
of them Hindus. For good reason. Lieutenant Colonel Aziz Ahmad Khan, then
commanding officer of 8 Baluchi in his disposition to the Hamoodur Rahman
Commission stated, ‘General Niazi (who had taken over
At the same time, in the privacy of his headquarters at Dhaka, Lieutenant General A A K Niazi was acquiring a notorious reputation for sexual immorality and indulgence in the smuggling of paan from East to West Pakistan. He had trained himself for these operations as GOC Sialkot, when he was friendly with Shamini Firdaus who was running a brothel, and as GOC and martial law administrator, Lahore, with his connections with one Saeeda Bukhari of Gulberg, Lahore, who also ran a brothel under the name of Senorita Home. Nor was this sort of military activity confined to tension-ridden East Pakistan. Brigadier Hayatullah ‘entertained’ some women in his bunker in the Maqbulpur sector of West Pakistan on the night of 11–12 December 1971, when the Indian army was shelling his positions.
For his subsidiary task – defence of East Pakistan – Niazi catered for the conversion of important border towns into fortresses. Other places were to be made strong points. Troops deployed on the border would fight till they were ordered to withdraw to their allotted fortress, which would be defended ‘to the end’. Niazi thus used up all his resources to cover the whole border and kept no reserve in hand – just as he had learnt not to keep brothels in reserve – to influence battle in any sector. He then sent a message to the chief of staff in Rawalpindi on 28 November 1971: ‘Reassure that all ranks by the grace of Allah are in high morale… we are at the highest state of readiness to teach a lasting lesson to Hindustan should they dare cast an evil eye on our sacred soil.’
Yahya Khan tried to avert the ‘evil eye’ by
attacking nine Indian airfields by
Major General Farman Ali, adviser to the East Pakistan governor now saw Niazi falling apart; Niazi
came to see the governor and cried loudly. The Chinese were supposed to help by
activating NEFA and Americans by sending the US Seventh Fleet. None appeared on
the horizon and Niazi proposed a ceasefire on 14 December 1971 to the Indian
army in the manner he would have brought his connections with Saeeda Bukhari
and Shamini Firdaus to a close. But Manekshaw demanded a surrender on 15
December. The next day it was all over. The
speed of the operations surprised the world and would have elicited
admiration from even Caesar. A country larger than
FROM CHAPTER XLV - OF NORMA AND PALESTINE CAMPAGNE
The genius of my commandant, Colonel Kaliandasani,
in a bid to make me his industrious disciple, asked me and my battalion to
study and present the Sinai Campaign of 1956 to all the officers of the Centre.
Actually Kalian had a penchant for punishing his officers by making them give
presentations of military history campaigns. A few months earlier he had made a
fellow battalion commander present Malaya
Campaign of World War II. The laboriously prepared précis on the
campaign were read out by three officers while the audience yawned or slept
outright. I was reluctant but my attempts to avoid the presentation on the plea
that since we did not have a Suez Canal and
an Anglo-French invasion was unlikely in the aftermath of
The first scene opened with me presiding over
a meeting of my battalion officers to revise the standing orders of the battalion.
The unprepared officers divert my mind by bringing in the subject of the Suez
Crisis. Absent-minded as ever, I fall in the trap and introduce the crisis as
emanating from Nasser’s nationalisation of the
Anglo-French Suez Canal Company in July 1956. Fearful of losing access to the
Suez Canal,
Moshe Dayan, Israeli army chief, was holding a meeting of his officers in the second scene during which he gives his directives. The Israeli task was to bring about as quickly as possible the collapse of the enemy forces and to achieve complete control of the Sinai peninsula. They were to capture enemy weapons and equipment. They had no interest in destroying the enemy’s forces, the customary directive in framing the war aims, as the enemy could replace them fairly quickly. The troops were to seize the crossroads and key military positions which would give them control of the area and force their surrender. He explained the Israeli relationship to the Anglo-French forces thus:
We should behave like the cyclist who is riding uphill – when a truck chances by he grabs a hold. We should get what help we can, holding on to their vehicle and exploiting its movement as much as possible, and only when our routes fork should we break off and proceed along our separate ways.
A telephone call from one of his many mistresses ends the meeting and Dayan rushes for a ride of his own, presumably holding and exploiting whatever he could.
Scene III was the operations room of the Israeli Army HQ where the execution of the campaign was explained by the corps commander, Colonel Simhoni, in three phases. Phase I comprised penetration and breakout on southern and central axes. Like the proverbial swarm of locusts, Israeli reconnaissance elements fanned out in all directions and found the weak points in the enemy defence. In many cases reconnaissance forces conducted attacks to both eliminate spotty resistance and maintain the attack momentum. These elements fought and won fifty per cent of the Sinai Campaign.
In Phase II there were three major actions
which determined the success of the Israeli venture. First was the elimination
of Abu Ageila-Kusseima defence complex for advancing westward on the most
tankable central axis. The second battle evolved around an airborne brigade’s
efforts to seize the Hittan Defile and
The presentation of the Sinai Campaign was so well received that it bestowed a certain transitory celebrity status on me. Before long I would sink back into oblivion again.
From CHAPTER XLVI - REJECTION AT DELHI
In Delhi, it was with a sense of awe – and great importance – that I went to Vigyan Bhawan to attend the twenty-second meeting of the council of military engineers. The conference hall was itself very impressive – it was built like a theatre. At the boxes in the rear were the instant translation facilities; alas the translations were only from one language to another and not from nonsense to sense. The raised stage in front served as a dais on which sat Major General B P Wadhera, AVSM, director general of Works, and Major General J S Bawa, AVSM, director general of Border Roads, with the central seat left vacant for the president of the council, Lieutenant General B N Das. Nine top brigadiers – chief engineers of various commands and corps and three colonels – commandants of the three engineer centres – formed the audience together with me, the lone lieutenant colonel. I held my breath for the show time to begin for this great gathering of the top officers of the Corps of Engineers. Presently, Lieutenant General B N Das, the engineer-in-chief, stepped into the chamber with his eyes darting this way and that to preside over his first council meeting. As he proceeded down the aisle, clutching a file, we all stood up, and did not sit until he was seated on the dais. In his introductory remarks he declared that some changes were necessary for the effective working of the institution. I braced myself for some lofty pronouncements.
The first change that was proposed was for the year to be changed from January to December to April to March. No, it was not to derecognise the birth of Christ but only to change the financial year for reasons nobody comprehended. Of course, everybody agreed. The second great change was to shift the venue and date of the future council meetings from the April heat of New Delhi to pleasant October of Poona. It would also give the engineer-in-chief an escape from New Delhi for a week. The council unanimously agreed. The greatest decision of the day was that the editor of the journal of the IME should secure advertisements worth Rs 2,500 per quarter. The fact that the editor was neither a member of the council nor was he present at the meeting did not matter.
A chief engineer complained that the copies of the IME journal were not reaching some units in time. The problem was solved by a directive that dispatch details of the journal should be sent by separate mail to the units who do not receive the journal in time. By now my reverential wonder at this council meeting had completely worn off. I decided to make a contribution myself. But to make sure that my point was not completely out of line I whispered it to Brigadier V V Bhide who was sitting next to me. He said he would support me ‘up to the hilt’. I picked up the mike and suggested that the journal of the IME should start accepting articles on military history, strategy and tactics of war. The president looked at the ceiling of the hall as if he had heard a voice from the planet Mars and responded that we continue discussing matters of vital importance to military engineers. I looked at Brigadier Bhide but from the position of his hands I could make out that he was already holding the ‘hilt’ of his sword. I also made out that the council of the IME was not a proper place for me. For the average participant, attending a meeting is simply the freedom to agree with the chairman, and no more.
FROM CHAPTER XLVII - RECKONONING AT SIMLA
At the officers’ mess my position as the senior dining member was degraded when Major General Harish Rai was posted out and was replaced by Major General K V Krishna Rao as the chief of staff, who came to the station without his family and decided to stay in the mess. The next morning the mess havildar came to my room with summons from the general and tidings that the young subaltern in charge of the mess property was already receiving a lecture from the general.
On approaching the general’s room I saw the
door of the room wide open and the young subaltern sitting on one chair with
his left hand under his chin. The general was sitting on the next chair with a
newspaper in his left hand and his right hand raised to the height of his head
and pointing upwards. To me it seemed that the general was tutoring the
subaltern in helicopter-borne attacks in which he had acquired some experience
in the recent war in
To utilise the remainder of my leave I drove
down to Delhi with the whole family for getting
a visa to visit
With military speed we quickly put on whatever clothes we could get hold of and reached 1 Race Course Road in the stipulated time and after a couple of security checks found ourselves on the lawns where Mrs Gandhi was already greeting some other visitors. She looked completely imperial as she met us with charm and a smile. She inquired about my home town and my work and posed for a photograph with us together with her grandson. When she walked away to the main building after saying namaste to us not in my wildest nightmares could I have foreseen, that at a spot just a few yards from us, and in eleven years time, she would be assassinated by her own guards.
FROM CHAPTER XLVIII - A NORTH AMERICAN ODYSSEYGeneral Rikhye greeted me with the news that
he had got a marriage licence to marry his American girlfriend, Cynthia, and
invited me to have dinner with them at Ashoka, a newly opened Indian
restaurant. He also told me that Chris Kemp, his daughter-in-law, Christine’s
mother, had been wanting to get in touch with me for the last two weeks to
invite me to her home at New England.
Christine and General Rikhye’s son Ravi had
been our neighbours in Shimla. Dinner at Ashoka was fabulous, Cynthia very
charming, and General Rikhye very hospitable. I was amused to know that the
interior decoration of the restaurant was done by Erica Sattler, the girl whom
I had dated once at Bangalore
in 1958. In the five hours we spent at the Ashoka I was astonished by the
amount of bourbon drinking, casual embracement, squeezing, and public kissing
which I saw going on among so many Indians who were patronising the place. It
is refreshing and instructive to see how quickly Indian women have adopted this
amorous part of culture in America; in India anything more than a distant
namaste with folded hands would be considered vulgar by them. And poor me, what
was in store for me that night? An absent-minded meditation and a sleepless
night at the Shivanand Kendra on
Gracious Chris Kemp collected me from the bus
station at Middletown,
FROM CHAPTER XLIX - NIRVANA BY MORPHINE
All of a sudden I found myself free, as free as one could be. I would say goodbye to this dehumanising life where all that mattered was a senior rank; your value as a human being or an officer counted for nothing if you did not climb up the ladder of army ranks. Now I would go to another country and to a new system of hierarchy where I would perhaps be treated as a normal person rather than a ‘have been’. In my freedom I drank till I got drunk; I played bridge till all the tables were empty at the Green Room which was at 3 a.m. And in between I played tennis and went for hikes. One evening I drank to glory at the dining out of some officer at the officers mess till early hours of next morning, went for a tennis game, and returned to pick up Shams for a movie and dinner with General Sharma at the Green Room. While watching the movie all of a sudden I felt sick and an irresistible desire to lie down overwhelmed me. And to lie down I went quietly to the anteroom of the club without whispering a word to Shams so as not to distract her.
I may have left the movie but the feeling of sickness did not leave me. To overcome that feeling I then stepped down from the Green Room to the Mall to chew a paan. But on returning to the Green Room I still felt sick and headed for the bathroom where I vomited heartily. The red coloured contents of my vomit put me in panic and feeling faint I decided to walk home quietly rather than make a nuisance of myself at the club. It was a long walk. Many a time I had to stop, squat on the roadside, and relieve myself by vomiting.
By an inhuman effort of the will, I pushed
through the solid Saturday crowd down to the
By the time the doctor came I was hit by severe chest pains which would not let me lie down or sit up. I felt that I was going to die because I could see, as from the bottom of a well, the faces of Shams, Indira, KK, and the doctor leaning over me. The doctor had no problem in diagnosing that I was having a heart attack. My mind wandered back to the telephonic conversation with the man who wanted to replace me and my masochistic idea of a heart attack. I knew I had brought this on myself. The doctor rang for the hospital ambulance and administered me an injection of morphine. Now calmed down, I attained a nirvana-like awareness, and gradually lost consciousness.
Of the drive to the hospital and the treatment in the operation room I have very little recollection except that I was calm and ready for transit from the body to the immortal self. When I woke up next morning the snow-capped hills visible from the window of my ward at the hospital made me say my prayers in silence for still being alive, though on one side a glucose drip was inserted in my veins and on the other an oxygen cylinder connected to my nostril by tubes was helping me breathe. Suddenly the sure things – health, strength, the organs that would do their work silently and automatically – were not sure at all. Then the treatment began taking effect. The weakness drew away slowly, but I was now on notice that anywhere, at any time, another heart attack could transform me in moments into an invalid, a person at the mercy of oxygen cylinders, glucose, tubes, and wires.
FROM CHAPTER XLX - FAREWELL TO MY INDIAN PAST
Harbinger of happy tidings was an envelope from the High Commission of Trinidad and Tobago in which was a three-year contract for me to accept to serve in that country from a date of my choosing. I rushed to Delhi, saw a pretty eighteen-year-old Bengali girl, Sumita, the receptionist at the high commission, marked her out as a person to be remembered if the reconciliation between Shams and me did not work out, went to the office of the first secretary, one Horace Broomes, and told him that I was ready to leave on 21 May 1975. ‘No problem,’ Horace said, and then presented me with a huge problem. He said he would arrange with BOAC flights for me and my family, inform Tobago (that is where I was required to work on a road project) of my arrival time, and signing of the contract, as soon as a doctor nominated by the high commission certified me fit. Shucks.
My protestation that an army officer who has fought three wars should not be subjected to a medical examination from a civilian doctor cut no ice with Horace. He said it was only a formality. I shrugged my shoulders and drove to the doctor’s office. The humourless Sikh doctor checked my blood pressure, examined my chest, hammered almost all limbs – felt those which he could not hammer – got my urine and blood tested, and could still find no trace of any heart problem. Quite astounded I was when he gave me a certificate of fitness but he nonetheless perceived me to be queer when in spite of his beard I made a motion as if I wanted to kiss him.
Once again the Mathur family got busy in packing at Shimla. Some stuff for me to travel with on 21 May, some to be shipped, Dolly’s doll house to be stored at the Engineer Park in Shimla, some suitcases for Shams, Varun, and Dolly to travel with when they would join me at Tobago three months later, and some to be stored at the Depot Battalion in Bangalore. Meanwhile Generals Tappy Raina and Sharma were gracious enough to give Shams and me a farewell dinner. The speeches did make me feel as if I was saying goodbye to a life of mine – the only life I had known.
Just when we were getting ready to go to the
railway station on our last day at Shimla, the fourth document arrived. It was
from the office of the president of the
On the evening of 21 May I saw Shams, Varun,
and Dolly off to Bangalore at Delhi
railway station and then headed to
