Raghu Karnad - Farthest Field - An Indian Story of the Second World War

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.