Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

“Sugar?” he said.

“No,” she said. Her voice was oddly husky. She took the cup and the saucer and held it in her lap. Shiv stood stupidly still, and then realized she was waiting for him. Quickly he picked up his cup and saucer, and tried to keep it steady in his trembling hand. He took a sip, and it was very hot and he usually took sugar, lots of it, but he drank rapidly and watched her. Finally she raised her cup and drank.

“You’ve come here before,” he said.

“I go to the hospital at the base,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. His legs were shaky, and very carefully he sat on the chair to her left. Looking at her directly, he saw that she was very thin, that the way she held her head alertly above her bony shoulders gave her a kind of intrepid dignity.

“I’m looking for my husband.”

“Your husband?”

“He’s missing in Burma,” she said. “He is a pilot.”

There was nothing to say to this.

“He is a fighter pilot,” she said. “He was in the first batch of Indian fighter pilots in the RIAF. He was flying a Hurricane over Burma in 1942. They were protecting transports. They were attacked by Japanese fighters. The last his wingman saw of him was the plane losing height over the jungle. The plane was smoking. That was all they saw.”

She was speaking in an even voice, and the sentences came steadily after one another, without any emotion. It was a story she had told before.

“So, at the hospital …?”

“I talk to the men who come back. Before it was only a few. Now they’re all coming back. From the prison camps. And the others, from the INA.” She looked at Shiv. “Somebody must have seen him, met him. Only today I met a soldier from the Fourth Gurkhas who said he had heard about a fighter pilot in a camp on the Irrawaddy.”

She had complete confidence. The names of the units and of the faraway places came to her easily.

“So I’ll go to the army headquarters in Delhi, find out who was in that camp. Talk to them.”

She nodded. She finished her tea, and put the cup back on the tray. Then she folded her hands in her lap, and it seemed she was now content to wait, either for the train, or the man from the Fourth Gurkhas, or a flier in a plane above the trees. There was again that strange quietness, as if the world had paused. Again Shiv felt that he was vanishing into the huge wash of grey above, the sudden and endless green to the horizon. He shut his eyes.

“The man in the hospital told me he had seen the most evil man in the world.”

Shiv opened his eyes. “Who? The Gurkha told you this?”

“No, no,” she said impatiently. “The man in the next bed. He was from the Twenty-third Cavalry.”

And then she told him the story of the most evil man in the world. Shiv listened, and the words came to him through the burning of his blood and the din of his pulse. The shadows drifted in the room and then she was finished. Then Frankie came in and said the train was near, and they walked down the platform, and Shiv held her attaché case in his right hand, and walked slowly behind her. They stood on the platform until the train came, and when the train pulled away neither she nor Shiv waved or raised a hand.

Frankie walked up to him. “You don’t look very well,” Frankie said.

Shiv fainted.

*

His sister was pressing a glass against his lips. Shiv choked on the hot milk and turned his head away from the bitter metal of the glass.

“You have to drink, Shiv,” Anuradha said. “There is this weakness you have to defeat.”

He raised himself up against the pillows, and his body felt light, ready to float. He drank the milk, and saw that Frankie was sitting at the far end of the darkened room. Shiv finished, and handed the empty glass to Anuradha, still feeling the hot liquid burble in his throat. After Anuradha left, Frankie opened the window a little, so that Shiv could see the swirling sky. And there were still the steady drops splattering on the stone outside.

“Crazy man,” Frankie said. “But you’ll be all right. Just a little flu you’ve got.”

Shiv tilted his head, yes, and the room moved around him.

“She was talking to you for a long time,” Frankie said, smiling. “I saw. Very seriously. What was she telling you?”

“She,” Shiv said. He stopped for the friction in his throat. He tried again. “She told me about the most evil man in the world.”

Frankie turned, came and sat next to the bed. “What do you mean?”

Shiv didn’t quite know. What she had told him, how she had told him, that day yesterday was now left to him only in fragments. He remembered it now only across the dark sea of sleep, lost behind the distant horizon of sunset and illness. He reached back and held only slivers. But there was something else in his throat, complete and whole. “I think this is what she told me.” He cleared his throat. It hurt.

I touched my mother’s feet and she sent me to war with an aarti . “Ja, beta,” she said. And so I left her, and the smell of incense, and went. My grandfather and my father had served in the Twenty-third Cavalry, and there I went. Our colonel McNaughten said our job was to kill Germans, and we killed them. We are fighting evil, he said. In the mess there was a cartoon of Hitler crushing Africa under his jackboots. So we killed them on Ruweisat Ridge, on the Rahman track, on the Aqaqir ridge. I saw huge stony fields and burning tanks and trucks and upended guns till the eye could see no more. Long black columns of smoke and oily burning at the root. We killed them. And they killed us. Mahipal Singh, Jagat Singh, Narain Singh. Kirpal Singh in the night when we ran into the First Life Guards and they shot us and we shot them.

On the Tel the Germans tried a counterattack. They came at night down a narrowing slope, after a barrage with what they had left. Across a narrow wadi, facing the slope, the 1/9th Suffolk had dug in. They had machine gun positions and antitank and mortars sighted in on the slope. All night the Germans came and the Suffolk cut them down. They could hear the Germans calling to each other. Then the light of flares and the Suffolk firing. The Germans came and tried and tried again and then again. All night it went. Then in the morning the Suffolk counterattacked, and then they opened up and let us through, followed by Bren gun carriers. I was driving the lead armoured car, not only in the troop but in the regiment. We came down the Suffolk side of the wadi with the wheels and tracks crunching on the rocks and we could see the bodies of the Germans covering the slope opposite. They had fallen so close, so many, that it was as if all the rock were covered with faded olive cloth, a green carpet. German bodies. Of course not all of them were dead. But we had killed them. We bounced into the bottom of the wadi and the engine growled and we struggled against a lip of rock and the heavy wheels bit into the ground and rocks crumbled and sprayed and then we were almost over and then I stopped.

I stopped the car, I brought it to a halt. Through the driver’s slit, through the armour plate, not six feet away and ahead, a German was looking at me. He was very young, propped up on an elbow, that strange golden-white hair, and he had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. He was looking at me. He had the bluest eyes I had ever seen, against the dust-covered face, eyes the colour of a sky you or I had never seen. I could not tell if he was dead or alive, and he was looking at me. “Damn it, Huknam,” Captain Duff crackled into my ears. “Push on.” But I could not tell if the man with the blue eyes was dead or alive, and he was looking at me. “Huknam, you’re holding up the whole advance,” Captain Duff shouted, and I thought of the troop behind me, and then the regiment, and the army and armies and all the countries beyond, all held up behind me. So I let in the clutch and the man with the blue eyes was looking at me for a few seconds more and then we went over him and up the slope and the regiment followed. The engine was thundering in my ears as we crunched up and up but as we went up I could not have heard it but I heard them, them outside on the ground calling out. “ Mutti ,” they said. “ Mutti .” We came up over the ridge and they had nothing left, but thirty-four miles on and the next day we came into a line of anti-tank guns. They were very close to the ground and well-camouflaged and they caught us well, two other cars in our troop burning in the first minute. We saw the muzzle-flashes and tumbled one, but then there was a whang behind and above me and I was deaf, and I raised my hatch and jumped out. The sand was on fire and there was a burning behind my ears and on my shoulders. I fell down and got up and ran as I could and then I knew my shoulders were on fire. I rolled and rolled and finally it was out. The car exploded and I never saw any of them again, not Captain Duff or the others. It must have been an eighty-eight.