160. Dogfight

dogfight (Illustrator: Sam Weber)

I was eleven when India and Pakistan fought their second war over Kashmir, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, which lasted for five weeks and took thousands of lives before the UN mandated a ceasefire. My mother had also been eleven when the Second World War broke out; its duration of more than five years interrupted her education and brought her childhood to an abrupt end. Like many other children, she was wrenched from her family in a mass evacuation from London and billeted with a succession of foster families. Even after she returned, the bombs pounded away at the city night after night and she remembers going to the air-raid shelters and direct hits that killed friends and neighbors. By contrast, war was like a game to me, something that brought excitement to our quiet lives on the IIT campus in Kharagpur and created a feeling of community while it lasted. I remember the sense of self-importance drummed up at the meetings of women and children as we learned how to tape up and black out the windows and to perform simple first aid. Suddenly everyone was civic-minded. Married women were even donating their gold jewelry to the war effort.

A few more memories stand out from that time. Living in West Bengal, we were not terribly far from the border with East Pakistan (later to become Bangladesh), close enough to receive Pakistani radio broadcasts as well as Indian ones. On All-India Radio, we heard again and again the slogan, “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” along with reports on the numbers of losses to both sides. Always, I noted, there were more enemy losses than Indian ones. Imagine my 11-year-old’s surprise when I heard the crackling Pakistani radio broadcast pronouncing with equal certainty that Kashmir was an integral part of Pakistan and reporting considerably more Indian losses and fewer Pakistani ones for the same time period.

There was a lone Muslim student in our class at St. Agnes’ School in Kharagpur. Poor girl, surrounded by whispers that her father was a spy for Pakistan. It never occurred to me to support her or to protect her from those rumors. We kept going to school for the duration of the war, but one day at tiffin-time we witnessed something so surreal that I still find it hard to believe that it actually happened: a dogfight between IAF and PAF fighter planes just above the maidan adjoining our school playground. We stared in disbelief as one of the planes sustained a direct hit and, stricken, begin to tip and trail smoke. The next day it was confirmed that the plane—the Pakistani one, as it turned out—had crashed, killing the pilot as well. People had already stripped it bare, taking home critical parts and accessories as war trophies, and the authorities had to issue orders for them to be returned.

In the aftermath of the crash, still more rumors circulated, reaching even the ears of us children. The United States had not been particularly friendly to India since Independence, particularly during the Cold War era, because of Nehru’s socialist leanings and willingness to take aid from whichever superpower was willing to offer it, notably the Soviet Union. In the black-and-white formulations of the 1950s and 1960s where one had to be in one camp or the other, India’s very nonalignment made it suspect. The U.S. had been providing military aid to Pakistan for years, but in this war, so we had heard, it had assured India that it would prevent Pakistan from using American arms. Nevertheless, the people who swarmed over the downed PAF fighter plane reported that it was American, along with everything in it, even down to the pilot’s gloves.

I was not old enough to understand much that was going on, but that air battle, fought right over our school playground as if it were a spectacle designed for our entertainment, helped to confirm my view that war is a bloody dogfight. Each side insists that its cause is just and honorable but in the end, the only ones who profit are the arms suppliers.

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49. Making Sense of the Movies

Before I was ten, I could count the number of films I had seen on the fingers of my two hands: we hardly went to the movies at all. For a little while, in our living room in Athens, my father played and replayed Hindi movies—wildly popular in Greece in the early 60s—translating them into English for Greek subtitling. I remember them only hazily, their plots all blending into one another as Dad rewound the big reels, played them for a few minutes, and then rewound them again. One tearjerker involved a childless couple who decided to adopt; soon after they brought the child joyfully home, the woman became pregnant, and when her biological child was born, she began mistreating the once-adored little adoptee. In the scene that stands out the most vividly in my mind, a runaway child is caught on the railway tracks as a train approaches at top speed. At the last possible moment the mother throws herself on the child as the train bears down on them. After it has passed, the bundle on the tracks is still for a few terrible moments, but then—blessed relief—both mother and child are safe.

In Athens I was also taken to see my first American film, Disney’s 1959 hit, The Shaggy Dog, which I found extremely frightening. In it, a boy began turning into a dog, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The most terrifying scenes were when he was actually metamorphosing in front of my eyes, his smooth skin sprouting bristly fur and his face taking on canine features. I couldn’t watch, and had to squeeze my eyes shut until my mother told me it was safe to open them again.

During our last summer in Greece we went out to the open-air theater (altogether different from a drive-in) to see Cliff Richards’ 1963 hit musical, Summer Holiday, and were swept up in the romance of it. Since the plot involved a group of teenagers singing their way across Europe to Athens in a double-decker bus, it’s not surprising that the film was popular in Greece. “Summer Holiday” and “(Put on Your) Dancing Shoes” were on our lips for months, and still evoke that summer for me.

Back in India, at IIT Kharagpur, we went occasionally to the Saturday film screenings at the Institute. Hindi films generally alternated with English ones, and not all of them were deemed appropriate for us, so I remember only a handful, but I loved going to those Saturday movies. The atmosphere was set by the music that played before the show, most evocatively the theme from Come September (1961, starring Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida, and Sandra Dee, though I didn’t know that at the time, and have never seen the movie). Another favorite theme song was Henry Mancini’s “The Baby Elephant Walk,” from the 1962 film Hatari (which I didn’t see until years later in America, as an oldie on television). The show started with newsreels and sometimes an American cartoon like Tom & Jerry, followed by advertisements for the latest birth control campaign (“Remember the Red Triangle: do ya teen, bas (two or three, enough)”) and the national anthem, for which we all rose and I sang along at the top of my voice.

When the movies themselves began they were both bewitching and bewildering. They were set in worlds that were completely alien to me, and I found it hard  to work out what was going on. Making it still harder was the fact that the projectionist could never seem to get the reels in the right order, and if there wasn’t a breakdown, with the power failing or the film snapping, there was an abrupt and indefinite halt in the middle of a reel, after which the reels would be rewound and switched. If we were lucky, we would begin again, impossibly confused; if we weren’t, they would announce, after an interminable wait, that nothing could be done and we would simply have to go home. The reels got mixed up in Gone With the Wind, I remember, so that  one moment Scarlett O’Hara was having her corsets tightened and the next, she was making clothes out of curtains; I still have no idea what happened in-between. The same thing happened with Lawrence of Arabia, where all I can remember is large expanses of desert with the sun rising inexorably again and again, with a horrible torture scene in-between which both fascinated and sickened me.

One Saturday the film was The Sandpiper (1965, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton). A few minutes in, my mother said, “Oh dear, this isn’t very appropriate for you, is it? Well, never mind, I suppose it’s harmless.” She kept watching, and so did I. Once I had been told it was inappropriate I tried to make the most of the experience, but, truth be told, I didn’t know what the fuss was about. It was set by the sea, with small, long-legged birds skittering across the empty beach at sunrise and sunset, and, as I recall, the man and the woman spent most of their time doing (and wearing) next-to-nothing inside the cottage. There didn’t seem to be much to it, as far as I could make out.

As a teenager in America it took me years to become visually literate like my  American friends. If I came even a few minutes late to a movie I might as well go home, because, not knowing the stock formulas, I would be hopelessly lost. I was culturally illiterate as well. I saw Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate almost as soon as I arrived, and couldn’t make head or tail of it: “Just one word: Plastics” was completely unintelligible.

By the age of ten, a typical American child—and a typical Indian one, too, for that matter—has seen hundreds of movies; without them, I had more time, and other ways, to make sense of the world around me.

 

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35. The Nation

Hijli Forest (photo by Kinshuk Bairagi, picasaweb.google.com)

My father used to call the wild area beyond I.I.T.’s Hijli campus the Dandakaranya, the forest in the Ramayana where Rama fought the rakshasas—and the site of a very real epic struggle raging in east-central India as I write.

Our bungalow was on the very edge of the campus, so, as children, we spent many hours wandering through the Dandakaranya in search of adventure. It was during the school holidays that I had the idea of founding a nation. We came across a flat, unforested area, and I thought what fun it would be to mark out a boundary and divide it into plots for our friends, each of whom could cultivate it as he or she chose. I suppose the idea was in the air. These were still early days after Independence—Nehru had only just died—and the Congress Party’s Land to the Tiller slogan and Vinoba Bhave’s bhoodan movement had captured our young imaginations (although they redistributed relatively little land).

Most of the fun lay in the idea of it. In the abstract, the nation was a model of cooperative organization. In my mind’s eye I saw the neatly maintained borders, both internal and external, perhaps marked with white lines as on a tennis court. I saw the enthusiastic but compliant citizens keeping to their allocated plots and—now that I come to think of it—doing what Puttu and I told them to do. Besides cultivating their gardens, I imagined them attending meetings where we would discuss our plans for the future and take votes; votes, it went without saying, that would unanimously endorse our proposals.

But voting was where the problems began. Modeling ourselves after the world’s largest democracy, we held elections for Prime Minister, and the electorate voted decisively for Puttu. I was heartbroken, though I put on a brave face at the time. After everyone had gone home, I ran to my mother and told her my tale of woe.  “Never mind,” she said comfortingly,  “She may be Nehru, but you are Gandhi, Father of the Nation.” Her words did console me a little, but the fun had gone out of the project. It turned out that nobody else had really cared much about the idea, so it died, along with my political ambitions.

At ten, it never occurred to me that somebody might already own the ground on which our nation stood; or that the  peaceful Santhal tribals, whose village was only a short distance away, might have prior claims to the land.

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