Bombay — Late September 1940
The SS Strathallan sat at its berth like a building that had given up pretending to be a building and had decided, reluctantly, to be a ship. It had been a P&O liner, white-hulled, Art Deco-appointed, built for passengers who drank gin and tonic on the promenade deck and watched the sea change colour between Aden and Marseille. The Admiralty had painted it grey. They had mounted two six-inch guns on the foredeck, stripped the lounges of their peacetime furniture, and filled the holds with military stores. What remained of the original ship was ghostly: a mahogany handrail here, a brass porthole frame there, the ghost-letters of the ship's name in faded gold on the stern, as though the vessel itself resisted the erasure. The Strathallan was now a troopship. It would carry them west — not through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, which since Italy had entered the war in June were as dangerous as a loaded pistol, but around the Cape, through the South Atlantic, up the coast to Freetown, and then north to Liverpool. The journey would take three weeks, perhaps four. The U-boats were in the Atlantic. It would zigzag. There was no guarantee of arrival.
They assembled on the stone quay at Apollo Bunder in the late September heat, twenty-four men in civilian clothes, carrying tin trunks and canvas bags, and the air around them was thick with the smells that Bombay produces when it is not raining: salt, diesel, the sharp rot of fish guts from the trawlers in the commercial basin, and jasmine. There were always jasmine garlands at the docks, vendors threading the white flowers onto string and holding them up to departing families as though the fragrance could substitute for a farewell. The harbour water was dark green and oily near the hull, catching the light in broken patterns that reassembled and broke again with the motion of the ship's hull against the quay. Above the quay, behind them, the Gateway of India stood in its yellow basalt, three storeys of Indo-Saracenic arches built to commemorate the arrival of King George V in 1911, though the actual structure had not been completed until 1924, thirteen years after the event it celebrated. A fact that said something about the empire's relationship with time.
They came from the hill stations and the plains, from the cantonment towns and the port cities, from households where theGuru Granth Sahiboccupied its own room and households where the fire in the agiary had been tended for generations and households where the muezzin's call and the temple bell arrived at the same window within minutes of each other. They were Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsi, and Christian, sons of doctors, lawyers, government officials, surgeons, and one family in which the Maharaja of Patiala's court was a relevant reference. They shared almost nothing except the ability to fly a small aircraft and a willingness, which in some cases bordered on eagerness and in other cases resembled a complicated form of defiance, to cross an ocean and fight a war that was theirs and was not theirs in proportions that no one had yet worked out.
The oldest was Man Mohan Singh. He was thirty-four, which made him older than any of the others by more than a decade, and he stood on the quay with the ease of a man who had boarded ships before, who had crossed oceans before, who had been to England and back and was returning to it now not as a student or a pioneer but as an officer in an air force that was not quite his own. He was large, broad-shouldered, heavy for a pilot, and his hands were restless, moving when he spoke, shaping the air into the thing he was describing, because Man Mohan Singh was, above all else, a storyteller. He had flown a Gipsy Moth named Miss India from England to Karachi in 1930, the first Indian to complete the solo flight, and he had missed the Aga Khan's prize for the journey by a single day, and he had flown solo from England to South Africa, and he had been the Maharaja of Patiala's chief pilot, and these facts existed in the air around him the way heat exists around a stove. You could feel them before anyone spoke. The younger men looked at him and saw what they might become if the war was kind. He looked at them and saw what he had been, and the looking made him gentle.
Beside the gangway, a cluster of families held the space that families hold at departures: close enough to touch, too far for the touch to mean what it needs to mean. A mother adjusted a collar that did not need adjusting. A father shook his son's hand with the formality that Indian fathers adopted when the feeling was too large for the gesture, pressing the handshake into a shape that could contain what an embrace could not. A younger brother stood slightly apart, watching, his face carrying the particular expression of boys who are not old enough to go and are old enough to understand the going.
Mahinder Singh Pujji stood among them, hisdastarwound tight in dark navy blue, the cloth immaculate, the folds precise in the manner his father had taught him in Simla — each layer a discipline, each turn of the fabric an act of identity that was older than the empire and would outlast it. He was twenty-two, the fourth son of Sardar Sohan Singh Pujji, a government official in the hill station where the Viceroy spent his summers, and he had learned to fly at the Delhi Flying Club on Safdarjung's dusty airfield, and he had worked for Himalayan Airways running the Haridwar–Badrinath route, and he had refuelled aircraft for Burmah Shell, and now he was here, on the quay at Apollo Bunder, in a dark suit and a navy turban, holding a tin trunk in one hand and his mother's cloth bag in the other. The bag was cotton, hand-stitched, and it was light — lighter than the trunk by a factor that had nothing to do with weight.
Rustom Nariman Dastur held a leather-bound prayer book in his left hand and wore wire-rimmed spectacles in his breast pocket. He was from Bandra, the Queen of the Suburbs, where the fire temple sent sandalwood smoke into the sea air. He was Parsi, Zoroastrian, the quietest of the twenty-four, or perhaps only the most private. A young man who had read widely and said little. His silence was not emptiness but containment. He would remove the spectacles before flying. He would keep the prayer book. In Bandra, when a Parsi died, the body went to the Tower of Silence on Malabar Hill, where the vultures did their work. Dastur had not told anyone about the Towers or the fire temple or the prayers in Avestan that he had learned from his mother. He did not volunteer information. The keeping of silence was a form of privacy that the war would eventually violate.
Hari Chand Dewan was eighteen. He stood near the edge of the group with the specific posture of a young man who is not yet certain he belongs where he has been placed, his shoulders slightly forward, his hands at his sides, his eyes taking in everything with the wide, ungoverned attention of a face that has not yet learned to choose what to see. He had been eighteen at Walton when the seventy-two arrived and the twenty-four were selected, and he was still eighteen now, and he would turn nineteen on the ship, his birthday falling somewhere in the Arabian Sea, unmarked, because he had not mentioned it. He said almost nothing. The others let him be quiet because they understood, or would come to understand, that at eighteen there are things you cannot yet say, and the not-saying is not weakness but the particular dignity of youth confronting a scale of experience for which it does not yet have the grammar.
Ranjan Dutt arrived at the quay with the energy of a man who had been in motion since birth and did not intend to stop. He was small, quick-eyed, Bengali, from a military school in Dehradun where he had earned a civilian pilot's licence at sixteen by means of a birth certificate that bore a flexible relationship with the facts. The exact year of his birth was a matter of negotiation between Dutt and the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy had lost. He carried himself with the lightness of a bantamweight who knows that speed compensates for everything, and when he spoke, which was often, his English carried the rapid cadence of Calcutta, and when he told stories, which was more often, he told them about himself in the third person, as though the boy from Calcutta were a character in a narrative that Dutt himself was observing with amused detachment.
Ali Raza Khan Pasha had already prayed theFajrbefore dawn, in the room they had been given in Bombay, a room that smelled of plaster and ceiling fan dust and the faint sweetness of a city that could not decide whether it was tropical or imperial, and his forehead had touched the floor while the others slept, and the Arabic had come from a place deeper than memory, from the place where the body knows what the mind has not yet assembled, and now he stood on the quay with the calmness of a man who has spoken to God before breakfast and found the conversation adequate. He was Muslim, his bearing Frontier-shaped, his courtesy the particular courtesy of families in which manners are not social lubricant but moral architecture, and when he spoke, which was not often, and always in complete sentences, and always with a formality that the English officers would mistake for distance and the Indian officers would recognise as breeding, his Urdu carried the cadences of Ghalib, because Pasha read Ghalib the way other men read newspapers: daily, for the necessary information about the state of the human heart.
Shivdev Singh stood beside Pujji, two Sikhs, two turbans, one dark navy and one slightly paler, and his expression was the expression he would wear for the rest of his life: composed, watchful, giving nothing to the air that the air had not earned. He was twenty, younger than he looked, and people would say later that he resembled Man Mohan Singh, the eldest, the same height, the same breadth of shoulder, and the resemblance would become, in time, a kind of haunting, though neither of them knew this yet, standing on the quay with the sun pressing down and the grey ship waiting.
Erlic Wilmot Pinto watched the quay with the expression of a man at a party he has not yet decided to enjoy. He was from Porvorim, in Goa, Portuguese territory, which made him not merely an Indian volunteering for the British but a subject of one European empire volunteering for another, and he was Catholic, Jesuit-educated, socially fluent in English, Konkani, Hindi, and Portuguese, and the ease with which he moved between these identities was itself a kind of identity, the particular skill of a man who had learned early that belonging nowhere completely was a form of freedom, or at least a form of useful camouflage. He wore a small silver crucifix on a chain beneath his shirt, the metal warm against his sternum, and if you watched closely you could see his hand rise to his collar and touch the place where the chain met his skin. A gesture so brief and so habitual that it was not prayer but reflex, the body's way of confirming that the small, familiar weight was still there.
Kenneth Joseph Bhore was the second-oldest, twenty-eight, and he moved through the group with the quiet authority of a man who understood logistics, who knew when the ship would sail, how long the gangway would remain down, where the trunks should go. He was not a storyteller like Man Mohan or a performer like Dutt. He was the kind of man who made things work, and in a group of twenty-four men about to cross an ocean, the man who made things work was as necessary as the man who told the story.
There were others. Gnanamuthu from Coimbatore, whose father was a surgeon; Nazirullah, whose quiet competence revealed itself in the way he checked the gangway's handrail before ascending, testing it with his weight the way a man tests a thing he might need to trust; Mehta, who laughed easily; Khanna, whose face the others would later struggle to recall; Tandon, who arrived at twenty-one and said his name and not much else; Ghose, who stood beside Shahi in what would later become Vanderson's photograph; Latif, Sanghi, Chopra, Tarlochan Singh, names that would appear on duty rosters and squadron records and, for some of them, on headstones in English cemeteries where the rain fell differently than it fell at home. They were twenty-four and they were about to board a grey ship and none of them could have told you with any honesty why they had come, because the honest answer, which included adventure, and the pull of the sky, and the need to prove something to the empire or to a father or to the self, and a patriotism that had no clear object since the country they were defending was not a country they were permitted to govern, and the simple, ungovernable human desire to be in the place where history was happening rather than the place where it was being waited for, the honest answer was not a single thing but a tangle, and they were young enough to mistake the tangle for clarity.
The gangway was narrow and steep, metal ridged for grip, vibrating faintly with the ship's idling engines, and they went up it in a line — tin trunks bumping against the railing, canvas bags slung over shoulders, the metal warm under their hands from the September sun. Man Mohan turned at the gangway's base and looked back at the youngest ones — Dewan, hesitating; Gnanamuthu, adjusting his grip on the trunk. "Chalo, beta log," he said. Come, children. The Punjabi was warm and it moved the boys toward the gangway the way a hand on a shoulder moves a boy.
The families on the quay did not cry out or wave or do any of the things that departures in films require. They stood and watched. A mother pressed her palms together. A father raised his hand, once, not waving, just raised, as if taking an oath or placing his hand against glass. A vendor held up a jasmine garland to no one in particular, and the fragrance rose through the diesel and the salt and arrived, briefly, at the railing where the twenty-four now stood.
Below them, the harbour water lapped against the Strathallan's hull with a regularity that was not tidal but mechanical. The slap of water against painted steel, the ship breathing. A porter carried a trunk aboard that did not belong to any of the twenty-four, and for a moment the gangway held a thirty-first body, a thirty-second, a civilian with a suitcase whose war was a different war, and then the gangway belonged to them again, to the twenty-four, and the metal of it hummed beneath their shoes with the vibration of an engine that was waiting to be given purpose.
Pujji's mother had packed the cloth bag that morning before dawn. She had risen in the dark and gone to the kitchen and rolled therotisand placed them one on top of the other, seven of them, each one perfectly round because she had made rotis every morning for thirty years and her hands knew the shape the way a pilot's hands would come to know the control column, and she had placed the tin of mango pickle beside the rotis and the handkerchief beside the pickle and folded the cloth and tied it and given it to her son at the door without ceremony, because in Simla, in the household of Sardar Sohan Singh Pujji, the large things were done quietly and the small things were done with care — though one roti was not quite round, one had a ridge on the left side where her palm had pressed too hard, and he would eat that one first. At the door she had said, "Rabb rakha," God keep you, the Punjabi that mothers say when the keeping is out of their hands.
He had not said goodbye to his father in the way that films would later suggest such things should be said. His father had stood in the hallway of their house in Simla, the pine-scented hill station air coming through the open window, the Guru Granth Sahib in its room behind him, and had looked at his fourth son with an expression that Pujji would carry for the rest of his life without ever being able to name. An expression that contained pride and fear and the particular love of a Sikh father for a Sikh son who is about to do something that the father cannot prevent and does not wish to prevent and cannot bear. They had shaken hands. The handshake had lasted four seconds. It was enough.
The ship moved.
It moved with the particular slowness of large things leaving fixed places. The quay water widening, dark green, oily, the mooring lines gone, the hull finding the harbour current and accepting it. The Gateway of India slid to port. It did not grow smaller. It simply receded, yellow basalt against the haze, the arch that had been built for a king's arrival now framing a departure of twenty-four men whom no king had summoned, whom no arch commemorated, who had volunteered for reasons the arch could not contain, and then the haze closed around it and it was not small but simply gone, the way India would be gone, the way everything they were leaving would be gone, absorbed into the grey distance between the ship and the shore until the distance itself became the only fact.
The harbour gave way to the Arabian Sea and the Arabian Sea did not announce itself. There was no line between harbour and open water, no threshold, only a gradual change in the quality of the motion, the ship settling into a deeper rhythm, the swells longer and slower, the Bombay smell, that particular compound of diesel and jasmine and commerce and four hundred years of arrivals and departures, thinning until the air held only salt and the faint chemical trace of the ship's own paint. The water changed. The oily green becoming blue, then darker, the depth beneath the hull increasing until the bottom was no longer imaginable, just a darkness that the mind refused. Below deck, the engines settled into their travelling rhythm, a vibration that entered the deck and the railing and the soles of their shoes and would become, over the weeks ahead, as constant and as unnoticed as a heartbeat. On the foredeck, the guns pointed at nothing. The wake spread behind them in a white V that the sea erased as quickly as the ship produced it.
Pujji opened his mother's cloth bag. Seven rotis, a tin of mango pickle, a handkerchief.
The rotis were unleavened, slightly stiff from the morning's baking, the wheat carrying the faint char of thetawa. The mango pickle wasaam ka achaar, raw mango in mustard oil, fenugreek, red chilli, turmeric, sour and hot and oily, the taste of every kitchen in northern India compressed into a small tin. He did not eat them. Not yet. He opened the bag and looked at what was inside it and the looking was enough, because the bag was not food but a room, his mother's kitchen, the brass vessels, the stone floor, the light coming through the window in the way that light comes through windows only in the place where you grew up, and the room was in his hands and the room was already behind him, receding like the Gateway, and he would carry it across the ocean in a cloth bag that weighed almost nothing and contained almost everything.
He held the handkerchief to his face and stood at the railing and did not move until India was gone.