IS IT A PLANE?

The long drive through Burma led the 5th Indian Division, my grandfather's formation, deep into the interior of the country, and to better quarters and better living conditions. Luck has a way of changing suddenly, when you least expect it, and in my grandfather’s case, he caught a break.

In a small town in interior Burma, next to a famous pagoda (a Buddhist temple), the company settled down to something very like comfort. Among the local people were Indian-origin settlers. With the enterprise of the true Malayalee when he’s out of Kerala (there’s something about the southern state of Kerala in India which makes its expat inhabitants hugely proactive when it comes to the food and beverage business), the ladies would come around on Sunday mornings with traditional South Indian steamed rice dumplings (idlis) and savoury rice-flour pancakes (dosas) to sell to the home-sick Indian men. 

 My grandfather was promoted to Chief Quartermaster. He and his friend Subedar Bali, being two of the  senior-most men around, had the luxury of getting a thatched hut by way of accommodation, a definite upgrade from the tents which had served as living quarters so far. And sharing a boundary wall with an anti-aircraft unit meant that they could relax and stop worrying about the constant, ever-present threat of the German bomber planes that hovered over the Great War.

For my grandfather, who possessed the happy knack of ignoring unpleasant things and enjoying life to the hilt whenever possible, this was living the high life.                 

 For a while.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. My grandfather and Subedar Bali sat outside their hut in the peaceful tropical surroundings and enjoying a breakfast of masala dosas, crispy golden brown pancakes filled with a spicy, savoury potato filling. There was nothing to do but eat and bask in the sunshine. They looked up lazily as seven planes painted with the Indian insignia flew overhead. The planes swooped down, raining bombs on the unit. At the first, explosive sounds of the deadly shower from the sky peppered the camp, my grandfather and Bali abandoned their masala dosas and dived into trenches.

Ironically, the anti-aircraft unit’s artillery guns were just outside the unit, but they, too, thought the, as my grandfather put it, that “the planes were ours”. It wasn’t until much later that everyone figured out that the planes were enemy bombers, cleverly disguised with the Indian insignia and flying under false colours. By the time the anti-aircraft unit realized what was going on, the planes had disappeared.

The ruse had caught everyone unawares. The camp was levelled and as many as 30 vehicles were reduced to smoking wrecks in a matter of a  minutes. 22 people died that day. My grandfather came out of the trench to find that friends and colleagues who hadn’t been so lucky were gone forever. Also gone was the prized thatched hut (which had take a direct hit) and all his worldly possessions, which had been in the hut. But things, unlike people, can be replaced; and as the Quartermaster, retrieving a fresh set of clothing and other supplies from the stores was a simple matter. Far simpler, in fact, than dealing with the sudden deaths of twenty-two people with whom he’d lived, worked and travelled for so long - a loss that cut so deeply that 75 years later, he still couldn’t talk about it.

In fact, he had been lucky again. He could have been inside his hut when a bomb from the enemy planes had landed on it, but instead, he’d been outside.

That was how my grandfather survived bombing by enemy aeroplanes in the Second World War. 

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