IN THE ARMY NOW

Anything is possible. We don’t believe in miracles anymore. If you ask me, a miracle is having an unemployed young man, from a small village in an enslaved nation, achieve glory, despite the prejudices against his privileged ancestors, whose name he bore. What makes this tale even more astonishing is that everything I’m about to describe to you happened during the Second World War, a terrible era in human history, a time when one would never believe anyone could get ahead in life. This is the true story of this miracle, which changed the course of my grand-father’s life – and the lives of all of his descendents- forever.
In the 40s, India was still under British colonial rule. My grandfather, Kavaseri Krishnaiah Venkateswaran, was a young man who had just finished his Bachelors’ degree in Arts. In the year 1941, it was pretty unusual for a native Indian to be so well-qualified. Unfortunately, because of belonging to the ‘Brahmin’ caste, the former elite caste which was generally hated (and not without good reason) by the emancipated folks of the new age, this exceptionally well-educated young man couldn’t get a job anywhere.His father (my great grandfather) still wanted his son to live with his family and wanted him to follow in his father’s professional footsteps. “I will get you a job as a Collector,” he boasted to his son, with the rider, “Stay at home, my son.” In those times, nearly every Indian family was a joint family. Unthinkable to let a son of the house go far from the bosom of the family home.
But my grandfather had a better handle on reality, bitter experience having opened his eyes to the truth. The Brahmins had abused their privileged position in society for far too long, and nobody, but nobody wanted to give a Brahmin a chance to regain a position of power once again. So young Venkateswaran decided to hide his caste from prospective employers. He applied for a position as a train conductor at Trichy, the place where he lived, now part of modern-day Kerala, in the very southernmost region of India. He soon received a call for a job interview. At first, it seemed like everything would work out. But at the end, the person conducting the interview casually asked, “So, what is your caste?” Venkateshwaran was obliged to reveal the truth. “Brahmin? Get out!” shouted the interviewer rudely.
Most people would have been discouraged by the tough situation in which this unemployed young graduate found himself. My grandfather, the world’s biggest optimist, went to see the famous Christmas celebrations in the city of Bangalore. His best friend, Krishna Nayar, also wanted to go there, but to enlist in the British Indian Army. Young Mr Nayar, who had never travelled by train before, was afraid to go alone. “I don’t want to go alone! Come with me, please,” he begged his best friend.
At that time, the British were looking to recruit people from the colonies in Asia to fight against the fascists. The British Army had announced that it would send free return tickets for the train journey to people who came to enlist. My grandfather decided to take advantage of this opportunity. That was how fickle chance tossed young Venkateshwaran on a train journey with his best friend K. Nayar, who was on his way to enlist as a recruit in the great war that had engulfed the entire world.

The two friends gave the exam, and they both passed. When he was invited to join the army, young Venkateshwaran hesitated. Krishna Nayar pressed his friend to enlist. Peer pressure seems like a modern phenomenon. But 75 years ago, my grandfather went to Bangalore to give a friend moral support, and ended up being a recruit in the British Indian Army – that too, in the dangerous time of the Second World War! Like any teenager today, he lied to his father to do so, too. The adventure which led my grandfather all across the Asian sub-continent had begun. In those days, it wasn’t unusual to spend one’s entire lifetime in one place. But destiny led my grandfather to the ends of Asia, across seas and deserts. It was perhaps the force of his optimism that led him to realize his dreams of grand adventure, and to give him what he had been looking for all along – a job. 

 

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RISING THROUGH THE RANKS

Having enlisted in the British Indian Army during the peak of the Second World War, my grandfather went home and broke the news to his appalled father. It had been just one year since he'd got married. After the failure of all the blandishments, inducements and entreaties to persuade my grandfather to stay home like a good boy rather than go off to war, his dad reluctantly bid him adieu, knowing perhaps, that there was no chaining his free spirit.

Armed with a kit with the standard-issue khaki uniform, hat and boots, my grandfather got ready for life in the army. The first two months in the army were spent loading and unloading supplies and digging trenches, in addition to the small arms training that was mandatory for all recruits. The new recruits prepared for the rigours ahead by digging, lifting, hauling and shooting; all on a monthly salary of Rs 10 per month - a sum that was not considered all that bad, back in those days.

My grandfather was recruited as a Sepoy Storekeeper. He spent two months training how to shoot weapons like sten guns (widely used in the Second World War), pistols and rifles, after which the third month was dedicated to learning the trade of the storekeeper, the position he'd been chosen to fill.

That wasn't all, either. My grandfather and his best friend Krishna Nayar were both Kerala born-and-bred, and had been brought up on rice meals all their lives. In the army though, a nasty shock to their culinary sensibilities awaited them, in the form of the unfamiliar north Indian fare of yellow lentils and unleavened flatbreads (dal and rotis) which the army had decided would serve as native 'Indian' fare for all Indian army personnel.

But you just can’t keep a good man down. The Army began to pick out recruits for promotion based on an examination. Out of the 600 people who took the examination, my grandfather stood first. He had his reward in a triple promotion. He skipped from the rank of Sepoy Storekeeper straight to the rank of Havildar Storekeeper, a prestigious position which made his salary jump to the then princely sum of Rs 70 per month. Three months into his first job, he sent his entire salary to his overjoyed and proud father.

That was how he got his first promotion.

 After his promotion, though, he was posted at Allahabad Arsenal, where he got his first taste of discrimination. The facility had British officers, sergeants and men, working along with the Indians. White men of the same rank, whose uniform bore the same three stripes as his, were paid seven times as much as my grandfather. The British ruled the country at the time, and the British officials would bark insults at the Indians with impunity, and the Indians had no choice but to tolerate the slights that came their way. "Bloody Indians!" they'd say as they passed (this must've really stung, because my grandfather remembered it and repeated it with great bitterness, though 75 years had passed). There was a separate mess for British personnel and a separate mess for the Indian personnel, all nicely segregated, apartheid-style.

Getting your own back was out of the question, of course, but a measure of vindication was to come later. The post-independence Indian Army had many British officers who had opted to serve out their tenure in India rather than to retire prematurely. As an MT (Mechanical Transport) instructor, my grandfather, still at the rank of Havildar, had the privilege of teaching a class full of lieutenant colonels and colonels. The Commandant himself  used to sit right behind him during the class. 

"But you're an Indian! How are you so good at this?" came the surprised exclamation, after his very first class. Hardly a politically-correct remark, but to an Indian in a newly-liberated slave nation, such praise was a triumph, a victory of personal merit over colonial prejudice; hard-won and infinitely precious.

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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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ON THE VERGE OF WAR

It was a time of war, and the war was happening right at our borders. It was 1962 and a contingent from newly-liberated India's very own Indian Army was sent to the North-West Frontier Province (NIFA) close to where the action was. My grandfather happened to be among them.

When the news of the war broke out, my grandfather, then posted at Rourkee, was called to the front. He left at once, while his family back home coped, somehow, with packing up everything in the house and moving in with relatives at Chennai. My grandfather's contingent was ordered to join the forces in action at an altitude of 20,000 feet above sea-level. Four miles short of the closest mountain pass, the contingent halted. It wasn’t just cold – it was airless. A lack of oxygen meant that everything was twice the effort. The men put up their tents and set up camp. After their efforts, the men, their lungs not yet acclimatized to the thin mountain air, stayed in bed. For warmth, small charcoal burners with live coals were strapped to each man’s stomach, with a few layers of clothing in between to prevent the coals from causing burns.

As for the enemy, the Chinese troops demonstrated their linguistic skills by learning up swear-words in Hindi, and shouting them out across the border to the Indians. The Indians, not to be outdone, yelled curses back. My grandfather still remembers this, but without much rancour. Hurling abuses at each other remains one of the regular amusements of troops stationed along the borders of countries with a history of enmity, and seasoned veterans know better than to take such pastimes seriously.

As the Quartermaster, it was my grandfather’s job to make sure that the food made it into the men’s plates. But first, he had to make sure that the supplies made it to the mess. They were stationed in the only area where rations were being air-dropped. And in the high mountains, when food was air-dropped, it was not unusual for heavy objects to get blown off course and get scattered all over the mountain-side. The supplies also had a habit of rolling away inconsiderately so that the men had to search far and wide to retrieve their rations. My grandfather, who was in charge of making sure that the army continued to march on its stomach, detailed men whose duty it was to search and retrieve rations. Giant pumpkins fell from the sky like lethal missiles which could easily kill an unwary passer-by, should he be hit on the head with one. And sure, meat was on the menu as well. But meals on hooves fell from the heavens in the form of a rain of live goats, still bleating as they dropped from the sky. They then had to be found, taken back to the common kitchen or ‘Langar’ and butchered before anyone could get their dinner. One of the more welcome forms of precipitation was rum in plastic bottles. “Please put me in the working-party!” men would plead with my grandfather, volunteering eagerly to be a part of the group of men helping the Quartermaster to collect ration from across the countryside, in the hope of scoring a bottle or two for themselves!

In the end the Chinese retreated without engaging them in battle (rather to disappointment of my grandfather who described this with a growl of, ‘we just had to come back, nothing happened’). So it ended. The men were sent back to Sikkim (now a north-eastern state in its own right), from where they dispersed to return home.   

That was how my grandfather played his small yet significant part, feeding the army in one of the great wars of Independent India.

Life’s greatest moments often come in scary disguises. But people like my grandfather, who was almost never afraid, often find wonderful experiences - because they expect to have fun. My grandfather went from being a spirited young lad starting out from the deepest recesses of Kerala; to rising on his own merit to become Captain K.K.V. Waran, decorated officer of the Indian Army before and after independence.

This is a true story, his story, as he saw it and as he told it. It is a story of grit and determination, yes. But it’s much, much more than that. It shows that when life throws you a curve-ball, that can be a good thing. It’s the story of a man who was living proof that when you’re excited instead of dismayed, wonderful things can - and do - happen. 

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