Military musing

As hostilities made headlines, I travelled back in time to the Chinese invasion of 1962, or rather its aftermath. I was eight years old, and after the ceasefire, I remember my parents discussing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s emotional response to Lata Mangeshkar’s moving rendition of Ae Mere Watan Ke Logon.

When we clashed with Pakistan in 1965, as a child I actually found the conflict exciting. I communicated my exhilaration to my younger brother, who faithfully followed my lead. Growing up in Delhi, we were passionately patriotic. So were the other children in our Armed Forces colony, all of whom had relatives serving in the professional uniformed services.

My brother and I were proud of our father, who was serving in the Air Force, but would have liked him to be a fighter pilot. We admired Squadron Leaders Trevor and Denzil Keelor, who sailed the skies and proved victorious in aerial combat. Once peace prevailed, we were privileged to meet those living legends at the weekly housie in our neighbourhood. We did not understand that electronic and radar warfare (our father’s area of expertise) was no less vital to India’s interests than shooting down Sabre jets.

Since our nation’s capital was a prospective enemy target, schools ensured that students were equipped to face airstrikes. Consequently, mock drills routinely rescued us from lessons. The sound of a wailing siren would send us scurrying to the trenches that covered the playing field. Crouching in them, as we had been taught, we were in no hurry for the ‘all-clear’ signal to return us to our classrooms.

Evenings at home were slightly scary. We drew curtains across blackened windowpanes so that not the slightest sliver of light could be sighted by bomb-bearing aircraft. In the darkness, the alternate rising and falling pitch of the air-raid alerts, which seemed unreal in the daytime, indicated that an attack was imminent. Night after night, we waited anxiously, only relaxing when we heard the anti-aircraft guns open fire and knew that the danger was averted.

Looking back, I must regretfully admit that we were not concerned with casualties; not, that is, until the Indo-Pak war of 1971. One day, our friend’s sister appeared without her bindi, in a plain white sari. Her husband had lost his life in battle. That, we realised much later, was the sort of tragedy that prompted Wilfred Owen, a soldier-poet who fought in World War I, to write about ‘the pity of war’.