He had ‘a craze for suicidal speeding’, Nair found, on the day he borrowed his uncle’s brand-new motorbike, a 350cc Ariel Red Hunter. Manek swiped it whenever he could. They rode it out along the sweltering Cooum river, or idled by the gates of the Women’s Christian College, gunning the engine for looks. On the sweep of College Road the boys did stunts, opening up the throttle and trying to pull a 180-degree turn without crashing. Only Manek could. In fact, he could pull out of an awful, squealing, imminent catastrophe, rebalance, and ride back with his hands off the handlebars, patting his pockets for his Hohner harmonica and puffing out a tune just as he sliced back through the group.
For their generation, raised in the doldrums of the Depression, the motorcycle was a promise of a new decade of speed. For Manek it was more: a simulation of his real dream, which was to join India’s new air force. In the Hunter’s skid and turn, he played at dives and spins and open sky. In the college canteen he was a one-man recruitment centre, reading IAF ads aloud from the papers. ‘Be a Leader Among Men,’ he hollered. ‘High up in the sky, you are in independent command, monarch of all you survey!’
Parsi boys were mad about flying, anyway: the gadgetry, the gallantry, the gymnastic possibilities of the open sky.2 Even Manek’s little brother, Edul, was itching to sign up. The Indian Air Force was a new thing in the world, budding and flexible and deadly glamorous. But military aviation relied on advanced technology, and there was scepticism, especially within the RAF, of Indians’ ability to handle it. That scepticism was a headwind, creating both impedance and lift. It made the IAF a service for daredevils. Manek would go.
Organised in alphabetical order, Bobby Mugaseth’s room-mate at college was P. Mukundan, whose family was from Calicut too. The Mukundans were Thiyyas, a caste deliberately advanced by the British to counter the strength of Brahmins and Maplahs. They were loyal in return, and around the Cannanore Cantonment, they had grown noticeably lighter-skinned, the wages of their hospitality to British soldiers. Mukundan taught Bobby bits of political doggerel – ‘Gandhi sanyasi, India maanthi punn’aki …’ – ‘Gandhi the sanyasi tears at India and opens its sores’ – with which they mocked the Congresswalas, boys who rose early in the mornings to struggle with cotton tufts and turning spindles.
It was nothing personal, and in any case, things had been pretty quiet since Bobby had arrived in Madras. A new constitution had been introduced in 1935, and nationalist parties had agreed to join elections to form provincial governments. The Congress had done very well, and in 1937 it formed a ministry in Madras under the moderate premier Rajagopalachari, who was fondly called ‘Rajaji’. A few protests took place, but it was less easy to protest the government now that they were part of it.
In the spring of ’38, Bobby and his friends finished at Loyola, and prepared to go their separate ways. It turned out that none of the ways led very far from Madras. Through most of the 1930s, a middle-class young man could expect to finish his education and find nothing to do, only irritating his family, squandering his eligibility and beating the air with superfluous certificates. Bobby and Mukundan enrolled together in the College of Engineering in Guindy, and Bobby saw plenty of Manek; in fact, he had to keep an eye on him.
Manek’s magnetism had an opposite pole: Bobby’s sister, Khorshed Mugaseth, who had arrived in Madras in her turn. As with any risky manoeuvre, Manek was a dab hand at courtship. He found a sudden passion for the opera, and then the boys were over listening to La Traviata, and Kosh came along.
Bobby had a theory that he had put to Nugs and Subur: that after Calicut, they had studied literature and medicine as the two most direct ways to learn about men. Kosh went and got herself a real one. Manek would pick her up at the hostel, and she ran out to the gates while her girlfriends catcalled from the verandah. Queen Mary’s College sat plumb on Marina Beach, so if he didn’t have the motorcycle they walked, eating puffed rice, and her pallu billowed in the breeze to run over his hands and face.
At the end of her first year Kosh dropped out of college, and she and Manek were married. Kosh was young and out of turn, and should have let Nugs marry first. But Manek was a Parsi, and after Subur’s elopement the couple was harassed by the blessings of priests and parents. Their wedding day was a profound vindication for Khodadad, fitting with his new opinion on the proper schedule of education and matrimony for young women. Often he looked over at Nurgesh, expecting her confirmation that all was in order in the family, and nothing would happen again to upset him so dreadfully. But Nugs was not herself. To the guests who noticed, she explained that she was harried by all the organising, which they took to mean that she was dismayed at her much younger sister beating her to the altar. Bobby knew better.
It was in Subur’s home that Bobby first saw him, apparently trying to hide beneath a towel. He sat on a chair with his head between his knees. The towel hung off his rounded back and fell like a curtain to his toes.
Bobby knew that Gopalaswami Parthasarathi – GP – had a lot of socialist friends from London, and that even now he and Subur sometimes harboured young Tamil communists while they hid from the police. For a moment, Bobby wondered if that might be what this man was doing. But of course it wasn’t.
‘You’re … Ganapathy?’ Bobby asked the mound. It straightened, and the towel was pulled aside. Ganapathy’s face emerged with a puff of steam, like a conjuror’s trick. A bucket of just-boiled water was between his feet, and his face was glazed with condensation. ‘Yes,’ he wheezed, ‘Hullo. Sorry about …’ and wiped his forehead with the towel. ‘It’s my asthma. Your sister has been …’ he wheezed.
‘Don’t talk, then,’ Bobby said, and sat.
The man nodded. He touched his chest and said, ‘Ganny’.
Looking him over, Bobby must have thought: typical. Nugs would always choose the sick puppy. Sick, though really quite well built and evidently well treated by life. His face had a residual roundness, and a tidy moustache held within the bound of his lips made the curve of his cheek look fuller. A face like that made a person look trusting, even without its being steamed pink. Nugs obviously trusted it in return. Something between them made them allies against the rough tendencies of the world. The truth was the reverse, though. It was their alliance that would make the world cruel.
Bobby had heard through collegiate chatter how much time his sister spent in ‘joint revisions’ with a fellow, not a Parsi, as his name made clear. Kodandera Ganapathy was a Kodava, of the arrogant tribe from the densely timbered, isolated hills north-east of Malabar. Those hills had bred a martial race, not one recognised by the Army, but definitely by their neighbours in Canara and Mangalore, who considered them dagger-bearing, boar-spearing, maiden-stealing terrors; worshippers of rifles, or of ancestors to whom they made offerings in arrack. Which was fairly accurate.
By the twentieth century, however, the Kodavas had been tamed by the Raj, and their wealthier clans sent sons into the police and forest services. Ganny’s father had been Deputy Conservator of Forests, so Ganny was raised in civilised postings across the Presidency. Fourth in a household that had six children and zero privacy, he had grown into a shy, asthmatic young man, reluctant to make easy friendships but devoted to the ones he had.
Nugs and Ganny were in love, and for four years they had found no way of ending it. The Kodavas took endogamy seriously, and were even better than Parsis at enforcing it. One distant aunt had promised to set herself on fire if her son married a Telugu girl; when he went ahead, she did too. Ganny’s family was above that, he knew, which only meant that it was the family