Thanks to Subur, Nugs had seen what she was in for if she married Ganny. The scales could never settle when she weighed young love against the old bond of family. To marry Ganny would mean a fugitive existence, and already, at least until they finished medical school, it meant lying low. They spent their summers apart, pretending the other didn’t exist. He carried a fountain pen in his breast pocket, and in its cap, in a tight scroll, he kept her photograph.
Their lives in Madras were their own, however, and the Mugaseth siblings met the new additions with happiness and curiosity. Soon they saw less of Subur and GP, whose lives were helter-skelter between a new baby and his job at the national newspaper, The Hindu, and their trips to Kashmir, where his father was Dewan to the Maharaja. When they did meet, they only quarrelled with Manek about the war.
It was the other five who learned to laugh at and tease one another, the way Kosh teased Ganny about the mole – the chic ‘beauty spot’ he had on his lip. She pretended to pinch it off and place it on her own.
‘Can’t I have it, Ganny?’ she said.
‘You’re pretty enough already,’ he replied. ‘But you can have it if Nugs says so.’
Like children in a treehouse, out of reach of their parents, they formed a new unit in Madras, with new rules of membership. Through his sisters, Bobby was bound to new brothers, and they built themselves, half-unawares, a new family. It was his sisters who poured the milk and roses down his neck on his twentieth birthday. The boys dressed their hair after Ganny’s instruction, with rich pomade and many pulls of the combs they kept in their pockets, whisking the hair grown long on top into victory rolls. They learned new dances and how to drive, had brandy evenings and gramophone nights. They let their days slip from the clutch of memory into the quickening stream of the decade.
A month after Kosh’s wedding, far away in the west, the war began. Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland, and from Whitehall, a morose Neville Chamberlain informed the world that he had waited until a quarter past eleven, giving Hitler an extra fifteen minutes, but was compelled at last to declare war. The next day, the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared for India.
Indians, who had spent two decades entering the river of nationalist sentiment, now found its flow violently reversed or eddying in confusion. The freedom struggle was a diversion from the fight against fascism, or vice versa. The word ‘freedom’ pulled one way and then the other. It meant freedom for the men of Europe. It meant freedom from the men of Europe. Likewise ‘victory’: frowning black Vs appeared amidst the newsprint and on walls, everywhere, demanding that the populace believe the war their own.
Beneath the turbulence of ideology, the tow of opportunity pulled as hard and also in many directions. Khodadad, like most Parsis, supported the war. It was almost tradition that, when the Empire got into fights, the Parsis were entitled to what spilled from its pockets. War in Europe and Africa would mean a tidal rise in industrial orders, without any risk to Indian property. As leaders of Indian capitalism, the Parsis could appreciate how the economy would be fattened up by military salaries and rising commodity prices. Where Congress ministries had failed to bring about import substitution, German U-boats would succeed. Europe’s combustion was a genuine concern, but also an opportunity.
The princes were similarly aligned. They raised funds and regiments, and freed up land for new airfields: favours they hoped to redeem whenever decisions were made about the fate of the princely states in free India. The Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and other parties of the right were happy, too, to trade global support for domestic credit.
The communists and socialists called Nazi tyranny no different from British tyranny and disdained the war effort. In the main recruitment districts in Punjab, they chanted, ‘Na ek pai! Na ek bhai!’ – Not one penny, not one man. Before long, however, Germany would invade the Soviet Union, and the tow would reverse. The survival of the communist hope was more important than India’s transition to bourgeois self-rule. The college comrades then rose from their picket lines to line up instead at the recruitment centres. At the same time, the insurgent Bengalis of the Forward Bloc, friends with whoever opposed the British Empire, gave rapturous speeches comparing Hitler to Lord Vishnu, and spread implausible tales about Panzer tanks in France flying the Kapi Dhwaj, the standard of the chariot of the mythic hero Arjuna.3
It was the Congress, the party that would speak for the nation, which remained perplexed. Through the thirties it had opposed fascist aggression: much more so than the British government. ‘In India there are no fascists,’ Gandhi’s protégé, Nehru, told a Czech journalist in 1938. ‘We are very well aware of what Berlin, Rome and Tokyo want but we shall never allow the forces of our national anti-imperialist movement to be harnessed to their carriage … They want to drown the world in blood.’
With the war begun, however, Nehru could not accept that Indian soldiers would die for the freedom of a nation which denied that very freedom to India; or that Indian taxes would pay to maintain those troops. Above all, the Congress leaders were appalled by the arrogance with which the Viceroy had committed India to war, without even consulting them.4 Linlithgow had met Gandhi, whose first reaction was keen anguish at what violence lay ahead. Gandhi expressed his sympathy for Britain’s heavy task. During the Great War he had personally recruited ambulance teams for the British side. Afterwards he had felt betrayed, as Britain would not repay India’s sacrifices with freedom. Now he would write letters to Hitler imploring him to ‘shun the method of war’. But he could not endorse a violent reply to the blitzkrieg.
Nehru, though an ardent Anglophile and anti-fascist, took a stronger position. If some Indians saw their private opportunity in supporting the war, Nehru saw all of India’s best chance in opposing it. After meeting in council, the Congress leaders offered support for the war effort in exchange for Indian independence at the war’s end. It was declined. In October 1939 all the Congress’s provincial ministries resigned. They had governed since 1937 and grown complacent with petty powers. Now the movement could be re-energised as a true opposition, though its first agitations did not strike much of a chord.
The war was far away. There was no chance of dissuading new Indian volunteers. Their rural homes in Garhwal and Rajputana were as removed from the havoc as they would have been at the top of Kanchenjunga. It was still the year of the ‘phoney war’, when Britain only scowled at the fascists from across the English Channel. Around the world, the belligerent states chewed on their new possessions – Eastern Europe and Manchuria – in their respective backyards. India was safe, and its confident army sailed abroad to distant campaigns.
No place felt further from the action than Guindy. The college was a handsome one, the oldest school in India for training engineers, a monumental pile of pink brick and granite crowned by another sola-topi dome, and skirted by a cool arcade. Students sat in the archways, cross-legged over diagrams, the Brahmins tugging at top-knots which would be gone by their third year.
On the morning before his lunch escapade, Bobby had burst into the room where Verghese Kurien was spreading textbooks open on a mat on the floor. ‘Kurien!’ Bobby implored, pushing pinched fingers into Kurien’s face. ‘One rupee. One rupee. One rupee … Please?’
He got the rupee.
‘Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you –’ and he was gone. His day was in motion. The ticket at the New Elphinstone, nine annas; a cool drink at the soda fountain, one. Nobody would bring him back to Guindy for less than four annas, so his lunch had needed to be free.
That evening, he went searching for Kurien again. He found him at the Non-Veg Mess (D),5 where they were both invariably drawn by sizzle of pepper and coconut oil. Bobby wasn’t about to pay Kurien back yet, only to reassure him how well his rupee had been spent. Kurien was from Calicut too; in fact, he had been brought into the world by Kobad’s hands, and for that service, Bobby thought, it was fair to still be charging twenty years later.
Some alarm entered Kurien’s eyes as he listened to Bobby breathlessly brag about