The figure of the Mad Mullah, too, was still intact in 1941. The mullah of the present was the Fakir of Ipi, Mirza Ali Khan, who in 1936 had stoked the Waziri and Mahsud khels into full armed rebellion. It took three years and half the strength of the Indian Army,2 supported by the RAF, to suppress them, but the fakir remained at large. Using guile, or sorcery, he escaped every British grasp: whenever Gurkha units captured a cave being used as an insurgent hideout – killing, say, thirteen men – they invariably found fourteen beds inside. One person had simply been spirited away.
The Italians had been the first of the Axis powers to make contact with the fakir, using agents sent out of Kabul disguised as Pashtun tribesmen. They had made gifts of arms and equipment, including machine guns and a wireless set, and sought the financial terms on which the fakir would agree to create trouble.
Soon, German agents, with larger funds to dispense, tried to take over the negotiations with the Fakir of Ipi, the figure they codenamed ‘Feuerfresser’, ‘Fire-Eater’. Spies, some posing as scientists collecting specimens of butterflies, attempted to reach the fakir and foment a full-scale uprising in September. The Axis aim was to break the Soviet line at Stalingrad and the British at the Nile, and blitz across Central Asia. Through these passes, India could be invaded again, by a force of traitors and terrors: Nazis, Indian mutineers, and Pashtuns berserk under the spell of the Mad Mullah.
So it was that dragon’s teeth grew in the ancient gums of the Khyber Pass – concrete pyramids to snag and slow the German Panzers. And so it was that in 1941, in the middle of a world war, Flying Officer Manek Dadabhoy patrolled the Frontier on duties a century old.
Manek was now at the tip of the lance of British-Indian power, raised against threats from the west. As he flew on, his mind travelled back along the taper of the lance: to Miranshah, the forward operating base, then Bannu, the supply station, and Kohat, where the No. 2 Squadron had its headquarters. Further back was Peshawar, the last real city of India, filled with commerce and political clamour. Beyond Peshawar the land descended to the busy fields of Punjab; to Lahore and Ambala, where he had learned to fly, and then Delhi, capital of the Raj and general headquarters of its army, the shoulder that raised the lance and set him here in the sky. Finally, at the end of an endless country stippled with shrines and laddered with railway track, where at last the land became water: Madras, where his family and his sweet wife awaited him.
Manek’s family had never been as scrupulous as the Mugaseths, but like any Parsi home, theirs was printed at regular intervals with the icon of the winged-disc Farohar. The figure was sewn in cross-stitch and hung by the kitchen door; it was embossed onto the front of brass pen stands and printed on the warped paper stickers that someone once applied to the corner of each bedroom’s mirror. The general effect was as if Farohar spent all day fluttering around the house, alighting on any old thing, spreading consecration like bees spread pollen.
The first impression Manek ever had of his faith was that it centred on a man riding a winged device. His tribe had spent 4,000 years admiring an angel who set an example impossible to follow – until now. Not to say that Manek felt divinely enjoined to be a pilot, but he did sense that in flight he might approach a lofty state that he never achieved on the ground. When he won his wings, the silver badge of a pilot officer, he thought of them as the pug mark of Farohar on his khaki breast.
After his appointment as an officer-cadet, Manek had taken a long train ride from Madras to Lahore for preliminary training at Walton airfield. His months there were an already misted memory of drill, physical education, riflery and lectures; theory of flight, theory of weapons, assembly and disassembly. Half of his fellow cadets were cocky young men from Bombay and Karachi, members since their teens of the flying clubs there, and with more flying hours than some instructors. The other half were Khalsa schoolboys who had never set eyes on an aeroplane, let alone flown one. They struggled with every sentence spoken by the sergeants in their regional brogues. ‘Brother, what are “goons”?’ one whispered, at the end of a demonstration. ‘He keeps saying “goons”.’
‘Guns,’ Manek replied.
The Cranwell accents of the RAF officers could be equally elusive. ‘Fahpah, what is fahpah?’
‘Firepower,’ Manek hissed.
He made the first selection and went on to Jodhpur, for flying instruction on the fine airfield of Maharaja Randhir Singh. They were billeted in tents, but they messed like rough-necked royalty in the Maharaja’s guest house. They learned the luxury of living with bearers – magical chaps who could despatch you from your tent with gleaming shoes and your training schedule, and be waiting at the mess when you arrived there, setting out your bacon and eggs.
Manek learned to fly at last, in the Tiger Moth, a plane forgiving of beginners’ errors. The Moth took care of him. To put it into a spin, you pulled the nose up until the plane stalled, and let it begin to drop, with one rudder held down. The plane corkscrewed towards the ground. He neutralised the rudder, and the Moth recovered on its own. It made the cadets cocky: they placed bets on who could pull off the longest spins. Manek’s body stopped fearing the sensations of flight in the fabric vessel: the restless bob of the fuselage over the wheels as the props began to turn, its brief careening sway as it moved down the tarmac, and the effortless, almost absent, moment when flight began and the horizon dipped away. Back on the ground, he could feel a throb of racial rivalry among his fellows. But for him there was only one superior race: the flyers – all those who summitted their alp of air, and did effortlessly what their fathers in their youths would never have thought possible.
At Ambala he learned to attack the ground, dropping dummy bombs and strafing on the range. He learned to fly at night, high above the cancelled earth, flashing code down into the darkness and fighting panic until the ‘glim’ lamps were uncovered along the airstrip, one by one, a faerie road to bed. At last, in the summer of 1941, Manek returned to Madras carrying a scroll of rich parchment – his letter of commission. It began in lettering so thick with tendrils and curlicues that the words themselves seemed borne on a bank of clouds:
George VI by the Grace of God, of Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India &c …
And then, in a tighter calligraphy:
To our Trusty and well-beloved Manek Hormusji Dadabhoy Greetings; We reposing, especial Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage, and good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer in our Indian Air Force …
The letter was signed by His Excellency’s Command, the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow. It was a splendid thing. It rustled with honour and authority.
Newly winged, Manek left for Peshawar to join the No. 2 Squadron. ‘The Winged Arrows’ had been raised on 1 April, but had spent months waiting for its aircraft, the dregs of the RAF fleet. The Westland Wapiti, popularly called the ‘What-A-Pity’, was a biplane that had actually been out of production since 1932. To start its propellers, a team of airmen threw a length of rope around a blade and yanked it into motion, as if hand-cranking a car. Still, the Wapiti was endemic to the skies above Waziristan: brown, spindly and locust-like, with bright RAF roundels for eyespots and tappets beating as visibly as an insect’s heart.
Far more exciting than the planes Manek could expect to fly were the men who flew them – and the most exciting of them all was his squadron leader, Aspy Engineer. Manek had been too young to remember when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, but the Parsis had their own flying ace, and Aspy was it. He and his three brothers, all in the air force, were an Indian sensation.
Aspy was from Karachi, and grew up with the whine of biplanes rising from the great RAF depot at Drigh Road. While he was still a boy, his father used the family savings to buy a Tiger Moth so that his sons