Baaz

by Anuja Chauhan

  EPILOGUE

  The golden jubilee reunion of the class of ’68 takes place on a sultry June afternoon at the IAF Officers’ Institute in Jodhpur. Old men in sharp suits, jaunty ties and dashing berets (so useful for hiding thinning hair) trickle in on unsteady feet, dragging along wives, children and grandchildren, eager excitement in their rheumy old eyes. What had been a batch of fifty has dwindled to thirty-seven – crashes, conflicts and illnesses have claimed the rest. One officer is in a wheelchair, another is having chemotherapy, several are divorced, one is dressed in a jaunty red T-shirt emblazoned with the legend IAF – Insane As Fuck. They stand around in little knots on the lush-green lawn, whooping, back-slapping, talking over each other, while their children and grandchildren sit on the chairs that ring the edge of the lawn, marvelling at their grandfathers behaving as boisterously as schoolboys.

  ‘Thata’s in really good form, huh!’ whispers one jean-clad little girl to her mother in a distinctly Californian accent.

  ‘He’s so happy… It’s kinda cute, actually.’

  ‘Your father says he used to be this very dashing pilot, once,’ her mother replies in a slightly bored voice. ‘He won a big gallantry medal for crashing a helicopter into a building.’

  The girl’s eyes widen. ‘You mean like nine-eleven?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it was quite like that…’ Her mother clarifies, her voice sounding a little harassed. ‘Go fix your hair in the bathroom, honey, it’s gotten all untidy.’

  The little girl leaps up and makes her way across the lawn, her shaggy black ponytail swinging. About halfway across, she is yanked to a halt by Air Commodore Madan Subbiah.

  Maddy is seventy years old now – his family recently celebrated the big birthday with a cruise through the Mediterranean countries. He has lost some hair and some height, but he is still an imposing man. Kainaz Dadyseth’s prophecy has come true, however – his high cheekbones have packed on the fat, and he has begun to faintly resemble a chipmunk.

  Now he hooks his granddaughter by the loop of her jeans and spins her around.

  ‘Say hello to my friends Group Captain Aggarwal and Mrs Aggarwal. You can call them Raka uncle and Juhi auntie. Esha is visiting India for the first time, folks.’

  Juhi auntie, plump and pretty, smiles down at the little girl.

  ‘Here, let me fix your hair, beta,’ she says, extracting a hairbrush from a capacious bag and suiting her actions to her words. Esha winces but submits. When it comes to desi people intruding on your personal space, she has realized, resistance is futile.

  Raka uncle, a fat, smiling man with a very black moustache, leans on his gold-topped walking stick and enquires if she would like to see the swimming pool.

  Esha sniffs, unimpressed.

  ‘What’s so great about a pool?’ she asks, with a toss of her re-tied ponytail. ‘We hardly use ours. It costs a thousand dollars to clean every summer, so many leaves and snakes get into it! Mum’s planning to turn it into a lily pond.’

  ‘Ah, but this is a special pool,’ says Raka uncle persuasively, nudging her away from his wife and down the garden path. ‘This used to be our Flying College, you know. It got converted into an Officers’ Institute only recently.’

  They round the corner, her grandfather close behind, and it comes to them, the slap of water against cement and the sharp reek of chlorine. Esha tilts up her chin, rocks back on her heels and lets out a low, impressed whistle.

  ‘That’s quite a diving board.’

  The old men stand next to her and gaze up at the monstrous metal spider squatting over the pool with dreamy eyes.

  ‘Yeahhh.’

  Esha squints up at the thing.

  ‘Did you jump off the very top of it when you were young?’

  She says this like she’s talking of the age when dinosaurs still walked the earth.

  ‘Yes,’ Thata replies. ‘The very top.’ After a pause, he confesses, ‘It was scary, but I could do it ’coz my friends did it.’

  Esha tilts her head to one side quizzically.

  ‘If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?’

  ‘Without a second thought,’ Madan Subbiah replies unhesitatingly.

  Meanwhile, Group Captain Aggarwal is leaning on his walking stick and gazing up at the diving board, his thoughts clearly far away. ‘Woh bhi kya din thhey,’ he sighs heavily. ‘Hum kitne thin thhey. Hey, I’ve got to have a prostrate operation next week, Maddy. Have you had one?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Subbiah grimaces. ‘I’m still intact. But it’ll come to that, sooner or later. Come, baby girl, let’s head back – the speeches are starting.’

  And indeed, they can hear the sound of the mic being tapped and tuned. The two old men walk slowly – partly because they’re old and partly because they want to linger – and enter the hall, where chairs have been set up in rows in front of a screen.

  An audio-visual plays footage of their passing-out ceremony mixed with black-and-white photographs sourced by the organizing committee headed by Wing Commander Gonsalves. This committee has been very busy mailing, nagging and badgering people and their families for months to ensure that no batchmate has been missed out or forgotten. All the pictures draw murmurs, sighs, oohs and aahs, but the loudest whoops are reserved for one particular individual. Esha, staring up at the screen, decides she likes him – he has a young, laughing face, sparkling grey eyes and the kind of clothes she likes – bright and tight.

  ‘Have your parents told you who that is?’ Thata nods to the figure on the screen.

  Esha shakes her head.

  ‘He’s a big hero,’ her grandfather continues. ‘If you went to school in India instead of in stupid America, you would’ve read about him in your textbooks. There’s even a road named after him! It links Delhi to Haryana.’

  The film ends with a smiling close-up of the nice young man’s face. Under the picture are the words:

  Pride of the batch of ’68

  Flying Officer Baaz Faujdaar

  Param Vir Chakra

  Nishaan-e-Azmat

  Bir Putro

  Medal of Valour

  Lion of the Soviet Union

  Esha doesn’t understand what most of these mean, but she does know what a medal of valour is. Thata isn’t exaggerating – this dude had been hot stuff.

  Then an old gent with a hearing aid and a big paunch, whom everybody has been calling Gunner, begins to speak.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s so good to see all of you! As always, we’d like to close the function with our combined donation cheque to the Baaz Foundation, which provides free schooling, health and housing to children all over rural India. Thank you very much for your generous contribution.’

  ‘Is the foundation run by Baaz’s family?’ Esha asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Thata replies. ‘The main school campus is on a fifteen-acre plot the government bequeathed Baaz for being so brave.’

  Esha doesn’t know what beqweed is, nor what an acre is, so she just nods.

  Gunner continues to speak, wheezing a little.

  ‘We now request the trustees of the Foundation, Mrs Sneha Singh, chairperson of the renowned chain of Chakkahera Public Schools, and Mrs Tehmina Dadyseth- Khan, Director, Amnesty International, South East Asia and the Pacific, to please accept the cheque.’

  Two elderly ladies enter the room now. One is placid and clad in a yellow sari, while the other is more eye-catchingly dressed in a deep-green tunic. She has grey hair, bright red lipstick and a flower in her hair.

  ‘You speak.’ Her voice is assured and determinedly cheerful.

  ‘You speak, Sneha! You do all the work anyway – I travel so much I’m hardly of any use to you!’

  Saying which, she hugs the other woman and walks to the back of the room, her eyes searching the gathering eagerly.

  ‘Over here!’ Juhi auntie throws up one hand and waves animatedly. ‘Over here, Tinka!’

  Tinka’s eyes light up when she sees Juhi. She rushes over, laughing, a
nd everybody scooches up and lets her sit. She’s a hugger, Esha realizes, hugging Thata and Raka uncle and Juhi auntie at least three times each.

  Meanwhile, the other lady has started to make a speech. She talks of how providing quality education to village children had always been her dream, one that her brother had funded, and how many awards CPS has won, and other blah things like that. She has one of those soothing, rhythmic voices that always cause Esha’s attention to wander.

  She smothers a yawn, her eyes wandering back to the young man frozen on the screen. He looks like he would’ve found the speech boring too.

  Esha tucks her arm into Thata’s.

  ‘He’s cute,’ she declares.

  Her grandfather chuckles.

  ‘All the girls thought so, too. Especially Tinka auntie – she was his girlfriend.’

  Esha’s head swivels around to the grey-haired lady sitting behind them. She frowns. ‘Really?’

  He chuckles again. ‘Oh, she may not look like much now, but when she was young, she had a certain…’

  ‘… je ne sais quoi,’ Esha says knowledgeably.

  ‘Exactly! Don’t take my word for it. Just go on YouTube and search for the Freesia ad, original. It has more than eight million ticks.’

  ‘You mean hits. But he looks more like he’s my age than your age, no offence.’

  ‘None taken. And you know what, you’re right. Me and Raka and all of us, we’re a bunch of old farts – but you and Baaz, you’re young.’ He lets out a gusty sigh. ‘Heck, he’s young forever.’

  ‘How old was he when he died?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  She considers this for a moment, her brows furrowed.

  ‘That’s a bit young to die,’ she says finally. ‘I want to die when I’m really old, like thirty.’

  Raka uncle, who’s been listening carefully, sitting on the other side of her, winces at this. ‘Ouch, how old are you now?’

  A defensive look crosses her face. ‘Ten,’ she mutters. ‘I don’t look it, I know. All the kids in my class are like four times my size.’

  ‘Oh, size is nothing!’ he assures her. ‘In fact, I can tell you a secret that’ll ensure you never feel bad about being short again!’

  Her eyes light up.

  ‘What?’

  Raka bends lower. ‘Baaz wasn’t too tall, you know. And here’s what he taught us – it’s one of the scientific principles on which the world is built! Look!’ He holds out his hand, thumb extended. ‘Big guy, small—’

  Then he comes to an abrupt halt.

  Esha stares at him wide-eyed.

  ‘Big?’ she prompts enquiringly.

  ‘Haan, haan, tell her, na,’ Juhi auntie entreats from beside him, her black eyes dancing. ‘Cut off our noses in front of Maddy’s snooty American family! Why did you stop, Raks?’

  ‘Never mind,’ says Raka, straightening up, looking rather red-faced.

  ‘Tell me!’ Esha demands, dismayed.

  ‘No no…’ Raka mops his forehead.

  Paunchy Gunner hollers from the front, ‘Oi, MiGGie, pipe down! You bloody backbenchers haven’t changed a bit!’

  Everybody starts to laugh, including the lady who’s holding the mic. Esha swivels her eyes to stare gleefully at her grandfather.

  ‘You were a backbencher?’

  ‘Shush!’ he growls hastily. ‘Settle down now!’

  Esha hunches, crossing her arms over her chest.

  ‘But I want to know what Baaz taught you!’

  The lady who likes to hug people leans in and hugs Esha now. She smells really nice. Like a border of springtime flowers.

  ‘He taught us that size doesn’t matter, darling,’ she whispers.

  The little girl, who has been squirming in her seat, stills at this.

  ‘It doesn’t?’

  Tinka shakes her head firmly.

  ‘Nope. It doesn’t matter how short you are, or how short your lifetime is. Why, I’m sixty-seven years old now, and I still haven’t done half as much as Baaz managed to do in just twenty-four!’

  Something in the lady’s voice makes Esha hug her back hard.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ she asks in a whisper.

  Tinka sighs.

  ‘Every day.’

  A NOTE ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY

  Kalaiganga is a fictitious Air Force station, based on the real-life Kalaikunda. Kalaikunda did not get bombed on the infamous night of 3 December 1971, Kalaiganga did. The pilots in this novel speak a little more on the R/T than pilots do in real life and, occasionally, fly solo on planes that would require two pilots. The character of Nikka Khan is completely fictitious, loosely based on General Niazi and General Tikka Khan. Sarhind Club does not exist. 34 Squadron-The Streaks does not exist and is loosely based on 22 Squadron-The Swifts. The Battle of Boyra is real, and happened pretty much as described in the book. The cratering of Tezgaon is loosely accurate too, and was carried out mostly by the MiGs of 4 and 28 Squadron. All IAF pilots in this story are entirely fictitious. Deeds done by them were actually done by real soldiers, with real names, of whom the author and the nation are very proud. The climax is entirely imagined, but does exist in the delicious realm of ‘could have been’.

  Anuja Chauhan

  March 2017

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I was born a year before the events described in this book. Seven men from my family were serving officers during the ’71 war. War talk dominated our dining table. But in a very casual, matter-of-fact way. The way business people would discuss year-ending taxes or festival-time rush. In fact, till I was thirteen, I thought the world was neatly divided into Defence folk and civilians (who, of course, were lesser beings). In fact, I still think so.

  Dhaula Kuan, S.P. Marg, Pratap Chowk, Dinjan, Burdong, Chandimandir – these places were gated communities before India discovered gated communities, with flowering trees, well-brushed dogs, swimming pools and May Queen balls. It was a beautiful world – and the shiniest, most glamorous things there were the handsome, good-natured, fit young officers. They fascinated me.

  And so this book, born out of my love for all things fauji.

  It couldn’t have been written without those initial, weekend-long briefings from the Fighters in my family – my much-larger-than-life uncle Wing Commander Rajendra Singh Rajput, the hero of every child in our family, who motored up from Meerut himself at the ripe old age of eighty-six to meet me, and my dashing light-eyed cousin Group Captain Ashok Kumar Singh, VrC, still so fit at seventy-six. Thank you so much, Rajjan Mama. Thank you so much, Ashok Bhaisaab.

  My nephew Wing Commander Naman Singh Bundela and his friend Squadron Leader Kartikeya Singh. Thank you, guys!

  The very dapper and suave Wing Commander Jaggi Naath, MVC and bar, for giving me whiskey-paani and perspective at his lovely home in Juhu. Thank you, sir.

  I gleaned information in large quantities from Eagles over Bangladesh by P.V.S. Jagan and Samir Chopra. And India’s Wars: A Military History by Arjun Subramaniam. Thank you, gentlemen, it was a pleasure reading (and sourcing shamelessly) from your work.

  I also trawled YouTube diligently and found a priceless recording of the real heroes of Boyra being feted by their juniors at what was clearly a rocking party.

  But my most important source of all, my personal military Wikipedia, was K. Sree Kumar, who gave me all the technical terms and phrases and handheld me through the dogfights, quietly appalled at my ignorance, but always conspiring to keep it a secret from the rest of the world. Thanks a million, Sree. I owe you so much.

  All mistakes made are mine alone. My source material was excellent.

  Fully charged by the sources listed above, I started off with much vim and vigour and hammered out forty thousand words in four months. My mother was visiting from Australia for the summer, and we spent many lovely monsoon days drinking tea and gardening, discussing her fauji days and playing kot-piece with the children. She provided invaluable information on how life was for the ladies back then. She al
so bought me a garden swing. Thank you, Mummy.

  And then she went back, randomly caught pneumonia and died.

  It was horrifically sudden.

  Her worst nightmare was that she would linger (khichdo was the word she used with a fastidious little shudder) and suffer and make her family suffer too. (As if!)

  Well, that didn’t happen. She departed all self-sufficient and dignified, her girlish good looks intact, with Papa, Mini, Ruhi and Nandu by her side and Anuja bawling her eyes out on FaceTime, with her son-in-laws licked into shape, and her ten grandchildren both devastated and inspired, musing that Nani knew how to live, of course – she was full of josh and joy always and made a gift of her full attention to anybody who wanted a chat – but also how, like Ma Baker, to die.

  After she passed, I found I couldn’t write.

  And that’s when my Ruhi didi tucked me into the guestroom bed in her lovely home in Osna, Queensland, fed me trifle pudding and ‘superfood’ juices and sarson ka saag and let me snivel and snot into her gorgeous bed linen and got me back into writing mode again. So thank you very especially, Ruhi didi.

  The writing went steadily for a while and then, when I was almost done, my father, Lt Col. Revti Raman, got chikungunya and gave us all a horrible scare. He bounced back pretty soon but, robbed off his Global Gypsy status for a while, was confined to my home for almost two months, hence becoming a source I could draw upon freely. Thank you, Papa.

  To my chacha Dr Rajendra Chauhan and my cousin Rishi Pratap Chauhan for their help with the Haryanvi.

  To Ishan Roy, my son’s kindergarten bestie, for letting me steal some of his awesome persona for Shaanu.

  To V.K. Karthika for being her magical self. To Neelini Sarkar for her usual, obsessively meticulous editing. To Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri for his meticulous editing. And Joseph Antony for his painstaking work on the proofs. And to Ananth Padmanabhan, Amrita Talwar and Bonita Shimray of HarperCollins India for getting this book out so well.