The Book of Everlasting Things, page 25
During their final days in Marseilles, a Russian artist had come to speak with and sketch the Indian soldiers at their camp. For most, this was a new experience, and the men were curious to see a white lady among them, unencumbered by color or creed. They gathered from surrounding tents to get their caricature drawn by her, posing and modeling freely. She sketched the Afridi subedar with his elegant nose, and the muscular jemadar of the 59th Sikhs as his khaki kurta fluttered in the breeze. She drew men huddled in groups around campfires, and preparing the midday meal. She even drew the the large water barrels of drinking water, and the herd of goats by the kitchen.
At the end of the day, the Russi sahiba’s book was full of drawings and signatures. Next to my portrait, I signed my name and regiment, and men who did not know how to sign left impressions of their thumbs. I wonder what interest these names and faces will bear in the years to come—the Singhs, Khans, Bahadurs of the East.
October 4, 1914
Three days ago, we boarded a train from Marsay and have now halted in the town of Orleeyaans on the banks of river Lowaar. The weather is getting colder and the trees are changing color. Sipahi Ram Chand dictated a note to his father in Ferozepore, describing the beauty of France, with the greenest of pastures and the bluest of skies. “How can war ever be waged on a country so fine?” he asked. Of everything we have seen here, I think the same question is present in all our minds.
Vivek had written at length about the new rifles they’d been kitted with once in France, and the new friendships he’d forged these last few weeks, taking an immediate liking to the musically inclined Sucha Singh. He also devoted pages to his janral sahib, an Englishman born in Baraut, United Provinces, who had, to date, served in fourteen different campaigns and expeditions across Hindustan and took pride in commanding the multicultural Indian Expeditionary Force which held within its ranks more religious, regional, linguistic, and ethnic differences than any other army on the planet. As British and Indian troops began to assemble in the camp, Vivek had hoped that this was how the East would conquer the West—through camaraderie, loyalty, honor, and brotherhood. That perhaps, through their efforts in this war, the perceptions of color might slowly fade away from their lives at home.
And despite the excitement of being in vilayat, no matter how worldly or untethered Vivek aspired to be, there was no escaping the sudden flicker of Hindustan. For embedded in the lines of his palms and the depths of his heart, there remained the silhouette of home, quietly mirroring Samir’s own predicament.
October 14, 1914
I have written many letters today. Sipahi Daya Deen thanked his mother in Peshawar for the Quran she sent him. He held the holy book against his heart, and by the time we had finished the note, a sadness had settled into me as well. We have been away from Hindustan for two months now.
October 16, 1914
The subedars are calling this the Jarman di larai. We do not know who these Jarmans are or why they have begun this war, but we have received orders to move northward tomorrow. The destination is unknown. This morning I have sent home a bundle of newspapers, collected over the past two months, by packet post. In this country, the news is very up-to-date and pictures of the war appear nearly the very next day after anything happens.
October 18, 1914
We were collected in red buses and driven across to the country of Belljum, where the battle is being fought. I am writing this from a lookout stoop in a village the men are calling Whitesheet, whose residents had fled from their homes. No one knows what will happen tomorrow. The evening has been filled with muffled sounds of gunfire in the distance. The war is no longer far away.
“‘The war is no longer far away,’” Samir slowly repeated.
33
In the Trenches
Since the discovery of the journals, Léa had listened with fascination to how the Indian soldiers had acclimatized to new landscapes. But it was when Samir’s uncle described battle for the first time, detail after detail of all the eye could see and all the heart could feel, that something began to shift deep inside her. Images of war she thought she had buried, sounds she hoped she’d never hear again, the smells and textures, the terror, trepidation, unease, and loss, all began to reveal themselves again, prompted by Vivek’s visceral words.
“October 27, 1914. Wipers.” Samir held the journal in one hand and, with the other, marked Ypres on the map before he began translating.
My regiment charged across a rain-soaked field, under a darkening sky, and after a short bombardment, attacked the Jarman trench. I remember blood, and bombs. And the sound, I cannot forget the sound. Shell after shell, burying men, blowing up others. A whole body exploding within mere seconds. There are no words in any language to describe it. Here, I have seen a dead man for the first time. Subedar Mansoor Khan was slain by a bomb before my eyes. So close he was that my uniform bears the remains of his blood and body, along with mud, trench water, and my own vomit.
Samir paused and then concluded the entry, “‘This was not what I had imagined.’”
“Well, what had he imagined?” Léa asked plaintively from across the room where she was knitting a woolen hat for Sophie. “This is war. Why did he enlist?”
“I think he is wondering the very same thing…”
Continuing down the page, Samir noted how his uncle had returned to the billets and written about his soiled uniform in great detail, recording every tear and stain, as if taking an inventory of battle. His leather boots had emitted a foul, moist odor. The woolen puttees wrapped tightly from his ankles to his knees had left his legs numb and swollen. The wet turban and saffa underneath were soaked to his skull. He lightened himself of the leather waist-belt, ammunition cross-belt, water bottle, haversack, rifle, bayonet, and peeled off his trousers and kurta, splattered with the remains of the subedar.
There are thousands of thoughts in my head, yet none have the clarity of reason. A low beating of bombs mirrors my heartbeat. In the trenches, our actions are beyond control, we are fearful and desperate and suddenly aware that any moment could be our last. The ground vibrates as if it may erupt at any moment, clouds of dust enclose us, and the world is drowned by our bullets. All those who have survived this battle are afraid.
Vivek’s regiment became the first Indians to enter the trenches of the First World War in the Belgian farmlands at Ypres. These initial entries betrayed a fear that managed to reverberate across the decades and onto the page Samir held in his hands. They were written in haste, leaving messy, inky fingerprints, and placing his own fingers upon them, Samir pressed himself into the traces of his uncle, like a palimpsest.
Léa watched as Samir buried his face in the journal, taking in whatever smells of war and misery had endured, as if inheriting his uncle’s very memories. She noticed that as much as he was using the journal as a way to trace his family’s unknown history, he had also begun to use it as a means of belated conversation with his uncle. The brutality of battle had led him to interrupt, interpret, comment, and question, and there was something unbearably sad and tender about witnessing this relationship unfold.
* * *
From Ypres, Vivek was sent to Messines, which Samir faithfully recorded on the map.
November 5, 1914
The fighting in Wipers left many dead. Trenches were bombed through the nights, with noise loud enough to drive a person to deafness. Bodies were scattered everywhere, whole or in parts. There was no cremation, so all were simply buried together. Unholy, some men called this. Sant Ram is dead. Munshi and Waryam Singh are dead. Sher Khan, Mahant Ram, Sardar Ali, Jung Bahadur, all dead. The wounded soldiers have been sent to the hospital, but many men are missing, rendered invisible by the bullets and smoke in no-man’s-land … Khan Bahadur, Jagdir Singh, Jaffar Ali, all have vanished. In this age, there has never been such a war before, and there may never be one again. If I leave this land unharmed, then I shall look upon it as a new life.
Léa closed her eyes tightly and exhaled. Snow might have been falling in Paris, where she sat with her husband in a corridor of the hospital on their break, but it was stifling summertime in the Normandy of her mind. Vivek never saw such a war again, but Léa had witnessed it mere decades later, when stretcher after stretcher of wounded soldiers had been brought in before her eyes from the front line, in conditions no different from what the journal described. Field hospitals had to be located close, so close that sometimes they bore the brunt of incoming fire. Soldiers were brought in without arms or legs, with burns or in shock, and Léa remembered doing whatever she could to give them hope. Changing bandages, giving shots, administering oxygen, even declaring the dead; sometimes there were not enough beds so patients were laid out on the ground; sometimes the bloodstained operating theater looked no less than a battlefield. But almost always, the soldiers who survived their wounds considered it a second chance at life.
She had heard that sentence so many times that to hear Samir repeat it now, so far removed from the site of war, unnerved her. Léa was trying her best not to descend into darkness, but Vivek’s graphic account was not helping. She stared down the sterile corridor, trying to erase the images from her mind as Samir’s narration carried on.
That evening, after she had finished her shift, she sat in the nurse’s lounge contemplating what she was about to do. Léa was so certain she had laid her ghosts to rest, and yet now, for the first time in years, the seams of her heart had come undone. Perhaps against her better judgment then, she retrieved a creased photograph from a compartment in her purse. Carefully, her fingers caressed the sepia-toned face she’d fallen in love with at first sight, the coiffed dark hair she had run her fingers through as a teenager, the lips she had kissed by the port, the eyes she had gazed into before he left for battle. All this talk of war had resurrected her dead.
* * *
Two weeks had passed since they’d started reading the journals together, it had become their routine, but that night, Samir felt a tautness between him and his wife. Vivek’s words left no room for lightness or romance or respite. There was only imminent tragedy, recalled through the secret records of a dead man. But if Samir had any chance of knowing what had happened to his uncle, then he would have to continue reading till the end.
The unexpected intensity of battle had left many men desperately searching for a way out and back home. This led to an outbreak of self-inflicted wounds, but none felt to Samir as grave or terrifying as the letter sipahi Muhammad Deen from the United Provinces addressed to his brother about a rare plant he desired.
November 7, 1914
The smoke of the bhelwa plant, used to fumigate a part of the body, results in inflammation of that particular part. It can also be mashed up and smeared on the skin, or ground to a fine powder and lathered across one’s loins. The result of correctly using it will last for three days, and by then, the sipahi would already be transported to the hospital. Assuring me that the doctors would believe the condition as genuine, Muhammad Deen rambled on about how to make one’s eyes sore with the ground seeds of the rand plant, or apply the wax from one’s ear into the eyes with blunt needles, or provoke a fever or injure one’s foot with a knife and then insert a piece of copper in the wound. Horrified, I quickly sealed his letter and thrust it toward him with shaking hands, though it is my opinion that the censor sahibs will withhold it.
Shuddering, as his uncle might have, Samir turned to Léa. “This, this sounds inhuman.”
“War makes men do things they never imagined they would have to.”
The details of battle are both repetitive and gruesome, and I wish not to burden anyone, so I write only when necessary. Yet as an escape from this frightening world, home remains constantly on my mind. Its light is golden and its sky is full of evening clouds. I see the rain, I feel the sand, I breathe in the morning air. I see the Ravi, the wheat fields, the kites and the pigeons. Each night, Lahore unfurls before my eyes.
Samir awoke in the middle of the night to find himself brokenhearted by borrowed dreams, and haunted by a land he might never see again. It had been a long time since the loss of Lahore had gnawed at his heart, and reaching under his pillow, he held the journal until he fell back asleep.
Nestled beside him, Léa remained awake as the darkness of night gave way to the brightness of dawn, for each time she closed her eyes, she saw Michel’s face. The day he left for war, a halo of sunshine on his hair, the promise of their future on his beautiful lips. And then again, on the day he was brought into the hospital tent, when all life had left his body. Unable to move, unable to speak, Léa had watched in horror as the doctors declared her betrothed dead long before he’d been brought in. His face was undisfigured but covered in mud, as if it had been trampled on; his body was badly wounded, with bullets in both his legs and shrapnel through his arm. But it was the eyes that wouldn’t leave her now, wouldn’t let her sleep or forget, Michel’s pale blue eyes, hollow and lifeless.
The next morning, she decided that she needed to stop listening to the journals. Perhaps, then, it was sheer coincidence that while she tried to find an excuse that would help her retain both sanity and marriage, she was transferred to the intensive care unit, requiring her to spend more time at the hospital, a promotion she readily accepted.
* * *
It would take Samir a few days to get used to being alone with Vivek’s words. Often, he would read something that would prompt him to look around the room for his wife, only to remember that this was now a solitary journey. As a result, the journal became his constant companion—he would read at his desk, while he walked to work, as he put Sophie to bed or waited for Léa to return.
He read as his uncle attempted to learn the Francisi language, a list of words—bonjour, merci, oui, non, soldat—their translations and pronunciations rendered carefully in Urdu. He read as the regiment marched to Essars, where word reached the camp about two sepoys from the 15th Sikhs who had each been sentenced to thirty lashes in public for being asleep on their sentry posts in the trenches. He read as they were sent out to inspect a ruined hospital in the town of Festubert, close to the front line. Then, as he turned the page, a pressed fern revealed itself, and Samir discovered perhaps the first ever deliberate smell memory that his uncle would evoke during the war.
We passed through a dense passage of dark green, and I thought it extraordinary that some herbage had withstood the wrath of man. I broke a stem off the very tall tree and found it to be covered in flat, needlelike leaves. Taking off my gloves, I crushed them with my hands and brought them to my nose. Inhaling, I discovered a sublime form in this otherwise lifeless terrain. I couldn’t tell whether my senses were deceiving me, but the needles smelled like fresh lemons. It seemed like I had quite accidentally raised the curtain of winter and discovered a window to another world. My first thoughts were of Khushboo Lal and how through the years of my childhood, we traveled the world by way of the many perfumes in his collection. Now here I am, with the world at my doorstep, wishing only to find my way back home.
Samir picked up the dried leaf, first surveying it and then, out of compulsion, smelling it. Fir, a middle note. With a sigh, he set the leaf and journal down on his lap. Though the loss of his family settled deeper with every page he read, his uncle continued to be his most influential teacher. He remembered how, when Samir was a teenager, Vivek had concocted an eccentric composition of woody fir and sour green mango, to which Mohan had suggested adding a hint of jasmine buds for sweetness. The trio had laughed at their experiment, but the resulting ittar, mixed with beeswax, had been an intensely fresh solid perfume for the summertime, loved and purchased by a British sahib. And now, with no one to ask, Samir wondered whether the war could have, in fact, been the inspiration.
* * *
The weather became colder, the battles intensified, and Vivek’s entries became sparser and stranger. Sometimes he would write about the fat rats and wet sandbags in the trenches; other times he’d fixate on the gorgeous tendrils of smoke emitted from a hookah in the Indian camp. Notes on nursing wounds would be followed by a page on the foul taste of stale bread. A scene of a cavalryman brushing his horse, the redness of a tobacco-chewing sepoy’s teeth, a low-hanging cloud, the isolation of sentry duty, the taste of vilayati milk. Within these entries were moments so lucid that Samir could furnish an entire landscape of war, as if the world had been engraved onto his very brain. But there were other things that remained mere whispers, mentioned as fleetingly as a ray of passing sunlight.
Vivek also continued to write for his fellow sepoys, admitting that many, including him, were still unclear on the reasons for this war. Their correspondences home passed through the British censors, and were sometimes withheld, leading many men to omit things they could not openly write about. But in addressing letters and postcards to places that he had never seen or even heard of before, Vivek realized the scale of their service. The Hindustani sepoy was spread like grains of sand across the world, from East Africa to Mespotamia and across France and Belgium on the Western Front, where throughout winter, Vivek spent weeks in and out of poorly constructed trenches, braving the weather and constant enemy shelling. His words no longer bore excitement or even fear, but were imbued instead with desperation and defeat.
November 27, 1914
Engaged in a significant attack to recover enemy-occupied trenches. After the attack, we climbed back in our trench and cleared the dead. In the three months that we have been in vilayat, these are the first Jarmans I have seen from up close. As we emerged victorious, they lay lifeless, in heaps of blood and dirt, their bodies contorted and their eyes lightless. Some of the sipahis went around collecting the coats of the dead, their weapons and other stray items. But not me, for I have already surpassed the threshold of my barbarity.
