Chapter 118: Health and Battles

Chapter 116

Palam Airfield, New Delhi

April 5, 1949

The Avro York came down out of a dull yellow sky and rolled to a stop at the far end of the apron. The first hot winds of the year had laid dust over Palam like flour, and the windsock hung limp.

Ram came down the steps with a single leather case. Shaktidas followed, then Shroff and Deshmukh, both looking like men who had not slept in a week and did not intend to admit it.

Sardar Patel stood at the foot of the stairs with his shawl drawn up around his shoulders, though the temperature was already near ninety. He leaned on his cane. His face, which had always been broad and weathered like a block of old teak, had fallen in at the cheeks, and the skin beneath his eyes was the colour of ash.

"You are late," Patel said.

"The British wished us fair winds, but perhaps there was malice in their hearts and the winds were decidedly not fair, Sardar-ji." Ram took his hand with a smile and held it a moment longer than courtesy required. It was cold and dry, and the grip was weaker than it should have been. "You did not need to come yourself."

"Somebody has to tell you the news before the Cabinet Secretary dresses it up." Patel coughed, turned his head, and coughed again into a folded handkerchief, a long, wet, tearing sound. He pocketed the cloth before Ram could look at it. "Delhi dust. Every spring it finds my chest."

"Of course," Ram said, and said nothing more.

They rode to South Block in the back of an unmarked car, with Mullick’s driver and a plainclothes guard in front. Ram gave the outcome of London in six sentences: the treaty, Burmah Oil and the parity holdings, the waiver, the dollars. Patel listened with his eyes half closed and grunted at the figures.

"And Attlee?"

"More gracious than I expected, but not one to stay in the office for long, I believe"

"A civilised Englishman is the most dangerous kind." Patel opened his eyes. "I have two papers for you. Professor Sodhi’s proposal for a National Games in November and an Asian Games in the spring of next year, with a stadium. Twenty million rupees. And a charter drafted by a young IB officer named Kao, for a service that would look beyond our borders. He wishes to call it the Research and Analysis Wing."

"Research and Analysis?"

"He says a dull name will be hard to explain, which is the point."

Ram smiled. "The Games to inculcate a sense of belonging in our new countrymen, I suppose?"

"Sodhi said it better, but yes."

"Both are approved. Kao has six months, and he is to start immediately."

Patel turned toward the window. The cough returned, shorter this time, and he pressed the handkerchief to his mouth until it passed. Ram watched the road go by and could not help but feel concerned for his health.

South Block

That evening

The brass heater had been put away for the season, and the ceiling fans were turning. Ram waited until the last file was signed and the last secretary dismissed, then crossed the corridor to the Home Minister’s office. Patel sat behind his desk with a blue folder open and the inhaler on the blotter. His eyes were closed, and for a moment Ram thought he was asleep.

"If you have come to tell me to rest, Ram, save yourself the breath."

"I have come to tell you something else." Ram took the chair opposite and laid a thin telegram on the desk. "Dr. B.C. Roy lands at Willingdon at seven tomorrow morning. I asked him from London. He will examine you at Birla House, where Bapu’s old physicians still keep rooms."

Patel opened his eyes slowly. "You asked him without asking me."

"Yes."

"That is an impertinence."

"It is. I will answer for it afterwards." Ram folded his hands. "Vallabhbhai, I have watched you for weeks through other people’s letters, and for six hours today with my own eyes. You cough blood into a handkerchief and put it in your pocket where you think I cannot see."

"It is a little blood. Every man of my age..."

"You are seventy-three, and you are the only man in this government whom the princes, the generals, and the party bosses all fear in exactly the right measure. If you collapse, no one replaces you. Not Jawaharlal, who is a different kind of man. Not I. There is no second Patel."

"Flattery does not work on me."

"I know, and this is not flattery." Ram leaned forward. "We expect a hard fight on the Punjab plains imminently, simultaneous to that we expect to lay the foundations of an industrialised nation at a pace unmatched by any other in history. This country, our motherland, and I cannot afford to lose you before we have even learned to walk."

Patel’s mouth tightened. "Bapu did not question his body."

"Bapu refused the penicillin," Ram said quietly, "and we buried him in January. I will not do that twice."

The fan turned over their heads. Somewhere in the corridor a door closed. Patel looked at the inhaler, then at the telegram, then at Ram, and the stubbornness in his face gave way slowly, like a wall settling.

"I shall go for one examination." Patel raised a heavy finger. "One. And if Doctor Roy tells me to take to my bed, I shall tell him what he can do with it."

"I accept those terms."

"You will not enjoy them," Patel muttered, but the corner of his mouth moved.

Dr. Roy took four hours the next morning, with a stethoscope, a fluoroscope borrowed from the army hospital, a blood count, and a long, patient silence. When he came out onto the veranda where Ram waited, his face was grave.

"Prime Minister, I will be plain. The right side of the heart is strained. The lungs are scarred from old infections and from exhaustion, and there is a small shadow on the left that I do not like. He is anaemic. His weight is a stone below what it should be. He has been sleeping four hours a night for a year."

"What does he need?"

"Rest, which he will not take. A fixed meal schedule. No more than six hours of work a day. A cardiologist and a chest physician on his staff, with a re-examination every three weeks and another fluoroscopy at six weeks to see whether the shadow changes." Roy took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "If he follows this, he may have years. If he does not, I would give him one."

"He will follow it."

"Prime Minister, I have been a doctor for forty years. Men like the Sardar do not follow instructions."

"Then we must see that he does." Ram turned to Mullick, who had materialised at the end of the veranda, as he always did. "Director, a physician, and a cook will live in the Home Minister’s house in the guise of a private secretary. The three-weekly examinations are on your calendar and on mine. If he misses one, you will tell me the same day."

"Understood, Prime Minister."

"And Mullick. The Sardar is not to know you are keeping the calendar."

"He will know within a week," Mullick said dryly.

"Then he will pretend he does not, which is better."

Inside, Patel was buttoning his kurta with a look of enormous dignity. He did not look at Ram as he came out.

"Roy talks too much," he said.

"He talks exactly as much as is needed."

"He has given me a diet. Boiled vegetables. Dal without ghee." Patel said the word ghee as other men say the name of a lost child. "It is a conspiracy."

"It is the first of many."

"I will outlive the lot of you out of spite," Patel said, and walked toward his car, his cane tapping slowly on the stone.

Chhamb–Akhnoor Sector, Jammu

April 8, 1949

The first shells fell at four in the morning, from the Pakistani side of the international boundary across the Munawar Tawi. Mortar rounds followed, then heavy machine-gun fire, then the grinding of tracked vehicles in the dark.

By dawn, the northern command was in uproar. Radio nets filled with claims of breakthrough and calls for air support. Captain Mahendra Pal of the 4th Kumaon crouched in a mud-brick pillbox above the Chhamb crossing and counted the flashes along the far bank.

"Forty guns, perhaps fifty," he said. "That is more than they had in October."

"It is noise, Sahib," said his havildar, wiping dust from his moustache. "They are firing at ground where no one is."

"It is noise with a purpose." Pal lowered his binoculars. "General Thimayya sent word two days ago. If they come here, we hold. We do not call for the reserves, and we do not send them forward. The General was explicit. The road to Akhnoor is the prize they want us to defend with everything."

"Even if they take Chhamb?"

"Even then."

The Pakistanis did not take Chhamb. By noon, a battalion of the Pakistani 4th Frontier Force had pushed across the river in three waves, and each wave was broken by the 25-pounders on the rear slope and the MG 42s sited along the embankment. By dusk, the attackers had fallen back with two hundred dead and no ground held.

The Indian air transport squadrons at Srinagar and Jammu, which Akbar Khan had counted on pulling toward the north, stayed on their fields, fuelled and idle, and the reserve brigades at Pathankot never moved.

In Rawalpindi, a staff officer drafted a communiqué claiming a "great victory in the Jammu sector." It was never broadcast. Another message had come over the wire from the south.

The Ravi River, near Dera Baba Nanak

April 26, 1949

The river was in spate, which the Pakistani staff had not expected, because April should have been dry.

The night was black and still, with a half-moon behind cloud. At 0210 hours the first boats pushed off from the western bank, wooden country craft and inflated assault boats towed by lashkars wading waist-deep, with regular army ustads in civilian dress crouching in the sterns. Behind them, in the acacia scrub, eleven battalions waited in silence.

Lieutenant Colonel Zaman sat in the second boat of the lead wave with a Sten gun across his knees and a wireless set strapped to his back. He had not slept in two days. In front of him a young Mahsud boy of perhaps seventeen was whispering the kalima under his breath over and over, and Zaman found he could not tell whether the boy was praying or counting.

"Quiet," he said in Pashto. "Keep low."

The boat grounded on a sandbank. Men splashed forward into water that came to their knees, then their thighs, then, unexpectedly, their waists.

"The bank is not here," the boy said.

"The river has risen." A shout came from another boat.

"How?"

Zaman did not answer. He was looking at the eastern shore, where a low earthen embankment ran along the bank, and he was thinking of a sentence he had said weeks ago on the platform at Sargodha: they will adapt within an hour.

The first flare went up from the Indian side.

White light turned the river to beaten tin. Three thousand lashkars were visible, struggling through the shallows with their rifles over their heads, and every man could see every other. Then the dark embankment opened.

Vickers guns, MG 42s, and Brens fired in long, crossing lines, sweeping the river from both flanks. Mortar rounds fell among the boats. The Indian 3rd Rajputana Rifles had been dug into that bank for three weeks, and the field engineers had opened the canal gates upstream two days earlier. The river, which should have been fordable, was a brown flood eight feet deep in its channels, and the sandbars the Pakistani guides had marked were gone.

"Retreat! Retreat!" Zaman shouted. "Fall back to the west bank!"

No one heard. A boat capsized twenty yards to his left, and men went under with their packs and cartridge belts. Somewhere a malik was screaming a battle cry in Pashto and was cut off mid-word. The boy in front of Zaman was struck in the throat and fell backwards into the water without a sound.

Zaman threw himself over the side and swam, dragging the wireless. A round went through his left shoulder like a hot nail, and he kept swimming. He reached the Indian bank under the shadow of the embankment, in a pocket of reeds where the guns could not see, and crawled up through the mud.

A rifle muzzle touched the back of his neck.

"Haath upar," said a voice. "Hands up. Do not move."

Zaman lay still. A Sikh sergeant with a grey-streaked beard knelt over him, tore away the wireless and the Sten, and turned him onto his back. The face above him was lined, stern, and not unkind.

"Name?"

"Lieutenant Colonel Zaman. Pakistan Army." His voice was a croak. "I am wounded."

"I see that." The sergeant looked at the army-pattern boots and the paybook in the pocket. "Burma?"

"Fourteenth Army. Six years."

"Then you know a soldier when you see one." The sergeant called over his shoulder. "Stretcher here! Medical party! An officer, prisoner, shoulder wound." He turned back. "You will live, Colonel. We do not murder prisoners. That is what you do."

Zaman closed his eyes. He had no answer.

By dawn it was over. Of the eleven thousand who had crossed or tried to cross the Ravi, nearly four thousand lay dead in the river or on its banks, and perhaps three thousand more had been captured. The rest fled west in disorder, abandoning their rifles. The Indian 1st Armoured Division, advancing in the grey light along the canal embankments, found the western bank deserted for twelve miles.

General Cariappa’s dispatch to South Block was four lines long. The last read: Enemy broken. Our casualties light. Prisoners include a battalion commander who knows the crossing plan and the arrangements for the lashkars. Awaiting instructions.

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