A Soldier Never Dies

A soldier never dies, they say, he just fades away. 

As I walked past the empty plot of land that once had an old house on it, I thought of a remarkable fauji who had lived for many years there.  It had been a tiny little non-descript home, painted an unappetizing shade of green and its demolition left the city no poorer.  

Yet the elderly couple who had once lived there were a fascinating study.

About a couple of years after we moved to Bangalore, my father was delighted to meet his classmate from college, a now-retired Major from the Military Police, VR Menon. They lost little time in renewing their friendship and found an interest that brought them together for a couple of hours each evening, a passion for brisk, long walks, often followed by a small drink at either person’s home. 

VR was a fauji to his last atom and about as different as could be from Dad. He had a luxurious moustache, every strand of hair in immaculate position with Brylcreem (alas, no longer a staple in the contemporary bath), while Dad abhorred moustaches and never had one. If Dad was a fun-loving, jovial person, VR was overtly quite the contrary, his demeanour - aided by Brylcreem moustache - forbidding and as stiff as his fauji backbone.  When amused, VR’s moustache would twitch a bit and the eyes would narrow for but the briefest moment, which provided much relief to those around. And, if my father was easy going, VR had a temper that was legendary. 

Indeed, it was his fury, sharpened by a keen sense of right and wrong, that had plagued him for much of his life. A story was often heard in the Malu circles in Bangalore of an incident in the 1960s in the Kashmir Valley, when VR came out of his house in the Army base on hearing his elder son yell for help, followed by a dog’s snarl. The Alsatian belonging to the Brigadier of the base, no less, had bitten his son. 

Now, the rule in the Army is simple: a Brigadier’s dog is to be treated broadly on par with the Brigadier. VR took his son in, brought his gun out, and shot the dog. The Bangalore Malu circs were unanimous in their view that this incident, possibly aided by other bouts of fury, decreed his retirement at the level of a Major. VR seemed to agree as well. He once remarked, with candour, to my Dad that a donkey that joins the army cannot but retire as a Major. I do not quite remember his tone of voice when he said this. Was it regret? Pathos? Humour? Yet, notably, he never quite saw the need to change. In conversations over an evening drink, he would have the most simple solutions for the World’s ailments, each such solution aided by the liberal use of a Point 22 automatic that he believed was useless when kept in the armoury.  As a discussion on corruption, for instance, warmed up, his moustache would move an inch upwards, the eyes would narrow (that’s the smile quotient) and he would say: ‘shoot the bloody fellow, that’s the answer,’ and the ladies in the audience would either be in splits or full of ‘Aiaiyoo’s or ‘Guruvayurappa’ or some such invective. 

VR’s family was a study in contrast. Ammu aunty, his demure wife, was small and rotund in appearance, with a sweet high-pitched voice and open smile. She, so the Malu circs opined, channelled her husband’s behaviour with skilled gentility that no Point 22 could answer. It was impossible to not like her and VR was devoted to her, recognising her ability to moderate his own impulsive nature. 

VR and my father became so close in the three or four years that they walked together that, when my father died in 1984, he went into a depression, refusing to talk to anyone for days. He must have picked himself up as only a fauji can, for, some time later, I began to see him on his evening walk, now alone. The pace of the walk was brisk, the back erect and, when he saw me, the conversation would be formal and brief, yet those expressive eyes under the bushy eyebrows would mist up for a brief moment.  Or did I imagine this? But I knew that he missed Dad, as much as I did.  Theirs had been, like the odd friendship we experience in our lifetimes, a meeting of souls.  

A couple of years later, the family shifted from that home in Indiranagar – the one I had walked past – to a small apartment off Richmond Road. While Ammu aunty and mum stayed in touch, for VR the link had been broken. 

Some years later, his wife passed away. 

I have yet to meet someone who has been as devastated by a spouse’s death as VR was. She was getting on in years and wasn’t in good health, yet he was inconsolable. Many months after her demise, I knocked on his door and did not quite recognise the old, gently bent man who opened it for me, the eyes half-lidded, the expression one of disinterest. He had stopped his walks and, instead, moped about the home in the evening of his life, in search of meaning, avoiding the company of those who knew him well. It was hard to visit him again, for there was nothing to talk about, no connection to bond.  We were a chasm apart.  

So, I did not visit him again.

I once read an article by a surgeon where he describes a surgery as a partnership between the surgeon and the patient. A surgeon can only, he had said, fix an engine; the patient must provide the spark for it to run. VR had lost the spark and passed away in the early 1990s. 

The fauji had faded into the sunset.