Despite being dyslexic and petrified of heights, I had a fetish for choppers and nurtured a secret hope of getting a private helicopter licence. Till my age, bad eyesight, the severity of my dyslexia, and the domestic and financial imprisonment of being a caregiver and a lousy earner permanently relegated it to the basket of broken dreams.
This gentleman flew MiG-21s when in the forces. So I asked him what it actually felt like - the adrenaline rush, the euphoria, the sense of freedom, or being one with the limitless sky. His reply was something I was completely unprepared for...
“Well, you are strapped into a very uncomfortable seat with extremely poor frontal visibility, sitting in front of what is essentially a rocket in terms of thrust. All we cared about was fulfilling the flight plan - climb to a certain altitude, fly a certain distance, in one direction or another maybe do a manoeuvre or a barrel roll. By then you are almost out of fuel, and your only concern is landing safely and then filing your report.”
That was the most truthful, matter-of-fact account from any military man I had ever heard. As descriptions go, it comes second only to that of a cavalry colonel whom I asked how the Indian home-grown Arjun tank measured up. He replied expressionlessly with a shrug, “Well, they work...”
Most serving or retired officers I came across, were unassuming, at time completely unremarkable gentlemen. The majority were in the forces to earn a living and build a career like any other. Not because of some self-sacrificing patriotic binge, as it’s now fashionable to say. Some were utterly corrupt. And, as in all sectors involving uniforms and guns - the grunt guys are often arrogant and full of shit.
The Army intelligence personnel though, the few I had interacted with, were vastly superior to those from civilian agencies - both in analytical skills and processing data. Though most of them were old-school, from an era before narrative-building, political ideology and logo design took precedence over field data and operations.
Personally, though, I have never been at ease with the idea of armed forces. The reasons are neither fully ideological nor entirely based on their track record. Though growing up in Northeast India during the insurgency years - when daily military excesses were widely documented - this too had a role to play. Plus my Bohemian outlook on life also never sat well with an institution based on discipline and obedience. But, like with many things in life, the real seed of the antipathy laid in something far more mundane: It was the lifelong resentment of an uncle’s behaviour towards me.
A career military officer, a known philanderer, a bully first to his younger siblings and then to his wife and children, and a condescending asshole to the rest of us. I remember him only vaguely from childhood because he only visited us to entertain his military friends at our house. Bringing only subsidised canteen liquor, while my father - on his university lecturer’s salary - paid for the rest. His excuse was convenient: Our grandmother disapproved of drinking. Likewise, I was told that he borrowed money from everyone and rarely returned it. Thankfully, he was usually posted elsewhere, so we saw little of him.
During one of their visits, when I was in the 7th or 8th standard, I remember sitting with them in our kitchen. He first told his son, who was a year younger than me, “If you don’t study well, I’ll send you to Guwahati to stay with him,” pointing at me, the very nadir of human existence.
When my mother asked where he was posted, he replied Ahmedabad. I naively blurted out that I heard the city was filthy, as the newspapers then were full of stories about its civic issues.
“Have you ever been there?” he snapped.
“No, I read it in the papers,” I replied.
“Then shut up!” he roared, beaming all around as if a mission had been accomplished.
That day, the line was drawn.
We rarely saw each other’s families. By the time I was in college, he expressly forbade his children from interacting with me as a bad influence, not that it bothered me in any way. Something they dutifully adhere to with abject filial piety to this day.
After retiring, he became a school principal, tried his hand at law, and held a token position in a trade lobby. For a short while, he headed the local Sainik Board but was reportedly eased out. During that time, whenever people asked him about me - because, to them, he was my uncle first - he would go on tirades about how useless I was, a parasite, unemployed at thirty, and how my father was at his wits’ end with me. Conveniently nullifying my work as a freelance journalist of some repute, as well as an automotive and travel writer. At the same time, he never failed to boast about his own children’s academic qualifications and careers.
Part of the script was essentially my father’s. He had an almost compulsive need to ignore, trivialise, or grind into the ground any small victory I ever managed to achieve. It was his pathology and had been that way since school, and anything else would have been seriously deviant behaviour. My uncle was merely the willing actor, who enthusiastically delivered the script to the world.
The key difference being, my father expressed his contempt, no matter how ill deserved, only towards his own issues and not the nephews and nieces.
Towards the end, we did have a few cordial get-togethers and even shared drinks at my father’s house, exchanging surprisingly friendly banter. For a change he was even respectful. I also wished him on every occasion - perhaps the only nephew who did so. His own children never returned the gesture to my parents even once.
I could never quite understand what prompted me to do so: I had neither any respect or affection for him, nor anything to prove. Perhaps it was just my way of dealing with my deep resentment of his early and habitual disregard.
And, I never once stepped inside his house.
When he died, he was surprisingly cremated as a civilian, not as an army officer befitting his high rank.
Needless to say, relations with the next generation remain cold, bordering on nonexistent.
The wall holds.
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