.......continued. Indian Army's Captain Pinaka Roy's musings from his diary.
The Gorkha sentry sat with a primus stove burning at his feet, staring out into the grey cloud through the bunker's porthole. Everything was white all around, except the black tip of angular rock that caught no snow and was scalped bare by the powerful wind. On the slab made of ammunition boxes a damp and soggy register lay in which the man on duty had to note down everything that he saw along the pass down below. The Chinese Army had a long double-story barracks on the pass and a road coming right up to the pass. There was a circular glass hut on the pass with a cemented plinth all around it. They knew the Chinese were there beyond the iced up no-man's land. Both sides passed sleepy months while nothing stirred under the cold rock five kilometres above the sea level. Ice melted, trickled from forlorn lakes down the valley to form raging torrents far away from those gentle, silent lakes amidst knotty rhododendron.
The bored watch slid from one week into the next and one kept sitting in one's soot-fluffed bunker in grim-dyed coarse wool clothing. The snow fell like the skies were shedding huge seas of dandruff. Deep fissures between rocks got filled and the steep slope, on which we had clung and cleaved tiny bunkers, looked like an even quilted ground of soft-surfaced cotton, ready to swallow a man in one quick burp and close its mouth again.
A Gorkha on duty pointed down to the far-off Chinese hutments at the pass. "Not even a mouse has stirred out of their post". They were burning wood inside; blue wood smoke drifted out of their chimneys. It was frontier in cold sleep and our neighbours, we envied. We lived like salamanders in holes and piles of stones on the mountain. Its pinnacle rose into the sky like the sword of a sky invader. When you looked up at the peak, the sky looked small and distant. The sections of Gorkhas and the artillery observers who were incarcerated on the tip of the sword had it much worse than the rest of the two platoons that clung around the hilt of the sword a thousand feet lower.
Those who talk of Kaala Paani and Tihar or Sing Sing or Belmarsh or Guantanamo Bay have no idea about the perilous ways in which the army beads the Himalayan oyster with platoon and section strength pearls for thousands of smiles. In the snow the Chinese never stirred out; their presence on the pass was the light plume of wood smoke that was distinct like a vaporous gray stain on a white bed cover. They didn't care a hoot about the pass being covered by our machine guns. Sometimes I thought that I could take my Gorkhas and kick them out in one hour and start living in their long wood fire barrack. Not in the thick of the cold season but when the snow melted and one saw the Cyclopean rocks naked. I was sure we could use the rocks, hide in them and overrun the pass. In the young, the very concept of physical fatigue is eliminated and replaced by rash courage.
The Gorkhas are silent troops; they have a soft tongue and they never slide into anger. When two Gorkhas are talking to each other, it is hard to hear them at five paces. This soft exterior is so deceptive to an Indian born and bred in the vulgar-tongued and noisy races of north India. The Gorkhas don't sing songs of braggadocio like the Sikhs and the Jats. Their soft songs are songs of love and longing for their wives and their children and their mountain homes in Nepal. They love and honour their women and spend their money lavishly and at startling speed on their loves.
The temperatures were dozens below zero and blizzard and snow reigned. The observation posts with the machine guns had to be manned with two men round the clock in each bunker. Even at 3 in the morning, when twenty foot of snow would bury most bunkers, the men stood awake and ready. Of course, each person knew that not even a snow leopard would venture out five yards from his lair in such weather. But orders were orders, sacred orders, sacreder than Gita, Koran or Bible.
.......concluded.
Tailpiece.
Got up groggily (Had got up around a quarter past 4 to go the rest room), the chores and was ready by a quarter to 10. Earlier, Lekha helped me in washing down the Chevy, that was full of dirt after our last trip to Kochi.
Lekha and the maid went across to the ration shop to collect the kit on account of the forthcoming festival of Vishu. Meanwhile, Rema and Padmakumar had gone across towards Thiruvananthapuram to invite our family for Achu's wedding.
Subsequently, had driven across to the bank, got Lekha's cell phone filled up with certain inputs and returned after about an hour or so.
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