Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Read Online Free Page B

would be extended, at once, to the remaining British officers of the Indian Army. I realized that I had been a fool to imagine that I would go on moving upward with Philip Mortimer and Bogey Sen, Hugh Pettigrew and Mohammed Usman, Derek Horsford and Shahid Hamid. The phasing out of British officers would not be gradual, as the phasing-in of Indians had been: it would be sudden and final.
    I said to Barbara, 'It looks as though a promising career is about to end with a bang, not a whimper.'
    'Not your career,' she said. 'I'm sure they'll give you all a chance to transfer to the British Service. They must.'
    Perhaps not my career, then, I thought; but my work, surely. England was a place to retire to, not to work in. My work was here.
    My dreams that night were not of careers or airfields but of my regiment, of the men with whom I had fought and sweated and bled — Manjang, Gumparsad, Hotu, Rudrabahadur, a thousand others. What was to become of us?
    But I was no longer even weakly in control of my fate. Events moved faster and more violently, in India and the world. Ratings of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied at Karachi and Bombay. British soldiers put down the mutiny in Karachi, Indian soldiers in Bombay. The Chief steadfastly refused to ask for aid from cruisers of the Royal Navy, then in Indian waters. Indian officers captured in Malaya and Burma, who had helped to form and lead the Indian Traitor Army against us, were tried by court martial. There was exultant talk in Congress circles that the verdicts would not matter anyway. It was certain that the men would never be executed. When India became independent they would be released and given high honour. This talk ceased suddenly when a number of Indian colonels and majors, who had kept to their loyalty, often under bestial Japanese and Indian traitor torture, let it be known that they would not serve in the same army with men who had failed in that loyalty. The Congress were stayed (at least until Krishna Menon's time as Minister of Defence, fifteen years later) from making the disastrous mistake — far more dangerous to them than it could ever have been during the British dominance — of forming a 'political' army. The officers they were about to inherit had disagreed with many British policies, but had faithfully carried them out. They would do no less when the civil power was wholly Indian.
    The hot weather began to make the dusty nights oppressive, Barbara's pregnancy advanced and she went up to Ranikhet to prepare for the baby. In a parallel move the British Government sent out a committee of the cabinet, headed by the old socialist peer Lord Pethwick Lawrence, to prepare the birth of Indian independence. The noble lord arrived, and apologized for his and our existence, while Congress and the Muslim League dug in for the decisive negotiations. Their points of view, which had once been close, were now opposed. A few years back the Muslim League had been asking only that when independence came the Muslims, as a large and generally under-educated minority, should have certain cultural, employment, and representational rights guaranteed to them. The Congress consistently refused to agree, and the League as consistently increased their demands, until now they wanted a separate country of their own, to be called Pakistan.
    Late one burning afternoon a month or so later Roddy sent for me and said, 'The Viceroy wants a paper on the strategic results of splitting India. Here are the approximate partition lines you have to consider. I want a draft, about five pages, at eight o'clock tomorrow morning.'
    I went back to my office and sat down with a sigh and a curse. Could this mean that the Cabinet Committee's plan which, I knew, offered adequate safeguards for minorities in a federated form of government but resolutely refused to yield to the demand for the creation of a separate Muslim state, had been refused by both sides? I didn't know and I had no time to think about it. My