This is a more personal post than the usual. My father passed away this week in India.
My brother and I were remembering the many ways in which he touched our lives, as he had doubtless affected so many others.
Baba was an old-school father, in an era when fathers didn't spend much time with their children. But when he did, he liked to show us a magic trick like cutting off his own finger, or a mathematical puzzle. He showed me how to use his slide rule, a Faber-Castell Aristo with beautiful red and green markings in a leather case.
Very rarely, we talked about important things.
He wouldn't hurt a fly, literally. If he caught a creature inside the house, he would carefully open the window and toss it out. Even when a cobra came out of the grass in the monsoons, he would not let us hurt it. Raised in a strict Maharashtrian Brahmin household and then in the College of Engineering in Pune, he was well-read but hadn't seen much of the real world before entering the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. In the officers' mess they had arranged yellow flowers on the tables for the cadets to eat, which he discovered were boiled cut eggs.
I had always wondered how a peace-loving, creative and bright mind like his had found itself in a rigid, top-down military bureaucracy. After getting his engineering degree, what had possessed him to become a commissioned officer?
I did ask him once. He said he had been bored working for a public works department in a town in Gujarat and for the state-owned oil company ONGC. Besides, he said, one of his childhood buddies from New English School in Satara had entered the National Defence Academy and loved being an army officer. So, he decided to sign up, too.
I wanted to know how it had turned out for him.
The career of a Bombay Sapper
Like many regiments in the Indian army, the Bombay Engineering Group, a.k.a. the Bombay Sappers, is much older than the country, having been raised even before the British Indian army, in the days of the East India Company. These are combat engineers whose business is mines, bridges, and similar technical work.
From his home base in the Bombay Sappers, Baba was often sent to faraway places. His postings read like a travelogue of the Indian subcontinent, a lot of it in the Eastern and Western Himalayas: Nagaland, Tezpur, Shillong, Mussoorie. He was often an instructor for project management or technical subjects at some institute or another.
However, his official obituary from the Bombay Sappers has a few gaps during classified assignments. One of these gaps is for a few months starting in November 1971, the period of combat operations in the Bangladesh Liberation War.