As always, I was late for my trip. I had left my PC connected till the last moment so that I could download all the emails and work offline. As I came back to my office walking past the window that overlooked the Winnersh Triangle roundabout, I noticed that there was one unrecognizable email on my system. I impatiently clicked on it and saw initial signs of a spam. But then, I started recognizing the chain of email addresses and as I journeyed the page, I was shocked to read its contents. I read it again and was troubled by it. I printed and stuck that page in the back of my computer case. The person outside my office paced restlessly and I started switching off my PC and packed my bag. Next, I remember sitting with this colleague in the car heading to the airport and as he talked I nodded inattentively. The email had created a mental overhang.
10 days later, after a long trip, I trudged back home late in the night. I walked in to our house on Beechwood Avenue in Kew, carried my bags to the living room and plopped myself on the contours of the deep sofa. I switched on the TV and stared blankly and then for some reason looked at the rear of my computer case that rested on the door. There, again, the edge of the folded paper was sticking out, staring at me. I had had no time to dish it out and read it over the last few days. I reached lazily and pulled the piece of paper and once again read its contents, still in disbelief. My mind started to rapidly travel back several years, two decades to be precise.
An autumn day in 1983: It was mid-afternoon. We were in a large bright room identified as Class XI. The open windows looked past the terrace to a beautifully carved temple on a hill top. As per the routine, we were plucking chairs and tables away from the neatly laid out classroom. Some of us went about it as expected, but there was one certain individual who lifted a table with one hand and a chair with another and carried it with deliberate aggression matched only by his jiving steps towards the walls. He would then run around the periphery—on top of tables and chairs, that is. This was by all normal circumstances, a challenging feat for anyone. But he had a physical way about him. As the room was cleared away, we started the rehearsal. He was once again the mischievous disrupter. He would play pranks with the house-master, at times to the latter’s chagrin. We were enacting William Stanley Houghton’s “Dear Departed.” I played Victor, a 10 year old grandson. The person I talk about here played my grandfather. Houghton’s play is a comedy. As I recollect the story—the grandfather dies; the daughter starts pilfering through his belongings; the estranged sister arrives to join her; the whole family can’t wait to start divvying up the inheritance, only to realize that the old man has been dead drunk after all—the revelation itself being the comedy. If I remember correctly, in our staging, the “grandfather,” this person I talk about, won the best actor award for the play—for faking his death and then coming around.
This person I write about is not one to forget. He was a hearty presence around the school premises. He was boisterous, playful and athletic even when dormant. Our school had an interesting layout—it was almost as if the architect had first designed the stairways and then designed the buildings to fill the spaces. My memory of our school is—stairways all over. You came out of your classroom and you were confronted with stairways going up, going down and if you went straight, you still had to climb up or go down. It was a smorgasboard of stairs, stairs and stairs all over. Us, 10-15 year olds, were not expected to climb each stair at a time. We were supposed to spring up and down 2-3-4 stairs on one go, but that was the limit for most. But this boisterous person I write about—he defied gravity and scale. He sprang up many, many stairs at a time. He glided down with barely one landing stop on the way. If you inadvertently came in his way, you were sure to be knocked out.
In school, I was his junior by two years. He was the first to be admitted to the National Defense Academy in Khadakvasla, inspiring others to follow in coming years. We all went our own way and some of us lost track of each other. I don't recollect running in to him after I left school. I heard he was posted to Sri Lanka….and then somewhere in Kashmir, but that was the extent of it. In later years, I heard his younger brother had joined the Indian Navy.
Sitting in my living room, as I opened the folded page with the chain of emails that had been forwarded, I read the text again. Major Ushnish Jaitley had become a martyr. The Times of India announcement talked about him with respect but also seemed to have the “canned text” feel of an official government release. It said that based on intelligence, he had gone to pursue terrorists in the woods outside of Jammu. The announcement said that he fought valiantly and “took bullets on his chest.” He was 35 years old. It stated that he was survived by his wife and their young daughter. At a grand event the soldier was to receive an award, posthumously.
I re-read the sentence about the honor, the award. I thought this time around Ushnish had not faked his death. This version of “Dear Departed” was unfortunately a tragedy and a far cry from the Edwardian interlude he had acted in several years ago.
Major Ushnish Jaitley became the first martyr to give up his life for his nation from our institution—the string of buildings with stairways that he had tamed, the desks and chairs he had tossed around playfully, the makeshift theater where he had walked up, filled up his lungs and narrated dialogues from Houghton’s play as the strobe lights tried to keep up with his stride.
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