Anand Tauji ki kahani, meri zabani

             My granduncle was a World War II veteran. As far as I knew he had always been old and had always worn a beautiful shiny set of false teeth although he worked in a dentist’s office. The dentist was Chinese. His daughter attended school with me. Anyway, this story is not about Chinese dentists and their daughters but about my granduncle and how he learnt Japanese. 

            The story he told went like this: He was a very young recruit in the army of the Indian Empire on his first mission, employed in Burma, fighting the Japanese, since Britain had declared war on the Nazis and the Japanese. Early one morning around dawn, while everyone was asleep, a Japanese platoon (or paltan, the hindi term my granduncle always used) attacked his paltan and killed off all the soldiers. Granduncle survived because like a good Hindu he had arisen at 4 and at 4:30 when the attack was taking place was 100 yards away, lightening his bowels.

Upon discovering the loss of his party and the fact that he was quite lost in the jungles of Burma, he set off on his own. Within the day, he was taken Prisoner of War. His captors were about to kill him, when the officer, the leader of the paltan called him into his tent to try and get information out of him. Stepping into the tent, my granduncle gesticulated at how cold it was in the tent and at a wound the officer had in his leg.

Using his charm and ingenuity, my intrepid relative bought time by preparing a healing poultice for the officer’s wound, using his knowledge of Ayurveda and the local plants and herbs. He also suspended his death sentence by showing the officer and his men how to use locally found material to stuff their blankets in the certain way so their makeshift beds were more comfortable. (Or so he said). He said that he really did not feel any anger or hatred for these fellows, not even as much annoyance as he had felt for those whose war he was fighting. He did not feel like he was betraying anything making himself useful to them as a odd-jobs man. 

He was an official prisoner of war for eight months, although he said, when he told the story, that he really was a prisoner of war for about four hours, a useful enemy for two weeks and a not-enemy-but-untrustable-friend for over seven months. They didn’t let him fight but they also actively did not let him die and they who had been his oppressor’s enemy stopped being his enemy although he had never really seen it that way before anyway. When the platoon was moving out of the area, they let him go, with good wishes, smiles and two days supply of food.

             Konnichiwa! Konbanwa! Gohan! Hai! Agemasho! Yosh! Gambarimasu! To-u! Granduncle would rattle off the 8 words of Japanese he remembered from those eight months. He could not, when asked, remember the names of any of the soldiers in that Japanese paltan or how he eventually found his way home to safety.