Cheetah
This battle was old school human-wave. How do I know? I’ve read one too many War novels. I was not one for the Army. I was one of the “Torchy” types, as my squadron seniors in Academy called me. Torchy: meaning those cadets who wear the Torch badge of Academic excellence for the squadron over their Khaki uniform. The Unicorns of the Army. The Readers.
Yet here I was.
“On one side lies Point 5140, and then a ridge that descends and climbs into Tiger Hill.” The General who had walked into the CO’s tent said. He had a big moustache and veined bulging eyes. You could tell he hadn’t slept better than us. The brass had been caught sleeping before. The war was going badly.
“Tololing top offers us both vantage and access to them via the spurs and ridgelines”
He did not mention the National Highway to Siachen. The Economics and Strategy of War was for Staff not Army grunts.
Why am I in the Infantry? Why not in the Artillery like the Bofors Unit being towed through the moraine behind our camp?
My father, a small hotel owner in the hills, thought he had caught me reading a romance novel one of the foreign guests had left behind. I was glued to Matterhorn. I was 15.
Second Lieutenant Mellas was a Princeton graduate and he chose the Infantry to fight in the jungles of Vietnam.
You don’t join the Airforce to change the tyres on Jets. You don’t join the Army to shoot a 40-calibre howitzer from miles away: you join the Airforce.
The Army is where boys join to live an ideal of being a man. To do things the world says are uncharacteristic of you. Impossible things. I learned this in my third term, when I lifted the boxing championship for my squadron.
“Your objective, gentlemen, is to take the top before dawn break tomorrow. You will be provided Artillery cover. Any questions?”
“No sir.” We clipped. The tactical orders were later repeated by the CO. The officers dispersed to their Platoons to break the orders down further. The instructions became terser the lower it was relayed. More clinical. Yet my Jawans knew what this was about. The Grenadiers had been cut down by fire the previous day. Their officer had attained martyrdom to capture a spur before they were pushed back trying to retrieve his body.
I saw only their gaunt moustached faces and glimpsed the light in their eyes that seemed to shine like Ushas shone in the beginning of dawn, with the same light.
Dawn on us with prosperity
O Ushas, Daughter of the Sky.
Dawn with great glory, Lady of the Light.
Dawn Thou with riches bounteous One.
There was no fear. There was Josh. There was the spirit of 2 Rajputana raring to go with the morning that had lit up the snowed spurs of the peaks around us in molten gold, and was going to wash over the Camp in another hour.
Tololing shone right above us in a golden light, as we packed our gear and began to assemble in a file before the quartermaster.
INSAS. Canteen, Grenades, Patkas. I gave them a choice of the Self-loading rifle because there were reports of the INSAS jamming from amongst the survivors of the Grenadiers who had scaled the ice wall the night before. Most of my men picked the SLR in spite of its slower fire rate. The 7.62mm round was legendary in the Army for its power that could cut through ice or rock. I could trust my men even with a knife as long as one edge was not blunt.
I also had one Light Machine Gun and one Carl Gustaf in the platoon, which would be carried by the tagda OG types, if and when I needed to rain hell. I packed the INSAS for myself.
I gave the men another choice: extra rations or ammunition. Every one of them picked the extra ammunition. The climb was hard. We could carry only so much but had to carry enough as no vehicle would supply us.
The whistle was blown and we began the march. I led the way up the stream, where it cut into the sand and rock. We began climbing as the morning light began to spread down the slopes, in full view of the enemy on the heights above. We knew they knew, because of the ranging shots from their artillery beyond the Line of Control had landed near the camp.
The surprise had been lost the night before with the Grenadiers who made it to the bunker at the end of the first rock wall. We would be the next human wave. And there would be one after us if we failed to take the top before dawn break tomorrow. Orders were to do or die. It was that simple.
Veer Bhogya Vasundhara
The brave shall inherit the earth. That was our regimental motto. Did I tell you, we were not trained in Mountain Warfare? We are like the Grenadiers: regular Infantry. So even if we could pack ice-climbing gear, it would be of little use to us.
The Academy had killed my internal monologue by the third term. Like sandpaper on tender skin, rubbed until it looked like leather on standard Army boot that had to be spit polished for inspection. All of them the same. Yet all of them perfectly shining.
In the later years as a Young Officer, I had more spare time than I had in years, and the Reader often sprung like the pink flower I saw on the way up. It was frozen. I saw it being crushed under the boots of the file after me. I was also their Platoon commander. My monologue was necessary: it was the Hosh to their Josh.
I remembered how the flower would thaw in the sun before freezing again in the extreme cold of night. We had thermals under our fatigues and gloves to stave off the frostbite that follows the evening.
After an hour of an endurance march, we reached a wall, where the stream we had followed became a water fall. I checked the firmness of the slope. It was loose shale, so I decided to scale it first till where the water dropped. I raised my head carefully above the ledge. There was nothing but a fissure, before another slope which could be scrambled on all fours over the grass. I gestured to my Platoon, and they climbed after me into the cramped space.
We got over the slope, hunched forward with our packs, and used our hands on the gravel and grass. We avoided the looser rocks. At its end we saw one last tree, to which we tied a rope to drag the machine guns so the tagdas, who were the last to arrive, could scramble on all fours, like the rest of us.
Beyond this new ledge, there lay a treeless, grassless, cratered rock face with the peak of Tololing towering in the sky. A desert moonscape. Our breathing was harder. The air was thinner. This was not a place of life.
But the Company Commander of the Grenadiers had been martyred at 12,000 feet. Suddenly, the thought seemed impossible to me. It was like a hot flash. I remembered falling into my mother’s lap as a child. It was a brief moment of weakness. Maybe one single laboured breath. I knew because none of the men noticed me, nor paused behind me. I plodded on making a path out of the scramble of loose shale, gravel and often jagged rocks that could snap your ankle if you pulled a fall between them with the weight of your pack dragging you on the men behind. There was no path here marked by man, not even the droppings of a goat.
We finally came onto a gentler slope, where there were banks of permafrost and snow that never melted, and fed the stream we had followed here. Yet even here the sun felt hot in our thermals soaked with sweat. It was not the sun of life. It was the sun that scalds your skin and blinds your eyes when you get too close to looking upon its face.
Vishram. I ordered my men, as we crouched in the shade of a field of boulders, the rare feature which would provide us cover in this grassless, slippery ground.
The canteens came out even before they fell to the ground. These were tough men. I had pushed them hard before this stop. I had to make time before the final climb would grind us down. Tololing top was looming in view, looking menacing; a mangle of stone giants, breathing down a cold wind onto our faces to compete with the harsh heat.
I peered behind the boulder with my binocular looking up the stony shoulders of the ridgeline ending in Tololing top. The Artillery spotters had noted a few thousand feet above the boulders we lay crouched behind, was another boulder bank being used as a bunker. The Company Commander of the Grenadiers had stormed it and claimed it with his life before his men were pushed back by enemy re-enforcements from bunkers further above it.
The enemy had secured the Mountain like a circular citadel with layered inner walls made of granite.
There was no more Internal Monologue, for I spotted nothing of beauty between me and the boulder bank. I knew our dead lay there, unclaimed in that space. Beauty may have been there but I had been trained all my adult life, like a war horse for this endurance run and could search only for the finish line.
The one emotion I felt was a vague frustration at the boulder fields being indistinguishable from being a make-shift bunker made of rocks and sandbags.
Northern Light Infantry they were called. Tribal boys who had grown up in the Karakoram. This was their turf away from turf.
We Desert men had to surprise them from another path.
Bravo Platoon spotted Shriman
My Subedar shouted. I turned and saw men clambering up antlike on the slope we had left below.
Bravo was led by my senior from the Academy. I turned my Binocular and spotted him carrying the LMG, breaking protocol as an officer. Very O.G — Olive Green of him.
Radio Subedar sahib
He turned the dial and I watched the column stop below me as he muttered Alpha to Bravo
Lieutenant Saakar Mishra Sir this is Thakur from Alpha platoon. I said, my neck twinging slightly from amusement.
Since when are you not a Charlie, Thakur?
He joked about our Academy squadron, which was known for its physical prowess, while I was not. Mishra was my senior by two terms. In the Academy that distance was greater than the distance between Gods and Men, for the Gods do not have such power over men’s lives as senior cadets have over juniors. In the actual Army he held the same Rank as me.
Once a Cheetah, always a Cheetah sir.
I spoke. I used to hate this bastard’s guts. Saakar Mishra. Squadron Cadet Adjutant. Wolf amongst sheep. He had a penchant for picking on the weaklings, the bookish types he thought did not belong in Charlie — being an OG (Olive Green) PT stud, an inter-squadron Ironman Champion, a mascot of the mighty Charlie Squadron whose standard was the leaping Cheetah.
I can’t forget how Mishra made me roll in the dry gutters of red deccan mud before evening muster could assemble, specially seeking me out with his evil glowering eyes that had softened only after he grew the Rajputana regimental moustache and earned a commission. He was more famous now for over-speeding and getting in trouble on his red Royal Enfield. The Academy is a far more frustrating place than the actual Army, where the Cadets learn to relax for the first time in their adult lives, and Mishra had never seen outside of a Sainik School since he was an infant.
Jitna Ragda, Utna Tagda Thakur
I smirked as he jogged my memory. The rascal had treated the whole squadron to cake when I had lifted the Boxing trophy. I learned that day that the monster, Saakar Mishra, had a heart.
Crib to me. How hard is it? How is your squad getting along?
I am fine sir. Please take cover which we mark for you. It is mostly exposed territory from here to the top. We will attempt the Adhikari Point through a glacial channel on our east side.
I said referring to the first bunker that had been named after the Martyr from the Grenadiers.
Did you spot Adhikari Point?
No sir, I would need your assistance. I said, he was my senior after all. Any other officer would have asked for my court martial. For the next five minutes he guided me in spotting it with the Artillery spotter charts he had kept, while I had relied on my memory of the tactical orders the CO barked in the tent.
Through my Binoculars I spotted amongst the indistinguishable mass of grey stone, inter spread with snow banks, a green flag with a moon crescent. Under my sweat-soaked thermals a heat seared through my chest that then made the hair on my arms holding the scope rise.
Subedar Sahib
I ordered. Radio for artillery officer.
I relayed what I say over the radio and acted as their spotter.
Negative for activity. Location marked by an enemy standard. Their flag.
We heard loud thunder, which echoed up the valley. Booming of the Bofors. Then seconds later the shriek of shells streaking on the rocks. Then the earth shook. The boulders seem to quake.
We set out on cue, not wasting time. I moved forward, holding my patka with one hand, and INSAS in the other, running through the open ground until we reached the gully. We began to scamper through its rocks and gravel banks which shook and resulted in rock falls from the shelling above us. By pure chance, the rocks fell into the other gullies, following the laws of Physics, which could also have pushed them into ours. The Ushas watched us over. The Sun shone bright on the valley, but it was mostly shadowed in the gully we climbed. The stones which had been cold to touch, were frozen here.
My machine gunner slipped and dropped into a gorge still holding the LMG like a sacred talisman. He was the star Hockey player of our Regiment. Yet I could not be sure if he had not fallen from exhaustion from carrying the weight I asked him to bear. I ordered the Radio operator to relay the news of his possible resting place. I could only spot the crevasse thousands of feet below, below whose melting ice flowed a stream in which he may be lying broken and embalmed. We would mourn our comrade the rest of my life but not now. I calculated the loss of the LMG was graver.
Above us, the barrage had dropped to a silence befitting the death zone, with only the whistle of a chill wind, hardly distinguishable from the wheezes from some of my exhausted men. We could not stop here. The enemy was already given time to regroup.
The distant echoes of the bombardment had become a permanent memory in the gullies and crevasses of the mountain stone it had disfigured, when we pulled into the Sun at the top of the ascending channel which had been made by a tumbling glacier in another season or age. I peered above the last ledge, trying to spot the boulders with the flag. The disfiguration of the shells had confused the geometry of the place like the broken teeth of jousting stone giants but I had my bearings that we were in the approximate location.
Jawano, aage badho
I shouted in the direction of where I thought the bunker lay.
Raja Ramchandra ki Jai
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Raja Ramchandra ki Jai, they cried as they charged like rams under the weight of their packs, their SLRs pointed forward.
Bullets whistled. My radio man, a rifleman from a village near Bikaner, rolled over the rock. They had targeted him, thinking a Subedar would be leading the Platoon. I had removed my officer epaulets and had the Subedar remove all insignia, and save the INSAS, I was like all of my men.
One thing the firing did was make the direction certain in my mind. I asked my Subedar to provide cover fire. He ordered the Carl Gustaf poured on to a large twin set of grey boulders, set together with only a small gap, as if set there by giants in another time. The enemy’s barrel peered through the tiny gap and began thundering at the Carl Gustaf, whose carriers were pinned down.
I crawled forward on the cold, damp stone. Unpinned a grenade. Then lurched to my knees and shot for the gap in the boulders. I could feel the heat of the barrel, like a glowing coal in that cold space, as I dropped the grenade in the gap and crouched under the barrel where the rocks I hoped were thick enough to block all shrapnel. My ears were ringing and I could not hear the grenade go off. But the barrel went silent even as it continued to burn.
Subedar Bhanwar Singh, who was from Jaisalmer and whose eldest daughter had just been commissioned in the Army Medical Corps, did not wait for my orders. Before I could get on my feet, he had the flanked the boulders with the remainder of my Platoon. I joined after to see them scouting amongst what looked like a channel full of man-made debris and stone broken from the bombardment. Amongst them lay several bodies. Some covered in stone. Others without beards and in Indian Army camo. Grenadiers.
Jhanda gaade shrimaan
He asked me
Nahi Subedar sahib. Oopar hai hamare asli dushman. Nazar rakho agar reccon party bheje.
I was to be the Hosh to their Josh. The Grenadiers had been attacked by re-enforcements. The enemy’s radio was nowhere to be seen in the mangle of rock and flesh, and I assumed it lost.
Our own radio passed to a new operator. We contacted Bravo, who would retrieve our fallen men and bury the dead, leaving behind one rifleman at Point Adhikary as a liaison, and also to haul back our martyred to what remained of the bunker.
We had to push ahead. Those were our orders. We were the tip of the spear; Bravo our relief. I allowed my men a stop to re-sort their ammunition and load up on the calories we would need for the harder push ahead.
Canned DRDO food, or Swiss Chocolates, which I was told are best because appetite gets suppressed at higher altitudes. I had lost my own.
The Sun had begun its descent into late afternoon, when we re-started. I could not wait for darkness to hide us. Army Intelligence had said it was not sure if the Enemy had American night vision.
I would call for Artillery, I told myself. I was also afraid about my men lying exposed in the sub-zero cold with no night vision to guide us. I had also calculated we were in the last days of the waning crescent moon, and there would be near total darkness. Further, the enemy would expect us to begin our ascent at night.
More than anything, I could not shake off the feeling that we had been lucky with Point Adhikary
The glacial channel had allowed us stealth access to the precipice around the bunker, whose occupants had mostly perished in the Artillery barrage. They could have stepped out and pinned us in the narrow channel if there were more than a handful, or brave enough to step outside within range of artillery.
I looked up at Tololing top and realized how much harder the job would be from here. The distance was less than half a kilometre; we had climbed a lot more but the approach was steeper and over firmer rock, chipped and sharded by ice and wind. We would need to crouch and crawl from rock to rock. There was no surprise ascent, no gully, except a steep ascent from the east face, which we could not now take as it would mean descending down the mountain until the sun set. The Grenadiers would be attempting the east face during the night.
Regimental Honor required us take the top by morning as the Brass had asked us to do. Regimental Pride required us to take it before the Grenadiers.
I asked the men to prepare for the cold. Mix our rum rations in the water. Tuck the water canteens near the thermals so they did not freeze. Put on their gloves. So, we crouched beyond the ruin of boulders, crossing pockmarked sheets of ancient bedrock, which the artillery had cratered. Crawling in and out of the holes, till we spotted the next bank of rocks we could crawl to and finally crouch for a clearer look at the peak. I looked out in every direction to see if there was another bunker on the way to the top. Army Intel had said no. The same Army Intel which had said the first infiltrators were Mujahideen not Pakistan Army.
I could spot no bunker, only more rocks that could be makeshift bunkers. There was no green flag. There was no colour deeper than shades of grey and shades of white in this world. I gestured my men to begin crawling up the bedrock. The Sun was setting in the west and would soon drop below the mighty Tiger Hill, and just like that, the blessing of Ushas would abandon us.
The rock was getting colder and harder at the same time, or it was our exhaustion that depleted our vitality. The shale stacked atop the bedrock was frost-shattered at its edges, like chipped teeth on a decaying stone mass, making sharp points which hit our backpacks. We were making a riot of noise, as the gravel slipped and rolled beneath our leather boots, grating against the stone, and our heavy equipment dragged alongside. The only mask to our sound in this zero-zone, was the icy wind, which howled and soused over the ridgeline and cut straight through layers of our heavy clothing, embalming our skins in a deathly pallor.
The colour of our woodland camo masked us even less here against the grey rock. I felt less like Tanaji leading his men up Sinhgad, where Squadron Cadet Adjutant Mishra made me do several Punishment runs, and more like one of General Lee’s men at Gettysburg. Charging exposed at an opponent not just holding but entrenched at higher ground, not because I didn’t know better but because I had no choice.
But we drew no fire. The sun had now dropped behind Tiger Hill and shrouds of fog and darkness on the valleys below heralded an early evening. We stopped at where I thought there would be bunkers. But it was a barren stone shelf, almost cave like but not deep enough to be more than a ledge. We could rest our backs against it without fearing a free slide down into gorges now a mile below us.
A few riflemen asked the Subedar if they could smoke. It was getting cold. He glanced at me for permission. I could hear one of them wheeze and cough. But it was to get dark soon, and then we would be lights out. So, I allowed them to light one last cigarette. I am not the Medical Officer. Whatever lit a final spark in the infantry man. I did not ask them if they had a headache, or any other symptom. No one asked to relieve themselves, having lost more fluid in sweat. But I am not the Medical Officer. And there was no going back from here.
I radioed the camp asking for Artillery fire. I gave him the grid. We were ready to make the final approach.
We began to clamber up as the guns boomed. If they missed the grid, their shrapnel or the rocks, would shred us, who climbed just under the rings of suppressive fire. I had calculated that we could not take cover, because the approach over the ridgeline was too exposed and too steep, and the Artillery was our only chance at making progress without being taken apart like ducks in a row.
Thankfully the Artillery did not miss. It struck great shrapnel of fire and rocks a few hundred feet above us, which led to many rockfalls. The earth shook, and I knew it was Composition B: TNT blended with RDX, which creates sharp shockwaves of fiery expanding gas on impact. But we were able to crouch instead of crawl and that mattered most in gaining ground. The barrage was short, as I had requested. It ended just as we climbed into the grid whose stone had been riddled by metal and chemicals.
Then our luck ran out. I remember the moment, as the sky had turned to dark orange of twilight in a mangle of cloud. Just as we had crossed the exposed ridge into open bedrock again, my men began to fall. There was a rolling thunder of small blasts. We dropped to the ground on instinct, our guns to our side.
I watched a Rifleman, who hid behind a rock, shredded in bloody splotches through his jacket. High-velocity rounds. Heavy Machine Gun. Lying pinned on the bed rock, sprawled corpselike, and the laws of physics, were our only defence against this beast we had awakened. The kinetic rounds pierced through backpacks, sliding the men further down the rock. I was afraid it would light up the ammunition inside. We lay until the beast stopped breathing fire, to save its vitality. It knew there were more of us coming.
I dreaded looking back over the field of dead. But I spotted the Carl Gustaf handlers were safe, which mattered to our mission. Without a machine gun of our own, if they fell, we fell. The waning crescent moon, two nights before dark moon, I hoped, was our next best defence.
We lay there still as corpses. The waiting was drilled into us. Idle standing was an old Army drill; through rain and sun we stood on the concrete of the parade ground. Not a single one of remaining souls would move without my order.
The sky had turned to violet, from caramel. The stars glittered in the dark, the crescent moon would not rise till morning. It was a dusk worthy of a painter’s third-eye but the cold had come from all directions. From the rock under us, as if there was subterranean ice, and on the surface, we could see pale frost settle in the sharp rocky edges like a foam. Around us, the cold wind began hardening my nose and cheeks, and the skin between the patka and the thermal seemed deadened.
Cold’s bite seemed sharper now when the adrenaline was gone, as we lay like cold-blooded geckos native to the rock. I gestured for my Subedar and radioman with my hands to crawl closer to me. Then a light flicked as the machine gun opened again, and its sound in the thin, freezing mountain air, made a chest-rattling concussion that made our steel canteens shake, slamming off the steep granite faces, creating a rolling roar in the valley. The first time we were shocked, now its menace seemed fully revealed. Its tracer rounds leaped in the air, arcing over us like a fire-spitting serpent. Vritra, the Reader in me named it: the serpent coiled on the mountain, hoarding the waters, until Indra came for him.
Night vision. I wondered.
The tracers streaked like comets of melting copper a few feet above our patkas but they gave away the beast’s lair. The bullets came from a dark mangle of stone on the western shoulder, less than a hundred feet from the summit and too close to us to risk a precise Artillery barrage.
Subedar sahib. Aapko machine gun dikhi
I called out as the man, nearly two decades older than me, inched within earshot.
Ji Shriman. Aarambh kare
Thoda andhera hone do. Aap peeche jaake koi cover dekho, phir Carl Gustaf set karo. Jab ho jaye to nishana maaro. Mei west side se crawl karunga objective pe.
I asked the radio operator to call in Bravo company, and inform them of the Heavy Machine Gun, in case it outlasted us. The HMG rained burning brass a few feet over him. The young family man, still older to me, and who had just taken over as operator, held his nerve.
Likely, no Snipers. I asked him to relay back. I was setting up a section to provide cover fire, when we heard a hiss and saw the chemical sun illuminate the landscape like the break of a false dawn.
No Night vision, I barked at the radio operator, as the Machine Gun opened fire at my assembling section. It hit two men at an unfortunate angle. I watched as one of them flew from the ground, tumbled like a rock and vanished in the darkness below. The remaining men stayed still as stone but their eyes were moved with emotion, in the illuminating, sinking flare that was slowly sputtering in an orange-red light and dropping to be swallowed by the darkness like our fallen comrades.
I picked 3 other men to crawl up with me and assigned a section leader for the party that would provide covering fire. As we fixed our bayonets, the section fired back at the machine gun, absorbing the recoil in their shoulders, their thighs and legs slipped under them on the bed rock. The Machine Gun answered in its fiery metallic tongue pinging stone more than flesh.
We began to glide sideways in the commotion, towards the west. Thanks to the tracers, we knew the gun was pivoted away from us, chasing the section providing cover fire. I gestured to the men to get to their feet, when we found a stony ridgeline, broken here and there by bofors shells, giving us cover. The ridgeline led to the Machine gun nest above.
We were ambling up on the rocks, when there was another hiss and a magnesium flare went up in the air illuminating us. They could see us and we could see them. It was fired from a figure near the top of the summit, to aid the machine gunner in seeing. I lifted my INSAS but decided not to fire at him.
Get down I gestured and we crouched in a depression of hard flint crushed powder-like by a Composite B shell.
Nara-e-Taqbeer, yelled the man at Tololing top, waving a rifle to the sky. The answer came from the Machine gun nest. I heard two, maybe three voices as the muzzle flashed in between black granite humps. But we were close enough, and the spent brass from the Machine gun came rolling downhill to us, before it fell into the depths. We waited for the illumination to die. We had barely moved again when another flare hissed, and we dropped flat to the ground. I looked up and saw not one but three bearded men at the top, dressed in salwar kameez whose earth brown tones matched their background better than ours. The muzzles of what looked to me like Heckler and Koch rifles that Army Intel had reported, flashed on my men below who were answering with their SLRs.
Sir asked one of my men aiming his SLR at Tololing top. Abhi nahi, I whispered. We were a few dozen feet under the Machine Gun nest. Too close, too lucky, to reveal ourselves.
Just then a blast came, sounding like an artillery shell, and a big cloud of smoke shrouded us with the sound of falling rock. A HEAT round from a Carl Gustaf had struck the side of the Machine Gun nest and I could spot in the dark, what looked like sandbags roll over the ledge.
Raja Ramchandra ki Jai
I shouted as I lifted my INSAS and charged up the final few feet, taking long strides towards the bunker. The muzzles from the top flashed and my men fired their SLRs over my shoulder. I saw a bearded man fall sidewards and then drop down the ledge. I heard an anguished cry behind me and a tumbling sound. I did not look. My eyes were stiffened on the dark humps of the rock, scanning the black for the entrance to the nest. I could smell gunpowder, dampness of human fluids, and could hear a radio crackle. Like a blinded Cheetah, I honed into the bunker’s entrance with the singularity of my remaining instincts.
A man who was crouched over his dying mate, sprang at me. His salwar was blooded with shrapnel and broken granite. His nose aquiline like a vulture’s beak below grey-blue eyes. His beard was black as the night. I grappled this monster with my hands, forgetting my bayonet. Stripped of all distance, what remained of this cramped bunker became an arena of brutal, raw geometry. We fell to the stone, breaking my bones and shattering his but our hands on each other’s neck. I felt how much energy I had spent climbing. My enemy had only been shattered by a HEAT round, and he hauled my head onto the Machine Gun. My eyes went dark and my head felt hot against its iron. I knew what would happen next from instinct and memory. Pain would come a few minutes after. I had felt this before. In Academy Boxing matches. I heard Saakar Mishra say Once a Cheetah, always a Cheetah. I snapped a short hook directly into his chest. His choke on my head loosened. I gave him another hook, then wrapped my forearm around his throat, using all my remaining lower-body strength to slam him to the floor. There I lifted my freed arm into a fist and gave his head a concussive blow. He sputtered and slowed, and then stopped moving.
I lifted my INSAS and shoved the bayonet into his wind-pipe. His grey-blue eyes popped open, one final time; in them settling a light of the dying flare as he choked with blood, gasping for the thin air.
I then lifted the butt of my rifle, and smashed the feed tray of the Machine Gun with all my remaining energy. Outside the guns were rattling again and echoing through the dark canyons. I thought of my three other men. None of them had joined me inside the nest.
Gunner, report cracked the radio in the nest. Sab salaamat?
They heard the commotion. I was wheezing, my bronchioles inflamed for the first time in my young life. I hacked a cough like my grandfather in his final years. I felt my shins and my ribs were turning to ice.
Gunner, report It spoke again and I could hear the Heckler & Koch firing from its third dimension.
Vritra is slain. Gun is with 2 Rajputana.
For the first time, my Hosh lost to my Josh. The radio went silent. I took out my pencil flare from my jacket’s pocket and shot a red signal outside the slit in the wall for the barrel I had now disabled.
The sky was illuminated in many chemical colours, as I climbed out of the entrance to look for the men who had followed me. I could feel the frost on my ear again, when I heard bullets whistle and thud into the granite. I turned my INSAS in the direction of the top and blasted an automatic round. A massive, dull blow struck my torso, and I fell backwards, back into the bunker, as if kicked by a mule in my guts. The wheeze deepened into a death rattle and I felt breathless, like the enemy over whose body I crouched had felt. My lower body felt strangely heavy and disconnected from my heart that beat strongly, telling me I was not yet dead.
Stay strong champion.
I heard Saakar Mishra. In between there was a tiresome sleep, the sleep not of rest but of struggle. He was crouched over me, still holding a light machine gun. I felt a slap on my face. Then again, a dark wind-tunnel.
I remembered coming out of the tunnel, seized by extreme pain. I was shivering in a thermal blanket, woollens covering my face. But I was not where I had crouched, in the serpent’s nest. I was lying behind a giant granite rock that resembled an elephant without a head. I felt a field dressing around my stomach hiding something cold and painful still lodged inside me. I slipped back into the tunnel but its darkness was now splotched blood-red, as I slipped in and out of waves of acute pain.
The red was the light of the day. Ushas was in the sky again. I woke feverish but able to mutter. A field medic was injecting a shot of Morphine into my arm.
How did I get here? I asked him.
Bravo company sir, he addressed me, being an enlisted rank.
The objective is ours?
Yes sir, the objective is ours.
How about Alpha Platoon?
You must rest now sir, he answered.
The Morphine hit me right after it was injected. I dropped back into the wind tunnel, skirting above the waves of pain, which I could still sometimes feel.
I could not ask about Saakar Mishra.
I learned later that he had left his machine gun with another, to take me in a fireman’s lift, over the narrow ridgeline, to his waiting party. It was an offence on the edge of dereliction of duty. I also learned later that he had stormed the bunker at Tololing Top, sustaining bullet wounds. He passed on Tololing top. Once a Cheetah, always a Cheetah.
I learned later of my platoon. Somewhere in a Field hospital, a young Captain of the Medical Corps had received the telegram. Eight more of my men, including Subedar Bhanwar Singh had been martyred in the assault. I have the rest of my life to deal with my Internal Monologue; my costly mistakes.
I have read many war novels since. None of them has these men in it. So, I wrote this story, hoping you would remember them.
