We were youngsters when our country went through three wars within a decade. We were far from the country’s borders, far from the battlefields, far from all that blood and gore. What’s more, mass media didn’t exist in everyday homes to flash images into our safe little drawing rooms and make us live each awful moment again and again with stomach-turning and heart-wrenching intensity.
Each time, however, we lived fairly close to a ‘sensitive’ location: Once, the railway station and twice, the airport. It may not have been a real danger, but we believed we were especially vulnerable and were therefore quick to black out our windows and switch off all the lights when the air-raid sirens screamed. To be doubly sure, we also bunkered ourselves under a heavy dining-room table, somehow imagining that our roof of bricks and mortar may collapse, but that teakwood table would protect us!
It took a couple of blackouts and the discomfort of squeezing into that limited space to let the folly of our belief to sink in — and then, we just sat close together in the same room, as if our solidarity would provide protection from whatever was happening in the skies above. To distract us, Mother would tell us stories of Second World War movies she had seen from time to time, and thus, we heard names like Dunkirk, El Alamein, Tobruk, Midway, Pearl Harbor, Arnhem, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, Normandy and many others that do not come to mind easily now, and we developed a fascination for places and happenings.
Perhaps Mother thought all those stories would help keep our spirits up — and to this end, she varnished the horror, she gilded the hardships and she highlighted the love stories to the point where we wished we had lived in so ‘romantic’ a time in history.
When we reached college and set about getting an education, we finally came to understand what wars were all about: Both from our text books and from fiction. And we appreciated how Mother had tried to preserve our innocence and postpone reality for us by glossing over the cruelty and the losses and the sheer waste of human life in its millions.
Being on our own, fending for ourselves in sometimes difficult situations, and in general just growing up, had brought us to the stage where we could handle the truth of the mighty injustices of war.
But we still felt secure, firm in our conviction that the days of war were over and we had reached that stage in evolution where it would not occur again.
Thus, although much of our adult life was spent in military cantonments near the border and we listened to conversation all around us about soldiers, tanks, various weapons and their calibers, targets, firing, war ‘exercises’ and war ‘games’, we took it in our stride because we believed that all this was a great deterrent and no enemy, however close, would cross over and attack us.
It was only after we came to ‘peace’ stations and lived in ‘safe’ civilian pockets in different towns and cities that we started to get a taste of real life and the new world. For the idea and the face of war had changed — and was everywhere. The battlefield was no longer far away and long ago.
As we think back and appreciate Mother’s efforts to soften the blows of hard and horrific history, we are also forced to acknowledge that, then, sirens screamed and gave warnings of air strikes.
Then, there were battlefields and strategic ‘occupied’ areas — not terror strikes on any street or any building in any corner of the world and every person forever looking over his or her shoulder, wondering where the next ‘hit’ will be coming from.
Cheryl Rao is a freelance journalist based in India.
