Let Bhutto Eat Grass Read online

  Let Bhutto Eat Grass

  Shaunak Agarkhedkar

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  On Historical Accuracy

  A Timeline of Events

  Moving Forward

  Copyright © 2017 Shaunak Agarkhedkar.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of public figures, all names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Actions and motives that have been attributed to public figures in the interests of building a narrative are entirely the author’s creation.

  Connect with the author on Facebook and Twitter

  Facebook.com/LetBhuttoEatGrass

  Twitter.com/ShaunakSA

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1973730354

  Paperback ISBN-10: 1973730359

  Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by the author.

  For Shikha

  “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”

  —Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

  Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pakistan

  11 March 1965

  Salute the sappers, all you fighting men;

  All you great guns and tanks and lorries, bow!

  Bow down, bazooka, bayonet and Bren.

  Without the sapper, where would you be now?

  The bridge is broken, mines are in the hay.

  A thousand deaths are hidden in the grass.

  But here’s the sapper—he will find a way:

  And, you great guns, salute them as they pass.

  —A. P. Herbert

  11 February 1945

  Prologue

  1971, Moulvi Bazar (East Pakistan)

  Drawn with swift, practised ease, the seven-inch stiletto blade emerged from its scabbard with only the softest rasp that blended unheard into the noise of the rain. The soldier stood two yards away, his rifle casually slung across his back. He remained oblivious till the moment a heavy hand reached over his left shoulder and clamped across his mouth. The wet mud that coated it entered his nostrils, clogging them. As his head was jerked back and he lost his footing, the soldier cried out, but the only sound he heard was the sharp exhalation of his assailant. Whatever little training he had received before being rushed east to this post deserted him, and he clawed desperately at the hand that was suffocating him. Time seemed to slow down. He fell back, vaguely aware of a burning sensation at the right side of his neck. Then, a sharp jolt of pain shot inward, searing his throat and sinews. His eyes flew wide open, but all he could see were dark leaves and stars too bright to be real. He was on his back now, his limbs flailing, like a drowning man. The pair of legs that had wrapped around his waist pinned him down. Choking on his own blood, the young soldier’s lungs gurgled to clear his airway. By then the stiletto had driven forward remorselessly, severing the carotid artery. As blood supply to his brain collapsed, his dying scream emerged as an awful, sibilant hiss from the severed windpipe.

  Captain Sablok wiped the blade clean on his victim’s khaki shirt and pushed the corpse away. Rising to his feet, he sheathed his trusty stiletto with a satisfying click. He had spent the last four hours lying prone in the dark rice fields and watching the bridge, waiting for the right moment. It had taken forever, but at long last, the majority of the platoon had crossed over to patrol the northern side of the bridge, leaving only two soldiers at his end. Well, at least the wait had been worth it. He looked down at the corpse and spat in distaste. The soldier’s bowels had released as he died and the rancid smell of shit mixed with the coppery tang of blood still spurting from the severed carotid. Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long. Havildar Singh emerged from the gloom to his left and, catching Sablok’s gaze, gave a quick nod: the other soldier had been dispatched. Sablok watched as Singh then bent down and, grabbing a handful of hair to extend the neck, severed the dead man’s head with an indifferent slash of a machete-like blade to which the Mukti Bahini had introduced him. Sablok smiled. This action at the bridge had not been part of the original plan, but when he had proposed it, Singh hadn’t hesitated even for a second. They arranged the bodies such that they appeared to be resting against the trunk of the tree with their heads on their laps—Sablok’s grim joke. Then, the two men melted into the dark landscape to the east.

  Sablok and Singh were sappers with the Indian Army. They had volunteered, separately, after the extent of Pakistan’s genocidal campaign against its own Bengali populace became apparent. The first time they had met each other was at a ramshackle camp north of Agartala three months earlier, in May. Since then the two had infiltrated deep into East Pakistan half a dozen times. The first four missions had been aggressive; they had led a team of Mukti Bahini that had ambushed patrols and killed Pakistani soldiers. The last two missions had seen Sablok and Singh slip in quietly without any support to reconnoitre terrain. The current one, too, had begun as a reconnaissance mission. They had been charged with the responsibility of mapping the lay of the land, based on which the axis of advance would be chosen for the eventual Indian assault. Everything had been going as planned until the platoon of soldiers at the bridge they had been observing from afar caught a family fleeing towards India. The mother’s screams soon rent the air. Sablok and Singh couldn’t intervene: they were too far away and, equipped only with their rifles and side arms, there was no way they could have taken on an entire platoon. All they could do was grit their teeth as each soldier crested the elevated road, went down the other side out of their sight, and had his way with the woman. Sablok was no stranger to violence, having served with distinction on the western front in ’65. Even so, the gruesome accounts of brutality related by Bengali refugees who had crossed the border to camps in India had seemed to have a surreal, fictional quality that had kept them at a comfortable distance from everyday reality. Now, though, there was no avoiding what was happening in front of his eyes. A loud hoot grabbed his attention: a soldier put his muddy boot on the neck of the woman’s husband and began to slowly squeeze the life out of his battered body. Cheered on by his mates, the soldier would squeeze till the man was almost gone, then let go for a while before squeezing again. It reminded Sablok of a kitten tormenting a mouse and bile rose in his throat. Further down the road, a pair of soldiers had cornered a child of five or six years. The boy’s shriek was abruptly cut off when his distended belly was pierced through by a bayonet. The mother couldn’t have seen it from where she lay, but her agonised scream indicated that she knew. By then the father was dead of asphyxiation. The mother survived for another hour. That’s when he had decided. The men were in uniform—the dull khaki of the Pakistan Army—but there was no honour in what they had done. The hapless family deserved revenge. Some blood would have to be spilt. Singh agreed.

  ‘These aren’t soldiers, sir,’ he spat out. ‘They’re scum.’

  The impromptu mission had cost them precious time, though, and Sablok was keeping a close watch on the chronometer on his left wrist. Staying within two hundred yards of the Kushiyara River and wading through knee-high mud in rice fields, it had taken them nearl
y an hour to reach the Manu, a tributary of the Kushiyara that flowed from the south and impeded their way. A rowboat stood on the near bank, ten yards above the swollen river’s edge, exactly where they had been promised it would be. Battling against a rampaging current that sought to wash them away to the larger Kushiyara, they took considerably longer than expected to cross over and pull the boat up the other side. Both men were exhausted, but there was no time to rest. Two large swamps and certain death lay directly east of their position, so they headed south instead. Five miles from the large Pakistani garrison at Moulvi Bazar, they turned south-east, keeping as close to the edge of the Farahanga Beel as they dared, to avoid Pakistani patrols. They skirted Mathiura lake at 3:30 a.m. and found themselves, at long last, on solid ground.

  Sablok retrieved a map from his pocket and consulted it, taking care to remain flat in a depression in the ground. Their intended destination, the Kadamtala border, was nineteen miles away, a distance they were unlikely to cover in three hours. Rangauti was the nearest Indian border, just twelve miles from their location. But it was right next to two East Pakistani towns and would certainly be well-patrolled. The third option, of course, was to go to ground till dusk. He looked askance at Singh. In the summer of ’63, the importance of consulting Havildars had been relentlessly hammered into him and his mates at Doon until it was internalised. Havildar Singh was six years older than Sablok. More important, while Sablok’s professional life began at twenty-one as a Second Lieutenant, Singh had become a soldier at seventeen and had served nearly twenty years in uniform, the last ten devoted to keeping callow Second Lieutenants from getting themselves and their platoons killed.

  ‘Rangauti,’ Singh replied without hesitation, echoing Sablok’s own exhaustion.

  Bisecting the road between the towns of Bizli and Shamshernagar, they reached a point two miles from the border. It was just after 5:30 a.m. and the eastern horizon was lightening under a dark layer of clouds. They ran fast, each man scanning his own arcs for any signs of a patrol or border post. The terrain was flat and offered no cover. It was only a matter of time before they would be spotted. To the left, they saw the Manu river once again, slightly emaciated, thirty miles closer to its source. In the distance, they could make out the silhouettes of houses in Rangauti, almost within reach. Sablok’s lungs burned with the intensity of an overworked mortar tube. Singh was fifteen yards ahead of him, but beginning to tire.

  Sablok caught up with him: ‘I’ve seen Generals run faster, old man.’

  In response, the Havildar dug deep within himself and somehow found the strength to speed up. Moments later they heard the tell-tale high-pitched whistle of a mortar somewhere to the right. They dived to hug the earth. Fifty yards to the left, the ground exploded, deafening them momentarily. Within seconds, they were up and running again, brushing off debris and veering to the south-east to put more distance between themselves and the point where the mortar had landed. Another loud whistle and, once again, they dropped to the ground. This one landed further away, about seventy yards to the north.

  About five hundred yards ahead, they could see the meandering Manu which served as the border near Rangauti. Sablok threw off his rucksack. Every pound counted.

  Four hundred yards.

  A few huts came up on their right, concealing them from the mortar crew.

  ‘Drop the sack!’ he shouted to Singh.

  The older man heard him and cast it off. They were both going flat out now, carrying only their weapons, bayonet affixed to each man’s rifle and ready for anyone foolish enough to block their path.

  Three hundred yards.

  They were back in the open and, almost immediately, the screaming whistle returned, passing overhead to land some distance away. Sablok glanced up as he ran; Singh didn’t even bother to crouch, preferring to trust his judgement that the mortar crew were second-rate.

  Two hundred yards.

  Sablok could hear the river now, a gentle gurgle barely louder than his own breathing, the exact sound the young soldier’s drowning lungs had made as he lay bleeding from Sablok’s stiletto. Its bank was fifty yards ahead and, as the next inevitable whistle sounded, Singh reached its edge. The explosions were nearly simultaneous and the blast wave knocked both men down. Sablok was dazed; his ears rang loudly. There was blood streaming from his nose and right ear. He struggled to orient himself within the thick cloud of mud. Rushing forward, his body feeling no pain at all, he stumbled over Singh. The Havildar’s eyes were open and stared, his right leg had been blown clean off just below the knee, and Sablok could see a jagged white edge of the tibia poking through red flesh. Singh blinked, then scrambled to try and get to his feet. Faced with overwhelming shock, Sablok’s mind had shut down all thought and fallen back on the primitive, more dependable terrain of instinct. He hoisted Singh onto his shoulders and stepped into the current, his heart pounding deafeningly. The water was freezing and fast and, across it, he could see a patrol. Its soldiers took position to face him, but their uniforms and insignias remained unclear. Downstream the Manu flowed back into East Pakistan and headed straight for Sharifpur. Wading upstream was impossible, not with Singh weighing him down. Hoping the patrol that faced him was an Indian one, he pushed on, fighting the raging river. A mortar screamed past but landed a safe distance away. In response, another flew up from somewhere in front of him and headed towards Sharifpur, a warning that was promptly heeded. Four men rushed down the left bank and reached for him. He pushed the first one back in anger, then got a good look at his uniform; it wasn’t the dull khaki of the Pakistanis and the insignia sported the Sarnath Lions. The soldier was screaming at him. His words didn’t penetrate the fog of Sablok’s consciousness, but the Lions did. He handed Singh over to the care of two soldiers and leaned on a third for support. He made it across the river but collapsed before the steep slope of the far bank.

  A blur of field hospitals followed. They cut into Sablok’s left leg thrice, removing shrapnel from the anti-personnel mine that Singh had unwittingly triggered. The last of seven fragments was, the surgeon decided, too close to the femoral artery to operate; Captain Sablok would just have to learn to live with that souvenir from East Pakistan. A few days later, when Sablok emerged from the fog of general anaesthesia and grogginess, it was raining heavily. That night he experienced his first nightmare since early childhood, one of many to come about the bayoneted child and its parents.

  The next morning, he had a visitor; word had reached his handlers that he was out of surgery and conscious. The visitor was a new face but that didn’t bother Sablok: all spooks looked more or less the same anyway. The debrief proceeded well until they got to the point where the soldiers had discovered the Bengali family hiding in a grove about fifty yards from the road, waiting for dusk. After that, the next detail Sablok said he remembered was the first mortar whistling in; everything in between was blank. After half an hour of persistent probing, the spook sighed in disappointment. His callous expression rankled Sablok.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Havildar Singh?’ Sablok grunted through the pain.

  ‘Singh died a few minutes after you were rescued. The mine severed an artery. Without a tourniquet…’

  The words that followed did not register. Sablok could still see the spook’s lips move, but his mind seemed incapable of moving beyond the fact of Singh’s death.

  The spook reached over after a few moments and shook Sablok’s shoulder, bringing him back to the conversation.

  ‘Captain, we need to know what happened. Did you perform any reconnaissance at all on the mission? We could not find any maps on either you or Singh. Do you remember anything at all?’

  Sablok had suddenly tired of the whole affair and wanted nothing more to do with it.

  ‘I can’t remember what happened,’ he said, speaking slowly and enunciating each word. ‘But I might remember key features about the terrain.’

  For the first time since
his arrival at Sablok’s ward, the spook’s expression changed, relief apparent on his face. He retrieved a series of maps from the briefcase along with a pencil and held them out for Sablok, but the injured man made no attempt to take them from him.

  ‘Havildar Singh’s son is in high school, I think. Singh had hoped that he would grow up to be an officer in his own regiment,’ Sablok said, his eyes locked on the spook’s. ‘Since Singh died doing what you asked him to…’

  The spook sighed. It seemed exaggerated to Sablok, but he said nothing.

  ‘We don’t react well to blackmail, Captain.’

  Sablok nodded and managed a half-smile, half-grimace. Moments passed with each man trying to stare the other down. Finally, the spook returned the maps and the pencil to the briefcase and left. He came back the next day carrying a letter for Sablok.

  ‘Havildar Singh’s son will be cared for,’ he said.

  Sablok read the letter and smiled despite the pain in his leg.

  ‘Do you still have those maps? I’ll need the pencil too,’ he said.

  That evening Sablok asked the doctor for a prognosis. The sharp pain that intruded into his consciousness, despite what the nurse had assured him was the recommended dose of morphine, carried within it the possibility of terrible news of his own.

  ‘We’ve had to cut away parts of your muscle tissue, Captain. Besides, the fragment that remains is worryingly close to an artery. I’d recommend a desk job from here on.’

  The surgeon was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Corps, and it did not behove a mere Captain to dispute his assessment.

  ‘What if you take the leg off and fit me with a prosthetic, sir? Soldiers have served with artificial limbs.’

  The surgeon’s eyes narrowed. ‘You want me to take your leg off?’

  ‘Havildar Singh lost his life, sir. A limb seems trivial against that.’