Nowadays, everyone has a story to tell. Actors, chefs, domestic workers, porn stars, politicians, stand-up comics, spies, survivors of misfortunes—ranging from an unhappy childhood to cancer—are writing their memoirs.
Why are the lives of others, seemingly ordinary lives like one’s own, grist for the memoir mill? Partly because there is an innate voyeur in each of us; chiefly because, in this era of fake news, a memoir promises authenticity.
Retired army officer Naresh Rastogi, teaming up with author Kiran Doshi, has penned exactly this kind of a memoir in The Bugle Calls: A Life in the Indian Army.
Born in 1936 into an MES officer’s family, Rastogi’s childhood was spent in cantonments. His anglophile father rather hoped his son would join engineering, medicine or law. However, ‘What I was meant for was the army. All my life it had kept beckoning me.’ It wasn’t a bad choice. Aside from the adventurous life, the armed forces have always promised, the money then was good. ‘I would be getting Rs 350 per month, the highest starting salary there was in the country.’ At age 17, he joined NDA. The anecdotes from the defence academy days will resonate with everyone who was ever a military cadet. They read like ‘Humour in Uniform’: breezy, droll, ironical, with a good punch line. However, they also offer insights into the military tradition, inherited from the colonial era, that has transformed thousands of raw teenagers into disciplined, polished officers, confident and capable of leading men into combat.
In later chapters, the tone becomes more reflective. Commissioned into the Corps of Signals, and switching some years later, to the infantry (The Madras Regiment), Rastogi saw action in two important conflicts, both against Pakistan—in September 1965 and December 1971. Telling a true war story isn’t easy. What is told is, naturally, presented in the best light, the 20/20 vision of hindsight. What is unbearable, but sometimes equally heroic, is often never revealed. One has to strike a balance between what happened and what seemed to happen. This memoir succeeds in that by evoking the right sensory images.
There is the inherent drama, but also the confusion, not just of the ‘dust and smoke’ of battle, but of contradicting orders. In the account of the ’65 war, there are serpentine army convoys rushing to the border under the cover of darkness, but losing their way because all road signs have been obliterated—for security reasons. There is the ignominious tale of an officer who inflicts a self-wound to get out of the conflict zone, but there is also the cool courage of the legendary Abdul Hamid of the Grenadiers. There are ironies such as a brigade commander being congratulated for a great victory at Khem Karan and blamed subsequently, and rather unfairly, for a setback. These accounts, as well as those of Bangladesh
War, six years later, are candid, told with flair. They convey a strong sense of what war is really like.
A good memoir sifts the innumerable events that make up a life, threads them along with key themes, imbues them with feelings and emotions.
All this in a voice that rings true. Its chief attribute is that of drawing readers into a different world, and keeping them there—just like a good story. This is a story well-told.