P. S… The One About The Bear
And The Ambulance
Nicholas Tomalin
Probably the oddest story was of the bear in the ambulance on the railway bridge. Major Suri, however, had other good ones. For instance, the Pakistani regimental leopards were kept in a cage and fed each evening with innocent, freshly beheaded Bengalis. One for 8 each leopard. rushed in by jeep from the local marketplace like lobsters to the Ritz. Or there was that padlocked room, which the major described as containing 150 Bengali ladies “of indescribable filth. stench, and degradation.” Near the large brass padlock which imprisoned them was a shelf. On the shelf was key. Any Pakistani officer in that unit – which Major Suri didn’t precisely identify -could at any time open the padlock, “wreck his beastly satisfaction” on the prisoner of his choice, and then depart. Army regulations demanded only that each officer replaced the key after use.
Major Suri can go on like this for hours. He has disemboweling stories. bayonctting stories, raping stories. looting. shooting. and burning stories. There is enough truth in all of them to serve the major’s propaganda purpose. but after a dozen the mixed impulse to cry. giggle. and be sick and grow painful. Of all of them. The one he could never have invented, or embroidered is the one about the bear.
He kept it from us till late in the evening of our guided trip around the conquered territory. First he mustered us in Calcutta. then he drove us in neat formation eastwards past the refugee camps which are as terrible as ever but now scarcely noticed. then into liberated Bangladesh, In December it is very beautiful. Yellow mustard fields. young green rice fields. dusty yellow jute fields. Very flat. Like Norfolk in summer. Give or take a few hundred thousand palm trees. At the small town of Jhikargacha he halts us for two hours at the neatly dynamited roadbridge immortalized by the Indian colonel who pointed his swagger stick at it and bellowed : “Say what you will about your Pak, he does a topping blow job must have been there 15 hours, mascot of a craven cowardly regiment. One brave Indian officer slashed the twine from his jaws. Others freed his legs, They carried him back across the bridge. Now, he is at our mess, a trophy of war. He is growing slowly, happy and confident under tender loving Indian care. We shall not let him roam free, or, if he cannot -grow tame, we shall have to shoot him. We Indians are lovers of animals. We inherit it from the British tradition, perhaps.”
As Major Suri finishes his story we cross the border back into India, nation of animal lovers, and if the unnamed brigadier is to be believed – at present the one frankly expansionist military power in Asia. I ask the major if he thinks Bangladesh is a trophy that can be tamed, or will they have to shoot? But his attention is diverted by an advancing tank.
Reference: The Sunday Times, 19 December, 1971