Who planted blossoms in the belly of the crater? Who slapped the breath out of the pirouette of spring? The crater blew, and all turned to cold ash. The spring abandoned what still stirred in its writhing being, spread-eagled on the high rock.
They were a sight, such a sight you’d never want erased. They were the closest thing to what we do to ourselves. Bring the formaldehyde in monumental floating gallons! Bring on the glasses and goblets! Let’s drink to the bells of hell.
The call has never fallen a decibel within me. Not that I have answered it but occasionally; but never that it has lost its will to woo. It works in yawning boomerang loops in those rarefied skies, across and around the brows of the heavens — slo-mo, stratospheric, infrasonic…whoop… whoop… whoop…whoop… whung… whungg, whangg… whhanggg… thwack! There. Landed. Cold and ionised around you. The call. Come.
I went and went and went again, but I never went enough. And each time I went I sensed the place, the look and the air of it, and the touch and the feel of it, altered in ways that had rendered it less of what had taken me there that first and cursed time.
That lofty table, monstrous and at once magnificent, lay dismantled, a cosmic lego masonry taken apart and put back to box. Stolen away by sweet treachery, that grisly knockout hunk, almost too handsome to fit into eight-lettered handsome, and replaced by a masquerade — beauty, arrogant and audacious, shamming afore and installing herself as inheritor deity — an impostor if there ever was one, an effrontery of an anti-memoir. As if it ever could efface and squat there, centrestage, unaware, as always, it is the most passing of things, such a thing is beauty.
I went to see the pegs of soldiers’ tents still knocked into the earth, the securing ropes long loosened, the tarpaulin blown. I would have imagined the remains of shattered ribs of artillery tyres dug into the ground. I went past a vacancy where once stood a little canteen of ramshackle corrugated sheets — transistor cells, cheap cigarettes and bidis, chai, a musty slice of bread if you were fortunate. And always, jawan chatter — a bachelor’s cheerily mocked slipstream dream, a newlywed jeered to blushing, backpacks of drudgery, distances to trudge, let’s just walk on, fellows! I went high up to revisit an observation post and saw none; last, it had been sawn in two standing halves by a shell from across; a causeway washed its shallow grouting. It was gone. In my iris the flambeau of a distant peak, a lofty snowtop ablaze with gunfire. I imagined a scree of crooked shards of lead and iron, shovelled as memorial — “Please keep off the shrapnel.” Or a cascade of pack mules lumbering down the peaks, bodies of soldiers and soggy worldly goods wrapped across their scrawny backs. A stretcher trundled off the hillside, a punctured drip-line hanging by a tree, no longer of any use to anyone.
Would there once be a canvas, stretched out against the cumulonimbus skies, wrought with the erasure of beauty and the reclamations of verity? The morning air was thick with pungent gun smoke and the hillside was littered with the debris of a harsh night: hollow brass gun shells, fatigued, soot-ridden gunners sprawled in their pits, the earth lacerated with the heels of field guns that wouldn’t stop to fire. The sun broke and you couldn’t tell the plateau’s fleeting mists from the remnants of saltpetre.
There was that night, long ruptured. I lay across the narrow spine of a culvert in a nowhere village. Sanjak, was it? Sanjak.
A gurgling stream beneath, the surround-sound of apricot orchards rustling in the dark breeze. The shells were little lights silently leaping into the sky and mingling with the stars. From the left and from the right, across unetched frontiers in the hollows high above. A planetarium reverie. The luminous sky lay blistered by silent assault and its counter, a sky swilling with smoke and phosphorous, so far away you could only smell the sweetness of apricots ripening as you watched. It was almost too lyrical to be a war. If you’d been into the Yuriyatin of Boris Pasternak or David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, you’d probably have heard the distant melancholy strum of Lara’s Theme.
I saw straight and zig-zag lines of beaten tarmac, and chin-up walls of sandstone. I saw spit-and-shine polish and glinting granite. I would have imagined Stefan Zweig’s rasping imagery of the serial horrors of early and mid-20th century — the pale horses of apocalypse. I saw shiny boots; nobody gets to wear shiny boots on a warfield. Memorials often fail upon their purpose to memory. Memorials are grand. Wars aren’t.