New Delhi, Nov. 17: Samir Bhattacharya was a cadet in the National Defence Academy (NDA) in Khadakvasla, Pune, when one day he telephoned the Southern Army commander's residence, also in Pune, and asked his daughter for a date.

The girl not only refused; she complained to her dad.

The furious general ordered that the cadet, who had such temerity, must be traced and punished. The call was traced to Bhattacharya's squadron.

A system of collective punishment is often followed in military academies, and the squadron was asked to file out as its commander went around quizzing each cadet.

When he came to Bhattacharya - Shomu to his friends - the squad commander asked: "Tell me, is she good-looking?"

Ashok Luthra, a contemporary at the NDA, today recalled that Shomu let his guard down.

"No, Sir," he replied, and was caught out.

That was in the 1950s. More than 60 years later, Brigadier Samir Bhattacharya displayed the same candour, say his friends, in his magnum opus, a 3,770-page epic in six volumes called Nothing But!

"I believe I will tell nothing but the truth. That is why I have called the book Nothing But! , and obviously Indian publishers were initially nervous, with one wondering 'kitaab nikaloonga, jail jaaoonga ' (if I publish the book I will go to jail)," Bhattacharya says.

Nothing But! , published in the UK but with the first volume now reprinted in India, spans about 120 years of contemporary history of the subcontinent, from the time of the beginning of the Great Game - when the British began sending expeditions north of Kashmir in the 1870s to probe Russia's presumed expansionist aims - till the year 2002, months after the December 2001 Parliament attack.

While many of the events are descriptions of historical fact, Bhattacharya has woven fictional narratives of eight families through them. The families originate in different parts of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh but the stories hover around Jammu and Kashmir - India's and Pakistan's intractable territorial issue.

The characters are also informed by real persons, through shared experiences or names, though the author does not link them to real names: among them Ronen Sen, who retired as India's ambassador to the US and was one of the architects of the India-US civilian nuclear deal.

One of the characters in the book is named after Sen, who also went to the same school as Bhattacharya - St Vincent's in Pune - and who also served in Russia, first when the author was going through a course in Moscow, and then again as the Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union as the cold war was unravelling. But the character named Ronen Sen does not quite hold the offices that the real Sen did.

"I happen to know Shomu for a long time," said Sen at the book launch today. "We met in Moscow in 1968 when I was in my first assignment."

Around the same time a group of Pakistani army officers was also attending the course to which Shomu and his colleagues were assigned. But the Pakistani officers left before the course was over because of developments back home. Among them was an officer with whom Shomu was very friendly - Aslam. In his story, there are at least two Aslams who figure.

Bhattacharya, a veteran of three wars (1962, 1965 and 1971), says he never managed to trace Aslam. But there is an Aslam who figures as a witness to the events leading to the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979.

Among the most intriguing of the stories - and there are some veterans of the Indian army who draw parallels to a real-life situation - is of a Muslim man born a Kashmiri and a Bengali Hindu woman.

The man, orphaned early, is brought up by Punjabi family friends and grows up to be an Indian Army officer. He meets the Bengali girl and they fall in love but have to keep their marriage a secret.

Soon he is sent to Kashmir, by when she is pregnant. During hostilities with Pakistan he leads a commando action in enemy territory, carries out his assignment but loses his men.

He decides not to return to India for fear of being branded a traitor because of his religion. The Indian government declares him dead, killed or missing in action, and declares a posthumous gallantry award. The man masks his identity and goes on to, first, join the Pakistan Army and, later, become a diplomat.

Thirty years later he is posted to Moscow. His Indian counterpart is a Punjabi lady. Through a talisman he digs out of his belongings, he tells the lady he is her long-lost husband. She tells him she too hid her identity and, leaving their child in the foster care of Punjabi friends, had adopted a Punjabi identity herself.

By then it is 2002, three years after the Kargil war, when Indian and Pakistani armies are massed eyeball-to-eyeball on the border once again.