COAST TO COAST : THE GUARDIAN ANGEL WHO SAVED MY LIFE
' when i finally decided to sit and record my memoirs my scars had already healed ... or so I thought
its a journey backwards .. it always is for everyone who has waited long enough .. without much hope ..but pretending that someday her hopes would be realized.
for me its not a journey.. its story of a life time.. and finally am prepared to trace my footsteps back into the past which left many a shell of themselves.. and me , well ... it left me as I was... alone and lonely..
but just added a pint of pain ..
I was living with my parents at a small town very near to the indo chinese border . I was christened lakisha and was was in my last year in med school. i never had much ambition in life.. wanted to be doctor and serve the people ..that was it.
my people in my village were extremely poor.. that was partly why I chose to be a doctor when my parents wanted me to pursue engineering.. a very radical thought in those days.
anyway I wanted to come back to ferlung.. and be the local doctor there.. nothing more and nothing less
but how things change quickly.. and without warning..
I had never been very religious.
raised a protestant i was never much interested in services and sermons.. and found them vaguely disconcerting... all the talks about angels and demons...
but I believed in goodness.. and recognized it when I saw one...
I remember our local baker giving free breads to beggers every day ..for 20 years ..never missing a single day..
that was goodness..thats how god operated.. he did not need a priest or a minister to do good.. and I wanted it to stay that way.
but things donot go the way you want.. time takes its own course .. and there is hardly any mortal who has the power to control it...I learnt that with a bitter regret.. becos what followed September 1966 - transformed my life forever.
I had by then graduated and was all set to set up a practise in my village when the sino indian war hit ...
i was apolitical.. but i did not want poeple to die on the war front.. china was in need of doctors to save injured comabatants..whatever that meant.. and it took me no time to enlist.
I was against war.. and more so now.. cos i saw the brutality .. as an insider.. I saw them dying.. all the screams..
I could not help them all.. and was forced to see many .. many dying in my own arms.
but that was a tiny part of it.. thats where my own story begins...
I was in a midst of a major operation when lt tina lung came marching in to announce that an indian battalion had just surrendered and they were bringing them in.. somehow i could hear a faint note of pride in her voice..which for some reason i laothed....
the same night however things began to unfold ... and my own life fell aprt.
it all started with a blood crdling haul.. i could not ignore the intensity ..and went out to ask a soldier what was happening..
he gave me this awful smirk ..telling me it was one of the pow..prisoner of war screaming.. he had been shot and wounded ..I was furious.. i asked him should not i go and treat him.. was i not a doctor? his reply? well he just laughed in my face and went away...
the screaming continued all through the night .. I could not take it anymore and went to the camp anyway.. pretending I had the orders to do so..
it was insubordination on my part.
but I was a doctor first and a soldier later.. and I had taken the hypocratic oath.
the guy was blooding.. he was almost dead. i did not know what to do.. was it too late ? i kept praying to god i did not believe in while i performed a surgery without an anesthetic...
i had no idea when his condition stabilizes but at the carck of the down his scareams muted...
i was terrified .. i did not want anyone to see me..
then he opened his eyes..he had blues eyes..unlike any indian i saw ...
he looked more foreign than ever.
i did not catch what he said..but i knew i would come back to see him each day despite the obvious risk that was involved in the act.
i came back the same night.. this time he was awake and shacked..
he asked me my name.. and was surprised when he found out I was a soldier.. technically a doctor yet..and not a gaurdian angel
his name? well its irrelevant somehow.
I returned for a third time and many more after that.. always on the stealth so that noone could see me... and we talked..
no ....he talked, i listened..I was much of a conversationalist anyway.
slowly the war came to an end .. India had surrendered and demanded a ceasefire.. it was a chinese victory.
I remember the night when I crept into the pow camp and found it empty and in my heart i knew what it meant. I did not ask anyone about them.. somehow I wanted to keep a faint bit of my hope alive.
my life changed in more ways than one.. no sooner the war dragged to a close the news of a pow being treated without authurization came out...
my doctors and paramedics were questioned and detained without trial.. I was one of them too
I held my tongue.. confession meant death and I was not prepared to die but no good deed GOES unpunished ..I spent the next several years in detention camp until the govt decided to let the pow go.. I was free to go as well. it was almost a decade later.
I had spare time brooding.. and imagining our lives together.. which was impossible.. yet felt so true.
not often I fell in love.. that too with a prisoner of war..
I kept the hope alive.that i would see him again.. and he would remember me..
days went by.. the millenium ended.. and still no signs of him..
I was 25 when the war happened am now almost 75 .. old ..my memories jarred and faded..
I felt it essential that I should write it all down.. this time without expectation.
but things change ... and they always have something unexpected for u
it was my 75th birthday .. and my god daughter was kind enough to remember how I loved to readshe presented me a book by an indian soldier , a war veteran from sino indian war... the title was ---- ' the gaurdian angel who saved my life'