Books: Plane Tales

AN AIRMAN'S SAGA
BY V. SUNDARAM
BHARATIYA VIDYA BHAVAN
PAGES: 247, PRICE: Rs 300

Those were the days when a Dakota trip from Madras to Delhi with the full load of eight passengers cost the then Madras government a tidy sum of Rs 420. Those were also the days when Captain V. Sundaram flew VIPs who were hardly conscious of their status. Thus he could write an indignant letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, when stopped at the gate of his home, and get a contrite reply from M.O. Mathai, Nehru's secretary: "The prime minister hopes that you will forgive him."

Sundaram was one of those naturals who was able to keep his plane, a Gipsy Moth VT-ABH, straight and level during his first flying lesson. This made his instructor ask him whether he had flown an aircraft before. He was lucky in that he had as his co-pilot his wife, Usha Sundaram -- one of the earliest woman pilots of the country.

Sundaram's hero is surely Sardar Patel, whom he flew all over the country, usually in the Dakota of Mysore's maharaja. The indomitable Patel was then at his last great act of service to the nation -- the integration of princely states with the Union of India. Sundaram's narration brings out the quiet courage and impish humour of the Sardar. "He (Patel) asked me how far Calcutta was from Gauhati. 'As the crow flies sir, it is 350 miles, but we have to fly around Pakistan.' 'What is wrong with Pakistan? Let's fly over it and see their country.' " The trembling pilot radioed to the authorities and received, to his immense relief, a message from Dacca: "Greetings from the government and people of Pakistan to Sardar Patel. Welcome to fly over Pakistan."

Sundaram's book contains many such vignettes but is clearly the work of a person not used to writing. His splendid flying days are narrated in a log-book language that tempts one to skip pages. However, as a record of the early days of aviation in India, it is welcome.

AUTHORSPEAK: PINKI VIRANI
Trauma Retold
Her soul mate is a woman rejected by life and death

Reading Aruna's Story by journalist Pinki Virani is like being stabbed in the heart with a knife that keeps twisting, again and again. Staff-nurse Aruna Shanbaug of King Edward's Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, turned 50 on June 1, 1998. The day coincided with the release of a book dedicated to her fearless spirit, her antecedents, her brilliance in the years before she entered the twilight zone and her fight for survival afterwards.

Aruna's Story is a minutely detailed investigative reconstruction of the life of Aruna, her journey from humble beginnings in the village of Haldipur on the Konkan coast, spurred by an aspiration to rise above her lot, to the success and happiness she was so close to. Till a gruesome quirk of fate -- a molestation marked by bestial violence -- left behind only a fighting spirit in a broken, brain-dead body. Cortically blind with an irreversible brain-stem injury, and yet mercilessly sensitive to pain. Virani's book has provoked varied reactions. Says she, "I have been accused of raping Aruna all over again since the book begins with the incident." Readers have called to congratulate her for a sensitive investigative effort and ended up sobbing over the telephone. Yet another person called and "told me it made her so sick that she threw up". Not surprisingly, Virani's book seeks to trigger a debate on euthanasia

For Virani, Aruna's Story was a book waiting to be written. Even so, when Penguin initially approached her for the book, she was looking for reasons not to do it. As she recalls, "Every obstacle on my path was miraculously being removed." Medico-legal files dating back 25 years rapidly reappeared. Police records were easily accessed: "It was as if Aruna was behind me all the time." First exposed to the case in 1984, Virani worked on the book "like a woman possessed". She began extensive investigations, interviewing approximately 120 persons, travelling to far-flung places, tracking down Aruna's family, matrons, nurses and any other person who remotely knew her.

"Writing the book has changed me," says Virani. "This may sound terribly retrograde, but I have woken up to the fact that a woman is the weaker sex. Whatever our mothers and grandmothers said was correct all along. It just takes one beast to push you into nothingness." From Aruna's tragedy, Virani now moves to a larger one. Her next book is on the "people who destroyed Mumbai", the city she so loves.

-Nandita Chowdhury