World War II days often come to mind and don’t seem so distant after all for old-timers. There was Uncle James, Chunu Chacha to the kids, who would go up the narrow staircase of his 1869 house and, putting his hand slyly up the opening in the tin canopy, deftly catch a pariah kite. He would bring it down, tie a piece of paper to its leg with the words “Hitler the Great/ was born in a plate/ in the year 1938” and release the bird, which would fly away into the trees in the adjacent Nawab Sahib’s kothi in Old Delhi much to every one’s amusement. Probably his dexterity helped him avoid getting pecked.
Those were the days of civil defence drills. Silent war movies were shown and red poppies distributed in November (on contribution basis) to mark World War I. The Taj Mahal’s dome was camouflaged with a scaffolding so that a jerry (slang for German soldier) could not drop a bomb over it, or so it was believed. When evening came there was a blackout and children doing their homework had to sit with a lantern around whose chimney brown paper was wound so that the light could not be seen from a plane. That was also the time when “Chirront”, a short, comical, sparrow-faced boy used to come in, followed by Indo-Turk brothers Iqbal and Mehfooz who would pull his leg for thinking that the daughter of his landlady at Ishrat Manzil had been locked in a room to prevent him from meeting her. Chirront, whose real name was Arshad Husain, later began styling himself as “Rev Kennedy” and his idiosyncrasies nearly led to the arrest of his father as he told the police that the old man was a Nazi informer.
The afternoons of the early 1940s saw a man coming on a bicycle to distribute British emblem flags and war pamphlets with pictures of wounded soldiers and Red Cross nurses. Also, depictions of bombed sites in Europe, Africa and the Far East, where the Japanese were fighting against the Allies. Anglo-Indian nurses were in great demand and among them was Dulcie Alexander, smoking a slim cigarette when she came on leave to visit her family. The locality boys used to think the “Lal Bibi” was a foreign actress in a skirt and blouse with bobbed hair, long legs and high-heeled shoes, who had come to entertain the American soldiers staying in the barracks opposite Delhi station.
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The Italian priests, including Fr. Luke, builder of Sacred Heart Cathedral, were interned near the Italian POW camp in Dehra Dun, one of whose prisoners, Multedo, later married Dulcie’s younger sister Eena. Incidentally, those guarding the POWs included Jim Corbett and fellow-shikari Cyril Thomas. Every day the papers were full of war news and cartoons by Ahmed, one of which showed Hitler and Mussolini as two bald vultures sitting on a withered tree with a nest containing an egg-shaped bomb. Ahmed later migrated to Karachi but was greatly missed by newspaper readers who were constantly informed, after the ouster of Rommel, the Desert Fox, and the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain, that the war was soon going to end.
That was cheerful news for the Walled City, facing acute shortage of rationed safety matches, candles, salt, sugar and kerosene. Army canteens, however, were popular for supplying (at concessional rates) milk and egg powder as also tins of butteroil. The skies were illuminated with searchlights at night and during the day flew planes connected to their carriers with iron chains, making an old woman think her son was knotting them as part of his job at the Cantonment Ordnance Depot.
When the war ended big parades were taken out all over the country and “V” for victory signs set up. Delhi witnessed a grand parade too (a precursor to our own R-Day parade?). Besides the troops marching in formation, there were open trucks showing men cutting trees, dismantling bombs and nurses treating the injured. Tanks also formed part of the parade, followed by weapon-carriers seated in which tanned Tommies with dishevelled hair gave dirty looks, provoking some to remark that they were the Hoosh (frenzied Firangis) eyeing local girls after being cut off from their “mems” for long.
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Those times are past. Chunu Chacha is long dead and the trees in the Nawab’s kothi have been cut down to make room for a school that has come up there after the death of all but one member of the family. But the War Arch at India Gate, the museum in the Red Fort, the cemetery at Brar Square and recurring anniversaries are still vivid reminders of the two World Wars.
The author is a veteran chronicler of Delhi.