Chapter 3: The Airwoman

EELA — 1942

The train pulled into Pune at six in the morning and the heat was already indecent.

She had been travelling since the previous afternoon — Birmingham to London by the evening mail, then the boat train to Southampton, then the ship, then Bombay, then this final rattling, swaying, soot-breathing journey across the Deccan plateau — and every mile had taken her further from everything she knew and closer to something she could not yet name. The compartment smelled of coal dust and sweat and the particular metallic tang of Indian railways that she would later learn to associate with freedom, though at this moment it tasted only of exhaustion and the tinned biscuit she had eaten somewhere around Lonavala because the platform vendor's samosas had looked simultaneously delicious and dangerous.

She stepped onto the platform with her cardboard suitcase and her mother's letter in the pocket of her blouse, and the heat closed around her like a fist. Not the polite heat of an English summer — a suggestion, a request — but heat as a physical substance, as tangible as water, pressing against her skin and filling her lungs with air that felt pre-breathed. She could feel the sweat forming instantly, a thin film that covered her forearms and collected in the creases of her elbows and behind her knees and at the nape of her neck where her hair — pinned up, regulation, the way they had taught her in basic training — was already beginning to escape.

The platform was chaos. Porters in red shirts moved through the crowd with impossible loads balanced on their heads. Vendors called out in Marathi and Hindi and a smattering of English — chai, chai, garam chai — and the sound of it layered over the hiss of the engine and the slam of compartment doors and the cries of children and the honking of something — a goat? Yes, an actual goat — that had somehow gotten onto the platform and was being pursued by a small boy with a stick and an expression of deep personal grievance.

'You look lost.'

The voice came from her left. She turned and saw a woman leaning against a pillar with the casual elegance of someone who had been born leaning against things. She was about Eela's age — eighteen, perhaps nineteen — but she carried herself with the authority of someone much older. Her uniform was identical to Eela's — khaki shirt, khaki skirt, the cap that Eela had already decided she hated — but on this woman it looked like it had been designed specifically for her body, cut by a tailor who understood that military regulation and personal style were not mutually exclusive. Her hair was dark and glossy and pinned with a precision that suggested either natural discipline or a very good mirror. Her skin was the colour of milky tea. Her eyes — brown, wide, slightly amused — regarded Eela with an expression that was simultaneously friendly and appraising, the look of a woman who was deciding whether you were worth her time and enjoying the process of deciding.

'I'm not lost,' said Eela. 'I'm just — adjusting.'

'To the heat? You'll adjust in about six months. To the smell? Never. To the chaos? By Thursday.' She pushed herself off the pillar and held out her hand. 'Mohini Kamat. But everyone calls me Billu. Don't ask why — it's a long story and not a very interesting one. You're Chitale? They told me you were coming. I'm to take you to the station.'

Her handshake was firm. Her palm was cool despite the heat — an impossibility that Eela noted and filed away as the first of many things about Mohini Kamat that defied reasonable explanation. She smelled of Chanel. The scent was so incongruous in this setting — the sweat and coal dust and chai and goat — that Eela almost laughed. Instead, she said: 'You can call me Eela.'

'I intend to. Come on, the truck's this way. Give me your suitcase — no, I insist. It's not chivalry, it's efficiency. I know where we're going and you don't, and you'll walk faster without it.'

RAF Lohegaon was twenty minutes from the station by military truck, which Billu drove with a competence and recklessness that suggested she had learned from someone who valued speed over survival. The road was unpaved beyond the city limits — red laterite that threw up clouds of dust that coated the windscreen and turned the landscape into a terracotta blur. Eela gripped the dashboard and tried not to think about the ditch on her left, which appeared to be bottomless.

'Relax,' said Billu. 'I haven't killed anyone yet. Well, not with a truck.'

'That's not as reassuring as you think it is.'

Billu laughed. It was the first time Eela heard that laugh — full, unguarded, the laugh of a woman who found the world genuinely funny and did not feel the need to apologise for it. She would hear it thousands of times over the following years, in contexts ranging from joy to despair to the particular hilarity of shared secrets, and it would never lose its power to make her feel that whatever was happening, however dire the circumstances, there was someone beside her who believed that life was fundamentally absurd and therefore fundamentally bearable.

The station materialised out of the dust like a mirage deciding to commit. Low buildings, whitewashed, arranged around a central parade ground. A control tower that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts and optimism. Aircraft — Hurricanes, she thought, though she was not yet good at identifying them — arranged along the runway in a line that suggested both readiness and exhaustion. And everywhere, people — in uniform and out of it, moving with purpose or standing in groups, the particular choreography of a military installation that was simultaneously a village, a factory, and a prison.

'Home sweet home,' said Billu. 'Your billet's in C Block — that's the women's quarters. I'm in the room next to yours. The bathroom situation is — well, you'll see. Breakfast is at seven. Don't be late: the idlis go fast and after that you're stuck with toast that could be used as building material.'

Eela's room was small, sparse, and already occupied by two other women who were doing their hair in front of a mirror that had been cracked and repaired with tape. They introduced themselves — Lata Joshi, from Mahabaleshwar, who had a round face and a laugh that came out in short explosive bursts; and Dolly Bhatia, from Bombay, who was blonde (dyed, Eela suspected), sharp-featured, and regarded Eela with an expression that suggested she had already formed an opinion and it was not favourable.

'Another one for the Filter Room?' said Dolly, applying lipstick with the concentration of a surgeon.

'I think so,' said Eela.

'Wonderful. That makes four of us then. You, me, Lata, and Her Majesty next door.' She tilted her head toward the wall that separated them from Billu's room. 'Word of advice: don't let her take over your life. She has a tendency.'

Lata gave Dolly a look that Eela would later learn meant please stop talking. 'Don't listen to Dolly. Billu's lovely. Come on, I'll show you around before breakfast.'

The station was larger than it appeared. The Filter Room — where they would spend their shifts tracking aircraft movements on a plotting table — was underground, accessed through a narrow staircase that descended into a chamber lit by bare bulbs and filled with the hum of electrical equipment. The table was enormous — a map of the region rendered in glass, with markers that represented aircraft and could be moved by hand using long magnetic rods. It was like a vast, deadly board game.

'You'll learn to love it,' said Lata. 'Or at least to tolerate it. The shifts are long but the company's good. Mostly.'

'Mostly?'

'Dolly can be — difficult. But she's good at her job. And Billu —' Lata paused. She seemed to be choosing her words with unusual care for someone who appeared to say everything that came into her head. 'Billu is the best person you'll ever meet. She's also the most complicated. Don't try to understand her all at once. It'll give you a headache.'

The mess hall was crowded and loud and smelled of idli batter and coconut chutney and the particular institutional aroma of tea brewed in quantities large enough to service an army, which was precisely what it was doing. Eela found a seat next to Billu, who was eating with one hand and reading a letter with the other.

'From home?' Eela asked.

'From my mother. She writes every week to tell me she's dying of worry and that I should come home immediately and marry someone suitable. I write back every week to tell her I'm perfectly happy and that there's a war on. We've been having this conversation for eight months. I think we both enjoy it.' She folded the letter and gave Eela her full attention. 'So. Eela Chitale from — where exactly?'

'Pune. Well, originally. My family lives on the outskirts. My father has a small manufacturing business. Spare parts.'

'Spare parts for what?'

'Everything, apparently. He's quite vague about it. I think he supplies whoever is buying.'

'A pragmatist. I like that. Brothers? Sisters?'

'One brother. Vijay. Younger. He's with the army — posted to Burma.'

Something shifted in Billu's expression — a brief darkening, there and gone, like a cloud passing across the sun. 'Burma's rough. I hope he comes through all right.'

'So do I.'

'And what were you doing before the war decided it needed you?'

'Teaching. Primary school. I was only there for a year before I was called up. I loved it, actually. The children were — well, they were children. They made everything seem possible.'

Billu smiled. It was a different smile from the one she had worn at the station — quieter, less performative, the smile of a woman who was pleased by something and did not need an audience to enjoy it. 'I think you and I are going to be friends, Eela Chitale.'

'I think so too.'

*

She met Rajesh three weeks later, at a dance in the officers' mess.

He was not the sort of man she would have noticed in a crowd — not tall enough to stand out, not handsome enough to command attention from across a room. But when he asked her to dance, and she accepted, and he took her hand and placed his other hand at the small of her back with a touch so light that she barely felt it and so precise that she felt nothing else, she understood that noticing had nothing to do with it. Some people announced themselves. Others arrived.

He was a pilot. Flying Officer Rajesh Deshpande, twenty-three, from a village near Kolhapur that he described with a love so specific and unselfconscious that she could see it — the river, the temple, the mango orchard where he had climbed as a boy, the grandmother who had taught him to make chapatis and who had died the year before the war. He was funny in a quiet way — not the broad, attention-seeking humour of the mess but the dry, observational wit of someone who noticed things that others missed and enjoyed pointing them out.

'You're a very good dancer,' she said.

'My grandmother taught me. She said a man who couldn't dance was a man who couldn't listen, and a man who couldn't listen wasn't worth knowing.'

'Your grandmother sounds formidable.'

'She was terrifying. In the best possible way. She once threw a chapati at my grandfather because he interrupted her during a prayer. Hit him right between the eyes. He never interrupted her again.'

They danced three dances. The band — a mixture of Indian and British musicians playing a confused but enthusiastic blend of swing and film songs — was loud enough that they had to lean close to hear each other, and the closeness was — Eela searched for the word — electric. Not sexual, not yet, though she was aware of his body in a way that she had not been aware of a man's body before. It was the electricity of recognition — the sense that she had been waiting for this particular conversation without knowing it, and that now it had arrived, everything prior to it seemed like a long, elaborate prologue.

Billu found her afterwards, flushed and bright-eyed. 'I saw you dancing with the pilot. Rajesh Deshpande. He's one of the good ones.'

'How do you know?'

'I know everyone. It's a gift. Also a curse, but mostly a gift.' She linked her arm through Eela's — a gesture so natural and so intimate that Eela felt a warmth spread through her chest that had nothing to do with the dance or the heat or the glass of nimbu pani she had just finished. It was the warmth of being claimed — of someone deciding, without asking permission, that you belonged to them. 'Come on, Chitale. Walk me back to the billet and tell me everything.'

They walked through the warm night — the air thick with the scent of neem and the distant sound of the band still playing and the closer sound of crickets and the occasional bark of a pariah dog somewhere in the darkness. Eela told Billu about Rajesh — his grandmother, his dancing, his quiet humour — and Billu listened with the particular intensity that Eela was learning to recognise as her natural state. Billu did not merely listen; she absorbed. She took in words the way other people took in air — automatically, completely, as though speech were a substance she required to survive.

'You like him,' said Billu. It was not a question.

'I think I do.'

'Good. Everyone deserves someone who can dance.' She squeezed Eela's arm. 'But Chitale? Don't let him take over your life. You're too interesting for that.'

Eela laughed. 'You sound like Dolly.'

'Take that back immediately.'

They reached the billet. The corridor was dark except for a strip of light under Dolly's door and the faint blue glow of Lata's torch — she read in bed every night, novels mostly, consuming them at a rate that suggested she was trying to read every book ever published before the war ended. Billu stopped at her door and turned to face Eela. In the dim light, her features were softer — the angles smoothed, the calculation gone from her eyes, replaced by something that Eela could not name and would not be able to name for years.

'Goodnight, Eela.'

'Goodnight, Billu.'

She went into her room and lay on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling. The mattress was thin and the sheet was rough against her skin and the pillow smelled of starch and someone else's hair oil. Through the wall, she could hear Billu humming — a film song, something from a movie she did not recognise, the melody floating through the plaster like smoke.

She closed her eyes. She thought about Rajesh's hand at the small of her back. She thought about Billu's arm linked through hers. She thought about the way both touches had made her feel — alive, seen, wanted — and she did not yet understand that these were not the same feeling, that they pointed in different directions, toward different futures, and that the woman humming through the wall would eventually break her heart in ways that the pilot with the gentle hands never could, because the pilot would die before he had the chance.

She fell asleep to the sound of Billu's humming and the distant bark of a pariah dog and the enormous, indifferent silence of a subcontinent at war.