Letter from Kathmandu

Bunker 13

Ajit Baral: How and when did you get into journalism?

Aniruddha Bahal: My first job was at the desk of India Today in 1991. I gave a few copy tests and they chose me.

Ajit: You have a nose for scams, as your exposes of match-fixing and arms deals suggest. This nose for scams, is it something that youdeveloped while working for some good magazines, or is it something inborn?

Aniruddha: I think every journalist, over time, devekops a nose for a story. Soem are also gifted with being able to develop contacts much better than others.

Ajit: How has your experience with tehelka been? The fame that came with the expose of arms deal and the subsequent hounding by the government?

Aniruddha: tehelka has been a very rich experience. In the sense of the work that we did and handling the subsequent backlash of the system while they accused you of having all kinds of motives in having done Operation Westend. But they didn't succeed with that and that's what matters. The, however, did succeed in scaring away all the investors.

Ajit: You have founded another Web-based magazine, cobrapost.com. Is it because tehelka was banned?

Aniruddha: tehelka was never banned. I just want to continue the brand of journalism that we practised in tehelka in cobrapost.com, developing a small, independent platform incrementally. I want to continue practising a lot of public interest journalism which the mainstream media is disinclined to do in India for a variety of reasons.

Ajit: Is cobrapost.com any different from tehelka?

Aniruddha: It's just started. So let's see how it develops.

Ajit: How did the transition to a writer happen?

Aniruddha: I have always had ambitions to be a writer. In fact, I started writing Bunker 13 way back in 1996 when tehelka hadn't even started. tehelka started only in 2000. I think if you are a journalist, and inclined to write fiction the job is easier for your imagination.

Ajit: Your novel got rave reviews in the West. The Observer has gone so far as to compare your book to Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. How does it feel?

Aniruddha: Very flattering. I think in the West it is being seen as a very un-Indian book. In the sense that Indian writers have a tendency to engage too much with the past, the British period, teh Mughals, etc. And here was Bunker 13 engaging with contemporary India.

Ajit: Not many Indian writers have ventured into the thriller genre. What made you write a thriller?

Aniruddha: I don't really consider Bunker 13 a thriller. It's racy, that's why people are calling it a thriller. But in the US the bookstores had it all slotted differently, some under action, some literature, some in espionage. So it's a novel that works across genres.

Ajit: Your first novel, Night Out, what is it about?

Aniruddha: It is a campus love story, written 12-13 years back.

Ajit: Wasn't it difficult to write the second novel, in the sense of your first novel having been rejected still rankling your mind?

Aniruddha: My agent Gillion Aitken rejected it. But it was published in India and the Indian market is very small. And then even more so!

Ajit: The trials and tribulations that you went through when with tehelka, has any of that seeped into the novel?

Aniruddha: Not from tehelka. But you could say that there are portions in the novel where I used my journalistic experience--portions where I could write about editorial meetings and then the war portion towards the end.

Ajit: You have been praised for your language. Is the language in the novel a natural extension of what you have been writing all along? Or have your tried to write differently to achieve different effects?

Aniruddha: It's a second-person tone, which I used because the reader feels as if he's in the cockpit and immersed in the scene. A kind of hypnotic effect if carried out well.

Ajit: Lastly, how would you like yourself to be remembered, a scam-busting journalist or a writer?

Aniruddha: I think my life will keep alternating between writing fiction and doing journalism. You can't really ask a father which one of his sons he likes more!

Ajit Baral is a frequent contributor to The Daily Star and various Nepalese newspapers. He lives in Kathmandu.

Extract

BUNKER 13

You have soldiering boots stuck between your teeth so you don't maul your tongue. Major (Dr.) Sandy is lancing a blister on your toe at the turning point of your twelve-mile tab. The others have overtaken you. After fixing you up, even Sandy goes on ahead. You are left alone to pull up your boots, and you tense with pain as you dig your toes in and put some weight on them. You are increasingly feeling that you needn't have got into the shit you find yourself in right now, tabbing twelve miles with a forty-five-pound rucksack burning your back.

But out of the many ways that a Homo sapiens with an IQ of 130 can **** himself at the flagging end of the twentieth century is by writing the following to his country's army chief: "Dear sir, With reference to our telephone conversation of a few days back, I am hereby forwarding a written proposal for your perusal. We at the Post would like to do a photo feature on the making of an Indian paratrooper: to put one of our writers through the course and see whether he can make it. In the competitive news environment we face, the treatment that we give to our feature stories is important, hence the rather offbeat request. But its our sincere belief that the piece would be a great image-building exercise for the army and do much to bolster its own efforts to draw top-notch talent through its gates. Yours sincerely, MM."

The request was granted in February 1999, after you pushed hard and greased the army's public relations officer, who, an ex-9 Para himself but now an army headquarters memorandum expert, kept looking at you weirdly all three times you met him and asked each time, "Are you sure of this?" Of course you were then. If he had spelled out in vivid terms what you were getting into, you might have been a little less sure.

But now that your sorry ass is in, you plan to stick it out to the end, make your jumps even if you have a pound of blisters on each foot. You have your reasons.

Sergeant Major Islamuddin is really enjoying putting you through the paces. He thinks of guys like you as soft ass to regulate, show what a tough guy he is. Do some show-off. He is now coming back through the runners to see what's with you. He thinks you are regular army grade four.

"What's up?" he asks. "Running out of gas? You want to go back a week, repeat the whole ****ing thing with the next batch coming in?" It's in Sergeant Major Islamuddin's interest to kick your ass through the fitness course before the army lets you even touch a parachute. Maybe that gives him some career motion. But the talk is, he likes only new faces in his basic fitness program. He doesn't like leftovers to fill in the new guys in advance about what a bastard he is. He likes them to discover for themselves.

You are not part of the regular 9 Para course, but the one they run for officers from other regiments, a kind of contingency reserve they have a policy of building up. That saves you all the 9 Para advanced hocus-pocus that you are convinced would send you straight to sick bay in two days flat. But even though they have condensed their drills and tabs into a diluted version of the big **** routine they run on their own lads it's still enough to screw your biocycle, give you a high-fatigue RPM.

What no one wants to do is have a second crack of Sergeant Major Islamuddin's fitness regimen, give him the opportunity to tinker with your biorhythm, reprogram it permanently with his 5:00 A.M. PT.

You get up and wobble along on the one and a half legs at your disposal, but then you say, What the hell, **** the toe. You pick up speed and find you can move into higher gear because the pain isn't as bad as before. Major (Dr.) Sandy has worked some magic.

It's a different point altogether that none of this blister shit would have happened if Sergeant Major Islamuddin hadn't told you to stuff your Nike power joggers in your locker the first day of your hitting base. The army likes its boys in leather boots. Likes to give them a shot at stress fracture in their first fortnight of marching and tabs. The guys in your batch have been wearing them for years. You haven't.

"Watch out for tendinitis," one of your batch mates from Jat Regiment warns you. "That's even worse than a stress fracture."

"What's that?" you ask him. "it sounds like a cow disease."

He looks at you with pity. "The muscles at the back of your ankles flame up from stretching too much. You be careful. I got it at the Academy. Got it in both legs. Couldn't walk for a week."

You don't know how to be careful to avoid tendinitis, but it's at the back of your head, so you try some fancy running steps that you think will keep you free from tendinitis. Then you get blisters instead. That's not as bad as all four of you, who are packed into this L-shaped army-hostel accommodation, taking off your boots at one go after a tab. Dogs, you read somewhere, pack a sense of smell that's a thousand times more sensitive than a human's. You are sure if a dog came sniffing in at that time, it would die.