Daman Singh’s ‘Kitty’s War’ explores lives and love in a railway town while two wars rage

The concluding sentence on page 170 of Kitty’s War by Daman Singh, her third novel, reveals the crux of the book in a single line:

“And just like that, the war came to Pipli junction.”

This “railway” novel is placed in the early 1940s, when Japan took on the Allies in the Second World War, and, it was feared, would march into India since it was territory owned by their enemy. The narrative spans various lives in a small railway town named Pipli, which has “low hills in the north” and frequent trains going “east” with supplies as the war intensified, but no refugees appear in town as Japan seizes Rangoon. A “not-happening” town, certainly.

The Pipli Railway Colony from where Kitty, Terence, Ayah and Chuckerbutty (a British mispronunciation of Chakravarty) narrate their quiet lives has a railway junction which sees very little traffic.

“Mail trains went through the main lines without stopping. One express train halted for six and a half minutes. A passenger train connected villages south of Pipli via the branch line. It was a popular service as the rural region had few metalled roads.”

A matter of identity

Kitty has come down to Pipli to nurse her heartbreak. Terence Riddle, Kitty’s father, works in the railways, and is a widower. Ayah is a nameless tribal woman yearning for her native village, identified only by the work she does for the Riddles. Her son is in the British army at Rangoon. And Chuckerbutty is the first “native” officer to be appointed at Pipli. Even his subordinates do not consider him a “sahib”, addressing him as Babu.

There isn’t much to do in Pipli, except wait for the trains to come and go, and for the war to either come to an end or arrive at the doorstep. So the residents find ways to take their lives into a zone excitement. Casual voyeurism, regular parties, accounts of lesser lives, and, of course, the dynamics between the characters take the story forward till the battles within and without take over. The Independence movement gathers momentum in the background. People regularly listen to news, and are anxious about relatives and friends who have enrolled in the British army.

But the question of whose war it is looms large in everyone’s mind. Who is the oppressor? And who, the oppressed? There is the cook, Latif, whose loyalties do not lean towards even his benign and generous employer. In his opinion anyone who helps the war is a traitor to the cause of the motherland. Later in the book, when Latif talks about how the Whites need to leave and will be kicked out if they don’t go on their own, Ayah tells him:

“White people only came here yesterday. We tribals have been used and abused for years. Will that stop when white people go? You and your friends in Pipli don’t talk about that do you?”

We also hear Ayah often telling Bela not to grow overly fond of someone else’s children.

“One day he will go away to another railway colony, to another ayah.”

The strong sense of identity of the tribal protagonists is quite in contrast to that of Chuckerbutty’s, who has aspirations of being endorsed by his white employer. He does not join the tea shop crowd airing its opinion about the need to chase the British out. He sees a stranger who talks nationalism as a “trouble maker”.

Sex and the Indian woman

At the same time, Singh explores the less visible question of women’s sexual freedom, with the different characters bringing out divergent approaches. The tribal women in the story, the nameless Ayah, and Bela are open in their attitude to men, but undergo different experiences through their choices. Ayah stays away from the “mali” and the cook, but makes her choice nonetheless. While her relationship with someone from her own kind is accepted as perfectly natural, Bela’s sleeping with a “tongavala” from outside the clan is subjected to patriarchal moral policing by her people.

“Since Bela would not mend her ways, the second assistant of the headman had visited all the villages in the neighbourhood, carrying a sal branch stripped of all but five leaves. Wherever he went, he told people about Bela and invited them to attend the ceremony to shame her. The headman held a sal branch from which a soiled leaf-plate, a worn-out broom and a burnt piece of wood hung. Two sal leaves dangled from the branch – one folded into a cone to symbolise a penis, the other pinned into a groove to represent a vagina. The branch was stuck into the roof of Bela’s house. Lewd songs were sung to mock the lovers. Drummers drummed in fury and dancers danced in a frenzy. They defiled Bela’s house by urinating on the walls of the courtyard, and then left. This was the custom. This was how things were supposed to happen.”

Bela leaves the village, missing her sister but no one else. She never wants to go back. Ayah, on the other hand, is waiting for her son to come back with enough money to pay back their debt and retrieve her land.

While Kitty’s two meetings with Chuckerbutty, the assistant station master, is questioned by the station master’s Wife, Latif the cook is seen observing how Kitty’s easy closeness to a young man within the confines of her room is deserving of physical punishment.

“If Miss Kitty was his daughter or sister, he would have broken her legs and nobody would have blamed him.”

Kitty’s War has been meticulously researched. The music, films, entertainment, food, railway lives and even technical observations have been recreated and merged into the narrative seamlessly. The pace of the book is certainly slow – it reads like an English novel from an earlier period – but then the lives of the people in Kitty’s War are slow-moving too.

Kitty’s War, Daman Singh, Westland.