How a son’s discovery of his father’s army dispatches from World War Two became a book

My father died in his sleep on August 24, 2011, in Bangalore. He was a formal man – not given to easy confession, conversations about difficult personal matters requiring what he called a “special sitting”. It was only after his death that I truly came to know him.

In the weeks that followed, my brother Ranjit and I sat in the room where he had passed away, a few meters from where our mother had died 15 years earlier, sorting through what remained. The house and its possessions had outlived them both.

My father liked to keep things. There were Savile Row suits he had somehow imagined we would wear one day, spectator shoes still polished to a mirror shine, ticket stubs, diaries, scrapbooks, government correspondence, and bank statements going back decades. There was even a Ministry of External Affairs permission slip authorising him to travel up the Yangtze River to Shanghai, a relic from some long-forgotten disruption to the rail network.

Discovering dispatches

Ranjit, who lived in Washington, DC, was reluctant to cart back much. I was living in Chiang Mai, Thailand and had recently downsized. I discarded most of what we found, but then something made me hold on to his stack of files of typewritten...

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