The Tiger Claw Read Online Free PDF Page B

his tool kit from the back. He squatted and stared solemnly at the motorcycle engine.
    “Just think, sir,” he said, “you and I gotta go to all this trouble because a bunch of Kraut, Eye-talian and Jap white folks wanted to take over the world from the other white folks.”
    Kabir nodded, though he’d never thought of the Japanese as white. And the war with those chaps was far from over; the U.S. fleet had just begun bombarding the main islands of Japan. In three weeks’ time Kabir would have to report for duty and could be sent to the Far East to bomb Japan. At least he wasn’t a fighter pilot who’d be called on to intercept those suicidal lunatics strapped into their bomb-loaded planes. What did they call themselves?
Kamikazes
.
    His view of the war was rather different from those of his fellow officers. As a colonial, born in Britain of a father from an Indian princely state subservient to the Raj, he felt Britain’s historic lust for power and its rule in countries it occupied to be only slightly less virulent than Germany’s, and scoffed internally at the English view of themselves as being less racist, more humane than Hitler. Over the last four years more than three million Indians—many Muslims like himself—died of starvation in British India, thousands in the streets of Calcutta, from deprivation far worse than any he had witnessed riding through the villages of France or Germany, many times worse than privations in blitzed and bombed London. After the bombing of Chittagong and Calcutta, Churchill’s “Rice Denial policy” and “Boat Denial policy” diverted rice from the people to war-related industries; and in London, when only the tiny expatriate Indian community had protested and shouted “Famine!” it was Churchill, demigod to Kabir’s fellow officers, who refused to extend UNRRA ’s war relief to His Majesty’s brown subjects. So Hitler caused the deaths of yet-uncounted millions by his actions, Churchill by inaction.
    Was there a difference
, Kabir wondered,
excepting opportunity and method?
    A ragtag band of blond-haired waifs gathered around the Jeep, the youngest about five, the oldest fifteen. Holding hands, whispering. He didn’t have to know German; they were debating what could be filched or begged.
    The will to survive is amoral
.
    These children and every other survivor had a tale. Stories the newspapers could not know. They’d tell them someday, in pubs and bistros, in beer gardens and boarding houses, to anyone who would listen.
    Kabir was as responsible as Churchill for the rain-filled craters in German cities. Somewhat responsible for the lost stares of these children. But now that he was on the ground, on the Continent, a single line from Mr. Gandhi’s prison cell resonated louder in Kabir than all the stentorian speeches of Churchill. When askedhis opinion of Western civilization, Gandhi said, “It would be a good idea.”
    Small errors compounded. The German interpretation of Darwin, and the loss of faith all over Europe, that loss of faith of which he too was guilty. Errors hardened into assumptions that clogged the arteries of intelligence, scarred the sensitivity of synapses, till European minds travelled only pre-grooved pathways. Infidel armies were drawn into battle, each fighting for their collective hallucinations and territories.
    Kabir’s family had the misfortune of being caught between them. Hitler first outlawed Sufism in Germany, whether practised by Muslims or anyone else. Then, when his armies swept through Holland, the Sainah Foundation at The Hague was raided by the Gestapo and Abbajaan’s followers were arrested, thrown into camps. Before that happened in France, Kabir and his family escaped, and soon he and Noor found themselves fighting “for England.”
    The motorbike stood motionless, and Kabir, in a fever to be on his way, paced the alley. Children followed like dogs sniffing at his ankles. Eventually, the sergeant, using wrenches, spanners,