Forget the past.
The past of all men is dark with many shames.
Everything in the future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.
—SRI YUKTESWAR
The bridges you cross before you come to them are over rivers that aren't there
—GENE BROWN in Danbury
Happiness lies in good health and a bad memory.
—INGRID BERGMAN
I t was the summer of 1944, during the Second World War. The Japanese were sweeping across India. Burma on the other side of Manipur had already been captured and occupied, and now the Japanese had captured Kohima, near Imphal, capital of Manipur state; the British and Indian troops were on the run in the valley beyond Kohima. Imphal came under siege, and all lines of communication between Imphal and the rest of India were cut off.
We got an urgent message that a fierce battle was raging in the foothills of the valley. The casualties were expected to be very high, and additional medical personnel would be required.
We were ordered to move to the front line and set up our field hospital.
The Japanese were fanatics as fighters. If a column of Japanese soldiers encountered barbed wire rolls blocking their way and their advance in that sector was deemed vital, the first dozen or so soldiers would simply lie down on the barbed wire and allow the rest of the column of soldiers to march over their bodies across the barbed wire barriers toward the enemy, without losing vital time. That was their training. Sacrificing their lives for the Emperor and the country was considered a matter of great privilege.
The Prince of Wales was the mightiest British warship the Allies ever had. It had tremendous firepower, and was considered invincible: no torpedo or missile would ever be able to pierce its armor. Then one fine morning it was blown to bits and scattered over the ocean waves along with the bodies of hundreds of British soldiers and sailors. How could it happen?
A small Japanese fighter plane belonging to their suicide squad, loaded with explosives, dived into the wide smokestack of the mighty warship. We heard later that more than a dozen volunteers among the daredevil pilots had vied for this mission; lots had to be drawn to determine which man would be lucky enough to help his country win the war and gain a place in heaven by blowing himself up along with the Prince of Wales.
That was the enemy we were fighting in the valley of Manipur after Kohima fell. It was the same battle, whether it was fought on the high seas, in the skies, or in the hills of Nagaland and the valley of Manipur. We had to face the same formidable enemy on every front.
I and another general duty doctor, Dr. Chattopadhyay, went right into the battle line. It was a foggy, hazy early morning, before dawn. The forest was thick. Our men were trained in digging and camouflaging the advanced dressing station (ADS) so that we could be close to the fighting men, but this time we had no time to dig, as we had to get to work soon after we reached our destination. We were attending to the wounded soldiers right out in the open.
234 YOUR LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS
When a wounded man staggered over or was carried to us, we would quickly dress the wounds, apply stitches, inject morphine to relieve the pain, put on a Thomas's splint or a bandage, offer a cup of tea, say a few comforting words to the wounded soldier, load him in an ambulance and send him back to the headquarters of our mobile hospital, where a surgical team would take care of him.
As day dawned, we could see some hand-to-hand fighting and shooting right nearby. Through the fog and drizzle, I saw some Japanese soldiers darting through our dressing station. I suddenly noticed that Captain Chattopadhyay was missing and the nursing attendants (male nurses) were doing all the work. I was told that he was feeling very unwell and a little while ago had gone back to Imphal in an ambulance along with the wounded. We were now running short of ambulance vans and were packing the patients off in whatever vehicle we could get hold of.
Around 11 a.m. the noise of the gunfire suddenly became less. It was still very hazy, but I could just make out a column of vehicles moving slowly on the road toward Imphal. A senior British officer from our brigade headquarters walked up to me and told me that I should pack as many wounded soldiers as possible into whatever vehicles I could lay my hands on and start moving toward Imphal. We were retreating.
As the officer was walking back toward his jeep, he was hit by a bullet. We crawled to him and dragged him inside our dressing station. The bullet had gone through his chest. We dressed his wound and put him in a three-ton vehicle along with other wounded Indian and British soldiers and joined the moving column. There was a shower of bullets among us as we started moving a little faster. The enemy must have known by then that we were on the run. After a while all became very quiet and still; probably we were getting out of their range of fire.
The pulse of the British officer was getting very feeble. I thought he, and some other seriously wounded patients, would be able to receive emergency surgical treatment when we reached our main dressing station. Ten doctors were there, including a
surgeon. But when we arrived, we found the equipment and implements strewn all over; the officers, doctors, and men were gone.
We set out for the headquarters in Imphal, thinking they must have gone back there, but by the time we got to the base hospital, the officer was dead and everybody got busy with the treatment of those among the wounded who were still alive.
None of the missing people came back. Investigations by the brigade headquarters started. It was feared that all might have been taken as prisoners of war. Then in the afternoon, five British soldiers arrived, along with Captain Basu, one of our doctors. Basu was in a state of shock, and it was only the next morning that he was able to tell us the tragic story, which he had to repeat time and again, both at the brigade headquarters and at the corps headquarters, as the story sounded unbelievable to many people.
Basu's Story
"The Japanese soldiers ran through our field hospital and took all the officers and men as prisoners. They marched the men, with their hands tied behind their backs, to their own lines at the rear of the fighting front, then lined up all ten officers—two administrative officers and eight doctors, including myself. Our hands were tied, and it appeared they were planning to march us somewhere. Then they hurriedly conferred among themselves, and one of them, apparently the one who was in charge of the platoon, gave some orders in Japanese which none of us understood.
"Two Japanese soldiers took out their revolvers. They lined us up in a straight line. Each officer started at one end of the line, put his revolver to the temple of one of the officers, and shot him dead. Then he moved to the next in line.
I was in the center. My turn, along with another colleague, came last. We were shot in the head almost simultaneously. The last thing I remember was the barrel of the revolver at the side of my head, a little in front of the upper part of my right ear. There was the loud sound of a gunshot, and I fell to the ground.
236 YOUR LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS
“It was evening; the sun had just set, and it was becoming dark. After a few minutes I opened my eyes and saw, in the semidarkness, a Japanese soldier approaching where our dead bodies were lying. I realized that somehow or other I was not dead, and instinctively I managed to crawl halfway under my colleague's dead body, my chest and the upper part of my body mostly beneath his back.
“When the soldier reached the site of the massacre, he began stabbing each body in the chest, to make sure each man was dead. I somehow managed to escape this action, as my chest was under my colleague's dead body. I spent the night in the same posture, terrified to move a finger lest the Japanese were still around. It was painful to lie on my back for hours without moving, although I did eventually take the risk of slowly sliding out from underneath the dead body of my friend and colleague.
“I fell asleep. At dawn I awoke, to find myself lying on my belly with my head down, my face sideways. I was completely worn out, mortally afraid to lift my head from the ground.
"A little later, when the sunlight began filtering through the thick leaves, I instinctively lifted my head. Immediately my eyes met four eyes about thirty to forty yards away. I couldn't see their faces, as they had camouflaged themselves. I instantly lost consciousness, and came around only after I reached Imphal.''
We later learned that the four eyes Basu's eyes had met belonged to two British soldiers who were hiding in a trench with bushes and leafy branches on top of them. They had been left behind when the British and Indian troops retreated, and they had witnessed the massacre from a distance. These soldiers, along with the stuporous Dr. Basu, somehow or other reached Imphal by that evening.
The British brigade commander, Brigadier Wilson, did not believe Basu's story at all, although his senior officer suggested that the story could be true, that perhaps, to his extremely good fortune, there had been a blank cartridge in the revolver when it became his turn to be executed.
Brigadier Wilson would not accept that explanation. He
thought Basu was lying. Worse, Basu's name suggested that he was probably related to Indian National Army leader Subhash Chandra Bose (Basu and Bose mean the same thing in Bengali), honored by Indians as a great revolutionary and patriot and regarded by the British as a dangerous traitor (see Appendix 4).
Basu, Wilson surmised, was in league with the Japanese through Subhash Chandra Bose, and actually may have been a party to the massacre of British and loyal Indian officers. He recommended to the higher authorities that the case be investigated by the intelligence branch, and that Basu be court-martialed.
Basu was subsequently moved to Fort William in Calcutta. Further interrogation, including that of all of Basu's relatives in Calcutta, did not elicit any further or different information.
After about three weeks of detention in Fort William, Basu suddenly lost his voice. A neurological examination did not reveal any cause, and Basu apparently was not doing it on purpose. What seemed to be happening was that his subconscious had simply told his body's speech mechanism in chemical words, "No use talking, nobody listens to you anyway." Basu's loss of
speech was misconstrued and his detention lasted until after the end of the war.
In August 1945 the investigating authorities came to the conclusion that Basu was innocent. The day this was announced, his speech came back. He did not have to give any further explanations. He was reinstated, and soon after was posted to the army hospital in Pune, where I was already working.
The Crushing Burden of Memory
I was glad to see Basu, but it was clear that he was a completely changed man. Because of the difficult times and the great stress he had gone through, he had become very depressed. He was also forgetful, very introverted, and avoided social functions and get-togethers. It was very difficult to convince him that all of it—the war, his ordeal at the hands of the Japanese, his imprisonment—was really all over. The Japanese had been
defeated and were no longer there. Soon the British left India for good. But Basu still suffered.
It seemed impossible for him to forget the inhuman behavior of the Japanese toward the innocent doctors, who were treating Japanese casualties the same way they treated wounded Indian and British soldiers. He had suffered from three kinds of pain, and all of them still lingered: the pain caused by the assault on his colleagues and his own near death; the pain inflicted on him during confinement in Fort William in Calcutta; and perhaps worst of all, the pain he felt when his loyalty was called into question.
Basu had firmly believed the Japanese were making fools of the Indian people by using the Indian National Army (INA) for their own purposes. Now, with the war over, he was discovering a great deal of information to support his beliefs. An increasing body of documentary evidence was coming out, as well as personal testimony by witnesses and participants, which was embarrassing Japan into retracting earlier denials about its atrocities during the world war.
As far as the Japanese were concerned, the INA was only a mask to deceive the ignorant Indian masses. No doubt the Indian nationalists who founded the National Army believed they were doing a great service to their country. By opposing the British and fighting on the side of the Japanese, they felt they would hasten the end of British rule over India. But it is a fact that when the Japanese took Indians as prisoners, they either lined them up and shot them in cold blood, as they did to all of Basu's colleagues in the field hospital, or they turned them over to the Indian National Army authorities. There, instead of fighting the invading Japanese, they would fight against their own people, their own kith and kin.
The Japanese were intent on destroying the Allied forces, including all British nationals, and in their eyes, Indians were British nationals. Strengthening the ranks of the Indian National Army was not aimed at helping liberate India from the British rulers, but a strategy designed to help their own imperialistic
ambitions. In pursuing their goal of dominating all of Asia, the Japanese ran over Burma and parts of India, including Manipur and Nagaland. They were not defeated here; they withdrew during the middle and later part of 1944, about the time Basu's doctor colleagues were shot dead, because their lines of communication had become too long and difficult to maintain.
It also came to light that Japanese doctors used healthy prisoners of war to practice surgical techniques, and then killed them with intravenous anesthesia drugs.
Most of the Japanese who had done these things did not recognize their acts as crimes, because for them it was "justice" to kill, especially the Chinese and other Asians. It was all for the Emperor. Their minds had been conditioned to believe that the Emperor was God on this earth, that they as a people had also descended from heaven, and that all their homicides and sacrificial suicides were done in service to the Emperor. Fortunately, some of the participants in the crimes revealed many facts to investigating officers after the war, goaded by their conscience and their concern that the true history of the war might die with them.
It was difficult for me to believe all these terrible things, especially after I met and interacted with the Japanese people years after the war. I straightaway got the impression that they are the most disciplined people on earth. Elaving been to Tokyo and Kyoto, I was convinced the Japanese are a fine people in every respect. But you cannot ignore historical facts. And in August 1993, Japan's Prime Minister, Morihiro Elosokawa, finally acknowledged his nation's wartime aggression and atrocities.
After the Germans surrendered to the Allies, the Japanese resistance continued. On the fateful day of August 6, 1945 the Allies dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. Three days later another atomic bomb was detonated, about 504 yards above the city of Nagasaki. It devastated the entire city. More than 70,000 innocent people were killed in the flames, radiation, and blast. The bombs reduced both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a radio-
active moonscape. Was this the act of man? The man God created in His own image?
The Japanese surrendered six days after the Nagasaki bombing, on August 15, 1945. This brought an end to the Second World War, but then the cold war, the underground war, the war of fear between men and men, began. This was worse in many ways. Now, with the cold war over, there are still enough nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States to destroy the earth. Who has ever won a war? But man goes on killing man.
No Regrets for the Past, No Fear of the Future, Live in the Present
Thoughts similar to these disturbed Basu's mind, and he continued to suffer from acts of violence and torture in his mind. Although the physical experience of them had ended long ago, the imaginary experience continued, complete with vivid visualizations. His memories and the accompanying fear re-sulted in frequent attacks of screaming during his sleep over the nightmarish reality in his head.
He confided in me that his dreams were strange and horrifying. Once he got lost on a frozen mountain; in another dream armed robbers ransacked his house. Another time he was being chased by Japanese soldiers. They got hold of him and shot him dead, only this time he really "died" and as the bullet pierced his heart he shrieked with pain and found his wife holding his hand and shaking him awake.
His mind refused to accept that the past was all gone, and that he should be living in the present, which could be very fulfilling. Worst of all, he never opened his mind to anyone, not even his wife or his colleagues. He had no friends. Life seemed a struggle for him. As a result of continuing imaginary threats from all sides, and chronic stress, he was always physically fatigued and mentally disoriented when looking after sick patients.
I tried to impress upon Basu that if we experienced some
fearful event in our life at an earlier stage, we ought not go on projecting that fear into our day-to-day life. We have to free ourselves from the past, set it aside and live only in the present.
eepak Chopra wrote about this in his first book, Creating Health. He said: 5
No one has discovered a means of altering the past.
Once a thing has occurred, there is no way to change it .. . time has carried it off beyond anyone's efforts to make improvements. Dwelling on past mistakes or injuries is unproductive. It is also harmful, because it releases into your system all kinds of toxic substances that raise blood pressure and strain the heart Recognize past mistakes for what they are, learn
from them, and leave them in their permanent home, the past.
If only Basu could let go of these painful past experiences, open his mind and let them spill out, talk about them, leave them behind. But he could not. "If you bring forth what is inside you," said Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas, "what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you don't bring forth will destroy you."
Then one night he went to sleep; his wife was by his side. In the morning he was gone. What dream did he have that night? Or perhaps he had none; no one knew. He was a good soul who fell victim to circumstances. His heart just stopped one night without giving warning. Whoever gives up in the game of life is just swept away.
Basu s mind was caught up with pain over the past and anxiety about the future. But the more one vacillates between the past and the future, the more restless the mind becomes. When you are driving on the highway, you occasionally look at the traffic behind you in the car mirror, but you don't dwell on it. Your attention is primarily on the traffic to your left, your right, and just in front. Past experiences may guide you a bit, but to
The Courage to Live
A vivid contrast to Basu's tragic life after the war and an inspiration to anyone who has undergone suffering and difficulties, is the story of Viktor Frankl. A Jewish psychiatrist in Austria in the 1930s, Frankl was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War. Subjected to unspeakably horrible privation and torture, he somehow managed to be one of the few to survive. After the war, having lost both his parents, his wife, and his brother, he nevertheless rebuilt his life. He went on to become a world-renowned doctor and the founder of an important new school of psychotherapy. How did he manage to put the past behind him?
“We who lived in the concentration camps," Frankl wrote, “can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: this last of human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
The way these men bore their suffering, Frankl said, “was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom— which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful."
It is perhaps the great theme of this book that we are all free to create our own life. We are free to choose health, to choose happiness and well-being.
Most of us have not been faced with the cruel and harsh circumstances that Dr. Frankl had to face. For us it should be far easier to put our past sufferings behind us and create a meaningful life. Even in the most extreme of circumstances, we have that freedom. How much more so in ordinary life.
“We must never forget," Frankl wrote in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, “that we may find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph . . . When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves."
function in a meaningful way and use your potential, you have to live fully in the present moment.
Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday—why fret about them , if today be sweet.
—OMAR KHAYYAM
In Deepak Chopra's novel, The Return of Merlin, the great secret of Merlin the Wizard is that to be truly alive now, you have to be dead to the past. To be alive now is to have life-centered, present-moment awareness. If you have your attention on what ls and see its illness in every moment, you will discover the dance of the divine in every leaf and petal, in every blade of grass and rushing stream, in every breath of every living thing. Then
you are truly alive, truly living in the present the most precious moment of your life.