Grp Capt Anant Gopal Bewoor

Group Captain Bewoor did not want to be recorded. He asked for the questions by post and answered all sixteen in writing, in a hand that still uses the abbreviations of the service — RW for runway, Fauji for a service family, a transport aircraft called a kite. I have changed nothing.

He begins by taking the drama out of his own life. He never knew his grandfather, Sir Gurunath Bewoor of the Indian Civil Service, who died when he was five. He never met his uncle, Major M.G. Bewoor, killed in Burma in February 1944, eleven months before he was born. He was educated in Delhi in the front rooms of officers’ houses, where the wives taught. Nobody ever sat him down and told him he would be a soldier.

In January 1955, aged ten, he sat the entrance examination for the Rashtriya Indian Military College, went to Bombay for the interview, and by about September was informed that in January he would be joining his father’s school. “I suppose it was a decision taken for me by my parents.”

His father was General G.G. Bewoor, who would be Chief of Army Staff from 1973 to 1975, succeeding Manekshaw. Both his sons went into the Air Force instead, and he writes that his father never once tried to talk either of them out of it. There is one detail in that answer that he offers without comment and which seems to me the happiest thing in the whole document: in 1985 both brothers were flying the newest aircraft the Air Force had — Keshav on Mirage 2000s at Gwalior, he on Il-76s at Agra — and on one of the ferry flights bringing Mirages from France, they flew the same route on the same day, his brother in the fighter and he in the transport behind it.

On being the son of the Chief while serving as a junior officer, he is flat: there was no pressure, his father never let him feel it, and his commanding officers never behaved as though it mattered. He lists what he and his brother earned — instructor’s badges, ‘A’ categories, squadron commands, a Vayu Sena Medal each — and then writes: “None of it was out of turn.”

He was briefed at about four in the afternoon on 3 November 1988. The decision had been taken to attempt a direct landing. What occupied him, he says, was not the danger but the secrecy — the fiction, maintained with civil air traffic control at Delhi, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Thiruvananthapuram, that a single Il-76 was flying a routine sortie to the south. In truth there were two, with paratroopers aboard. He is conscious of what it was: “For the very first time India was intervening militarily, during peace conditions, into a foreign country whose elected government had sought help.”

My question had assumed he landed on two amber lights. He corrected me. There were no amber lights. At about half past nine at night he raised Hulule tower; the runway lighting was switched on for roughly ten seconds while he lined the aircraft up, and then it went off. Moonrise was not until half past one in the morning, and it was the last quarter. There were no lights on the ocean, none on Malé, none on the runway island. He explains, patiently, what that does to a pilot: normally a city gives you a horizon, traffic gives you movement, and there is a visible difference between the ground and the stars. Here there was none.

So the navigator put the island up as an echo on the ground-mapping radar and talked him into the centre of it — “by saying Left Left; Right Right” — while he held the nose on where he remembered the threshold to be from those ten seconds. He had told the flight engineer to be ready to open full power without hesitation. And then the sentence that tells you what he actually thought he was carrying:

I asked what his father said about it afterwards. His answer is four sentences long and the last two are these: “Besides, I was in Agra, he was in Pune we would not meet again. My parents had visited Agra in early 1988, and I would not see my father alive after that visit.”

General Bewoor knew about the landing. He had read the media reports. His son does not record a telephone call, a letter, or a word passed between them about it — only that the General knew, that they were in different cities, and that the visit earlier in the year had been the last. He died on 24 October 1989, a little under a year after Hulule.

Asked, at the end, what gives him the deepest fulfilment, he writes that his twenty-eight years were “very normal and ordinary” and that there were no spectacular events in them. What he names instead is that he served without blemish to himself, his family or his unit; that the Air Force told him it valued what he did; and that people still write to him, still telephone, still ask him to share a meal. “That someone has the time to write to you or call you or ask you for to share a meal together, is proof of consummation of a life well lived.”

The feature above is this archive’s reading of his written answers, not his own nomination. The closing request — for the one story whose fading would be a loss — is the single question of sixteen that came back unanswered, and he has been asked whether the tenth answer is the one he would choose. Until he says so, it is not described here as his Keystone, and this record does not appear on the Keystones page.