The Indian patient

Book review - Raj & Norah: A True Story of Love Lost and Found in World War II

Every family has a story. Sometimes, that story is extraordinary enough to be shared with the world — as a book, a song, or maybe a film. Many remarkable stories end up lost in time for want of a storyteller. But Rajendra (Raj) Shamsher Singh Kohli and Norah Eggleton were lucky to have not one but two storytellers in the family to record theirs for posterity — their son Peter R Kohli and granddaughter Shaina Kohli Russo.
 
Theirs is a story the authors have clearly heard innumerable times growing up. Raj & Norah is evidence of that. This is a real-life love story about two individuals from different worlds who met in the thick of World War II and went on to spend 56 years together.

 
It’s a journey back in time, with the prologue setting the stage. It is 2019 when we are introduced to a 99-year-old Raj Kohli, a retired brigadier, waking up at his home, Florence Cottage, in Mussoorie, between 3.30 a m and 4 a m (as he always does). After putting on his dressing gown, “without which he cannot face the world”, he moves with the help of a walker to prepare his tea with military precision, before sitting down with it to read a poem (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”) to his wife who is now dead and whom he first met in a military hospital in Naples, Italy, where he was being treated for his war wounds.

 

A turn of the page takes us to the Mussoorie of 1937, where Raj’s father is convincing his family that his 18-year-old son must be sent to Cambridge to study. Meanwhile, in England, Norah, 23, has already been a nurse for two years atRadcliffe Hospital. Daughter of a military man, she has lost her mother nine years ago and has decided to dedicate her life to taking care of her five younger siblings.
 
Raj and Norah’s paths will not cross for the next 250-odd pages.
 
The book is a glimpse into the England of the time, when it was possible — in rare circumstances — to turn up at a college in Cambridge with a great recommendation and even better marks and gain admission! That’s what happens to Raj, although after an initial hurdle, when he shows up at Gonville & Caius College. The story of his university years — his love for chemistry, his friendship with a roommate who he later discovers is a “lord”, the oppressive college rules that prompt a transfer to King’s College, London, the biases he sometimes encounters — makes for a good read.

 
But the book gets interesting when he enlists to fight the Germans after he sees his college-mates in London doing so. Before this, however, he also finds love. As does Norah. Both of them elsewhere and oblivious to each other’s existence.
 
Initially recruited as a private but soon made an officer, Raj’s days in the army also tell the story of the innumerable young soldiers from India who fought Germany and allies under the British flag.
 
As part of 3/1st Punjab Regiment, he’s stationed outside Cairo, leading soldiers who are mostly Muslim but also include some Sikhs and Hindus — all of them Punjabi. Names of many of these young men, which we would probably have never known, get recorded through this book. For instance, there’s Sepoy Mohammad Raffa, 18, whose life Raj saves in a battle. Or Havildar Major Ahmed, who helps him do so.

 
We find the Indian troops up against Erwin Rommel’s mighty German Afrika Corps in Gabr el Abidi, Libya. Raj, who at one point is an instructor at the machine gun school at Lincolnshire, is transferred around a lot—something he’s fed-up of but his peripatetic life enriches the book with the descriptions that come with each transfer. So we take a wartime journey from the reinforcement camp near the Pyramids and Sphinx of Giza to the Middle East Training Centre in Palestine and then to Haifa and, finally, to Italy. It’s while fighting up the Italian coast that he’s severely wounded by a German tank shell and his left ear is blown off.

 
He’s sent to a hospital in Naples, which is where he meets Lieutenant Norah Eggleton, now a military nurse who once dreamed of going to the Royal College of Music. It’s love at first sight but not with an instantly happy ending. When the two eventually do meet again, after eventful months of separations, it is in dramatic circumstances.
 
Raj’s story occupies a sizeable part of the book. But Norah’s story travels alongside: The reason she joins the army, her experience through it, the nurses’ sense of loss as they go about their job in wartime — such as when she loses a young Indian soldier of whom she has grown fond. She remembers this soldier’s name as “Captain Grewal Singh”, which is likely a mistake since in Punjab, Grewal is a last name.

 
In parts, the narrative appears exaggerated but that could be a function of the times in which they are set. Raj & Norah is about an extraordinary time and about two people who defined their lives through it. It is also about second chances.