Discovering My Father's Story: Eaten by the Japanese, the Memoir of an Unknown Indian Prisoner of War
What I present to you is two stories. One is of a simple Indian soldier from a village near Mangalore, one who, according to his brother Louis, "never got into a fight with anybody"--finding himself in the most brutal war in history, World War II, and being taken prisoner by a fellow Asian army--the Japanese Army, which treats thousands of Indian prisoners with a brutality that results in higher mortality rates for them than for POWs of the Nazis. And then, after a miraculous survival, comes home to write his story, which is forgotten, perhaps scorned by his feudal superiors. The second story is of a son discovering his father's story even as his father is 86 years old, and feeble enough as to leave the world at anytime--and being so moved by it as to be compelled to publish it and to give it to the world. It is a story about fathers and sons, part of the universal story that will never end, and will never cease to have fascination (incidentally, there