How my father lived to tell his Airlift story

Every vacation, my dad took pleasure in going around our small town in Kerala, dropping by the houses of his old buddies, reminiscing the same stories of the past, over chai and banana chips. One tale among these that I never got tired of listening to was his adventures in the time of the Gulf War.

I must have been in grade eight when I began to comprehend the horror of being trapped in a war zone. And then the same story began making more sense. He would take a sip of the chai, cross his legs and let theatrics take over, the fine storyteller that he is. My mom would stand on the side, smiling at his zeal, correcting the timeline, if necessary.

Watching Akshay Kumar's Airlift juggled up some of those memories. Though my father and mother remember it a bit differently. In the May of 1990, in a villa in Nugra Hawally, Kuwait, my mother carrying me in her belly gets ready to leave for Kerala. Two months later, my father gets a call from her saying it is a baby girl; he insists he will think of a name.

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A week or so after, my father's air conditioned slumber was interrupted by what sounded like bullets and incessant ringing of the land phone.

He picks up the phone and draws back his curtains to see tankers crawling up on the road, houses being barged into and Arabs being manhandled. The voice of the friend on the other side of the line crackled, "It's Iraq. You need to get out of there."

Nugra Hawally, my parents remember, was an area dominated by Arabs-Kuwaitis, Lebanese and the like. There were no Indian families around. My mother says they would yell Sholay, Qurbani on seeing her, words they had heard from the monthly telecast of Hindi movies in the Kuwaiti channel.

My father's dear friends risked their lives and drove from Abbasiya (an area with a dense Indian population) in the dead of the night to get him out of Hawally. And he is still thankful.

After passing through a million check posts, where they had to repeatedly flash their passports, the gang reached Abbasiya where a friendly baqala (grocery) owner sold them the entire contents of his shop and fled.

The Iraqi soldiers, who were around 18-20-years-old , my dad says, were called the red army and were believed to be the second most efficient army in the world, after Russia. Also, along with the army, a few locals also crossed the border. Most of them were cab drivers and in three days, all the Kuwaiti taxis disappeared from the road. My dad remembers sights of car showrooms and jewelleries being looted, even tyres being carried away.

My dad and his gang exchanged their Kuwaiti dinars that were now equal to "toilet paper", for a very few Iraqi dinars whose "paper quality was really poor".

For a few days, my dad says, they ate like kings, not really aware of the grave situation they were in. It was only when the baqala supplies began diminishing at an alarming rate and they had to stand in long queues for a packet of khubs (the Arabic bread) did they realise they needed to plan something.

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Iraqis would appear inside houses and buy off expensive items for a menial amount. My father says they picked up his microwave oven and began shaking it as they had never seen one before.

The next step was the Indian embassy. External affairs minister Inder Kumar Gujral had landed in Kuwait to hold talks with the Iraqi authorities about the evacuation of over two lakh Indians. He announced he would take back letters to India and my dad distinctly remembers scribbling a few words, including a name for me on a piece of paper for Gujral to take. My mother, he would later know, was sick with worry as Iraq and Kuwait were cut off from the world, apart from disturbing news in the papers.

A friend of his got out to sell his car and was herded by Iraqi soldiers who mistook him for a Kuwaiti. After days of search and waiting, he was let go from a refugee camp where he had encountered some terrible things. They did not have anything against Indians, my dad would reiterate.

After days on the embassy compound, the embassy organised convoys of buses to transport Indians to Jordan by the end of August. It was a three-day journey, without sufficient water and food in a blazing 50 degree summer. My father tells me that the cars that fled in the initial days were stuck in the no man's land between Jordan and Kuwait.

Many died, he says, of scorpion bites, dysentery and heat stroke, because Jordan would not open its gates and the cars were stacked one after the other.

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After the "no-shave" bus ride, as my dad calls it, they reached the Jordan border where gates were being opened for a brief time and closed again. Red Crescent, by then, had put up camps in the no man's land. There were cucumbers and tomatoes and water, dad says. We stayed there for a week, slept soundly on the uneven rocky desert that pierced our back, he says.

Finally, when it was their turn, my dad realised that Indians were the last to be evacuated, though the fastest.

He also fondly remembers the emergency fund of Rs 150 that was handed out to him by the Indian government on arrival in Bombay and the Nayanar government of Kerala offering free train services from Bombay to Palakkad.

When he got back, he would see my mother clutching me and a telegram that he had sent from Basra, on his first attempt to flee, weeks ago. It had said, "We are safe". "But I shaved in Bombay, lest your mom wouldn't recognise me," signs off dad.