The Jump
My uncle was not merely a general. He was a legend of a particular and specific kind — the kind that accrues to men who have done things that cannot be undone or forgotten.
He had won the Military Cross fighting the Germans in Greece, where he had blown up a key railway bridge to disrupt Rommel’s supply lines. He had come home to India and risen through the army to become Director of Military Operations, the man who guided the Indian Army’s strategy through the 1971 war and the liberation of Bangladesh. He was Colonel of the Parachute Regiment. When you were his nephew, people knew who you were before you arrived.
When the Parachute Regiment opened skydiving training to civilians, I was the first to apply. I was placed on SBC 2 — Skydiving Basic Course number two. We trained in Agra, home of the Parachute Regiment, and everyone knew who I was. My uncle had seen to that.
The training was serious and methodical. We learned to pack our own parachutes — a process you approach with the focused attention of someone who understands that the consequences of inattention are not recoverable. We learned the body position for the jump, the count, the moment to pull the chord. There were around thirty students on the course: mostly NCC cadets and young people from military families. I was, again, the one civilian who had no particular business being there.
The count, once you have learned it, stays with you permanently: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand — then the chord. The count gives the chute time to deploy. The five seconds between leaving the aircraft and pulling the chord are among the longest five seconds available to a human being.
The day of the first jump arrived.
I had packed my own chute. I sat in the window of the single-engine aircraft, looking down at the drop zone far below, and I made a private arrangement with whatever forces govern these things: please save me today. I will never do this again.
We went over the DZ. I jumped.
One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Four thousand. Five thousand.
I pulled the chord. The parachute opened — a sudden, violent, beautiful deceleration, as if an enormous hand had reached down from the sky and plucked me out of the fall. The ground came up slowly, gently, and I landed, and I was alive, and I started packing my chute.
Then I heard it.
One of the NCC cadets had jumped. His parachute had not opened. He was falling — what they call a Roman candle, the chute streaming uselessly above him — and he was screaming. He was calling for his mother. He was too shocked to open his reserve chute.It was his first jump.
Then he hit the ground.
There are things that, once seen, cannot be unseen. That boy falling. That sound. I have carried both for nearly fifty years and I carry them still. He was young, and he was frightened, and the last thing he called for was his mother, which is what human beings call for when everything else has run out. I do not know why his chute failed. I do not know what series of small errors or bad luck or simple mechanical failure had been assembled in the hours before that jump to produce that outcome. These questions do not have satisfying answers.
The course was suspended. They kept us at Agra for a few days, as if routine and proximity to the airfield might restore what had been broken. Then, in an attempt to steady the nerves of the remaining students, the instructors announced they would make a demonstration jump. The instructors were experienced men. They knew what they were doing.
One of their chutes did not open. He reached his reserve in time and landed safely.
They cancelled the course.
I think about that boy sometimes — not often, but at moments when I am thinking about the gap between preparation and outcome, between what you have done to be ready and what the world decides to give you regardless. He had packed his chute. He had done his count. He had done everything that was asked of him.
Every mountaineer knows the version of this truth that applies to mountains: you can be the best-prepared person on the ridge and the weather will still turn, the snow will still move, chance will still have its final say. The skies above Agra in 1977 offered the same lesson in a different and more brutal register.
I kept my promise. I never jumped again.
— P.S.B.