A Havildar’s ribbon from Melbourne

I stepped into my office one humid morning and saw a Havildar working at the computer table. The room was part of a palace once built by a Maharaja to assert his vanity. Its thick, whitewashed stone walls still held onto the last threads of royal nostalgia. The palace, now repurposed for government offices, seemed like a distant cousin of the Taj Mahal — minus the river, plus a wandering herd of bulls and cows.

It is said that actress Asha Parekh, during a film shoot nearby, had visited this palace with her college friend — the Maharaja’s daughter. The story goes that they went hunting and the actress shot a panther in these very grounds. Shikar, once a royal indulgence, now survives only in yellowing memoirs and fading photographs.

Inside the office, a civilian Internet-enabled computer was shared among clerks for GEM — Government e-Marketplace — procurement work. The room vibrated with the monotonous hum of a malfunctioning air-conditioner next door. It was a sound one got used to, though every new visitor would remark on it as though it were a personal failing of mine.

That morning, a young Lieutenant from the Corps of Signals walked in, accompanied by that tall Havildar from the Army Service Corps. The officer was new to service, visibly nervous, and already half-bald. The Havildar, calm and confident, had been sent to train him in GEM procedures. I returned to my paperwork as the lesson unfolded — a one-sided masterclass in bureaucratic survival and digital procurement.

At some point, our logistics officer whispered to me, “Sir, this Havildar can talk from morning till night about GEM. But kaam karna? Not his thing.”

The Havildar, undeterred, rattled off tips, warnings, and procurement loopholes. After the Lieutenant departed, he turned to me and asked, “Saab, you’ve come from Sector HQ, haven’t you?” I nodded.

“I served there too. Back in 2012.”

We chatted about the post — its terrain, the small changes, the bullet-proofing of vehicles. I noticed a brown ribbon on his uniform and asked, “Is that for meritorious service?”

He smiled. “No sir. That’s a foreign service ribbon.”

“Which country?”

“Sir, Australia.”

I was surprised. “You must tell me about your posting there.”

He promised to return and share the story. A few days later, he did.

“Many years ago, Saab,” he began, “I was sent to an RR battalion to train their clerks in e-procurement. Just after crossing Jada Wali Gali, our Maruti Gypsy came under fire. A terrorist bullet struck my stomach. My head hit something hard. I blacked out. When I briefly regained consciousness, I was in a helicopter. Then again — darkness.”

Next, he said, he awoke in the ICU of Army Hospital, R&R. “A doctor was slapping my cheeks gently. ‘What’s your name? Kuch nahi hoga, beta.’ I had a skull fracture and a brain haemorrhage. Machines kept me alive. I was unconscious and dependent on a ventilator.”

His mother came every day and waited outside. The staff told her to stop coming. ‘We are doing what we can. Please don’t sit here all day,’ they said.

“But she understood. They were waiting for me to die. She explored private hospitals and discovered that a hospital in Melbourne had success treating patients with brain injuries like mine. She approached officers, filed applications, made rounds of headquarters. But the system said: Everything possible is being done.”

His grandfather, a retired school headmaster, reached out to his former students, some of whom were now senior IAS officers. Through them, his mother approached the President’s Secretariat.

She told the officer there, ‘Please allow me 10 minutes with Shri Pranab Mukherjee. If even the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces can do nothing, I will resign myself to God’s will.’

President Mukherjee listened. And then he acted.

“Within 72 hours, I was flown to Melbourne for treatment. I remained unconscious. Two months later, I woke up to the sound of bhajans being played in the hospital room. It felt as though I was floating above my own body — a honeybee watching from above. I tried to tear the ventilator off. The doctors were astonished. I was alive, but barely. I weighed just 35 kilos. I’m 6 feet tall.”

The Havildar told them that he had intense stomach pain. They scanned and found a bullet still lodged inside.

“After giving me a high-protein diet, they operated and removed it. And then I was diagnosed with cancer — carcinoma. I underwent chemotherapy and radiation. Today, I take 22 tablets a day. I do my job. I don’t complain.”

The doctors, he told me stoically, said he may have six, maybe seven, years to live. “That’s okay. I am grateful. I got a second chance,” he said.

There was a long silence when he finished. I asked about his father. “He was a Kargil casualty,” the Havildar replied. “He took six bullets in one leg. They had to amputate.”

As he sat there, tall and dignified, the brown ribbon on his chest seemed to hold far more than just the memory of a foreign posting. It held bullets, ventilators, bureaucratic coldness, a mother’s defiance, and a Supreme Commander’s mercy.

I looked at him and said, “You’ve got many years ahead, Havildar Saab. You’re no honeybee flying into the white light just yet.”

— Now retired from the Army, Ahlawat has penned four books on life in the armed forces