To the point where they are able to narrate each other’s stories. Together with others in similar situations, on both sides of the border, they gather under the banner of the Combatants for Peace, and become catalysts of a peacenik impulse. Like Bassam’s ‘prison number’ (220-284), they become metaphorical ‘amicable numbers’, a mathematical curiosity that entwines their destinies and lets them see each other as humans united in the equality of pain. Bassam’s daughter Abir, born in the year that Smadar died, was killed by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier.īut overcoming the impulse for hate-propelled revenge, the two men channel their grief as a weapon for peace. Rami’s daughter Smadar, who once featured as a poster child for peace, was killed in a 1997 attack by Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem.
The two men have only one thing in common: each of them lost a young daughter to the conflict. The revelation, acknowledged with soldierly grace by both parties, does nothing to diminish their kinship.Ĭolum McCann’s part-fact-part-fiction ‘hybrid novel’ traces a similar unlikely friendship between Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian ‘terrorist’ who grew up in a ‘cave’ near Hebron, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, whose father-in-law served as a
On the eve of the Brigadier’s departure, his Pakistani host makes a startling ‘confession’: it was at his hands that the visitor’s son had died in the 1971 tank battle. Their two countries may have been at loggerheads, but the two soldiers find themselves drawn together by an unlikely bond of friendship and a karmic connection. Nearly 30 years later, on a ‘bucket list’ visit to his hometown, in current-day Pakistan, the Brigadier is hosted by a gracious Pakistani Army officer and his family. Param Vir: Our Heroes in Battle, Major General Ian Cardozo, the first war-disabled officer to be approved for command of an Infantry Battalion, recounts the improbable real-life story of a retired Brigadier in the Indian Army, who lost a son in a tank battle during the 1971 war with Pakistan. The shadowlines of history are often drawn in arbitrary fashion, as the civilisational narratives of South Asia and West Asia illustrate, but they make for compelling post-war stories.
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