Insomnia: Army Stories

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A perfect collection of stories about the lives of soldiers in war and peace. Rachna Bisht Rawat has the incredible ability to project how a soldier thinks, talks and acts in diverse situations. A must-read for every citizen of India, especially in these times of tension on our borders-Major General lan Cardozo, AVSM, SM.

The settings of Rachna's stories-locales ranging from Siachen, Kashmir, Garhwal to Arunachal-are picture-perfect. Her language, descriptions and similes are masterly. She brings alive her characters and the details of their lives and relationships in the army. Every soldier and his/her spouse will be able to relate closely with each story. This bouquet of stories comprises pathos, tragedy, valour, humour, even wickedness. In one story she writes, "Stories are born in the heart- from seeds quietly sown by people who once walked in and out of it-and can be written only when they start to choke you with their weight." These are stories from the depths of her heart, which could only be written by someone closely related to the army-General V.P. Malik, PVSM, AVSM, former Chief of Army Staff.

'The author's style of writing is easy, lucid and engaging. The bond between two "enemy" soldiers at the army posts on either side of the border, in the story "Saathi", speaks about the vanity of war. The author's affiliation to and affinity for the army comes through with flair in these tales'-Bala Chauhan, The New Indian Express.

In these stories laced with humour and pathos, Rachna Bisht Rawat steps away from the heroism of battlefields, as she has been doing in her previous books, to give us a sense of the bittersweet incidents that unfold inside hedge-lined cantonments across the country. A moving portrayal of the lives of soldiers, their families and their brotherhood. Rachna sprinkles her stories with an equal measure of hope and horror, and her lucid prose tells it as it is.

Rachna Bisht Rawat is the author of five books by Penguin Random House India, including the bestsellers The Brave and Kargil. She lives in New Delhi with Saransh, the wise teen; Hukum, the bushy-tailed golden retriever; an eclectic collection of books and music; and Manoj, the man in olive green who met her twenty-eight years back, when he was a Gentleman Cadet at the Indian Military Academy, and offered to be her comrade for life.

Insomnia is a compilation of stories, many of which 1 I wrote nearly parts back, in sleepy Ferozepur, the last town of Punjab on the India-Pakistan border. I would drag a chair into the bamboo thicket at the end of our garden and sit there with my laptop, the breeze carrying to me strains of the Gurbani from across the yellow mustard fields.

Though the stories were not getting published anywhere, they added so much meaning to my life. A portion of the book I wrote more recently, in the lonely months of the lockdown, cut away from the world by the pandemic that suddenly changed everything. I would work on it leaning back on the sofa in my Delhi flat, with a steaming mug of tea by my side and a bored Hukum- our handsome golden retriever-dozing off at my feet, his long silken ears brushing the floor. These stories helped take away some of the stifling sadness that had seeped into my heart as I constantly lived and breathed episodes of tragic human loss while writing Kargil, my previous book.

This mixed bag of tales will show you a world of olive green that is inhabited not just by heroes but also by characters cut out from the same fabric of society that defines most of us: some strong, some weak, some seeped in moral courage, others twisted and evil. Isn't that how it is in the real world?

The stories I particularly enjoyed writing are the ones about the escapades of a happy-go-lucky major in the Indian Army who is loosely based on a young paratrooper I know. You will find him and his company of badass soldiers navigating their Kashmir and Siachen postings with a devil-may-care attitude. Their (mis)adventures give you a glimpse of how life actually is in the army, where young boys, straight out of college, are ready to risk everything in the line of duty, with a song on their lips and a wicked prank in their heads.

While many of the incidents you will read in this book are based on true events and many of the characters are drawn from people I know, much of what you will read comes with what we, in the writing world, called creative licence. Which means that it is all a product of the writer's imagination and may or may not be true.

Many of these stories were written at a time when I had no contacts in publishing. So I wrote these promising myself that one day, maybe a hundred years later, I would compile them into a book.