In 1940, an Indian medical officer walked toward twenty German tanks holding nothing but a white handkerchief. Captured and sent to Colditz Castle, he became the only Indian prisoner among hundreds of British officers.
They made him cook their meals. They gave him a nickname. They told him he was not allowed to escape.
When Subhas Chandra Bose summoned him to Berlin and offered him a place in the fight for India's freedom, he refused. He returned to the castle. He starved himself for sixteen days. He escaped alone. He walked nine hundred kilometres to Switzerland.
Then he came home, married an Englishwoman, raised two sons, and said nothing about any of it for fifty years.
Drawn from MI5 File Z/240 at The National Archives, Imperial War Museum recordings, and the memoirs of Colditz prisoners, The Indian at Colditz is a novel about loyalty given to a country that never returned it — and the fifty-year silence that followed.