E-Paper
Wildbuzz: Centurion Prithipal Gill’s smoking barrel
The gleam still prevalent in Col Gill’s eyes reveals one of the defining traits of his character, an intrepid naughtiness inherent in his fauji escapades
A trait associated with some ladies hailing from an era long past is that their memories are elephantine and remembrances lucid. There is no better embodiment of this attribute than Preminder Kaur (93), who has this delightful anecdote to share about her centurion husband: “He was painfully thin. So, when a wounded bison charged at him and tried to gore him with the expansive, curving horns, Prithipal’s reed-slim body saved the day. The horns went around and not through him! That gave him enough time to pull out his service revolver and shoot the bison in the head at point blank range. But not before a final, glancing blow from the dying horns took out a pair of Prithipal’s front teeth!”
On December 11, 2020, India celebrated the 100th birthday of a unique veteran and city beautiful resident, Col Prithipal Singh Gill (retd). He holds the distinction of having served the Air Force, Navy and Army. During the 1965 War, four artillery guns of his regiment were cut off by enemy action in the Sialkot sector, but then Lt Col Gill personally led a successful mission to retrieve the guns. Also a World War II veteran of air and naval battles, Col Gill hung up his boots in 1970. The sprightly couple celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary on December 24, 2020.
A life across three armed services lent Col Gill a unique opportunity to traverse diverse Indian jungles and luxuriate in his childhood passion for the outdoors and the true calling of his heart, shikar. The gleam still prevalent in his eyes reveals one of the defining traits of his character, an intrepid naughtiness inherent in his fauji escapades! “Prithipal was born naughty, his mother could not handle him. That trait was omnipresent throughout his career. A leopard wandered into the Army camp near Hoshiarpur and Prithipal brought it down with a .12 bore shotgun. He then hatched a plan to surreptitiously place the dead leopard in his commanding officer’s (CO) tent while his boss was away so that the latter suffered a memorable though dreadful fright on return. However, wiser counsel prevailed and Prithipal’s wicked plot was abandoned on the apprehension that the unknowing CO could have suffered a heart attack,” Kaur told this writer.
Her husband, despite his mesmerising age, is all there. His skin glows with daily oil massages and grooming by an attendant. The “young” man still insists on clipping his fingernails and does so with such deft application of force that they fly off like spent cartridges dispensed crisply from an English shotgun’s ejectors! Till just six months back, 200 ml of Scotch would daily and just past twilight regale the run up to his dinner. The rare secret of his longevity, as he claims!
Adding shikari detail to the bison encounter, his eyes mist over with a recall of his fondest memory. “I had gone to hunt bison with a local guide in Madhya Pradesh. I fired upon the bison with my rifle, a .450/.400 Nitro Express by John Rigby. The guide, being a canny fellow and wise to a bison’s rages, promptly abandoned me and scaled the first tree in sight. The wounded bison charged and crashed into me, my rifle was flung with the impact but my revolver saved the day,” grinned Col Gill. He had his two teeth replaced or else the gap in his otherwise gleaming dentition would have showcased a remarkable relic of his shikar escapades!
The pursuit of shikar harboured more than the danger of diehard beasts. A remarkable Army connection ensured he lived to tell this tale, too. Posted with the Gwalior Mountain Battery, the irrepressible shikari would venture into the jungles every night on a jeep. “One night, dacoits laid a tree across the jeep track. They took Prithipal and his guide prisoner. Upon learning their prisoner was from the Gwalior Battery, one of the dacoits tested Prithipal’s claim and queried if he knew a particular subedar of the Battery. That subedar, as luck would have it, was a relative of the dacoit. Upon receiving a precise reply of affirmation from Prithipal, the dacoits released him with the warning that he should not venture into the jungles again. I thanked my stars when Prithipal got back as I was very young, had a baby son and was virtually alone. To whom would I have turned had the dacoits not spared the shikari,” said Kaur.
vjswild1@gmail.com
