Richard Crasta, Author

What I present to you is two stories. One is of a simple Indian soldier from a village near Mangalore, one who, according to his brother Louis, "never got into a fight with anybody"--finding himself in the most brutal war in history, World War II, and being taken prisoner by a fellow Asian army--the Japanese Army, which treats thousands of Indian prisoners with a  brutality that results in higher mortality rates for them than for POWs of the Nazis. And then, after a miraculous survival, comes home to write his story, which is forgotten, perhaps scorned by his feudal superiors. The second story is of a son discovering his father's story even as his father is 86 years old, and feeble enough as to leave the world at anytime--and being so moved by it as to be compelled to publish it and to give it to the world.  It is a story about fathers and sons, part of the universal story that will never end, and will never cease to have fascination (incidentally, there ...

My late father, born into a poor family, walked to school through tiger-infested jungles and completed his high school at St. Aloysius College High School, Mangalore. He said he was, a couple of times, kicked out of class for being late with his school fees. Joining the British Indian Army and being taken prisoner in Singapore by the Japanese, my father underwent 3 1/2 years of horrific captivity in Rabaul, New Britain (now part of Papua New Guinea), during which time his mother had no news of him and thought he might be dead. Back in India, almost as an act of therapeutic release, this high-school educated man, with little exposure to literature, wrote down his story on the letter-pad stationery of his brothers' footwear shop. He wrote it in pencil, in 1946, and the manuscript lay unattended for 50 years until I read it and decided it had to be published. It was presented to him on December 27, 1997, less than two years before his death. I give below an excerpt from his memo...

I just saw Railway Man, the movie based on the bestselling book: the true story of Eric Lomax, a former British prisoner-of-war who decided to confront his nightmares by confronting his Japanese torturer, Takashi Nagase, in the flesh. It's a fascinating movie, with a surprising ending. In fact, most reviews of this movie do hint at the ending, so the story is actually in the telling, in the progress of Lomax from fury and terror to forgiveness and understanding. In Eaten by the Japanese: The Memoir of an Unknown Indian Prisoner of War, my late father, John Baptist Crasta, tells his own story. For him, the only possible therapeutic outlet was the act of writing the book. He, like thousands of other Indians, some dead, never got to meet the Japanese who ill-treated him. However, the Indians did engage in a form of forgiveness, as shown in this section from my father's book: On 27 August, we were taken to Romali, about thirty miles from Rabaul, to be “handed over.” ...