Indian Navy

The Indian Navy is both an instrument of state power and a practical caretaker in the Sabarmati affair. It provides Commander Sabarmati with access to a weapon, shelters him from civilian imprisonment while his case proceeds, and takes responsibility for his children after his wife loses custody. Through these actions, the Navy turns an individual crime into a question of military privilege, career, and family custody.

Role in the Sabarmati affair

After receiving an anonymous note about his wife’s relationship with Homi Catrack, Commander Sabarmati hired a private detective and waited for the report. On the Sunday he acted, he went to the naval arsenal, signed out a revolver and ammunition, and travelled to the address identified by the detective. The weapon’s availability through naval channels made the Navy a material part of the events, even though the account presents the Commander as acting on his own.

The Commander later surrendered to a traffic policeman, but the case quickly raised a separate institutional concern: under naval regulations, a man who had served time in a civilian jail could not aspire to become Admiral of the Fleet. Admirals, politicians, and Ismail Ibrahim therefore pressed for the Commander to remain in a Navy jail while he awaited trial, arguing that his career should not be ruined before guilt was established. The authorities agreed, placing him in the Navy’s own lock-up rather than civilian custody.

Custody, public response, and consequences

Naval custody did not remove the Commander from public controversy. Supporters sent telegrams and flowers, and well-wishers brought him rich food despite his request for a simple diet. The prosecution charged him with first-degree murder; he pleaded not guilty. The Navy’s role was not to decide that question in the account, but its lock-up preserved the possibility of his naval advancement while the criminal proceedings continued.

The affair’s institutional effects extended to the family. Lila Sabarmati was denied custody of her children, and the Indian Navy took them into its care until their father completed his thirty-year jail term. In the novel’s account of the aftermath, the children leave with the Navy, while Lila disappears from the narrator’s life. The transfer of care makes the Navy more than a backdrop to the scandal: it becomes the authority that reorganizes the family’s future.

Institutional power and narrative significance

The Navy’s involvement links personal violence to rules governing military status. The same institution that supplies the Commander’s revolver can also protect his standing by controlling where he is detained; later, it assumes parental responsibility for his children. These actions reveal how official structures shape the consequences of private conduct, without resolving the conflict between the Commander’s public popularity and the legal charge against him.

The narrator places these institutional actions within a wider chain of reversals and departures. The Sabarmati apartment is eventually put up for sale, Lila loses custody, and the children pass into naval care. The Navy thus appears at both the immediate and lasting edges of the affair: first in the Commander’s access to a weapon and protected custody, then in the family’s separation and the children’s interim home.