PUNE, Nov 25: It is almost 26 years since Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla was martyred and took his pedestal as a war hero, when he went down with the INS Khukri, as commander of the Indian naval anti-submarine frigate when it was torpedoed on December 9, 1971, by an enemy submarine, and his charming wife, Sudha Mulla is on a house-hunting mission to make Pune her permanent home.Sadly, her choice of Pune is due to her affliction with cancer which makes it necessary for her to be near the Tata Memorial Cancer Research Institute in neighbouring Mumbai. Her stoic attitude to adversity seems to come from her husband. Says she, ``All my responsibilities are over. Both my daughters are married, and I am not worried about how long I live.''Sudha Mulla, here in Pune to choose a new home, expresses gratitude to to Maharashtra Chief Minister Manohar Joshi who lost no time to accede to her request of a home in Pune on the ten per cent quota basis.Her memories about the Indo-Pak War of 1971 are still vivid and tears well her eyes when she recalls the war her husband never came back from When contacted, she mused, ``He was so devoted to the nation that he never revealed to me his dates of arrival or departure on his ship. I was always taken by surprise and sometimes would grumble about why such secrets should be hidden from his better half. But, the staunch naval officer that he was he did not confide anything to me.''It was 16 months before the Indo-Pak War of December 3, 1971 that Captain Mulla was posted aboard the Kukhri. Recalls Sudha, ``We were based in Bombay then, he unexpectedly came home on December 6, 1971 in the midst of the war, since his ship had some trouble with the boiler system. Luckily both our daughters, Amita and Anjali just come home for vacations.''Says Sudha, ``He had come just for that one day and we were delighted. When the war started I did not fear any danger to the navy, I thought my husband would just swim across. When I told him this, he was strangely quiet.''He left his home on December 7 for his anti-submarine frigate for the last time. INS Kukhri sank in the Arabian Sea along with 18 officers and 176 sailors two days later.Newspapers reported the final moments of his life. One report said: ``Capt Mahendra Nath Mulla (45), the skipper, stood by his ill-fated ship to the last and shared their destiny when he could have easily save himself. ``The story of the 45 year old gallant commanding officer's efforts to rescue as many as he could and then going down with the ship was told by survivors. The 183 cm tall Captain Mulla himself goaded younger soldiers into the sea, directing them to swim away. When one of them offered him a life jacket he reportedly said: `Go on, save yourselves, do not worry about me.'Survivors remember looking back as they swum desperately away from the sinking vessel. They saw the lone figure of the captain sitting on the bridge - the highest art of the ship's superstructure. That was his last glimpse the world got.While high drama ruled in the Arabian Sea, Captain Mulla's petite wife was surrounded by wives of sailors that were aboard the frigate. ``I did not remove my sindoor though I had this instinctive feeling that he would never come back. My elder daughter, Amita, consoled me saying `we must think positively and that Papa is sure to come back'.''Even as she made herself a pillar of strength for the other women, she recollects, on December 14, the survivors came back . but not her Mahendra. Steadily, she picked up the threads of her life, helping war widows and the making of the Kukhri Memorial. Subsequently, she took up teaching, and even went on to edit a woman's magazine, Beads and bangles in the late 60s. Today, Sudha Mulla is a proud grandmother of two teenaged grandchildren and of course, still a proud wife of a lion-hearted naval officer.
