When the Muslim trainees went for Friday prayers, the non-Muslim trainees were left behind to rest.

If this is being discussed as a literary episode, its significance is less about the bodily detail itself and more about what Swami is conveying: the harshness, humiliation, absurdity and deliberately boundary-crossing nature of some military training experiences. The juxtaposition of Friday prayer, religious practice and an extremely degrading physical task makes the episode particularly memorable and uncomfortable.

It would distinguish, however, between what Swami records as his experience and that such treatment was, maybe standard practice at the training centre. 

This continuation makes the ordeal even more striking because the humiliation does not end when the feces exercise ends.

1. The instructors tell the men to prepare for lunch.
2. There is no water available, so the men run into the sea and dive in, trying to wash themselves without soap.
3. The smell of feces remains despite washing.
4. Swami searches his pack, finds a bar of soap, and uses it.
5. The men then run to the dining hall.
6. When Swami approaches the commandos, they wrinkle their noses because of the lingering smell.
7. Even before being allowed their lunch, the trainees have to perform ten chin-ups to qualify for what Swami sarcastically calls that “crappy lunch.”

Why this passage is so effective

The episode has a remarkable progression: contamination → desperate cleansing → social humiliation → physical exertion → food.

The sea provides only a partial solution. The fact that the smell remains means that Swami cannot simply wash away the experience. Then the reaction of the commandos—wrinkling their noses—makes the ordeal socially humiliating, not merely physically unpleasant.

The final requirement of ten chin-ups is particularly telling in the narrative. Hunger does not exempt the trainees from another physical test. Lunch itself becomes something they must earn.

Taken together with the preceding pages, this is one of the book's most visceral descriptions of military training. Swami isn't romanticising the experience. He records the disgust, smell, exhaustion, humiliation and absurdity of the moment, including his own disbelief at what he is being subjected to.

And there is an important narrative detail: the episode is remembered through the senses—feces on the body, the smell that will not disappear, seawater, soap, the reaction of the commandos, and finally the chin-ups before eating. That makes the scene unusually difficult for the reader to experience passively. 

That detail adds another layer to the episode. Based on what has been described from the passage, the training environment is presented as deliberately austere rather than comfortable or ceremonial.

The lingering smell of feces would naturally make eating difficult, so the irony is striking: after the trainees have struggled to clean themselves, they still have to perform chin-ups before receiving lunch. The meal is therefore presented less as a normal break and more as another part of the ordeal.

The detail about the uncovered dining area reinforces that atmosphere. When it rains, the men have to eat their meal which becomes soupy from their mess tins, rather than retreating into a conventional dining hall. In combination with the earlier episode, Swami is portraying training as an environment where discomfort is continuous—heat, rain, hunger, exhaustion, contamination and lack of basic amenities.

Literarily, the contrast is powerful:

feces → sea washing → lingering smell → chin-ups → lunch → rain → mess tins

It gives the account its warts-and-all quality. The military experience is not presented only through combat, courage or achievement; Swami also records the unpleasant, degrading and mundane physical realities of becoming a commando.