The mechanics of colonial-era troop transport created Deolali's particular misery. A railway connected the camp to Mumbai's port, and the system worked simply enough: arrive in India, train at Deolali, deploy elsewhere. When service ended, return to Deolali, wait for a ship. But troop ships operated on a seasonal schedule driven by monsoon weather, and the math was merciless. By the end of summer the camp filled with soldiers who had finished their tours, men who had been disarmed and given only light duties. New arrivals often had to sleep on the floor because beds had run out, and sand flea bites covered anyone close to the ground. There was nothing to do and nowhere useful to go.

Soldiers were permitted to visit nearby Nasik, which offered gin bars and brothels. Venereal disease became common. Malaria, which can affect the brain, was endemic throughout the Deolali area and remained a serious problem for the British Army through the Second World War despite the development of anti-malarial drugs. Suicides were not uncommon. The irony was that Deolali's climate was actually milder than Mumbai's or Pune's. The suffering was not primarily about temperature. It was about purposelessness, about men with military training and no mission, confined in a place designed for transit but functioning as limbo. The camp had a sanatorium but never a dedicated psychiatric hospital. Soldiers who developed severe mental illness were confined to the military prison or transferred to hospitals elsewhere in the country.

During both World Wars, Deolali served purposes beyond transit. It functioned as a prisoner-of-war camp, and during the Second World War, the military prison held captured Indian nationalists who had served in the Japanese-founded Indian National Army. The camp expanded with the times. By the 1940s it included cinemas, swimming pools, amusement parks, and restaurants for the troops, a far cry from the bare-bones misery of earlier decades. As Indian independence approached, the camp was renamed the "Homeward Bound Trooping Depot" and reversed its original function, processing the mass withdrawal of British forces and their families from the subcontinent. The departure was more orderly than the suffering had been.

After independence in 1947, the Indian Army took over the complex and transformed it into an artillery school and depot, hosting at least 10 artillery and service corps units along with an army records office and an aerial observation squadron. The camp's colonial-era notoriety took on a second life in British popular culture when it became the setting for It Ain't Half Hot Mum, the 1970s BBC comedy series about an entertainment unit in wartime India. The comedy mined the absurdity of military life in a distant posting, but the real Deolali had supplied that absurdity for decades before anyone wrote a script about it. The word the camp gave to the English language remains its most lasting export, a reminder that language carries history even when the speakers have forgotten the source.