Education in India was becoming tainted by fraud and corruption as early as 1960. In the middle of writing the external grade eight Middle Standard mathematics examinations, a three-hour closed-book test, I was excused to go to the washroom. As I relieved myself in the urinal, a roofless brick enclosure, I saw a hand reach over the wall holding out a piece of paper. I looked at the paper and got the shock of my life. On it were purported solutions for some of the most difficult test questions, though the first and only answer I saw was wrong. Scared, I threw the paper back over the wall and returned quickly to my seat. Later on, I heard stories of students in high schools and colleges having their tests written by complete strangers who had guns resting on their desks and of teachers, principals and invigilators facilitating fraud.
IN THE CULTURE of India in the 1950s and 1960s, a person with one eye was called kana , a person who limped was called langaan , and a person missing a hand or part of one was called tunda : all extremely derogatory terms. My eye muscles were weak, and when I was tired, my eyes wandered. As a child I was called teera (cross-eyed), which made me ashamed and angry. India was, and unfortunately still is, a very status-conscious country. At school or college, if you wore pants and a shirt in place of an Indian pyjama kurta (the traditional long pants and short shirt), you were considered hip. If you were poor and rural, you were the lowest of the low in the eyes of the urban rich and the middle class. My family was both rural and poor: we were peasants.
Once, during summer break when I was visiting Bahowal, Nanaji hung a bag of fresh ripe mangoes on his bicycle and sat me behind. We rode off to see my new first cousin Aman Sara, the first-born of my aunt Masiji Gurmit, at Hoshiarpur. On the way it rained hard, and we had to cross several fast-moving rivulets filled waist-high with the runoff from the nearby Siwalik mountain range.
It took us several hours to reach Masiji’s home, Harbax Mansion, a palace-like house built by her late father-in-law. It had two large gates and a covered patio for a car. Aman’s great-grandfather had been a supporter of the British Raj and had served it in the capacity of honorary magistrate. His son, Masiji’s late father-in-law, was a London-trained barrister, also prominent and wealthy during the British Raj. His youngest son, Harnaunihal — a teacher by training — and Masiji, who also was a teacher, had fallen in love. Nanaji was not happy about the idea of his daughter marrying the son and grandson of supporters of the colonialists he had fought all his life. But Chachaji persuaded him, saying what could an enlightened family do if Masiji simply decided to run away with the boy? Nanaji overcame his politics to allow the marriage to go ahead. And so Harnaunihal became my Masarji (mother’s sister’s husband).
One evening during our visit, somebody told a joke that had me clutching my belly with laughter. Then I heard Masarji Harnaunihal yell out what he probably thought was a light-hearted remark about me: “Look at that paindubandar laughing so loud.” He had just called me a village monkey, and I shut up in a split second. I was a kid, and one did not confront one’s elders. In the morning we got up, got ready, ate a meal and left for Bahowal. Although I never held it against Masarji, that paindubandar comment never left me. It was a reminder of the deeply status-conscious, class- and caste-laden Indian ethos.
As I got older, I started to connect the various dots of history, science and politics. Our mid-year English examination in the ninth class included an essay question. I chose to write on “A Street Quarrel,” one of the essays in the texts prescribed for our class. We tried to commit all of the essays we read to memory so we could regurgitate them on the exam paper, but learning by rote was not one of my strengths, and my memory failed me every time I tried. However, my English lessons from Chachaji had given me the ability to think and compose. My essay on “A Street Quarrel” allowed me to plunge into history and to connect the backwardness of a village and its people to the neglect and impoverishment visited upon them by uncaring British rulers. India had become independent only fourteen years earlier. One could not blame the British forever, but it was an entirely plausible argument then. None of this was in the essay in our prescribed text, but I added my own thoughts to what little I remembered from the original.
A couple of days later, at the morning assembly, my English teacher stepped forward. He wanted to share with the whole school what he thought was the best essay of the ninth-grade test, he said, as an example of what an essay should be. He had read only the first two sentences when I realized it was my essay. With difficulty, I sat motionless through it all. Not being able to commit things to memory had been a blessing in disguise. Over the years, it has forced me to find my own voice to express myself.
There was no sex education at school or at home. All we ever heard as boys was that we were to think about and treat each young woman from the village as if she were our sister. Every cell in a fourteen-year-old’s body militates against that, and I was no different. But the whole notion of good character was wrapped up in sexual strictures and mores, and violating them had very serious consequences. Boys and girls who breached those strictures were killed if they were caught, or maimed to send a message to others. Our problems were compounded when the school decided that the class a year behind us would go co-ed as part of a new secondary system. The girls were beautiful, bright and mostly local. I did succeed in treating them like sisters. But did anyone except their actual siblings succeed in thinking of them as sisters? The honest but dangerous answer was no.
7
CHACHAJI WAS A RESTLESS SOUL who liked change and improvement. For him, these two things were synon-ymous. After some potential robbers tried to yank out the window from the mud walls of our home, my father decided to replace the exterior walls. We demolished them ourselves, carrying the dry mud and debris on our heads to the khooh as fill. A bricklayer was hired, and Bhaji and I, then fourteen and twelve, prepared the mud and cement as needed. The interior walls were still made of mud, but Chachaji innovated by mixing small amounts of sand and cement into the mud and using that to plaster the interior surfaces. They turned out as smooth as the drywall would be years later in my Canadian home. The floors of our house were resurfaced with bricks, as was the roof. The spaces between the bricks were filled with cement. All the work was done by the same skilled bricklayer, with Bhaji and me mixing the cement and mud, carrying it and cleaning.
Chachaji was also part-owner of a flour mill in Dosanjh that had been built on our land. People brought their grains to be crushed and ground in a machine powered by a generator. The machine was faster and more efficient than kharaas , the grinding stones powered by oxen, and one by-product of the water-cooling system used by the machine was the almost-hot water that poured into a cement tank where, on cold winter days, children from the neighbourhood bathed and women washed clothes. The water was laced with streaks of engine oil, but as far as I know it did not occur to anyone that it might be injurious to our health or the health of our land.
Then one day the mill was moved from our land: the partnership had ended. Soon we were demolishing the structure that had housed it. Chachaji, Bhaji and I took it apart brick by brick, carrying the wood and bricks to the khooh for storage. That kept us busy for days. Once the bricks and wood were stored and the area around the well levelled, Chachaji was ready for his next venture: a new three-room building at the khooh, with a veranda. Once again Bhaji and I did the heavy lifting — moving the bricks and preparing the mud, carrying it in containers on our heads and pouring it as directed by the bricklayer. Preparing the mud was the messiest and most difficult chore. We dug up soil from a field, piled it on a hard surface near the construction site, fetched water and then began the work of mixing water with the dirt. As the mud became heavy and harder to turn with our shovels, we crushed it with our bare feet, moving in a circle in the knee-deep mound until the soil was totally soft, smooth, and capable of flowing out of a container. The process was not unlike dragging the falha over dry wheat, except in this case we were both the falha and the oxen. (Often the mud used for bricklaying actually had wheat husk added to it; the theory was that the husk prevented the mud from dissolving quickly in the monsoons.) After we’d prepared the mud, our skinny legs would be bruised and battered below the knees.
It took many months, but finally we had a new building at the khooh . In keeping with the rural Indian ethos, Chachaji was a recycler par excellence. We’d incorporated every usable piece of iron, wood