From the looks of it, the man and boy riding the oxen were poor subsistence farmers. At the chungi , a place where toll was collected for commercial traffic, two uniformed police officers questioned the gudda owner in the presence of the two “civilians” Verinder and I had seen earlier. The two “civilians” turned out to be police officers too. One of them reached into the gudda and brought out the thing they had clearly pushed in themselves, a bottle of hooch. As they brandished the bottle in front of the farmer, his son started to cry. The police turned the gudda back, hurling insults at the driver.
Realizing this was a plot to extract some cash from the farmer, Verinder and I told the police what we had witnessed and asked them to let the farmer go home. The police then turned their abuse on us, threatening to teach us a lesson if we didn’t mind our own business. Persistent, Verinder and I accompanied the gudda to the police station half a mile back in Phagwara, where we demanded to see the officer in charge. He told us to get lost.
Verinder’s father was a former member of the Punjab Legislative Council, and Verinder also knew the current Phagwara MLA , Om Parkash Agnihotri. A few minutes later we were sitting in front of a man dressed in simple Indian clothes as he wrote up our complaint in his one-room office: an image of a public official scarce in India today. The MLA would mail our complaint to the superintendent of police at the district headquarters, he assured us. When Verinder and I passed by the police station on our way back to the main road, the gudda was no longer there; the farmer and his young son had either been released or been sent elsewhere for holding overnight.
This was my first real experience of dealing directly with the world. The faces of the crying son and his scared father haunted me. Their family must have been worried for their safety when they did not return to their village at the expected hour. The father probably feared that all of his proceeds from the family’s produce sales would go to line the pockets of scheming policemen, causing his children to go without shoes or school books. All the way home from Mr. Agnihotri’s office, I thought about Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of a free and just India. He believed if Indians changed for the better, so would India. Some of my hope for my country died that day, and I have remained alive to that feeling, a fear that sustains me in my daily pursuit of social justice.
The incident continued to haunt my thoughts. Then one day Verinder and I were called to the principal’s office and instructed to ride our bikes to the Phagwara Rest House, about a mile away. The place exuded authority and order. We were ushered in to see the superintendent of police, who showed us a row of uniformed men and asked us to identify the four involved in our complaint. We did, and their badges and belts were stripped off. They were being suspended, we were told, pending an inquiry. The suspended men later approached Chachaji and asked him to persuade me to withdraw the complaint. He refused, leaving me to decide the matter. Verinder and I decided to stand by our complaint. We knew the cops were not rich, and there was a possibility they would lose their jobs. On the other hand, the farmer and his son deserved justice. In the end, we never learned what became of our complaint.
A COUPLE OF MY rich friends from school spent much of their time travelling by train to cinemas in different cities. What little money my family had sat quite often on the shelf above our study table. One day the shelf held two hundred rupees. To my father’s horror, both that money and his young son went missing for two nights. I travelled to Jullundur, watched several movies, ate out and then slept at a friend’s. Thanks to Taeeji’s intervention, Chachaji let me off with only a warning when I returned, my wallet empty and remorse written all over my shamed face.
Until high school I had worn Indian clothes. Sweaters in the winter, yes, but even our blankets were cotton or cotton and wool mixed, homespun and woven. Chachaji did not suffer from a lack of self-esteem, and he did not need to dress his children in Western attire. That was not how I felt — I wanted to wear pants and jackets. But I did not complain. At college, the divide was even more pronounced. Many poor students pretended to be from rich families. I had not yet learned to be comfortable in my own skin. I started wearing cheap versions of Western clothes, tight pants with a well-defined crease or, even better, a stitched one. My desire to fit in was overwhelming. The pride I would later feel in my heritage eluded me at that age.
Chachaji never failed to lead by example in doing physical work. For him, work was like worship, and there was no shame in worshipping the labour that fed his children. But at college, even the students from the poorest backgrounds, who knew the need and value of physical work, denigrated friends caught working in the fields, carrying loads on their heads or tending to cattle. If one was seen by fellow students doing physical labour, there were always excuses: it was just for that day, the family servant had fallen ill, and so on and so forth.
My family was making an effort to educate me without constantly reminding me of our poverty. I was deluding myself that a new bicycle, cleaner clothes and the neater environs of the college had somehow changed our status. As I wrestled with growing up in a jungle of influences, the college offered new vistas and friends. Jagtar Sihota and Bharat Bhushan Maini, both of whom had more experience with urban India, took me under their wing, and I started paying attention again to my books and to what our teachers taught in the classroom. But their guidance came too late. I failed the final chemistry exam, receiving a compartment — a chance to rewrite it and thus avoid failing the year.
Chachaji had pinned on me his hopes of a child with a university degree. In later years, I felt like a criminal for putting him through what transpired for me at college. My brother and I never talked about it, but when a documentary about my life was made in 2009, Bhaji blurted out tearfully that in 1963, when Chachaji learned of my wretched compartment, he had cried, something my brother had never seen before. On learning that, I was justly cut down to size.
Writing the compartment exam in 1963 took me to Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, which was still under construction. I had been there once before, during a class trip in grade ten that took us on a bus tour of several important historical places. In Chandigarh, we had seen the Punjab Assembly, the Government Secretariat, the High Court buildings and man-made Sukhna Lake. Chandigarh had been designed in the 1950s by the French architect Le Corbusier, who was commissioned by Nehru to build his dream city for a modern India. Today it is an aging city turned into a union territory under the control of the central government.
The Punjab and Bengal were cut to pieces by the murderous partition of India in 1947, an inevitable result of pandering by politicians to religious passions and bigotry. Their lust for power could only be satisfied if the region was further divided to create a religious majority of Sikhs in the Punjab, but to shelter themselves from accusations of religious favouritism, they masked it as a campaign for a separate linguistic Punjabi-speaking state. The panderers succeeded in carving three states out of the Punjab, which had already suffered serious cuts and body blows. The central government, not to be left behind, acted like the monkey resolving the dispute between two cats over a piece of bread. Since the new states were not able to agree who should get Chandigarh, the central government appropriated it as a union territory.
The bus taking me to my compartment exam reached the city in the late afternoon. I could not afford a hotel room, so I stayed with the extended Dosanjh family of the poet Nazar Taras. They were generous hosts, making sure I had a room to myself in their three-room home, with a light for studying. On the day of the exam, I took a rickshaw to the Panjab University. The wide boulevard leading to it was freshly paved, and my nervousness perhaps made the spotless white building look even more imposing. This was no ordinary exam; a compartment meant a close brush with failing your year.
There were about two hundred other students ready to plunge into the test. Invigilators distributed the questionnaire, along with a booklet for our answers. I looked up to the ceiling, then at the door and the closed windows. By now, political battles were more exciting to me than chemical reactions. But there was no escape. For the next three hours, my head was empty of everything except chemistry.
Back at home, everyone wanted to know how the test had gone. I wasn’t sure. If I’d failed, I would have to be content to be a subsistence farmer for the rest of my life. I could not bear to see Chachaji worried to death about me anymore. In a society where the honour of parent and