On those last days in Dosanjh, I observed my surroundings with a sense of impending loss, storing away scenes of my family and the sights and sounds of village life. I had no camera, so my eyes were the aperture, my brain the recording device. The dust and beauty of my little world, including the faces of the men, women and children, began to feel special, since I would no longer be able to see them at will. I would miss friends like Bakhshish from Bahowal, Sardul, Hari and Gunga from Dosanjh, Jagtar and Bhushan from college. I had no photographs of them, so I tried to keep their images strong in my mind.
I took a quick visit to Bahowal to see Nanaji and family. Who knew when we next would meet? Air travel was very expensive. Punjabis who left for England returned rarely, and only after long periods away. I also went to Bakhshish’s home, only to learn he had enlisted in the army. A sadness came upon me, but soon other friends from school heard that I was visiting and showed up at Bakhshish’s house. Soon we were reminiscing about the rote sequential chanting of multiplication tables our teachers had forced us through, and our game of blindfolding a boy and then milling around him, chattering continuously, to see if he could follow the voices and footsteps and manage to touch one of us. Our talk also turned to a play we had once performed; I had played the newlywed wife, dressed in bright red clothes, and Bakhshish had played the husband who was going away to earn a living. The duet, which I still remember, was “ Kahnoo pavaaiyan kothian vay kahnoo Chhattia a Vehra ”: if her husband was planning to go away, the wife asks him, why did he have this big house and yard built?
On my way back to Dosanjh, I rode along the route that Nanaji and I had travelled by gudda twelve years earlier. In a culture where things had remained the same for thousands of years, this road had certainly been on the move. The spotless mud hut where Nanaji and I had enjoyed such memorable burfi , tea and milk was no longer there, and in its place stood a row of grimy brick shopfronts whose owners obviously lacked pride in their establishments. Inside the new tea and sweet shop, the walls were blackened with soot, and a single sooty electric bulb hung from the ceiling. But the chai was exquisite and the burfi delicious. The present had merged with the past.
It was getting dark as I entered the Dosanjh village limits. I tried to imagine what awaited me in England: the roads there were paved with gold and life was easy, people said. I knew that was a myth; yet I had no knowledge of my own to replace it. The darkness was a sanctuary for my ignorance. Bhaji had always been a fellow of few words, but that evening, in the room we shared, he and I talked late into the night.
The morning of December 28, 1964, brought mist and fog. As the sun burned through, I walked the five acres of land our extended peasant family jointly owned. Most of the hay had been ploughed and the ground prepared for sowing the next crop. By mid-February, the wheat would be lush green for miles across Punjab. The sugarcane would be ready for making shucker in a month or so. From the spot where our land ended, I could see the Saneen da Rauda of Mandhali, the site of the mela where qawwals from Pakistan used to sing. I was voluntarily leaving my motherland, and how painful it was! What must have gone through the minds of the millions who were forced to abandon their birthplaces and move hundreds of miles away after partition? Their lives lay in ruins.
My sister Nimmy, an irrepressible spirit, still lived in Dosanjh. Like my sister Tirath, she hadn’t been told of my departure — perhaps my father thought her too young, though she was considered responsible enough to help make roti for the family and to wash the family clothes, all while attending school full time. Within a year of my departure for England, Biraji’s wife, Kuldip, and their three children, Kulbir, Parveen and Jasmine, would leave India to join Biraji in England. Most of the household work of cooking and cleaning for family and for the hired help on the khooh would fall on Nimmy. She was forced to grow up fast. Years later, she told me that when she saw a photograph of me from Derby with my friend Resham, whose family tree connected with ours several generations back, she could not believe that clean-shaven boy was her brother.
Not many people outside the family were privy to my plans, either. Hurdles to emigration could be easily created by people who did not like you: a false police report here and a malicious prosecution there, spurred by petty jealousies or perceived offences.
I planned to catch the evening train, a milk run that would reach Delhi early the next morning. The tightly bundled and roped quilt holding my belongings had to be carried as well, so we took several bicycles. Outside our home, I was surrounded by neighbours and my family. Taeeji’s moist eyes kept looking down, as if she couldn’t bear the sight of me leaving. Tayaji stood watching and waiting near the Goraywala. He blessed me with his hand on my head, patting me on the back to launch me into the unknown. He must have been thinking of Biraji, the son in England he had not seen for eight long years. I have always cried easily, and tears rolled down my cheeks as we walked with the bikes to the khooh . Behind our home we passed the clay hearth of our water-drawer, Bachni. In the evenings she would light a fire in the bhatthi and roast corn for anyone who wanted it. You brought your own corn for that purpose, and Bachni kept a portion of it as payment for her labour of roasting the rest. I turned to take one last look at the home where I had been born and raised.
We took the less-travelled canal road to Phagwara. It was early afternoon, and the canal was filled with water that flowed from a much deeper, wider canal irrigating the land in Dosanjh and beyond. I still remembered when this canal was freshly dug and the bridge over it that connected our school to the village was brand new. One morning the students gathered to watch the new canal fill, and as the water sped into it we saw a human corpse floating toward us: the decayed, bloated body of a man. It had the look of a huge sculpted statue perched on the surface of the moving water. The swollen limbs, the penis — the “statue” looked grotesque, and a strong stench emanated from it. I felt it should be taken out of the water, and I said so to the adults in the crowd. They shut me up, saying, “Let others downstream worry about it.” Anomie in India was already in full bloom.
Now the canal looked so much smaller than it had appeared to that grade-six child. Its banks were overgrown with tall grass. As we rode past Virkaan, the noise of a chuckee , a flour-mill engine, filled the air. Once, during the monsoons when the cattle-pulled kharaas was inoperable, Jajo milled our atta by hand for seven days straight. I tried to help her, but I couldn’t even budge the stone. But I poured grain into the chuckee as she rotated the grindstone holding the handle, first with one hand and then the other as her arms got tired. The work was so difficult that, historically, it was part of the sentence of hard labour endured by convicts. Guru Nanak had once offended the Mughal emperor Babar, and as a consequence was sentenced to hard labour of the chuckee in prison. Offending is the fate of all great reformers, of course. Men like Nanak and Gandhi viewed it as their dharma to offend against the evils of their time. Perhaps Jajo’s own husband, my Nanaji, had felt the same about the hard labour he endured in the British prisons of colonial India.
By now, we were on the Grand Trunk Road that passed through Phagwara, taking travellers on to Delhi on one side and to Amritsar and Lahore on the other. The textile mill by the railroad tracks was the largest year-round employer in Phagwara. The sugar mill farther down the road provided seasonal employment. Some men from Dosanjh worked in these mills, cycling to and from work every day. Finally we reached the intersection of the Grand Trunk and Banga roads. Turning right would take us back to Dosanjh. We turned left instead, arriving at the rail station a stone’s throw away. Chachaji’s cousins from Virkaan had come to see me off. Bhaji went to purchase train tickets for Chachaji and me while others carried my bundled quilt to the platform.
11
THE POWERFUL STEAM ENGINE sounded ominous. Its noise lent an air of finality to my fate. There was no turning back now. Those who had gathered offered me hugs and words of reassurance. It was one of the few times I have ever witnessed my brother cry. Chachaji and I boarded the train, and the engine spewed steam as the train pulled away. Bhaji waved one last time, and then I could see him no more.
As the train found its rhythm, the fields alongside appeared to be dancing