Despite Biraji’s secular outlook, I learned, in England he had become more involved in matters of faith. In 1965, there was still no gurdwara in Bedford, despite a sizeable Sikh population. The community had begun to gather and pray every Sunday in one of the large rooms in Biraji’s home. Later, from that beginning, a gurdwara was indeed established in Bedford, with Biraji as its first president. In preparation for the centenary of Guru Nanak’s birth in 1469, to be held at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1969, the more than thirty-five gurdwaras of the U.K. set up a committee of which Biraji was elected chair.
Leaving India on December 31, 1964, and arriving in England in the early evening of the same day has always made it easy for me to remember the date. As Biraji and I walked to the nearest entrance of the London Underground, he told me he’d been worried about me being denied entry into the U.K. A planeload of Indians trying to enter the country as students had been sent back earlier that day.
Unsurprisingly, Biraji’s English consisted of a few words supplemented by gestures. He had not been to school in India, and he’d had no opportunity to go to school in England, either. In the tube station, he asked me to get directions to King’s Cross. I tried my luck with a couple of people, but the rudimentary English that had enabled me to converse with the professors and the immigration officer failed here. Finally we succeeded, and we boarded the train. I surveyed the flood of white faces around me. My eyes were slow to register the differences, so they all looked the same.
At King’s Cross, we boarded a bus for Bedford, and soon we were on the freeway. It was dark by now, and snowing. The headlights of the coach illuminated the falling flakes, and the snow was already piled up on both sides of the freeway. I had never seen snow, and Biraji explained it to me using the only Punjabi word there is for snow or ice: burf . (There is also a word for hail: ahan .) The coach picked up and dropped off passengers along the way, and when it came to a stop in front of a barber shop, Biraji and I got off. It was still snowing, and standing there under the lamppost, I felt as if we were in a scene from a movie. Fortunately for my numb feet, Biraji’s house was less than fifty yards away.
Two of Biraji’s friends, who were also his tenants, were waiting up for us. So was Meeto Bhenji, my cousin, who had come to England a month earlier to be married. The coal in the fireplace in the front room was red hot. I was famished and cold, but soon, with a plate of food on my lap and my feet stuck out close to the fire, I started to unwind. My physical journey to England was over.
The next morning, I learned more about my surroundings. Biraji’s home, at 2 St. Leonard’s Avenue in Bedford, was a two-storey brick house with a detached two-car garage. A nearby subsidiary rail line used electric trains to connect to several smaller towns, including Stewartby, the location of the brick kiln where Biraji worked. Biraji had only recently bought this house. He had a substantial mortgage on it, which his tenants were helping him to pay off. While establishing himself in England and carrying this large debt load, he had still been sending significant funds to Chachaji, which were used to buy several more acres of land for our family. Biraji’s wife and children were still in Dosanjh, but Biraji was hoping to save enough to have them join him in Bedford soon.
The British economy was strong in 1965, but every place I went looking for work I was turned away. The recently elected Labour government of Harold Wilson was dealing with the large trade deficit left by the previous Conservative government. Wilson had tightened the country’s fiscal policy. He did not want Labour to be known as the party of devaluation — a previous Labour administration had devalued the pound once before — so the economy was feeling the effects. Unfortunately, while I may have been accepted into Faraday House Engineering College, as yet, I had no money to enrol there. Biraji could not support me, given all his other obligations.
Meanwhile, Meeto Bhenji married Jarnail Singh Klair of Bir-mingham. Since there was no gurdwara in Bedford, the holy Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth, were brought to Biraji’s home for the ceremony, and after her marriage Bhenji left for Birmingham. I continued my job search. I consulted Biraji’s friends, young and old, and made lists of the employers they said I should approach. Every evening Biraji would cook a meal, eat his supper early, and then bike to the brick kiln, where he worked the evening shift. All of his tenants were men whose wives were still in India. They had no leisure time, and there was no radio or tv at the house. I would pick up the local evening paper to scour the Help Wanted section. Each morning, I would dress in one of my woollen suits from Delhi and the long woollen overcoat Biraji had bought me the day after I got to Bedford, and hit the road to look for work. Some days I walked many miles. Other days I went a little farther on the bus. But there were no jobs to be had.
Finally, Biraji suggested I try my luck at finding a job in Derby, a city about seventy miles away. Packing for Derby was easy. I simply bundled all my clothes and whatever else I needed in my quilt, tying a rope around it; my Indian experience still dictated my behaviour in most matters. But things were to become more difficult.
Nobody in Bedford had taken me aside to explain the dos and the don’ts of English life. I learned by trial and error. My English reading level was probably the equivalent of grade four in Britain, and my spoken English was much worse. If I knew I had to speak with someone in English, I would prepare by imagining the conversation and translating it in my mind. If the actual conversation veered even slightly from the anticipated course, I would get stuck. Luckily, most people laughed with me, rather than at me, especially upon learning I was a brand-new immigrant.
I had been a shy child, and had even stuttered a little. There were no speech therapists to help, of course; only the anxious stares of my father. I was left to figure it out on my own, along with Nanaji’s somewhat idiosyncratic advice: Pretend that the person you’re speaking to is blind, deaf and mute. Fear of elders, teachers and authority figures brought on the bouts of stuttering, and in England the stutter threatened to reinvade. The people here were British: the former rulers of India. Whites were considered “superior” in my Indian experience. But my love for reading and Indian history came to my aid; proudly I recalled the stories of Ashoka the Great, who became a Buddhist and a votary of non-violence at the height of his power, and Mahatma Gandhi, who non-violently stood up to the might of the British Empire. Kautilya, who lived from 370 to 283 BCE , had written The Arthashastra , his advice for kings, 1,800 years before Machiavelli wrote his, and his treatise put Machiavelli’s to shame with its bluntness and clarity. My pride in India’s past gave me the strength not to stutter. I was no less a person than any other, regardless of colour or heritage. I did not have to defer to anyone. Deference must be mutual; otherwise, it is servitude.
In 1965, the British Indian community was still small, except in the London suburb of Southall, which was often called “Turban Town.” The Indian Workers’ Association was a left-leaning immigrant organization that spearheaded efforts for integration and equality. Bedford had no local chapter, but some Bedford men were active in the national organization; they spoke better English than most other Indians and acted as social, political and language interpreters. These men were also called upon by the English political parties who wanted to connect with the Indians. Their role as the go-to people for Indians on the one hand and the larger society on the other mirrored the way the British had depended on a certain class of people in India to control and govern the country. That colonial experience is fortunately a far cry from the more integrated and assertive British Indians of today.
Dev Badhan, one of Biraji’s young Indian friends, was studying full time at Mander College in Bedford. Dev, who lived a block away with his parents, was a bundle of energy, always smiling, always impatiently ready to ride off on his bike with his bag of books.
On a sunny winter morning, Dev put my bundled quilt on the carrier at the rear of his bike, and we walked together to the railway station. Dev was doing his A levels, after having completed several years of schooling in Bedford. A year older than me, he spoke English reasonably fluently, and we hit it