The Bedford railway station reminded me of the major Indian rail stations, which of course had been built by the British too. It was a lot cleaner, though. On the wall opposite the solitary bench in the station’s waiting room was a regional map of the railway routes. I spotted Derby on it. The year was not 1893. This was not Durban, South Africa. I was not a barrister; I was looking for a job without any skills for one. I was no Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, but his story played through my mind nonetheless. He had boarded the train on a first-class ticket at Durban, and partway through his journey he had been thrown off the train. He waited in the bitter cold of the station at Pietermaritzburg, pondering whether to stay and fight racial injustice in South Africa or to return to India to make a living as a lawyer in the colonial courts. So far, Gandhi had not been known as a fighter, but being thrown off a train because he was not white shook him to the core and steeled his soul.
My economy-class ticket had no seat or compartment specified. I tried to push my bundled quilt through the door of the compartment nearest to where I stood on the platform, but the door was too narrow for the bundle to pass. As I stood on the platform wrestling with it, the train guard called out, motioning for me to come over to his compartment, which had a much larger sliding door. He signalled. The train moved. Then, in Punjabi, he asked me where I was heading. I looked at him in surprise as I answered. “I thought you were a gora ,” I said. He took his cap off, and his pitch-black hair and his dark eyes shouted “Indian” then.
As it turned out, Jasbir Mann was an immigrant from Banga, the town ten miles from Dosanjh. He had been to our village and school during a hockey tournament, and he knew my father. He lived in London, he told me, and had worked for some years for British Rail. Our conversation stretched all the way to Derby, interrupted by station stops along the way. Jasbir reminisced about his early life and his time in Britain. The more he talked, the brighter his face glowed. He clearly missed India. As we spoke, I imagined what lay ahead for me. Finally, the train slowed, creaking, and stopped at Derby.
Many people were milling about at the station. Taxis waited in line for fares. Already the region seemed more vibrant than what I had seen in Bedford. I hoped it meant I would find work soon.
13
I TOOK A CAB to Chacha Chain Singh’s house on Depot Street. It was early afternoon on a Sunday, and Chacha and his sons Resham and Ajaib were at home. Theirs was a typical row house of five rooms, with the toilet outside at the end of a small walled backyard. Each of the two bedrooms had two single beds. I was given the only unoccupied bed in the house. There was no bathroom; instead, my new housemates went to the nearby public baths once a week. Chacha was a foundry worker. Workers in the foundries and factories, where work was physical and hard, had bathing facilities at work, I would soon learn. In Chacha’s household, people occasionally heated up water on the stove and took a quick bath in the kitchen, which had a brick floor with a drain under the sink that carried water to the sewer.
Chacha was a member of Chachaji’s generation, and he belonged to the same patti as we did of the five there were in our village, which made him closer to us genealogically than many other Dosanjhes were. He was a tall, heavy man who had been in the U.K. for more than ten years. He had returned to India to visit in the late fifties bearing Terylene shirts, shiny suits and a reel-to-reel tape recorder deck that looked like a small suitcase. Ajaib and Resham had not yet immigrated to the U.K. with their father, and we had a whale of a time with that tape recorder. We would borrow an iktara , an Indian one-string instrument, to accompany ourselves. I sang my own poems, and I loved hearing myself replayed. Others laughed at my lousy performances.
In those days, when you went job searching or even shopping in a city centre, you dressed in your Sunday best. But there was a problem. There was no facility that starched turbans in Derby — nor had there been in Bedford. In Punjab, in the bazaars and along the roadside, there were countless places that did this for a price.
A starched turban is like a crown that you can take off and put away to wear the next day and the day after. A starchless turban usually loses its shape once it is taken off — and that, indeed, is what had happened to mine. In desperation, I tried to starch the turban myself, but the visible gobs of starch destroyed its beauty. There was only one solution. I thanked Chachaji in absentia for allowing me the choice to cut my hair, and one Saturday afternoon the deed was done.
It took me a couple of long weeks to land a job with British Rail. The railway had a large goods yard in Derby and they provided on-the-job training. The job was twelve hours a day, six days a week, starting at 2:00 PM . Sundays we had off. I made good money: twenty-two pounds a week after taxes.
I had been introduced to two neighbourhood pubs with names ending in “Arms.” I did not see any arms of the dangerous kind there, only the warmth of family-owned establishments. They served great draft beer, and everyone told me a beer a day did not hurt anybody. I learned it was in the pubs where working-class people met and en-tertained themselves in the evenings. But on weekdays I didn’t get home from the railway until three in the morning, so I visited the pub for a beer at lunchtime, walking to work afterwards with the food I’d packed for the night. On the way I would pick up a newspaper, which kept me busy in the intervals between trains being shunted.
For me at that time, everything was new: new country, new language, new culture — and now, the totally new experience of working for an employer in an industrialized country. I wanted to learn everything quickly, and the walk to and from work gave me time to be alone with my impatient thoughts. I hungered for knowledge.
My co-workers at the rail yard came from Pakistan, India and the West Indies. We worked on the grounds, coupling, uncoupling, slowing or stopping the wagons. All the other jobs were held by whites. Chanan, a teacher from Punjab, was the longest-working person at the yard at our level. Another worker, Aslam, was from Azad Kashmir, as he called it. (I called it Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.) Aslam always exchanged good-natured repartee with Bhatti, a Pakistani from Lahore, who claimed he had a BA from the University of the Punjab in Lahore and walked around with an air of superiority. The India-Pakistan War of 1965 happened during the time we were all working together, but we kept our passions inside us.
Shunting was not always safe work. One day a Pakistani co-worker not much older than I was fell while slowing down a wagon as his wedged bat slipped. He lost his right ankle and foot when they were crushed by the wagon. Chanan Singh had made sure I bought a pair of steel-toed work boots, but even those, I knew, would not prevent a leg from being chopped off.
The coal-burning stoves in the cabins in the yards were handy for warming our Indian food or for frying eggs and heating beans. The cabins served as lunchrooms and resting places when there were no trains to shunt. I read as much as I could when there was quiet: newspapers, books and magazines. There were heated debates among the men as well. For the West Indians, cricket was the thing. For Indians and Pakistanis, it was field hockey; cricket had not yet assumed the gigantic role in the life of these former colonies that it has today. The West Indians talked sports; we of the Indian subcontinent talked mostly politics. Religion in Pakistan had not yet poisoned minds, and there was no resurgent Hindu or Sikh militancy in India. We all knew stories of families maimed and butchered during partition on either side of the border.
One temperamental West Indian co-worker, though, often picked quarrels with others. Everyone tried to avoid him, but one day, when I had the misfortune of being in his company, the man made a vulgar remark about my sisters. I had not yet dealt in my mind with the question of violence, but I let the man know my culture didn’t appreciate that kind of talk. He flew into a rage and lunged at me with a knife he was using to peel an apple. The third person in the cabin intervened, and when the foreman heard the commotion, he ran into the cabin and led me away. It took me some time to learn that walking away from a principle is wrong, but walking away from an idiot is not.
Derby was not far from Nottingham, where Biraji’s brother-in-law Pushkar