Our family was helped by Chachaji’s teaching salary, though it was not huge. Our joint family had eleven mouths to feed from our five acres, and several school-going children to support. Being educated himself, my father realized the value of education, and he made sure that my Bhaji (brother) Kamal, my sisters Nimmy and Hartirath and I, as well as our Bhenjis (female cousins) — Bakhshish (the cousin we called Siso), Gurmit, and Harbans Kaur (whom we called Banso) — all went off to school.
Dosanjh was a caste of agriculturalists. The village consisted of five big families that had settled there several hundred years earlier. Each of the five was known as a patti, in the name of one of the five settler elders. Our home and the buildings on our land had mud walls and mud roofs, with wood from local trees holding up ceilings made of dried long grass. The roads were dusty, and the streets in our village were mostly covered by kiln-baked bricks. Sewage from homes flowed down naalian (channels) in the middle of the street, or on either side, out to two big ponds. The naalian were regularly dredged, with raw solid sewage piled up at various points on the street to dry. It was then carried away by the choohdays — the lowest group in the caste hierarchy — to be used as compost.
The stench from the naalian was bad. The monsoons were both a blessing and a curse: they washed the sewage out of the naalian into the ponds, but the stench from the ponds and other bodies of polluted rainwater was terrible in the extreme humidity. As young children, though, we were as one with our surroundings. One of our favourite pastimes was making paper boats and floating them in naalian full of gushing rain water. In the long rainy days of the monsoons, there wasn’t much else to do.
People went to the lands adjoining the villages to relieve themselves of their morning solid waste. That was a headache for those of us who worked that land every day. Quite often, hay-cutting or other chores would land our bare hands and feet in fresh human droppings. We were told the earth was a great disinfectant, so we would rub our soiled hands with dirt, and if any water was around, we would wash them. Failing that, we would wipe our hands on the hay or any other crop we were cutting.
We recycled everything. The village grew and spun its own cotton and wove it into cloth. We made our own unrefined sugar from homegrown sugarcane. The non-sugary upper leaves of the cane went to feed milk-producing cattle as well as the working oxen we used to help extract the juice. The cane’s skin, pulp and lower leaves were dried in the sun and then used as fuel to boil the juice to make sugar. Any leaves or pulp left over fuelled the home fires that fed our family. Once the cotton was picked, the plants were pulled out to be used as fuel, and the land was irrigated to prepare it for the next crop. Some of the ashes from this fuel were used for cleaning our metal dishes, and the remainder was mixed with animal excrement and composted, along with any greens left over from our farm or the household. Whenever we seeded a new crop, that compost was scattered and ploughed into the land.
The partition of India in 1947 affected Punjab and Bengal more than other parts of the country. Both were divided, creating East Pakistan — now Bangladesh — and West Pakistan, which included the large western portion of Punjab, with East Punjab becoming the Indian Punjab. From these divided regions, most Hindus and Sikhs migrated to what is now India, and Muslims migrated to what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh. Land consolidation was needed to accommodate the fourteen million people who had been uprooted. Before the partition, our family’s land was at Billayhana, half a mile from our home; it included a well with lots of trees around it and two Persian wheels, allowing two families to irrigate their land parcels at the same time.
Mangu, a handsome Dalit man from my mother’s village of Bahowal, was compensated with food, clothing, shelter and monthly pay to help out on our family farm. He lived at Billayhana with our uncle Tayaji. Their three meals a day were sent to them there. When the farm did not require Tayaji and Mangu to be there in the evenings, they joined the rest of our family at home for the meals, sharing stories and the gossip of the day. Then Tayaji would carry goodies for his beloved oxen back to Billayhana while Mangu would carry the human cargo, me, atop his shoulders. During the winter, I slept most nights on Tayaji’s bed. In the next room, the cattle were given respite from the noon heat on summer days, and shelter on cold winter nights and during the rains. On a cold night the warmth of the animals’ bodies and the sound of their breathing came through the door in the common wall, keeping us warm and comfortable; the smell of their urine and dung came in too. For centuries, peasants and their cattle lived cheek by jowl; the smell of urine and dung was the scent of life.
In the mornings, as the sun rose, someone from home would arrive with Tayaji’s chai. All the children in our family fought to be with him at chai time. He got special goodies, quite often pinnies , delicious balls made of nuts, seeds and flour that were skillet-baked in butter and raw homemade sugar.
Land consolidation after partition was a mammoth task, taking several years to accomplish. When I was four or five, the farm at Billayhana was relocated close to our village, a bare one hundred yards from our house on the other side of the firnie , the dusty ring road constructed around villages in ancient times for fortification — the word firnie meaning “one that goes around.” The firnies of old demarcated the residential boundary for each village. Even when I was growing up, very few families lived outside them.
Our new well and the land attached to it was called the Goraywala, which means “of the gora ” — one with a whiter complexion. The reason for the name was the colour of the old limestone platform around the well and the chalha , or reservoir. There was always some water in the chalha for the cattle to drink when the Persian wheel was not running. Until the arrival of local hand pumps in the mid-1950s, the Goraywala and its chalha served as the neighbourhood’s communal watering and washing place.
The cleansing of the Goraywala, which had been in disuse for some time after partition, was quite an elaborate ceremony. Blessings were sought from Khwaja, the god of water. Sweets were distributed, and much fun was had by all.
The ageless Goraywala was like an ancient witness to the march of men and women on the roads and streets of our village. It had provided drinking water to unknown travellers as well as generations of Dosanjhes. Thousands of children had peered through its cool water deep into the bowels of the earth. I too wondered at the deep secrets it held. I did not know then what I know now: the Goraywala was once at the heart of life.
Yet to me the Goraywala, being just a few yards away from our home, was an extension of it. In winter, we woke up to see the Persian wheel bringing well water to the surface. Steam rose like mist, giving the surroundings an enchanted look. The occasional winter fog made the Goraywala even more mysterious to my young mind. I would not learn until later that the fog was actually smog. Many a morning, the sun toiled and failed to come through. We conveniently blamed the gods, the sun god included.
In the fall, when the corn crop was harvested at Billayhana, huge, colourful mounds of cobs lay in the middle of a circle of drying stalks. As kids, we got to sleep in that circle under the starlit sky, waking up in the morning feeling as if we were small pieces of a multi-coloured work of art, brilliantly lit by the rising red sun. That beauty helped to mask the gruelling labour the land required. It was back-breaking work — under the scorching tropical sun in May, June and July, and in the dead cold of winter mornings.
In summer, I would sleep outside, either in the yard on the farm or on top of the roof at home. The stars and the moon entertained me. I marvelled at the wonders of the universe. On the moon we saw a shadow the elders told us was an old woman with a charkha , the traditional spinning wheel. She looked distinctly Indian, sitting motionless with both her hands in spinning mode, connecting us to the moon. In the world of my childhood, the moon and the earth were siblings, as they have been to Indians from time immemorial. The earth was our mother and the moon our Chandamama, or maternal uncle.
3
ONE MORNING BEFORE DAYBREAK , my mother woke me up. It was a cold winter morning, and still dark out. She dressed me up in warm clothes. The milk that had