In 1924, the Gurdwara Sudhar Lehar and the jathedars of all thirty-six districts of the then-united Punjab appointed Nanaji the Jathedar of Jathedars to lead the Lehar. Over time, he evolved from a Sikh political activist into a Marxist who learned to read and write Hindi as a political prisoner in the British jails. He spent nine years behind bars before India achieved independence. That is a big chunk of anyone’s life, but he was sentenced to many more years than he actually served. On top of that, my grandfather spent years under house arrest or being confined to his village of Bahowal. He also had to face sanctions if he violated the strict terms of his release. Add to all this the number of years of illegal and undocumented detention that he suffered, and it can be safely argued that between his return from China in 1919 and the independence of India in 1947, Nanaji was under partial or complete political detention for at least twenty years. After Independence, there were still periodic jail visits, house arrests, mandatory reporting to police and other restrictions, as Nanaji continued agitating for better economic and social conditions for the common folk in free India.
Nanaji was not perfect. After India was freed but divided, he, like millions of others, felt betrayed. He rejected the division of the country. The pace of change, too, was slow and disheartening, and, settled back in Bahowal, he came face to face with his own material poverty. He could not even provide enough wheat flour for daily rotis for his small family. Nanaji and his comrades felt that the India of their dreams was daily becoming more elusive, and one night some colleagues from the leftist underground in the region came to see him. They wanted him to do political work somewhere far away. It pained Nanaji to turn them down, but the hunger stalking his family kept him at home. He forever afterwards regretted that decision. This was the first time he had ever said no to his colleagues, and it felt selfish to do so in order to feed his family. Although he remained active in the Communist Party of India till he came to Canada in 1975, his failure to be perfect in that moment remained with him till he died.
Before his death in Canada in 1982, Nanaji regularly spoke out against inequality, religious hatred and the harebrained idea of Khal-istan, the imagined homeland that Canadian Sikh separatists even then wanted to carve out of India. Alienated from the mainstream and guilty about leaving India, the separatists in the Sikh diaspora had fallen into a stupor of fanaticism.
4
MY MOTHER AND FATHER were married in 1942, amid the anti-British turmoil of the Quit India Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi. Indians wanted a quick overthrow of the British regime. Nanaji, of course, was at the forefront of Quit India in his region. He was imprisoned once again — this time under the Defence of India Act, a law deceptively named, since its only purpose was the defence of British rule. Biji’s marriage, like most other family events, happened without her father’s participation. Nanaji’s friends on the outside pitched in, as did, remarkably, the groom-to-be.
Sometime before 1942, when he was not constrained by royal edict, Nanaji had asked a friend to suggest a good boy, if he knew one, for Biji, his eldest daughter. It so happened that the friend had spotted my father taking a bath at the Dosanjh family’s Persian wheel. My grandfather hesitated at first. Chachaji was quite a bit older than Biji, and although the economic condition of the Dosanjhes had improved, they were still quite poor. But Nanaji also had his other two daughters, Gurmit and Harjit, to worry about. They, too, would be of marriageable age soon.
After some discreet inquiries, contact with Chachaji was made. Nanaji was underground and on the run, but one day he showed up unannounced at the Dosanjh School. He gave Chachaji a one-rupee note, signifying that he and Biji were now engaged. That one rupee, exchanged in an unorthodox setting, sealed the tone for the kind of marriage ceremony Chachaji and Biji would have. Usually an Indian wedding lasted several days, but theirs would set a new record for brevity and simplicity.
Biji was only fifteen at the time of her marriage. Chachaji visited Bahowal to help Naniji and her family make arrangements for the wedding. It was unheard of for a prospective groom to visit his in-laws’ village at the time, let alone help with the preparations. Couples were forbidden from meeting one another before their weddings. How Chachaji and Biji navigated such a unique situation remains a mystery; Naniji’s small three-room house had few places to hide.
On the appointed day, Chachaji cycled to Bahowal, where he was met by his brother, my Tayaji; Baba Budh Singh, Dada Harnam’s cousin; and the family naai (barber). Any wrinkles to be ironed out at a wedding usually fell to the naai caste, who acted as go-betweens for the bride and groom’s families. Generally, jhirs and others attached to a family were paid seasonally, in kind with grains, hay and other farm products. On special occasions such as weddings, they, like the naai , would receive cash. After the wedding, as the others from his family returned to Dosanjh by train, Chachaji bicycled home, with Biji sitting behind him.
Biji had completed grade six before her marriage. Even afterwards, she attended regular classes at the high school for girls in Dosanjh, successfully completing grade eight. In 1942, it was revolutionary for a new young wife to be attending school in her husband’s village. Most rural girls and women never attended school at all. That Dosanjh Kalan had one of only two girls’ schools in the whole of the pre-partition rural Punjab certainly helped. Still, the people of Dosanjh must have thought Chachaji insane to send his young and exceptionally beautiful wife to school. She wanted to continue, but Bhaji came along, followed by the rest of us in quick succession. The family could not afford to look after Chachaji and Biji’s children without Biji’s presence at home.
While their father roamed all over India agitating for independence, Biji’s sisters had come to live with us in Dosanjh. Masiji (mother’s sister) Gurmit lived with us for two years while she finished her grade ten, and Masiji Harjit (whom we called Heeti) came to finish grades six to ten. Later, my sister Hartirath would attend secondary and post-secondary institutions thirty miles away at Hoshiarpur, living with Masiji Gurmit. And now I was taking my primary education at Bahowal. These “exchanges” were typical of the interdependence that’s still prevalent in traditional societies, without which life would be much more difficult. And the bonds we developed in those days in our extended family endure.
AS THE ONLY CHILD at Bahowal during my first two primary school years, I had the undivided affection and attention of all. Naniji and Masiji Heeti dressed me in clean bright clothes for school, then combed my hair and tied it in a gutta , the knotted dome of long hair worn by male Sikh children.
The three-room Bahowal School had been established by Nanaji in a home abandoned by a Muslim family during partition. The rooms had no windows, just a small opening in each of the outside walls close to the ceiling. The yard around the school had several mango and tahli trees, which provided shade. In winter, classes were held in the unshaded compound; in summer we sat under the trees. On cold or wet days, our classes moved indoors. Our teachers perched on a chair at the front of the class, and we students sat on mats that were rolled up at the end of each day and stored away for the next morning. When we reached grade two, the school asked each of us to buy a two-inch-high pine pedestal to sit on. The smooth, unvarnished pine looked so clean and beautiful compared to our mats and the teachers’ old chairs and tables. During recess there was time to run home, have a bite, then run back and play in the yard before classes resumed.
Masiji Heeti taught us for a few months. Mamaji (as we called him maternal uncle) Sohan Sangha also did so for a while. His father, Makhan Singh, and Nanaji were comrades in India’s independence movement, and the best of friends; like brothers, in fact. Makhan Singh had stood in for Nanaji at Biji’s wedding. Ours was a government school, and both teachers and funds were in short supply in a colony recently turned independent. At first, Urdu was taught along with Punjabi, so I learned the Urdu alphabet. Each letter seemed a work of art. To my dismay, schools in Punjab stopped teaching Urdu at the end of my first grade.
After a while, an older teacher named Husan (meaning “beauty”) arrived at our school. Clean-shaven Husan dressed in sleeveless shirts and pants, his feet in sandals. The traditional turban he wore in spring made it seem as if he had just returned from a royal soirée. Smoking incessantly on his chair as we sat cross-legged on our mats, he looked like a Mogul emperor holding court. His word was law