Biji did not come to Bahowal as often as Chachaji did, and her stays with us were all too brief. But I remember one visit with great clarity. I was in grade two; my sister Tirath had joined me at Bahowal School. Chachaji brought my mother and my sister Nimmy to Bahowal on his bicycle, and they stayed behind for a few more days. Biji seemed thinner than I remembered, and I clung to her, dreading the moment when she would have to leave. I begged her to stay and insisted upon going with her if she couldn’t. But of course she had a household to contend with back in Dosanjh, and I needed to stay at school.
Naniji, Masiji Heeti, Tirath and I all went to see Biji off at the bus stop on the Hoshiarpur–Garhshankar road. From Garhshankar, she planned to catch the train to Kultham, then walk the last mile and a half to Dosanjh. I kept hoping out loud that the buses to Garhshankar would be full and not stop for her. Sure enough, several buses packed with passengers passed by. It was getting too late to make the train connection at Garhshankar, so we turned and walked back home. At least for the day, I had won. The next morning Biji got ready early. When I woke up, she was already gone.
That visit was the last time Tirath and I saw our mother. Even today, the story is hard to tell. It was spring, the season of happiness and hope. On a beautiful day a few weeks later, sunny but not hot, Tirath and I stood with Nanaji at the place where the path from home to school crossed the kuchisarak . Nanaji was watching and waiting, his gaze fixed on the spot where the Garhshankar–Hoshiarpur road crossed the road that came to Bahowal. He seemed to be searching for something. For the first time in my life I did not perceive Nanaji as a giant; he seemed shrunken and shrivelled.
Suddenly, we saw two women in white walking toward us. I did not know then that white was the colour one wore in mourning. I had never experienced the death of anyone close to me, and nobody had told Tirath or me that our mother had fallen seriously ill. As the white figures drew closer, I realized it was Jajo and Masiji Gurmit, and they were crying. Nanaji’s eyes were also full of tears. “Why are you sad?” I asked. “Your Biji has gone to heaven,” he said, using the word swaragvas , meaning from then on she would reside in heaven. Jajo and Masiji were still crying as they hugged Tirath and me.
Many people came to Nanaji and Jajo’s home over the next few days. The women would weep and shriek. The men sat silently, occasionally talking about Biji or, as if to offer solace, telling stories of other young mothers who had left their families too soon.
My mother’s death had been cruelly sudden. In the days preceding her death, Biji had been weaving a cot for the dowry of a young woman in the neighbourhood who was about to get married. She cut herself accidentally but continued her chores, which included making half-moon cakes from wet cattle dung, to be dried in the sun for fuel. She developed a fever, and the cut filled with puss. Chachaji gave her some quinine, thinking the fever meant malaria, and he cleaned the infected wound using alcohol. When there was no break in the fever, Biji was taken to Dayanand Hospital, in the industrial city of Ludhiana. The doctors there told Chachaji that blood poisoning had spread to much of her body. They gave her a very expensive injection — five hundred rupees — but said her condition was most likely irreversible. It turned out to be so. She died of tetanus on March 13, 1954, the day Tirath turned four. Bhaji was nine, I was seven, and Nimmy was just two years old.
At the time, I didn’t understand that living in heaven meant death. If Biji was living somewhere else, why? How could she do this to her children? If heaven was such a good place, why had she not taken everyone with her? Jajo found it hard to satisfy my inquisitive nature. She told me that Biji had gone to another des (country), to return another day. At other times she said Biji had gone to Chandamama, Uncle Moon. The implied promise was reincarnation, reappearance, a concept central to my Indian heritage, but I took her words literally and lived in hope that I would see Biji again.
Biji was cremated. Her body must have been placed on a pile of wood on the land that had witnessed generations of Dosanjhes go from ashes to ashes. Draped in white, she would have been covered with pieces of wood before burning. Bhaji had been told, as I was, that our mother hadn’t really died. He found that difficult to reconcile with the sparks flying from the lit pyre. He told me years later that he stood there watching the cinders and embers in the waning fire glow late into the night.
I am told our whole Dosanjh village was in mourning at the death of our young mother. Everyone must have wondered how Chachaji, as a widower, would care for and bring up my siblings and me. They didn’t yet know about the complete commitment our uncle and his wife, our Tayaji and Taeeji, would make to our nurturing and well-being when we returned to Dosanjh Kalan.
While it is true that it takes a village to raise a child, villages can be cruel and parochial places. Dosanjh Kalan was no exception. Once, while Tirath and I were on a school break and visiting home, my cousin Banso Bhenji was washing our clothes; she gave me a worn-out shirt to wear while my other clothes dried in the sun. As I played in the vehda behind our home, I overheard a neighbourhood busybody lamenting my torn shirt and connecting it to the absence of Biji. I told the woman off — we loved our Bhenji.
Biji’s death changed our lives forever. It created a larger sense of family, and we drew even closer to our Dosanjh cousins. It taught me that the collective is important; sharing makes us stronger. Many years have come and gone since Biji went to swaragvas , but she has remained a compelling figure for us. When my siblings and I get together, the talk often turns to our facial features: who looks most like our mother? Our search for Biji continues in the faces of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren: her smile, her lips, her eyebrows, her cheekbones, an expression in the eyes here and there.
5
BACK AT BAHOWAL, life continued pretty much as before, though Tirath and I got some special attention. Every-one tried to ensure we did not miss Biji, at least not too much. I got my yearly new pair of leather shoes made by the shoemaker at Mahilpur. We did not wear shoes all the time, only on special occasions such as weddings or trips to other villages, but our feet outgrew the shoes much faster than we could wear them out. Once, while I was playing in the school yard on a holiday, I took my new shoes off to play, and I came home shoeless. Walking by the school yard, Nanaji had recognized my new shoes lying under a cart; he picked them up, hid them in a bag, and then, when I got home, asked me about their whereabouts. When I couldn’t remember where I’d left them, he thrust the bag at me and slapped my face. I was shocked, since he had rarely punished me physically. When he later caught me wearing a new pair to play football, using a brick as a ball, Jajo’s timely intervention may have saved me from another licking.
Nanaji owned four mango trees and had access to many others. During the summer break, Jasso, Jajo’s older sister, would accompany Tirath and me to the bagh , where we’d sit in the garden’s shade, ensuring that no one stole our family’s mangoes. We’d eat some of the ripe mangoes that dropped to the ground, leaving the skin and the pits behind to compost, and take the bulk home with us at night, to be eaten later or made into shisha , a concoction of mango, salt and pepper that we ate with rotis.
During mango season, our Bahowal home had the feel of a festive inn. Jajo and Jasso’s extended family and relatives all came for the mangoes, as did the Dosanjhes. Gurmit Bhenji was teaching by now, and her colleagues and friends joined us. So did many of Chachaji’s teaching colleagues and friends. Our three-room home was noisy late into the evening. People slept anywhere they could find a spot, including on the roof and in the compound. We always hoped for clear skies, but when it rained, Beant’s big house next door with its veranda came in handy.
One year during mango season, when my mother was still alive, Bhaji and I were in the mango groves when a buffalo came charging us. Bhaji climbed a tree, trying to pull me up behind him. I was too slow, though, and I couldn’t escape the