Читать книгу Journey After Midnight - Ujjal Dosanjh - Страница 10

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 on the school premises. Corporal punishment was common at the time, and parents expected teachers not to spare the rod. All of us dreaded being caned on our knuckles or bums in front of the class; it was considered weak and cowardly to wince. With Husan on the throne, his subjects usually behaved.

When Husan retired from teaching, he was replaced by two beautiful women, both recent graduates. Kamala Bhenji hailed from Hoshiarpur; Kaushalya Bhenji belonged to the village Bombeli, a mile and a half away. Both had attended a training school, and the urban influence set them apart from most of the village folk of Bahowal. Our new Bhenjis, as we called our female teachers, descended upon us like the fairies in magical tales. Kaushalya rode a bicycle to school from Bombeli every day. Kamala now lived in Bahowal, boarding with Beant’s wife at her palatial house next door to us. Almost everyone considered Nanaji the village elder. In that small world, as his dohta (daughter’s son), I could do no wrong.

I had always looked forward to school, and after Kamala and Kaushalya arrived, it became even more thrilling. When Kamala spoke to me, I felt special. I looked for any opportunity to be physically close to her, and since she lived next door, I got to be with her often. She would hug me often as I played with her younger brother, who also attended our school. My childhood crush remained a concealed embarrassment until I discovered how common such childhood crushes were. My fixation ended when Kamala transferred to another school.

The school was a microcosm of Nanaji’s village: rich and poor, big landholders and peasants, untouchables and Brahmins all enrolled their children. Private schools for the wealthy and the upper middle class had not yet sucked the life out of primary education. The egalitarian élan of the freedom movement was still alive. My classmates Seeto, Sutto and Mindo — bright young girls ready to challenge the world — came from the so-called lower castes. There was Gholi, the son of a relatively affluent family, and Jinder, who loved singing along with the toomba , a single-stringed instrument popular in the folk music of the time, which was dominated by artists like Ramta and Yamala. Bakhshish, the tallest and oldest boy at school, was my best friend. We spent a lot of time together. He was a harijan , Gandhi’s word for untouchables — the Dalits of today. Luckily, because Bahowal was home to many independence activists, nobody worried about caste in my home or at school. Bakhshish helped Nanaji and me tend to the cattle, and occasionally slept over. I went to his home too, sharing food with him and his family and spending the night.

Bakhshish told me stories about Indian history and mythology. Lord Krishna was warrior Arjuna’s guide and teacher in the grand Indian epic The Mahabharata . Lord Krishna and Lord Rama, of the epic The Ramayana , were an integral part of the Indian story, evident from the fact that there were several thousand references to them in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy scriptures.

Bakhshish, more mature than I, may have been more aware of caste and class divisions in India. He wanted our friendship to be like that of Krishna and Sudama — Krishna being from royalty and Sudama a poor kid. Their friendship was tested when the pauper Sudama took simple beaten rice, Krishna’s childhood favourite, to the adult king Krishna to seek material help. He was greeted by the king with love and affection, despite the distance of years, caste and class. Since I was not from an affluent family, Bakhshish may have had caste in his mind when talking about our friendship, which continues to this day.

Life at Bahowal revolved around school and helping Nanaji on the few acres of land he owned. He would take me with him to the fields to keep a watch on the family cattle. Often the animals, unimpressed by my tiny stature and the big stick I carried with difficulty, would wade into forbidden fields, crops or water. In Nanaji’s presence, however, they never failed to behave. When he ploughed a field, readying it for the next crop, I followed the plough and picked up weed roots to be dried and used as household fuel.

The older folk could tell time by looking at the position of the sun. Time for them wasn’t about what the clock struck. When I took the cattle out to graze, crossing a dry, sandy rivulet that flowed swiftly during the monsoons, I often ended up back at home too soon. Quickly, though, I developed my own way of telling time. I would stand under the sun out in the pasture, and if my shadow was almost nonexistent, it was time to go home for the noon meal. In the evening, I knew it wasn’t time to leave until my shadow was at its longest. The cattle no longer returned with stomachs half-empty.

The sandy rivulet was beautiful, with trees and other vegetation on both sides. About a mile away, a gurdwara stood on the edge of the rivulet, surrounded by trees and plants of different varieties. The bunhianwala , literally “of the forest,” was peaceful except on special days, when people flocked to it for praying and celebrations. On rainy days, the runoff in the rivulet prevented people from crossing over to the gurdwara, adding a certain mystique to the bunhianwala for me. When taking cattle to the pasture, I was ever afraid of being alone in the jungle. Jajo, my grandmother, told me to invoke the bunhianwala and my fear would vanish; it never completely did, but the invocation fortified me.

In Bahowal, a religious man distributed Sikh gutkas , booklets with excerpts from the scriptures, free of charge. The only conditions were that you demonstrate fluency in Punjabi, promise to treat the gutka with respect and cover your head when reading it. Fluency proven and promises made, I was a proud recipient of my own gutka , which I read several times. I only partially understood the words, but the poetry was mesmerizing. The new-book smell of the gutka rushed like a storm at my nostrils. Nostrils do not discriminate between the sacred and the profane.

Reading was something I was good at. Nanaji would get me to read the Punjabi newspaper of the Communist Party of India, Nawan Zamana (New Age) , to his many visitors. He took great pride in having this “reading machine” read (or broadcast) the news while he and his guests had lunch or tea. The two guests who came most often were Dr. Bhag Singh and Darshan Singh Canadian (he had adopted that surname after returning to India from Canada). In time, they were both elected to the Punjab legislature, representing the Communist Party of India ( CPI ); both were spellbinding orators. Dr. Bhag Singh had gone as a student to the U.S., completing his PhD there before returning to India. While in the U.S., he was influenced by the secular Ghadarites of the West Coast of North America and joined the CPI . Darshan, on the other hand, was an immigrant to Canada who returned to India shortly after Independence. In Canada, he had been a member of the Communist League and was one of the founders of the International Woodworkers of America. In India, Darshan was assassinated by Khalistani extremists in 1986.

Little things made big impressions in those days, be they gutkas , shinjhs (a series of wrestling matches in the villages), or a new toy, which was rare. Our lives were definitely poor, but we were without discontent or self-pity. There were no televisions, only the village radio, the battery for which was stored with Nanaji. People listened collectively to the Dihati , a program that Chacha Kumaydaan and Thuniaram, the hosts, aimed at rural folk and broadcast from Jullundur in an inimitable comic style. The hosts felt like members of our family; we laughed and cried with them. I carried the heavy battery on my head five evenings a week to the gurdwara so that the radio could function for that one Dihati hour. Despite often tumbling to the ground with me, the battery never failed to function.

If something went wrong in my slow, contented world, I brooded over it forever. One day a group of us took a trip to Barian Kalan, a mid-sized town equidistant from Bahowal and Mahilpur. At the bazaar, Jasso, Naniji’s older sister, bought some household stuff. I had eight annas (half a rupee) in my pocket, and I bought a toy wheel with a handle. When I walked, pushing the wheel in front of me, it made a noise like a bicycle bell. On our way home I was so excited that I got far ahead of others. I kept running as I looked over my shoulder at them, and I stumbled on the uneven dirt road, twisting and breaking my toy. I can feel the pain of that loss even now.

Chachaji came to visit Bahowal every couple of months. After the half day at school on a Saturday, he would bicycle to Mahilpur, briefly stopping there to pick up bananas, dates or other seasonal fruit, and then head for Bahowal, reaching us in the late afternoon. He would teach me English during his visits, preparing me for my return to the Dosanjh School for the high school grades.

Chachaji, with his white clothes and turban against his dark, sun-tanned skin, cut an imposing figure. During the school holiday he would take me from Bahowal to Dosanjh on his bike, and at break’s end he would bring me back again. Our trips back and forth sometimes meant new clothes or shoes, and certainly a special treat of sweet lassi along the way. Chachaji would ask Jajo to make special dishes like masur dal — lentil curry — for his dinner and mango pickle for him to take back to Dosanjh for Biji and others in our family to enjoy. My grandmother was a wonderful cook, and like most women of her era, was expert at making elaborate dishes at home and packing them up into neat, travel-worthy packages for loved ones elsewhere.

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.