Читать книгу Journey After Midnight - Ujjal Dosanjh - Страница 11

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 angry animal. It lifted me up and threw me several feet. The buffalo was beaten off me by its apologetic owner, but the mauling left me bleeding and unable to walk. Bhaji broke off a branch of a mango tree, placed me on it and dragged me home to Nanaji’s. Our mother had come to Bahowal from Dosanjh for the mango season. Brandishing Nanaji’s khoonda , a bamboo walking stick with a sharp steel point, she set off like an angry lioness to confront the bad buffalo’s owner, who apologized profusely once again.

Mangoes were a source of income for some families, since contractors bought their fruit to take to market. The government owned the mango trees on either side of the Garhshankar–Hoshiarpur road. One day, as Jasso and I were returning from Mahilpur on foot, a ripe mango dropped onto the road in front of me. Without Jasso noticing, I picked up the mango and started sucking on it. Suddenly, someone ran up from behind, catching hold of my neck and hurling abuse at me. I thought I was going to die. Jasso screamed at the man. It turned out he was guarding the mangoes for a contractor who had bought the season’s crop from the government. I put the mango back on the road, tears rolling down my cheeks. Hunger or no hunger, I’d learned that the mangoes on the public road did not belong to the public.

MY MATERNAL UNCLE, who was a good student in grade ten at Mahilpur, started missing class and staying away from home for days at a time. Mamaji had been showing signs of opiate addiction, and it turned out his absences from school were spent learning to drive a truck and indulging in drinking, smoking and taking either opium or doday , ground poppy husk. One evening Mamaji came home drunk and started arguing with Nanaji. Holding an unsheathed sword in his hand, he threatened to behead himself. Nanaji demanded the sword, promising to do the deed himself if Mamaji really wanted to die. Mamaji quickly dropped both the sword and the argument and ran for his life.

Jasso, Jajo, Nanaji, Tirath and I had been eating our evening meal of saag (mustard leaves boiled, ground and spiced with homemade butter) and makki (corn roti, my favourite winter staple). We were traumatized by the incident. Jajo comforted us, assuring us no harm would come to Mamaji or anybody else, but Mamaji went away after that and did not come back for a long time. Nanaji heard from acquaintances that he had become a long-distance trucker. Jajo missed him very much, though she rarely said anything about him. Occasionally, she would ask me whether I missed my Mamaji. Of course, I would say. With a smile that betrayed her sadness, she would reassure me he was safe and would come back one day. It must have helped her to voice that hope aloud, stilling her turbulent mind.

A few days after Biji’s death, Mamaji arrived home in his truck in the middle of the night. In those days, very few trucks came to the villages. Most of what the villagers needed came on the guddas . Bahowal had no electricity or street lighting, and the truck woke up half the village. Many people came out of their homes in the dark as they heard first the truck and then Mamaji crying, overcome by grief at the loss of his older sister. As he hugged and kissed each family member, his cries became louder. Nanaji sat him down, and Jajo gave him a glass of water. When he spotted Tirath and me, tears rolled down his cheeks again. He covered his face with his huge hands and cried uncontrollably. He was a tall, strong man, but at that moment he was a child who had just lost his bibi .

The next time I saw Mamaji was under much happier circumstances: Bhaji and I were the best men at his wedding. Mamaji beamed with pride and happiness, and his bride, Jagtar (now my Mamiji, or aunt), looked stunning. Mamiji and I became fast friends. For the rest of my time in Bahowal, the responsibility for my care fell on her. One of her chores, an activity I didn’t relish, was the washing of my long hair. It was difficult to wash and even more difficult to comb. But Mamiji was patient. She seemed a perfect match for my impetuous, but loving, uncle.

Soon after their wedding, my four years at the Bahowal primary school were complete. With my shirts, shorts and turban neatly packed into a cloth bag hanging from the handlebars, Chachaji and I travelled on his bicycle to Dosanjh Kalan. From now on I would be attending the Dosanjh School along with Bhaji, who had already been enrolled there for two years and was entering grade seven. My father would now have two sons among his pupils.

Our ancestral village had changed while I was gone. Around the circular path the oxen travelled to power the Persian wheel, the trees had grown taller, providing more shade from the sun. We called Goraywala well, the land irrigated by it, and the small building on the land close to the well the khooh . The khooh was now more inviting, since it had more vegetation. The five acres of land we owned lay in a jagged row, with Baba Budh Singh’s portion contiguous to ours. In the middle, as if to demarcate the division, ran an aard , a channel constructed of mud that carried water from the well to the fields.

At home Bhaji and I shared a portion of one room. In the other portion were two sandooks , traditional wooden cabinets carved and decorated with brass. These had been part of Biji and Aunt Taeeji’s dowries. Our two-storey home, with its several small rooms, now housed at least eleven of us, including our older cousin Biraji’s wife and children. My uncle Tayaji slept at the khooh . That brought the family to twelve. According to the seasons and special holidays, the number could swell to nineteen or twenty. Gurmit Bhenji would come back from school; Siso Bhenji would bring her children to visit. Silence was hard to come by. Some people can read or study even with the radios blaring, but I had a hard time concentrating if someone so much as whispered close by.

The search for silence led me out of the house to the khooh . It offered more possibilities for quiet, but not always. If the Persian wheel was running, there was the constant noise made by the kutta , the iron brake lever that fell on each cog of the wheel as the oxen walked the circle. But the kutta was not as disruptive as human activity or speech. In the wee hours before daybreak, the hooves and bells of oxen being taken to plough the fields, the clanging of the kutta and the occasional crowing of a rooster were the only sounds. At that time of day, there was enough peace to study for our annual examinations.

When the khooh didn’t provide enough refuge from the bustle of the village, I sought out tall crops so I could hide in their insulation. That worked only in the early spring and fall. At other times it was too cold, too hot or too wet to be outside. And even sitting in the tall plants, I couldn’t escape the human presence completely; some people would be working in the fields, others were on their way there, and still others were looking for cover to satisfy the call of nature. The farther I went from the village, the better my chances of finding a clean, secluded spot. It was heavenly to hit one. Hiding in the crops, I felt like a rebel, a giant defying his pursuers by cleverly hiding.

The Dosanjh School was just under a mile away, across the canal. It was a large, E -shaped building, welcoming students east and west. There were grounds for soccer, field hockey, volleyball and basketball. Many rooms had wooden desks and benches, and all of them had blackboards. It was a definite and welcome improvement over the school in Bahowal.

Seeing the respect paid to Chachaji as, not just a master at the school, but one of its founders, made me see my father in a new light. It was the first time I realized that Chachaji was a builder of communities and institutions.

In 1923, shortly after matriculating from grade ten at J.J. Gov-ernment High School in Phagwara, Chachaji had gone to Calcutta. There he obtained a driver’s licence, in the process being photographed for the first time in his life. In Calcutta, he earned his living driving a truck. He did not last too long as a trucker and took off for Assam, where he became a contractor supplying labour to big and small employers. The details are sketchy, but this much is known: the employers did not pay Chachaji all of the money they owed him. He used his savings to pay the labourers who were due their wages and was about to set off for home when he received a letter from his friend Maula Singh, who asked Chachaji to help him establish a school in Dosanjh. Chachaji jumped headlong into the process, personally borrowing some money for it. Some land was donated by the villagers, but the rest had to be bought. Until the school building was complete, classes were housed in the village diwankhana , or communal hall. Chachaji went door to door in Dosanjh and other villages, encouraging parents to enrol their children in the new school. He also set about persuading the parents of those enrolled at places such as Phagwara to educate their children closer to home. Dr. Bikkar Lalli, a retired Canadian professor of mathematics who now lives in Surrey, British Columbia, remembers Chachaji approaching his father in the field where he was busy ploughing and convincing him to transfer Bikkar to the Dosanjh School. Obviously, the switch did not hurt Bikkar’s prospects in life.

The school was not conceived as a profit-making venture. The founders who taught there received a salary if the school could afford it, based on the very reasonable fees for students. Chachaji was the only founder still teaching there when I came back to the school for grade five. His friends Maula, Mehnga and Davindra had left for England, and Thakar Singh and Chanan Singh had gone on to do other things, but these young men of the 1920s and 1930s had a special bond that would last till the end of their lives.

Chachaji too had made plans to go to England, but Biji persuaded him otherwise. After her death, he again thought of leaving for England, but Jajo dissuaded him, worried that abroad he would marry a “white woman” and our lives would be neglected and ruined.

Chachaji continued his studies privately while he taught at the school. He wrote and passed his FA (Faculty of Arts) examination for English. Next he turned his mind to writing the Punjabi examination for the certificate of giani (literally, “the knowledgeable one”), and passed that. He was preparing to write the BA papers for English when Biji got ill. My father’s dream of a BA died with her.

Chachaji’s political involvement also took a hit, as he needed to pay more attention to us. Whenever elections came around, though, Chachaji organized and canvassed for the Congress party. He was a “Congresswala,” and like most of his contemporaries, he was an impeccably honest man. He had participated in the freedom movement in his country, and its ideals still glowed in his heart.

Chachaji made sure Bhaji and I were up by 4:30 AM , the kerosene lamp illuminating our books as we studied for an hour before doing our morning chores. Then it was time to run to the khooh to help Tayaji tend to the cattle and cut and chop fodder for the day. Bhaji and I barely had time to dip in the chalha for a bath, run home, dress, tie our turbans and get to school on time. Combing our long hair posed a perennial problem. Overnight, and as we worked on the farm in the mornings, it would become knotted, so on the days we were running late, combing got a miss. Chachaji kept a keen eye on his students. Some days at the end of the school assembly he would ask those who had not had a bath or combed their hair before coming to school to stand up. On the days Bhaji and I had not combed our hair, he would never fail to ask. And if we did not stand up to confess and then run the obligatory four rounds of the grounds, our father would call us out as liars. My brother and I took the punishment, in our hearts blaming Chachaji because he worked us too long and hard on the farm.

Chachaji himself wore homegrown and homespun cotton clothes. Dressed all in white with a white turban, he looked angelic, yet he was merciless to all slackers. Our family was poor, yet our father exuded richness through his appearance. Many believed we had high status and did not need to work in the fields, or work at all. Physical labour had little value in Indian culture. Some people would rather starve than be seen to labour manually.

I have always wondered why so many of my countrymen felt shame doing physical labour. Despite India’s indisputable riches, a history of poverty and hunger in the country could stretch to several volumes. At one time, I put the shame down to the slavery practised by British colonialists. They hired servants to do everything for them and did no manual work themselves. More recently, I have speculated about the lighter-skinned Aryans who are alleged to have invaded India from the north and conquered it, subjugating the darker-skinned original Indians and assigning them the most menial labour, eventually creating the caste system. No matter what its origin, the problem persists.

Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to promote self-help through manual chores had a great influence on Chachaji, though, as did the teachings of the first Sikh Guru, Nanak, who, after many years of preaching and teaching, returned to his native village to eke out a living by subsistence farming.

Chachaji’s honesty and simplicity were also reflected in his politics. During the independence movement and afterwards, he worked with many men who became politicians, including the first defence minister of independent India, Baldev Singh. Swaran Singh went on to hold many positions in India’s central cabinet, including that of minister of external affairs. Darbara Singh’s last public office was that of the chief minister of Punjab. Chachaji did not befriend these men because they were in government. Power held no allure for him, and India was already slipping into ways he felt wouldn’t lead to Gandhi’s Ram Raj, or just society.

I once asked Chachaji why he didn’t run for state or Indian Parliament, because I knew he had been approached. “If one wants to befriend camels, one needs tall doors,” he said. The reference, which I did not understand then, was to the corruption that was beginning to take root in India. My father was not prepared to use crooked methods to amass the wealth necessary to run in an election. He was not prepared to make the moral and ethical compromises Indian politics demanded. The country of his and Mahatma Gandhi’s dreams was fast becoming a cesspool.

Chachaji had risked his life many times for his principles. After partition, he organized men in our village and the surrounding area to gather Muslims and safely escort them to the camps from which they could leave for Pakistan under proper protection. Some people in the region wanted to rob and massacre the assembled Muslims in revenge for the killings of Sikhs and Hindus across the border. When Chachaji got wind of it, he gathered a group of strong young friends. Somehow he located some liquor and handed it to his comrades-against-crime to fortify their courage. The group begged and borrowed some weapons, and at nightfall they started the journey with their charges to the nearest camp at Behram, some six miles away. Chachaji walked his bike along with the caravan. Rumours had spread about him — that Master, the teacher, was carrying bombs and a pistol in the cloth bag slung over his handlebars while in actual fact it was only his food and air pump for the bicycle tires.

Chachaji and his group continued to help Muslims escape the avengers and robbers. In a futile attempt to dissuade him from his work, some of his enemies threatened to kill my siblings and me. One day he was returning from Neehr, a predominantly Muslim village, when a gunshot rang through the air. A bullet whizzed past, missing Chachaji by inches.

India was turning its back on the collective dream of the freedom fighters. The English sahibs departed, leaving sahibdom behind. Elected and unelected officials alike began to behave like the rulers of old. Instead of a healthy challenge to authority, sycophancy gained currency. Chachaji’s rebellious streak remained, and he showed it often. One day the chief minister of Punjab, Chachaji’s old friend Darbara Singh, decided to visit our village school unannounced. One of his functionaries showed up at our khooh looking for Chachaji, who was working with us in the fields. The chief minister wanted to see Chachaji at the school, the functionary said. Chachaji thought for a moment and said to the functionary, “Tell my friend I am busy making a living. I am not a rich man. I need to finish this work today. But I am happy to receive him here.” So the chief minister came by to see Chachaji on his way to his next destination. The green wheat crop, less than a foot tall, was turning and twisting in the cool breeze. After the minister left, we got right back to weeding it. I learned from Chachaji that freedom and equality are like crops: they must be diligently weeded, watered and fertilized.

Chachaji was also a voracious reader of Punjabi and Urdu books and of the Tribune, the prominent English daily that Mahatma Gandhi had once called the most important newspaper in North India. Our father had a small library at home that included English titles such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and many Urdu titles I could never make out. His Punjabi books, of which there were many, included works by the premier Punjabi novelist, Nanak Singh, and the Punjabi translation of Gorky’s The Mother. By the end of grade six, I had devoured most of the Punjabi titles in Chachaji’s collection. My facility with the language was recognized when I received the award of a book of Punjabi plays at a public function in the Dosanjh School, in the presence of hundreds of people from the surrounding villages. I still needed to work on my Hindi, however.