Читать книгу Journey After Midnight - Ujjal Dosanjh - Страница 12

ONCE BHAJI AND I got home from school, we would eat quickly, change into our khooh clothes and walk over to help with the work. I did all the chores except ploughing and levelling the land, for which I was considered too young. As the sugarcane grew taller, we tied it together in bunches, using the semi-green leaves in the middle as rope. Our constant sweating cooled us down in the windless confines of the tall crop. In the evening, when we took a bath in the chalha , the water would sting the numerous cuts the sugarcane leaves had made in our skin.

Tying up the sugarcane was difficult, but nothing compared to harvesting the wheat or weeding the corn crop — the weeds were needed for cattle fodder — on hot, humid days. The difficulty of these tasks was, in fact, the stuff of legend. Folklore had it that, afraid of these very chores, the sons of small landholders would leave home to become sadhus , ascetics who renounce worldly relationships and possessions, meditate, and live on alms.

We harvested the wheat manually, squatting with a sickle in one hand. Chachaji, Tayaji, Bhaji and I raced against each other to finish our rows. I was no slouch, but I was the youngest of the four; I won only occasionally, thanks to the others letting me do so. Once harvested and dried, the wheat was strewn over a flattened surface in the field, specially prepared for separating the husk from the grains. The oxen were hitched to a falha , a rectangular flatbed made of branches from thorny hardwood trees covered with dried wheat stems, held together by dried bamboo and rope. The oxen dragged the falha over the harvested wheat, crushing it. New bales were continually added, and over a couple of days the wheat under the falha and the hooves of the oxen would turn into silky golden shreds. We took turns following the falha to ensure the oxen remained on the circular path. The wheat circle also had to be dug up and turned over constantly, to ensure no long stalks remained uncrushed.

Once the wheat was completely shredded, we piled it into a long, straight mound. It was now ready for the husks to be separated. We accomplished that by raking the shreds and throwing them into the air. The wind carried the husks a few feet away while the grains fell back on the mound. The work continued until the husks were completely isolated. Following that, cattle and buffalo were walked over any uncrushed ears until all we had left was grain. The grain went into jute bags that were sewn up and taken home.

Any surplus we took to the grain market at Phagwara. Most years we had enough for market even after the portions that went to the Dalits, the naais and the jhirs who helped our family throughout the year. The husks were added to cattle fodder and then stored in a koop , a dome built from dried cotton and wheat stalks. The koop kept the husks dry and was strong enough to withstand strong winds.

Farming work claimed much of Bhaji’s and my time. Every now and then I would disappear into the village to play marbles with the other kids, but Chachaji would send my brother to find me and bring me back to the khooh . I never wanted Chachaji to come searching himself, as that meant punishment. Many kids, even from families poorer than ours, got more time to play. Bhaji and I did steal ourselves some fun, though, at the samadh (mausoleum) of a Muslim saneen , or saint. At the end of the wheat harvest, the mela was held near the mosque for three days. Qawwals who sang like the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan came from all over India and Pakistan, and their performances filled the nights. Bhaji sometimes attended the mela with Biraji. They would watch wrestling matches and jugglers, take in some qawwali and then buy sweet jalebi with the eight annas Biraji usually carried in his pocket. By the time they got home they would be happy and full, with lots of jalebi left over for the rest of the family to enjoy.

If Bhaji and I made the school field hockey teams, we were allowed time for that as well. I made the team twice, though mine was a mediocre performance on the ground. Those days, cricket was the big sport for the affluent. Field hockey was for the masses; that made us like it even more. We had another reason to like hockey too. A player named Balbir Singh Dosanjh had captained the Indian field hockey team to a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics. (It would be the team’s first of three consecutive Olympic golds.) Balbir was from Puadhra, the village from which our ancestors had moved over four centuries earlier. His face adorned the cover of many a magazine and the front page of many newspapers, and Chachaji would buy these and show them to us with genuine pride. These days, Balbir makes his home in the Greater Vancouver area.

WE BOTH LOVED and feared Chachaji. One day he returned early from Phagwara and found Bhaji and me at the khooh , fighting and calling each other names. I had filled my brother’s shoes with fresh cattle dung, and he had rubbed it into my long, knotted hair. Chachaji flew into a rage. Picking up a stick, he unleashed a barrage of blows. Bhaji got the first one, but I got most of what came next. An eternity seemed to pass before the beating stopped. Sobbing, I set about washing the dung off my clothes and out of my hair. Chachaji headed home without looking back.

Chachaji could never bring himself to say he was sorry, except for once, after he’d slapped me. I was angry at the slap, because I felt I had done nothing wrong. In protest, I refused to eat or drink anything all day — a hunger strike of sorts. Chachaji came to my room before I went to bed, embraced me and asked me to eat my meal. All was forgiven. That was the only time I remember him hugging me. He was an Indian peasant who had grown up in the early twentieth century: not the hugging sort.

During my days at the Dosanjh School, there was a short-lived scheme to provide powdered milk to students. The milk was poured into big containers of boiling water and sugar. Each of us had to stand in a queue, drink a glass of lukewarm milk, run to the water pump, wash the glass and carry it back for use by other students. Rumour had it the U.S. had surplus powdered milk, and when that ran out the scheme came to an end.

We did not miss the powdered milk. It could not compare to the thick, creamy buffalo milk most of us got at home. Chachaji would take unchurned milk that had been cultured overnight to make butter and mix it with raw milk directly from the udder; then he would sweeten it with homemade sugar. We drank this dhrerhka at the khooh several mornings a week. Quite often we left cleaned sugarcane out in the open on cold nights. In the mornings we crushed the juice from the canes by hitching oxen onto the vailna , a machine with vertical steel rollers, and mixed that with the cultured unchurned milk before drinking it. In years past, boys challenging each other to fights would boast of having been reared on dhrerhka , and many folk songs make reference to it. Such was its place in our daily lives in the Punjab.

One afternoon, having been left to tend the fire, I was sitting in front of the bhatthi , the round hearth where sugarcane juice was being heated to turn it into shucker , and pushing dried sugarcane leaves into the bhatthi with a wooden stick. I was oblivious to the danger of what I was doing, but the stick caught fire, lighting up the dried sugarcane leaves next to me, and suddenly the whole place went up in flames. The fire spread instantly to the other piles of fuel nearby, then to the leafy cover on top of the bhatthi , and then to the roof of our only khooh room for the cattle and men. People came running with buckets and whatever else fell into their hands to draw water from the well with the Persian wheel. The fire was brought under control before it could do much damage, but I was frozen in shock, not saying a word for many hours. The family saw that I was a scared soul, and Banso Bhenji took me in her arms. The making of shucker resumed the next day, though I dared not go near the furnace for a long time. The incident changed me forever; silence became my way of absorbing shock in the years to come.

At school, things were not going all that well. The math teacher, a Dosanjh, would explain a new concept or a formula in writing on the blackboard only once before asking us to complete the related exercises in our textbook. Others would be busy writing in their notebooks while I stared at the ceiling, the walls, or the pages of my book. The teacher didn’t notice, since he slept through each period after the first few minutes of instruction. He probably worked late at night and early in the morning on his own farm. But he must have told Chachaji I’d failed the mid-year test, because when Bhaji and I sat down after supper to do our homework, my father told me how embarrassed he was by my math results. He was a mathematics teacher himself, so silence, I thought, would be the best policy.

The kerosene lamp had been cleaned and lit. Chachaji opened my text to the chapters covered in the mid-year test, explained how to solve the “simple” algebra questions, and then asked me to do so. Soon Bhaji and Chachaji slept. The night passed into early morning. The roosters began crowing, and I could hear the sounds of footsteps on the street. A Persian wheel kutta was also piercing the morning quiet. Seated at the table, I had solved the assigned problems. That night I learned self-reliance and math.

Education in India was becoming tainted by fraud and corruption as early as 1960. In the middle of writing the external grade eight Middle Standard mathematics examinations, a three-hour closed-book test, I was excused to go to the washroom. As I relieved myself in the urinal, a roofless brick enclosure, I saw a hand reach over the wall holding out a piece of paper. I looked at the paper and got the shock of my life. On it were purported solutions for some of the most difficult test questions, though the first and only answer I saw was wrong. Scared, I threw the paper back over the wall and returned quickly to my seat. Later on, I heard stories of students in high schools and colleges having their tests written by complete strangers who had guns resting on their desks and of teachers, principals and invigilators facilitating fraud.

IN THE CULTURE of India in the 1950s and 1960s, a person with one eye was called kana , a person who limped was called langaan , and a person missing a hand or part of one was called tunda : all extremely derogatory terms. My eye muscles were weak, and when I was tired, my eyes wandered. As a child I was called teera (cross-eyed), which made me ashamed and angry. India was, and unfortunately still is, a very status-conscious country. At school or college, if you wore pants and a shirt in place of an Indian pyjama kurta (the traditional long pants and short shirt), you were considered hip. If you were poor and rural, you were the lowest of the low in the eyes of the urban rich and the middle class. My family was both rural and poor: we were peasants.

Once, during summer break when I was visiting Bahowal, Nanaji hung a bag of fresh ripe mangoes on his bicycle and sat me behind. We rode off to see my new first cousin Aman Sara, the first-born of my aunt Masiji Gurmit, at Hoshiarpur. On the way it rained hard, and we had to cross several fast-moving rivulets filled waist-high with the runoff from the nearby Siwalik mountain range.

It took us several hours to reach Masiji’s home, Harbax Mansion, a palace-like house built by her late father-in-law. It had two large gates and a covered patio for a car. Aman’s great-grandfather had been a supporter of the British Raj and had served it in the capacity of honorary magistrate. His son, Masiji’s late father-in-law, was a London-trained barrister, also prominent and wealthy during the British Raj. His youngest son, Harnaunihal — a teacher by training — and Masiji, who also was a teacher, had fallen in love. Nanaji was not happy about the idea of his daughter marrying the son and grandson of supporters of the colonialists he had fought all his life. But Chachaji persuaded him, saying what could an enlightened family do if Masiji simply decided to run away with the boy? Nanaji overcame his politics to allow the marriage to go ahead. And so Harnaunihal became my Masarji (mother’s sister’s husband).

One evening during our visit, somebody told a joke that had me clutching my belly with laughter. Then I heard Masarji Harnaunihal yell out what he probably thought was a light-hearted remark about me: “Look at that paindubandar laughing so loud.” He had just called me a village monkey, and I shut up in a split second. I was a kid, and one did not confront one’s elders. In the morning we got up, got ready, ate a meal and left for Bahowal. Although I never held it against Masarji, that paindubandar comment never left me. It was a reminder of the deeply status-conscious, class- and caste-laden Indian ethos.

As I got older, I started to connect the various dots of history, science and politics. Our mid-year English examination in the ninth class included an essay question. I chose to write on “A Street Quarrel,” one of the essays in the texts prescribed for our class. We tried to commit all of the essays we read to memory so we could regurgitate them on the exam paper, but learning by rote was not one of my strengths, and my memory failed me every time I tried. However, my English lessons from Chachaji had given me the ability to think and compose. My essay on “A Street Quarrel” allowed me to plunge into history and to connect the backwardness of a village and its people to the neglect and impoverishment visited upon them by uncaring British rulers. India had become independent only fourteen years earlier. One could not blame the British forever, but it was an entirely plausible argument then. None of this was in the essay in our prescribed text, but I added my own thoughts to what little I remembered from the original.

A couple of days later, at the morning assembly, my English teacher stepped forward. He wanted to share with the whole school what he thought was the best essay of the ninth-grade test, he said, as an example of what an essay should be. He had read only the first two sentences when I realized it was my essay. With difficulty, I sat motionless through it all. Not being able to commit things to memory had been a blessing in disguise. Over the years, it has forced me to find my own voice to express myself.

There was no sex education at school or at home. All we ever heard as boys was that we were to think about and treat each young woman from the village as if she were our sister. Every cell in a fourteen-year-old’s body militates against that, and I was no different. But the whole notion of good character was wrapped up in sexual strictures and mores, and violating them had very serious consequences. Boys and girls who breached those strictures were killed if they were caught, or maimed to send a message to others. Our problems were compounded when the school decided that the class a year behind us would go co-ed as part of a new secondary system. The girls were beautiful, bright and mostly local. I did succeed in treating them like sisters. But did anyone except their actual siblings succeed in thinking of them as sisters? The honest but dangerous answer was no.