Читать книгу Journey After Midnight - Ujjal Dosanjh - Страница 17

THE POWERFUL STEAM ENGINE sounded ominous. Its noise lent an air of finality to my fate. There was no turning back now. Those who had gathered offered me hugs and words of reassurance. It was one of the few times I have ever witnessed my brother cry. Chachaji and I boarded the train, and the engine spewed steam as the train pulled away. Bhaji waved one last time, and then I could see him no more.

As the train found its rhythm, the fields alongside appeared to be dancing to it. Acre upon acre of hay, sugarcane and other vegetation glowed green in the dusk. Farmers were ploughing and levelling the earth, and the dust from the hooves of their oxen seemed to touch the heavens. As night fell, sounds took over: the steam engine and the wheels clacking along the steel tracks. Most of the passengers were dozing by now. As the train slowed at various stations, lights from homes and from tea and peanut stands punctuated the sleepy darkness. Dogs barked, disturbed by the activity. Inside lit-up factories, I could see people working away. Cities and towns never completely rested, I was learning. Chachaji slept on and off, every now and then glancing at me. He was worried, no doubt, about whether I would be able to make a go of it out there in the world.

It was still dark when we got off at Ghaziabad. The station was in need of repair and a thorough cleaning. Probably not much had changed in the city since the British left it in 1947. Dosanjh had its own share of filth, with raw sewage accumulating in puddles and ponds, but at least it had open fields one could escape to. In Ghaziabad, I soon saw, there was no escaping the crowds, the filth or the general pollution. Chachaji and I took a rickshaw to Siso Bhenji’s home, which had a big enclosed yard with a machine shed on one side. In one corner of the yard was a four-room house with a kitchen and a bath. Scattered everywhere were the machines and parts worked on by my Bhaji Sardara Singh, an expert machinist. Everybody managed to find a place to sleep.

The next morning we went shopping. Chachaji selected the fabric for my suits, which would be made by the fabric store’s tailor. I would soon be the proud owner of two woollen suits, my first ever. I also bought some toothpaste and a toothbrush, another first; I’d been told England did not have thorny kikar , acacia karroo, or cockspur thorn, trees whose thin branches had served as toothbrushes and tooth cleaners all my life.

Chachaji also bought me a small suitcase to put my clothes and toiletries in. I didn’t have much in the way of toiletries. I was a turbaned Sikh boy with virgin whiskers — nothing you could call a beard yet. I had never heard of deodorants. Natural body odour was fine as long as one was clean, we thought. And instead of body creams and lotions, we had mustard oil.

It had rained a little, and the puddles gave the paved roads an ugly, pitiful look. Traffic splashed the muddy water around, with bus, car and truck passengers avoiding the airborne mud only if their windows were shut. Travelling around as we were — in rickshaws, by bike and on foot — made us prime targets for mud’s fury. Chachaji’s outfit of naturally white khadi — homespun cotton — did not retain its pure whiteness for long.

That evening, Chachaji, Bhaji Sardara Singh and I visited Con-naught Place, perhaps the poshest commercial section of Delhi at the time. The rain-washed marble on the buildings, floors and pavement shone whiter than ever. Shops and stalls were full of the merchandise the elite of Delhi splurged on. The area was filled with expensive restaurants and emporiums; beautiful, colourfully bedecked women accompanied “kaala sahibs” in their London-style suits and boots. It appeared as if many of these “Mahatmas” had just returned to India after completing their dinners at the inns of the court in England. Certainly they had not gone to South Africa to be thrown out of first-class train compartments as coolies. This was the Indian idea of England. I wondered what the actual England would be like. Did the English people there hate doing their own chores, polishing their own shoes, cooking their own meals and doing their own laundry?

My mind was racing. A part of me longed to be like the rich of Connaught Place, though I knew intellectually that it was wrong to be consumed by the lust for wealth. I was travelling to greener pastures, and like all beating hearts, mine was a battlefield of competing influences. How would I navigate those influences to figure out what and who I would be? At that moment I had no business passing judgement on kaala sahibs. At least they were not abandoning India.

As the hour of my departure drew nearer, my fear of the unknown grew stronger. But Chachaji did not need to be burdened with the knowledge that his soon-to-fly son was ill prepared for the journey and beyond. The next morning was filled with love, food and laughter. Siso Bhenji made delicious pranthas , mango achaar (pickle) and homemade yogurt. As usual, I overate. Most human beings are blessed with a satiety mechanism. Within a few minutes of beginning a meal this mechanism sends signals to their brains to slow down and eventually to stop eating. I have never received such signals. We are all related to animals, and in this trait I am definitely related to dogs.

An old-model Ambassador taxi waited outside the front of Siso Bhenji’s house. Baggage tucked away in the trunk, our goodbyes said, Chachaji and I sped away in the cab through the descending fog. The turbaned sardarji driver artfully negotiated the traffic, offering a running commentary as we drove past places of historical interest. A mosque here and a fort there; he regaled us with stories of kings, queens, courtiers and intrigue from centuries long past. My head was spinning. My ancestors had struggled along with millions of others to free India from British rule. Now I was going to the home of our former colonial rulers in search of something better. It did not occur to me at the time that I was running away.

The Delhi airport was a building with a few high-ceilinged rooms. After I checked in, Chachaji and I sat down in the waiting area. I had three British pounds with me — all the money a person was allowed to take. That and the very restrictive controls on passports were Nehru’s way of encouraging Indians to stay in India. My leaving would be no loss to India, I was sure, but Nehru did have a point. He wanted Indians to stay and build their own country instead of providing cheap labour to the world. He was acutely aware of the history of indentured and other Indian labourers working on sugar plantations or building railways in other countries under exploitative conditions. In purely personal terms, though, I felt India was lucky not to have to expend any more resources on me. There were millions of others who were abler, keener and more useful for the future of the country than I was. I was not good at sciences or calculus, and I was more interested in politics than in engineering. India already had too many people interested in politics, not as a noble calling but as a means to power and influence for personal profit and glory. Had I stayed, the same fate might have befallen me.

At two hours past midnight, my fellow passengers began filing out to the airplane on the tarmac. “Get up, Bhai Ghunattha Singh, time to go,” Chachaji said. When he was feeling tender and affectionate, that was his favourite name for me: Mr. Ghunattha Singh. He hugged me tightly, then motioned for me to leave. Overcome with emotion, I focussed on climbing the mobile stairs reaching into the plane. But as I lifted my foot to the first step, a voice rang out, “Bhai Ghunattha Singh, come here.” It was Chachaji, a few feet away on the other side of the rope divider, standing among the relatives and friends of other passengers. “If you want to cut your hair, you may,” he told me. “When in Rome, do as Romans do.” He enunciated the latter in crisp English, employing the Indian accent later made notorious by the inimitable British actor Peter Sellers. “If you feel like drinking,” he continued, “it is all right. But don’t drink too much. And if you ever smoke I’ll kill you. Go. Run now. You are going to be late.”

Looking back, I am amazed at these words of wisdom from a father to his going-away son. Chachaji’s advice was at once liberating and arresting. He who had cherished his unshorn hair all his life and would have preferred me to follow his example had freed me from this Sikh religious stricture in an instant of foresight. He had never been out of India, but he had the wisdom of a seasoned world traveller. All those days as I was getting ready to leave, he must have been pondering the life and the challenges in store for me in England.

I settled in my seat. My feet were no longer touching the soil of my forefathers, and the plane was readying for takeoff. I had not even seen an airplane before. Once, a plane had landed in the fields near a village a few miles from Dosanjh, and the kids who saw it said it was larger than many guddas put together. Now I was not only seeing one for myself, I was sitting in one. By the old stored in our brain’s magic box of memory, we measure the new.

The plane’s interior was spotless white with a blue tone. The contrast with the earthy homes and streets, the dusty roads and fields of Dosanjh, was stark. It was as if I had entered an uninhabited and sterile part of the universe. I paid full attention to the flight attendant’s seatbelt and life jacket demonstration, struggling with her Aussie accent.

Though there weren’t many other passengers on board, they were all, as far as I could see, goray (white). I had seen few gorays in my life to date, and no gorian (white women) at all. Miss Jacob, the Anglo-Indian headmistress at our Dosanjh Girls’ School, was the first white-looking person I had ever met. There were a few Dosanjh girls who looked white as well.

The awareness of being among strangers now coursed through my head. To my left, across the aisle, sat the only other Indian passenger on the plane. He was deep in conversation with the gora beside him, and every now and then they would turn to look at me.

When the plane took off, my eardrums were ready to explode. I’d felt a similar but much less painful sensation when I’d played on the swings tied to a tall old banyan tree at Bahowal. This was no mere swing, however, and the skies no banyan tree. We were in a colossal machine ascending to float in the air. There was no rope to hold onto, just the armrests of my seat.

To distract myself, I tried to memorize the features of each of the white people on the plane, including the hostesses, as they were called then. All the hostesses had pinkish skin, some paler than others. In the hormonal department, the sexual repression and prudery drummed into my young head were in full control; nothing to worry about there. When my gaze fell upon an English newspaper in the seat pocket in front of the Indian man across from me, I asked in my broken and previously untested English if I could borrow it. He smiled and handed me the paper. I was still looking through it when the Indian asked if he could sit next to me for a while.

He turned out to be a professor at the University of London. His gora friend in the seat next to him was also a professor, and he soon joined our conversation. The Indian quickly realized I was more linguistically challenged than my request for his newspaper might have led him to believe. We spoke in Hindi until the gora joined us, then we switched to English. The two men were returning from a conference in Australia, they told me. I wish I could recall their names, because I have never forgotten the kindness they showed me during that flight and all the way past immigration and customs at London’s Heathrow Airport. It was undoubtedly clear to them that I hailed straight from the village and was untouched by the sophistication of big-city life.

The Indian man took me to the back of the plane to show me how to use a flush toilet. One could not squat on it, Indian-village style, he told me. That aspect of my education completed, the men turned their attention to my table manners. Breakfast had just arrived, and they sat me between them to explain the use of a knife and fork. I had never come across these utensils, and my natural inclination was to hold the fork in my right hand to convey the food to my mouth. To my amazement, however, the fork was to be held in the left hand. Both men showed me on their own plates repeatedly how to cut a piece of meat and then carry the pieces to your mouth. Finally, a light went on in my head, and it was smooth sailing thereafter. (Years later, when my wife-to-be, Rami, had to tutor me in the art of chopsticks, I found my apprenticeship with the professors on the plane had lit the path. She was an army major’s daughter, and good table manners were considered a prerequisite for marrying into many a military family.)

Our flight made two stops: Karachi and Paris. At each airport, we were allowed to get off the plane. (Security was essentially nonexistent then; the hijacking or bombing of planes to make political points came much later.) Landing in Karachi reminded me that the city had once been an important and integral part of an undivided India. I recalled stories of the conferences Karachi had hosted during the freedom movement. Nanaji’s favourite had been the conference of the Indian youth society Naujwan Baharat Sabha on March 27, 1931, timed to coincide with the opening of the Indian National Congress the next day. The hanging of Bhagat Singh and his associates, on March 23, 1931, had galvanized the country. There were fissures in Congress, with Subhas Bose, a prominent Congress leader who became the party’s president in 1938, arguing for more aggressive action than Gandhi was willing to take. On both days, Nanaji was in charge of security around the perimeter of the conference and for Subhas Bose personally. Inside the Karachi airport, I looked into Pakistani faces for signs of longing — for what could have been rather than what was now. To be fair, many Indians had gone about their lives, oblivious to the larger questions of fate and history. Why should the Pakistanis be any different? We were one people by history, blood, culture and our place on earth, though we were taught the hate that stands now between us.

Back on the plane, the welcome instruction of the two professors continued. The Indian man even touched on the issue of how one viewed women in British culture. He himself had been an immigrant, and he told me in no uncertain terms that just because British women dressed differently and spoke with men freely, it did not mean they were promiscuous. He also advised me that spitting and littering in public places were regarded as horrible behaviours.

As we flew into Paris what came instantly to mind was the oft-repeated myth that Nehru’s clothes had regularly been sent to Paris for washing and dry cleaning. There was no question his family was rich, but in the twenties and thirties, the frequency of air traffic would have made that impossible. As the inhabitants of a former colony, though, many Indians had an exaggerated sense of Paris and London’s splendour. Perhaps that was why the Indian professor made a point of reminding me that the ancient civilizations of India had gone through periods of splendour still evident in the classical literature and the monuments of the various eras. He did not want me to drown in the vicissitudes of history and disown my Indianness.

I did not buy anything on my stops at Karachi or Paris lest I exhaust my three pounds before I got to London; if Biraji did not show up to get me, I might need those three pounds and more. The gora , though, bought a small box of chocolates at the Paris airport and offered some to me and the Indian professor. The chocolate had a very different taste from anything I had ever eaten.

It was now the last leg of our trip. We flew over clouds that looked pure white in the sun. At first I mistook them for snowy mountains. The plane pierced the clouds as we descended to land at Heathrow. We fastened our seatbelts.