Читать книгу Journey After Midnight - Ujjal Dosanjh - Страница 21

IN GRADE SEVEN I had complained to Chachaji about my eyesight being poor, but he laughed it off, teasing that I only wanted to wear glasses in order to look smart. When I insisted, he took me to his friend, Verinder’s father Dr. Lekh Raj Sharma — a qualified denturist. I stood in front of Dr. Sharma, who held open each of my eyes in turn, looked into them and pronounced my vision twenty / twenty. I dared not disagree. Now, in Derby, I had my eyes tested by an ophthalmologist — who verified that I needed glasses. My eyesight improved and stabilized thereafter for many years.

For some time I had been thinking about taking classes at the Derby Technical College. Due to the hours required for my job at British Rail, however, part-time or evening courses were out of the question. Some employers allowed their employees one paid day off a week to study at an approved institution. I knew that wouldn’t be possible in my case, since my studies would not relate to my work. Still, I reasoned, even a day release without pay would be worthwhile if it meant I could attend school. Before I could register for classes, however, a formal letter was required from British Rail authorizing the arrangement. Despite the efforts of my foremen, no such letter was forthcoming.

I was determined to go to school, so I decided to return to Bedford to try my chances there. Chacha Chain Singh advised me against it; in Bedford I would not make the kind of money I was making in Derby, he said. Education did not matter much in relation to making money, argued others in the Derby community. Some even claimed that spending years at college or university would make it impossible for me to compete with those of my contemporaries who stayed out in the “real world,” amassing wealth.

This was an “immigrant syndrome,” as I saw it: poverty and scarcity led to an obsession with economic security to the exclusion of all other pursuits. Nonetheless, on the train to Bedford, anxiety overwhelmed my heart. My bundled quilt still hid within its embrace all my worldly goods, but I had tied it much more tightly this time so it would fit through the door of the train. I found a compartment with only an older white man sitting in it. He was reading the day’s London Times , but a few minutes into the journey he put his paper aside to ask where I was heading.

From my accent, the man could tell I had not been in England for long. He was a sociology teacher at a college in the Midlands, he told me, and he was researching the integration of immigrants into British society. How was I finding the new country? he inquired. Did I miss India?

Of course I missed India, the place that had nurtured me and was the only home I’d known until six months before. Everything in England was new, and I felt I was under scrutiny all the time. The hardest part of it was not understanding the nuances of the language — not being able to understand, for example, whether someone calling you “blue blood” was a put-down or a good-natured joke. The unease was less about the amount of money I carried in my pocket than about whether I could converse with people with ease as an equal.

The sociologist sensed tensions building up in the country with the influx of new people, he said, and I could see he was genuinely concerned about race relations. The television comedy Till Death Do Us Part had begun airing on BBC One, portraying the working-class life in a realistic way. The main character, Alf Garnett, had become a cultural icon, despite his being a racist and a reactionary. Millions of people watched the show.

When I got off at the Bedford station, I looked for a cab to no avail. So, Indian peasant style, bundle on my head, I walked home. When Biraji opened the door, the expression on his face conveyed a silent question: why had I returned to Bedford with all my worldly belongings? Promising to explain in the morning, I went off to bed.

LEAVING DERBY had been the right thing to do. I had to live among people who did not mock education, and Biraji agreed with that. During the day I went looking for work, and evenings I spent with Dev and his wide network of friends. Bedford had a smaller Indian community, though it was a younger one, with many professional and educated Indians among them.

This time my search for work bore fruit more quickly. I found a job on the shop floor at Cosmic Crayon Company, a five-minute bike ride from Biraji’s home on St. Leonard’s Avenue. The factory ran just a day shift, which appealed to me; on the other hand, working eight hours a day, five days a week, I’d be making half the money I’d made at Derby.

My job required a couple hours’ training from Joe, a West Indian. He loved talking as we waited for the crayons to form. Solid wax was melted with the required colour, and the concoction was stirred until the mixture was evenly hued. The hot, coloured wax was then poured into the crayon-making machine, a tray with holes in it. Cold water was used to cool the machine, and the excess wax was scraped off. The crayons came out standing straight on their bases. They had to be picked up and piled in special boxes, ready for packing. I repeated the process ad infinitum, and I was soon bored out of my wits.

The workers on the shop floor were mostly young men and women, almost all of them high school dropouts. They seemed like bright kids, happy doing their work, and I envied them that. At lunch time there was talk of soccer, cricket and sex. Such blunt sexual expression I had never heard before. I was pretty well versed in the Indian profanity department, and I’d heard many new British and West Indian swear words as well. But until then, I had never heard that kind of language used in mixed company, and some young women expressed themselves as boldly as the men.

As a child of Indian peasantry, I was a new entrant to the working class; in Marxist terms, I had taken a revolutionary step from the land to a cash nexus. I eagerly awaited my weekly pay envelope, my only source of sustenance. I think I was the youngest and most inexperienced worker at Cosmic, and that was probably the reason for everyone’s generosity toward me; even the lab staff stopped by to chat whenever they were on the shop floor. The lab staff spoke slowly and clearly, so I could easily converse with them. The shop floor workers spoke more quickly, and their earthy colloquiality was often Greek to me, but they were equally caring in their own way. Every time I needed a new sack of solid wax for my work area, someone was always there to help, and I often joined in on the Friday pub crawls.

Robert Symes, the personnel officer who had hired me at Cosmic, walked the shop floor a couple of times a day, talking to workers. The company had started a monthly newsletter shortly after I began working there, and Robert asked me to contribute something. I put together a hodgepodge of words about India, stealing an idea here and a word there, and a few days later Robert stood with me for a few minutes on the shop floor talking about his life at university. Before he went back to his office, he asked if I would like to join him sometime for a drink.

After that, Robert and I went pubbing every two to three weeks, visiting a different country pub each time. Robert would pick me up in his beige, two-door Italian Fiat. Our conversations ranged from English literature, about which I knew very little, to the politics and economy of Britain, India and the rest of the world. Robert and I differed on many things, and we argued our positions. My limited vocabulary encumbered our conversation, but he would correct me, suggesting words and expressions for what he thought I was trying to say. I looked forward to those pub outings with Robert, and he became a tutor of sorts.

A few months into my time at Cosmic, some of the office and lab staff, including Robert, planned a pleasure trip to Wales, and I was invited to go along. We set off in a rented multi-passenger van in the morning, arriving at our destination just as the sun set. Along the way, people played music, and the conversation traversed the mundaneness and profundity of the world. The Beatles were the craze at the time, though I could not make out all the words to any of their songs.

We put up at a bed and breakfast for three nights near the base of the Snowdon Summit, one of the highest peaks in the United Kingdom. The first day we climbed a steep mountain; I sat down halfway up and waited for the others to return. That evening we had reservations at a restaurant popular among the locals. It was walking distance from our lodgings, and since I was a bit late getting ready, I made my way alone, dressed in a suit and tie under my long coat. The doorman would not allow me in, despite my explanation that I was joining friends already in the restaurant. “We have no friends of yours here” was his reply. Stubbornly, I stuck my head into the restaurant and spotted Brian, the tall, curly-haired head of the Cosmic lab. I yelled out for him, and I was let in. That was my first experience with overt exclusion, and it rattled my soul.

The next morning we drove to the base of the Snowdon Summit and walked up rather than taking the train. The view from the top was astounding; we could see for miles, a new experience for a boy from the prairie of India. The Shivalik range of the outer Himalayas could occasionally be glimpsed from the plains of Punjab, but I had never seen the mountains up close. Now I was atop one. Spreading my arms, I made several 360-degree turns, for those few seconds feeling as though I was flying high above the world. I lost my balance, falling and rolling down to the railway tracks. I was lucky. Had I fallen off in the other direction, I would have plunged several thousand feet to a certain death.

AROUND THIS TIME, the Vietnam War was intensifying. Under President Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. had increased to four hundred thousand the number of its troops in Vietnam, and the dreaded napalm bombs were falling from the skies. There was huge anti-war sentiment throughout the Western world, which drew my sympathies, and I started hanging out with the Labour party activists in Bedford. Christopher Soames, a son-in-law of Winston Churchill, had been a conservative MP for Bedford since 1950, but he was defeated by Brian Parkyn of the Labour party in March of 1966. Along with some friends, I had volunteered in Parkyn’s campaign.

Dismayed that the Indians in Bedfordshire were by and large not civically active, Dev and I called a meeting of all the young men we knew. We met at Dev’s home, and there we founded the Young Indians Association ( YIA ) of Bedford. One of the group’s first public functions was to commemorate the anniversary of Bhagat Singh’s hanging by the British thirty-five years earlier for carrying on a violent campaign against British rule in India. I made the introductory remarks and managed the stage, and it was a proud day. But I soon realized it was easy to celebrate what we already knew; it was much more difficult to think about the problems Indian immigrants faced in our new societies. The YIA became a vehicle for representing our concerns and challenges to Bedford’s civic administrators. We also got immigrant youth involved in sports. Some YIA activists veered left over the years, and others started paying more attention to matters of faith and business, but the organization continued into the 1980s.

County and public libraries were the holy temples of my weekends. I checked out a book or two every Saturday after a couple of hours of reviewing the London Times , the Guardian , the Daily Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor in the library’s reading room. Books in hand, I would meet up with Biraji to help him carry the week’s groceries. At home, the books and BBC Radio 1 were my constant companions. I also stayed out late with friends, talking about our lives and the world. My options continued to seem severely limited, not just because I was penniless but because my English was still so poor. Hanging out and talking felt better than my lonely, desperate wanderings.

I was still seeking a job that would allow me a day release to attend college, and I ended up as a laboratory assistant for a science teacher named Mr. Tyler at the then Elstow Abbey Secondary School, a half-hour walk from St. Leonard’s Avenue. Mr. Tyler was keen to teach me what I needed to learn to do the job, and I took a course on operating a sixteen-millimetre projector in the evenings. I was soon responsible for setting up films on various subjects for the students. The fish in my care in the school’s fish tank did not fare as well; they died of too much food at the hands of someone afraid of scarcity.

The teachers at Elstow were kind and eager to teach a young immigrant the skills necessary to get on in the world. I was invited to their get-togethers on weekends, and the students too were anxious to make me feel included. The female students at Elstow had a cooking class that prepared a delicious lunch once a week, and I was often invited to share it. The school’s young chemistry teacher, William Jefferies, was interested in politics and history. He took Dev, our friend Jeet and me to London to see the Parliament Buildings and 10 Downing Street. The London bobby, a permanent fixture in front of the prime minister’s residence, obligingly moved over so we could snap a picture.

I had applied to several universities on the off chance one would grant me admission as a mature student, and only the University of Keele at Newcastle-under-Lyme, which offered a four-year degree in politics and law, showed interest and invited me for an interview. The interview, with the dean and two others, lasted an hour. Initially our conversation focussed on British politics, including constitutional conventions dating back to the Magna Carta, the “Great Charter” of liberties England had introduced in 1215. I felt I answered their questions fairly well, but then they narrowed in on further specifics of British history, which in truth I had not studied at all.

Following the interview, the university offered me provisional admission for the following year if I passed the British history O level in the interim. I had huge doubts about being able to fulfill this requirement, and I spent every available minute studying history, reading nothing else for the next two to three months. A new teacher at Elstow even gave me his history notes from high school, and I studied those, too. In the end, though, I still could not distinguish one Queen Elizabeth or one King George from another. I decided not to sit for the history O level after all.

I was not making much money at Elstow School, and my education appeared to be going nowhere. So I found a job with Armco, a company that made auto parts in Letchworth, a few miles from Bedford. Malkiat Rai, a dear friend of mine, worked there too. Another Armco employee drove us there and back, and we contributed to his petrol expenses for the week. The job was physically demanding. I was making more money, but my body ached from the hard physical labour, and my heart ached at my failure to find a way to educate myself. I spent the weekends with my friends.

A friend of Biraji’s, a man from Taeeji’s village, had a daughter who was barely twenty, a school dropout and clueless about life. Her father floated the idea of my marriage to her, and Biraji, thinking like many Indian parents of his time, felt marriage might give direction to my life. Malkiat ridiculed the idea among our friends, and the man never forgot the insult he perceived Malkiat’s remarks to be. A few years later, after I had left for Canada, Malkiat was severely beaten by the man’s friends. Malkiat was an orthodox Sikh, and his beard was also forcibly shaved. He was humiliated in this way because he was a Dalit; in the minds of his abusers, he was a lesser human being.

Caste, in all its ugliness, was alive and well in Britain. Another Dalit in Bedford, Meehan Singh, a handsome elderly man, was assaulted because someone’s relative had lied about some money he had already paid them. Nobody in the community stood with Meehan Singh. Because of caste’s millennia-long spell, the spectators and perpetrator alike were numb to Meehan’s humanity and his suffering.

Malkiat and a friend named Gurdial Ryat had been discussing the idea of launching a news and literary weekly. It was to be named Mamta , a term evoking a mother’s love for her child. When their plan firmed up, Malkiat asked if I was interested in helping put the weekly out. I would receive a salary equivalent to what I made at Armco, and I would have free room and board at Gurdial’s home in London. I accepted. Whatever the uncertainties, it would be an environment of letters. I was named the assistant editor of Mamta Weekly, and once more I bundled my belongings, this time for a move to the capital.

For the next twelve weeks I lived as a member of the Ryat household, which included Gurdial’s wife and two young children. Malkiat and I spent several weekends travelling in his brother’s car to different parts of England, signing up subscribers and ensuring that Punjabi shops and other establishments displayed and sold Mamta.

Many details about Mamta now escape me, but I do remember writing an editorial on the death in March 1968 of the first man to enter outer space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. My view was that we should use the resources on earth to improve the human condition instead of “conquering” space. I have not changed my mind about that; the space race for most countries is one of those “nice to haves.” For most people, more earthly needs beckon.

The other big news story of 1968 that I wrote about was the execution of five black prisoners on death row by the regime of Ian Smith in what was then called Rhodesia. I have followed with keen interest the developments in that country over the years, from Ian Smith’s white regime to Robert Mugabe’s corrupt brutal dictatorship in what is now Zimbabwe. I still remember the hopes the world cherished of a resurgent Africa throwing off the yoke of colonialism and of Africans taking their rightful place among the peoples of the world. With some exceptions, the dream has turned into a nightmare. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s successors are small men not up to the task of building a prosperous, compassionate and inclusive country.

At the time Mamta was launched, there were already two well-established Punjabi newsweeklies in the English market: Des Pardes and Punjab Times. That made ours an uphill struggle. Tarsem Purewal, the editor and publisher of Des Pardes, made a scathing attack on Mamta ’s quality. I telephoned him to suggest we could disagree without engaging in personal attacks, but I should have known that the man who’d invented abusive and extortive Punjabi journalism would not be receptive to reason. Purewal was known to warn men about upcoming negative stories, offering the suggestion that there was nothing a little hush money could not suppress.

Every week I took the original proof of Mamta to the printers in central London to have several thousand copies made and then carried the printed paper home on the tube. The Ryats and I would fold the papers and prepare them for mailing. But the paper’s narrow focus and limited readership, along with the suffocating nature of the Punjabi news culture of the day, soon made me lose interest. The crowds of people on the underground seemed to move purposefully, in sharp contrast to the meaningless drift of my days.

The state of British race relations also made me angry and discouraged. During the Notting Hill riots of 1958 in London, white youths had attacked immigrants from the Caribbean. In 1963, the Bristol Omnibus Company imposed a colour bar, refusing to employ West Indian or Asian crews; only after a lengthy boycott did the company agree to hire people of colour. Britain’s Race Relations Act, passed in 1965, made discrimination in public places on grounds of colour, race or ethnic or national origin against the law. A Race Relations Board was set up to handle complaints the following year. But the act was weak, and it did not deal with employment. The lack of jobs in immigrant communities brought colour prejudice into their homes, and unemployment pitted white workers against workers of colour. During the Bristol boycott, the Transport and General Workers’ Union had threatened that all wheels would stop if one black man stepped onto the platform; the union opposed apartheid in South Africa while supporting the colour bar at home. That’s how ugly and schizophrenic the response of even the so-called progressive Left was to discrimination at the time. Activists among the minorities and a significant section of the political class realized things had to change. The housing issue was also rearing its racist head. Blacks were at the bottom of the heap. Asians weren’t treated much better, but some Indian immigrants considered themselves “superior” to the black people anyway (I was finding that my companion on the bus had been right). Few recognized that equality for blacks would bring equality for us all.