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
