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.
7
CHACHAJI WAS A RESTLESS SOUL who liked change and improvement. For him, these two things were synon-ymous. After some potential robbers tried to yank out the window from the mud walls of our home, my father decided to replace the exterior walls. We demolished them ourselves, carrying the dry mud and debris on our heads to the khooh as fill. A bricklayer was hired, and Bhaji and I, then fourteen and twelve, prepared the mud and cement as needed. The interior walls were still made of mud, but Chachaji innovated by mixing small amounts of sand and cement into the mud and using that to plaster the interior surfaces. They turned out as smooth as the drywall would be years later in my Canadian home. The floors of our house were resurfaced with bricks, as was the roof. The spaces between the bricks were filled with cement. All the work was done by the same skilled bricklayer, with Bhaji and me mixing the cement and mud, carrying it and cleaning.
Chachaji was also part-owner of a flour mill in Dosanjh that had been built on our land. People brought their grains to be crushed and ground in a machine powered by a generator. The machine was faster and more efficient than kharaas , the grinding stones powered by oxen, and one by-product of the water-cooling system used by the machine was the almost-hot water that poured into a cement tank where, on cold winter days, children from the neighbourhood bathed and women washed clothes. The water was laced with streaks of engine oil, but as far as I know it did not occur to anyone that it might be injurious to our health or the health of our land.
Then one day the mill was moved from our land: the partnership had ended. Soon we were demolishing the structure that had housed it. Chachaji, Bhaji and I took it apart brick by brick, carrying the wood and bricks to the khooh for storage. That kept us busy for days. Once the bricks and wood were stored and the area around the well levelled, Chachaji was ready for his next venture: a new three-room building at the khooh, with a veranda. Once again Bhaji and I did the heavy lifting — moving the bricks and preparing the mud, carrying it in containers on our heads and pouring it as directed by the bricklayer. Preparing the mud was the messiest and most difficult chore. We dug up soil from a field, piled it on a hard surface near the construction site, fetched water and then began the work of mixing water with the dirt. As the mud became heavy and harder to turn with our shovels, we crushed it with our bare feet, moving in a circle in the knee-deep mound until the soil was totally soft, smooth, and capable of flowing out of a container. The process was not unlike dragging the falha over dry wheat, except in this case we were both the falha and the oxen. (Often the mud used for bricklaying actually had wheat husk added to it; the theory was that the husk prevented the mud from dissolving quickly in the monsoons.) After we’d prepared the mud, our skinny legs would be bruised and battered below the knees.
It took many months, but finally we had a new building at the khooh . In keeping with the rural Indian ethos, Chachaji was a recycler par excellence. We’d incorporated every usable piece of iron, wood and brick into the new building. The bigger room became a storage room. One of the two smaller rooms became a bedroom and the other a sitting room — although the sitting room had a cot in it so that in a pinch it could accommodate guests overnight.
Another of Chachaji’s ventures, a small poultry farm, meant that more structures were built a few feet from the three-room building. Eventually, the chicken moved into the original structure’s big room. The stench was terrible, and the work of feeding and watering the chickens and cleaning the big room fell to Bhaji and me. Some days he bicycled to the nearby town of Kultham to hand the eggs over to someone to market. I wasn’t allowed to go, since the one time I had, I’d lost control of the bike, and the eggs fell off and broke. After a couple of years, it became obvious that for the amount of energy and resources invested in the poultry, the return was minimal at best. Thankfully, the stench cleared upon the farm’s closure.
CHACHAJI’S EXAMPLE made my later transition into British and Canadian life easier. His legacy, along with Nanaji’s, helped me a great deal in politics as well. I inherited from them the art of being able to differ on important issues with someone and still remain friends.
My father and grandfather were always courteous and friendly with each other. They would sit up late into the night to discuss the state of the world as they saw it. Following Independence, they belonged to different parties, though their common enemy, the British, were gone. Once, just as a public meeting in Dosanjh organized by Chachaji and his Congress party was ending, Nanaji showed up with a friend. Both were members of the Communist Party of India. A few members of the audience were still milling around when Nanaji and his companion took the stage to expound the virtues of a socialist society and the ills of the Congress rule. Chachaji had already left the venue, but I caught most of their speeches as I was returning from school. That night Nanaji and his friend stayed with us. I wondered whether angry arguments would ensue, but Chachaji simply registered an objection about what had happened, and a friendly discussion followed as usual.
Dosanjh Kalan had strong contingents of Congress supporters, Communists, and members of the anti-colonialist Akali Dal. From time to time, the panchayat (village council) was controlled by one or the other of them. The area produced men such as Bhagwan Singh Dosanjh of Jaito Morcha fame, who led a group of Indians from Canada into the freedom movement; the Jaito Morcha was aimed at the restoration to power of the raja of Nabha, a state seen as anti-British. Amar Singh Dosanjh was another well-known figure of his time. A one-time MLA in Punjab, legendary orator and prominent Akali leader, he co-founded and edited for many years the leading Punjabi daily, Akali Patrika. Coming from such a politically active place, it was natural for Dosanjhes to hold strong opinions.
Poetry readings, mainly in Punjabi with an occasional Urdu intervention, were held in our village several times a year, with poets from around the region — the great majority of them, at that time, male — invited to participate. The writer could either sing his poetry or read it. The two best-known poets of Dosanjh, Nazar Singh Taras and Kashmira Singh Mahee, always participated. They wrote about the lives of the common people in simple language. I started writing verse myself, and by the time Chachaji discovered my secret, I had two mid-sized notebooks filled with poetry. My father thought pursuing poetry as a lifelong passion would keep me poor — even the vaunted Taras and Mahee had to earn their livings as a carpenter and the village postman respectively. So Chachaji took my poetry and burned it, and I can still see my words and emotions going up in flames. Ironically, even such a lover of language as Chachaji could not bear to see his son become a poet, such was his fear of poverty. Over the years, haltingly, I have tried to reconnect with the poet in me. Perhaps Chachaji was right, and the world is better off without long torrents of words from me.
Naqlaan — travelling performances by comedians, mimics, singers and dancers — also kept us entertained. In the villages of India at that time, there were only male performers in any naqlaan . Rural humour and folk songs would fill the air. Quite often, however, petty but violent scuffles between drunks in the village would spoil the show, and when that happened, no one was safe in the dark: you could be a mistaken target. There were no street lights; normally, as people came upon each other, they would identify themselves. We always told the truth about who we were; the political differences between fathers were not yet reason for violence to be visited upon sons.
A few young Dosanjh men once organized an evening play in the village. Ten minutes into it, the hanging kerosene lamps on stage were smashed with iron-bound lathis , and a fight in the dark ensued. I ran home and told Chachaji what was happening. Flashlight in hand, we returned to the scene. The actors, all from our village, had locked themselves in a room, and the attackers were challenging them to come out. A crowd of onlookers stood at a distance. With the nearest police post about five miles away and without any way of contacting it, Chachaji identified himself and told the attackers to
