he would be happy to talk to them about the issue that had generated such anger. Chachaji had no special powers, just physical courage and a belief that the young attackers would have respect for the schoolmaster. It could have gone wrong, but the attackers left, and the actors were escorted to their homes by Chachaji and a few other men. We never did learn the reason for the violent disruption. Some said it was because the play challenged gender and caste taboos. Others put it down to personal animosities.
Each political party had drama troupes that made the rounds as well, touring plays that were totally partisan. News about the upcoming performances travelled by word of mouth. The Communist Party of India had the best shows. Two great actors and singers, Joginder Bahrla and Narinder Dosanjh, were particularly devastating in their mockery of the ruling Congress party and its crony subservience. At the time, the Congress party controlled the government of India. It had such a monopoly and grip on power that it and the Indian government were barely distinguishable. The Congress troupes, for their part, traded on the still-fresh victory of the independence struggle.
8
THE YEAR WAS 1962; I was sixteen years old. My mat-riculation examinations were followed by two months of khooh work and visits to the school library to read up on everything I could find about medical education. Chachaji, like most educated parents of the time, wanted me to become a doctor. He took me to Phagwara to buy me an Atlas bicycle and had it assembled while we waited at the bike shop. Suddenly, I had entered adulthood.
Meeto Bhenji, my cousin and a classmate of the college principal’s wife, agreed to accompany me to Phagwara so I could enrol at Ramgarhia College. I had not been out of the villages much, and the family felt I needed my hand held on my first real outing into the larger world. But as Bhenji and I wheeled our bicycles out to the road, we saw Chachaji running along behind us, motioning for us to wait. He had been talking to some friends in the village who warned him that a doctor could be woken up in the middle of the night and asked to travel to all sorts of places at the most ungodly hours. No son of his would have a life like that, he said. His new goal for me was a degree in engineering.
I enrolled in the college’s non-medical science courses, but this sudden change in direction had a domino effect: I began to lose my interest in sciences and math, and I became a mediocre student. Newspapers and the world of politics had held an attraction for me since my days of reading aloud for Nanaji and listening to his stories of the freedom movement, and my interest in them grew. As time went on, I paid less and less attention to my textbooks.
Still, I rode to Phagwara and back every day to attend the college. Bhaji was taking an auto mechanics course at Jullundur, and he made the daily return trip by bike and train, so on weekdays Chachaji and Tayaji were on their own at the khooh . Occasionally I returned later than usual because of a trip to Paradise, the movie theatre in Phagwara. Out of my one-rupee-a-day allowance, I had to buy the Tribune for Chachaji. The newspaper cost twenty-five paisa, and the cheapest cinema ticket was fifty paisa, leaving me with twenty-five paisa for a cup of tea. Yet Chachaji thought anything more than an occasional trip to the cinema meant you were wasteful and spoiled, so added to the interest of the movies themselves was the allure of youthful rebellion.
One afternoon I was on my way home from Phagwara with my friend Verinder Sharma when two men on bikes passed us, riding quickly. As they caught up with the gudda on the road ahead of us, one of them reached into the back of the cart. The men sped on. Verinder and I smelled a rat.
From the looks of it, the man and boy riding the oxen were poor subsistence farmers. At the chungi , a place where toll was collected for commercial traffic, two uniformed police officers questioned the gudda owner in the presence of the two “civilians” Verinder and I had seen earlier. The two “civilians” turned out to be police officers too. One of them reached into the gudda and brought out the thing they had clearly pushed in themselves, a bottle of hooch. As they brandished the bottle in front of the farmer, his son started to cry. The police turned the gudda back, hurling insults at the driver.
Realizing this was a plot to extract some cash from the farmer, Verinder and I told the police what we had witnessed and asked them to let the farmer go home. The police then turned their abuse on us, threatening to teach us a lesson if we didn’t mind our own business. Persistent, Verinder and I accompanied the gudda to the police station half a mile back in Phagwara, where we demanded to see the officer in charge. He told us to get lost.
Verinder’s father was a former member of the Punjab Legislative Council, and Verinder also knew the current Phagwara MLA , Om Parkash Agnihotri. A few minutes later we were sitting in front of a man dressed in simple Indian clothes as he wrote up our complaint in his one-room office: an image of a public official scarce in India today. The MLA would mail our complaint to the superintendent of police at the district headquarters, he assured us. When Verinder and I passed by the police station on our way back to the main road, the gudda was no longer there; the farmer and his young son had either been released or been sent elsewhere for holding overnight.
This was my first real experience of dealing directly with the world. The faces of the crying son and his scared father haunted me. Their family must have been worried for their safety when they did not return to their village at the expected hour. The father probably feared that all of his proceeds from the family’s produce sales would go to line the pockets of scheming policemen, causing his children to go without shoes or school books. All the way home from Mr. Agnihotri’s office, I thought about Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of a free and just India. He believed if Indians changed for the better, so would India. Some of my hope for my country died that day, and I have remained alive to that feeling, a fear that sustains me in my daily pursuit of social justice.
The incident continued to haunt my thoughts. Then one day Verinder and I were called to the principal’s office and instructed to ride our bikes to the Phagwara Rest House, about a mile away. The place exuded authority and order. We were ushered in to see the superintendent of police, who showed us a row of uniformed men and asked us to identify the four involved in our complaint. We did, and their badges and belts were stripped off. They were being suspended, we were told, pending an inquiry. The suspended men later approached Chachaji and asked him to persuade me to withdraw the complaint. He refused, leaving me to decide the matter. Verinder and I decided to stand by our complaint. We knew the cops were not rich, and there was a possibility they would lose their jobs. On the other hand, the farmer and his son deserved justice. In the end, we never learned what became of our complaint.
A COUPLE OF MY rich friends from school spent much of their time travelling by train to cinemas in different cities. What little money my family had sat quite often on the shelf above our study table. One day the shelf held two hundred rupees. To my father’s horror, both that money and his young son went missing for two nights. I travelled to Jullundur, watched several movies, ate out and then slept at a friend’s. Thanks to Taeeji’s intervention, Chachaji let me off with only a warning when I returned, my wallet empty and remorse written all over my shamed face.
Until high school I had worn Indian clothes. Sweaters in the winter, yes, but even our blankets were cotton or cotton and wool mixed, homespun and woven. Chachaji did not suffer from a lack of self-esteem, and he did not need to dress his children in Western attire. That was not how I felt — I wanted to wear pants and jackets. But I did not complain. At college, the divide was even more pronounced. Many poor students pretended to be from rich families. I had not yet learned to be comfortable in my own skin. I started wearing cheap versions of Western clothes, tight pants with a well-defined crease or, even better, a stitched one. My desire to fit in was overwhelming. The pride I would later feel in my heritage eluded me at that age.
Chachaji never failed to lead by example in doing physical work. For him, work was like worship, and there was no shame in worshipping the labour that fed his children. But at college, even the students from the poorest backgrounds, who knew the need
