work, denigrated friends caught working in the fields, carrying loads on their heads or tending to cattle. If one was seen by fellow students doing physical labour, there were always excuses: it was just for that day, the family servant had fallen ill, and so on and so forth.
My family was making an effort to educate me without constantly reminding me of our poverty. I was deluding myself that a new bicycle, cleaner clothes and the neater environs of the college had somehow changed our status. As I wrestled with growing up in a jungle of influences, the college offered new vistas and friends. Jagtar Sihota and Bharat Bhushan Maini, both of whom had more experience with urban India, took me under their wing, and I started paying attention again to my books and to what our teachers taught in the classroom. But their guidance came too late. I failed the final chemistry exam, receiving a compartment — a chance to rewrite it and thus avoid failing the year.
Chachaji had pinned on me his hopes of a child with a university degree. In later years, I felt like a criminal for putting him through what transpired for me at college. My brother and I never talked about it, but when a documentary about my life was made in 2009, Bhaji blurted out tearfully that in 1963, when Chachaji learned of my wretched compartment, he had cried, something my brother had never seen before. On learning that, I was justly cut down to size.
Writing the compartment exam in 1963 took me to Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, which was still under construction. I had been there once before, during a class trip in grade ten that took us on a bus tour of several important historical places. In Chandigarh, we had seen the Punjab Assembly, the Government Secretariat, the High Court buildings and man-made Sukhna Lake. Chandigarh had been designed in the 1950s by the French architect Le Corbusier, who was commissioned by Nehru to build his dream city for a modern India. Today it is an aging city turned into a union territory under the control of the central government.
The Punjab and Bengal were cut to pieces by the murderous partition of India in 1947, an inevitable result of pandering by politicians to religious passions and bigotry. Their lust for power could only be satisfied if the region was further divided to create a religious majority of Sikhs in the Punjab, but to shelter themselves from accusations of religious favouritism, they masked it as a campaign for a separate linguistic Punjabi-speaking state. The panderers succeeded in carving three states out of the Punjab, which had already suffered serious cuts and body blows. The central government, not to be left behind, acted like the monkey resolving the dispute between two cats over a piece of bread. Since the new states were not able to agree who should get Chandigarh, the central government appropriated it as a union territory.
The bus taking me to my compartment exam reached the city in the late afternoon. I could not afford a hotel room, so I stayed with the extended Dosanjh family of the poet Nazar Taras. They were generous hosts, making sure I had a room to myself in their three-room home, with a light for studying. On the day of the exam, I took a rickshaw to the Panjab University. The wide boulevard leading to it was freshly paved, and my nervousness perhaps made the spotless white building look even more imposing. This was no ordinary exam; a compartment meant a close brush with failing your year.
There were about two hundred other students ready to plunge into the test. Invigilators distributed the questionnaire, along with a booklet for our answers. I looked up to the ceiling, then at the door and the closed windows. By now, political battles were more exciting to me than chemical reactions. But there was no escape. For the next three hours, my head was empty of everything except chemistry.
Back at home, everyone wanted to know how the test had gone. I wasn’t sure. If I’d failed, I would have to be content to be a subsistence farmer for the rest of my life. I could not bear to see Chachaji worried to death about me anymore. In a society where the honour of parent and child were so inextricably tied, I would not see him humiliated.
Luckily, I did pass the test, and I worked hard to get back into a rhythm at college. I wanted to succeed, especially for Chachaji and the rest of my family. My friends Jagtar and Bhushan were a good influence, and we all became close. When the chief minister of Punjab visited our village, Jagtar and Bhushan arrived for the day, bringing with them our new English teacher, Ranbir Singh. After the crowds dispersed, they came home with me for tea and sweets.
In a village household, a visit from college friends signalled a coming of age of sorts. My family remained silent, despite their view of the exercise as wasteful since I couldn’t afford the more expensive ways of my friends. I craved the approval of my elders and my family, and I knew I would have to earn it. From then on, in spite of other temptations, my focus remained squarely on education. I had also realized that if I became self-reliant, it might mean more freedom to pursue my own goals without burdening Chachaji.
9
I KNEW MANY YOUNG PEOPLE who yearned to go abroad and leave poverty behind. Thousands of sons and daughters (mainly sons, back then) of the newly independent India were trekking west to make their fortunes. Those who returned to visit seemed happy and wealthy. In my immediate family, my cousin Biraji had made the journey when I was ten, in 1956. I had not thought of leaving India myself, but then something happened to change that.
One afternoon as I was enjoying the spring sun on the college lawn and catching up on my reading, a fellow student named Harjinder Atwal stopped to say goodbye; it was his last day at college, he said, because he was leaving for England. He had been accepted at Faraday House Engineering College in London, he told me, and he thought they were still taking applications for admission from foreign students. He gave me the address for the college and bicycled away. Call it coincidence, fate or chance — our encounter would sculpt the story of my life.
I headed home that evening with my mind racing faster than the wheels of my bicycle. The dust on the road crackled under my tires, as if to prick my conscience. Chachaji had always made it clear that I was to stay in India to study. Riding home to Dosanjh that evening with the London college address in my notebook, I felt the shame of a deceitful son. The night felt darker and lonelier than usual. Even the warm quilt on my bed later that evening failed to quell my shivering bones and trembling spirit.
The next morning, after some quick chores at the khooh , I set off for Phagwara as usual. The fog was slowly vanishing in the glistening rays of the morning sun. Post-compartment, I was working very hard. But I was not happy. Chachaji would never abandon his dream of an engineer son and allow me to do a BA in history or political science instead. Those who studied humanities remained poor or underemployed: that was his logic, and it was somewhat true. Chachaji’s own life of poverty dictated his choices for me.
After several days of battling my doubts and fears, I invested half my daily allowance on an aerogram. I wrote to the college in London, asking for a prospectus and an application form. Not a soul knew about it. My routine of college, home and khooh continued uninterrupted for the next few weeks. Then, one Saturday, Mahee, the village poet-cum-postie, delivered an envelope from the college in London addressed to me. I quickly hid it from sight, opening it when I got back to school, in the anonymity of the college library.
As I read the prospectus and the application form, two challenges emerged. First, I would need to consult a dictionary to decipher many of the words and phrases used in the material. That would be cumber-some, but doable. The other was more difficult. The completed application had to be returned with a five-pound draft attached. At the time, getting an amount greater than three English pounds required approval from the Reserve Bank of India in Delhi. Getting that approval would be an impossibility for me. It meant travelling farther than I had ever gone and, what’s more, I would need Chachaji’s consent.
By now, I had made up my mind to try to get to England. I didn’t have the courage to share that with Chachaji or Bhaji — not until I had the college admission in hand. Biraji, too, had to be bypassed — having been repeatedly yanked out of school by my Tayaji, he was anxious that nothing should delay my continued
