and to wash the family clothes, all while attending school full time. Within a year of my departure for England, Biraji’s wife, Kuldip, and their three children, Kulbir, Parveen and Jasmine, would leave India to join Biraji in England. Most of the household work of cooking and cleaning for family and for the hired help on the khooh would fall on Nimmy. She was forced to grow up fast. Years later, she told me that when she saw a photograph of me from Derby with my friend Resham, whose family tree connected with ours several generations back, she could not believe that clean-shaven boy was her brother.
Not many people outside the family were privy to my plans, either. Hurdles to emigration could be easily created by people who did not like you: a false police report here and a malicious prosecution there, spurred by petty jealousies or perceived offences.
I planned to catch the evening train, a milk run that would reach Delhi early the next morning. The tightly bundled and roped quilt holding my belongings had to be carried as well, so we took several bicycles. Outside our home, I was surrounded by neighbours and my family. Taeeji’s moist eyes kept looking down, as if she couldn’t bear the sight of me leaving. Tayaji stood watching and waiting near the Goraywala. He blessed me with his hand on my head, patting me on the back to launch me into the unknown. He must have been thinking of Biraji, the son in England he had not seen for eight long years. I have always cried easily, and tears rolled down my cheeks as we walked with the bikes to the khooh . Behind our home we passed the clay hearth of our water-drawer, Bachni. In the evenings she would light a fire in the bhatthi and roast corn for anyone who wanted it. You brought your own corn for that purpose, and Bachni kept a portion of it as payment for her labour of roasting the rest. I turned to take one last look at the home where I had been born and raised.
We took the less-travelled canal road to Phagwara. It was early afternoon, and the canal was filled with water that flowed from a much deeper, wider canal irrigating the land in Dosanjh and beyond. I still remembered when this canal was freshly dug and the bridge over it that connected our school to the village was brand new. One morning the students gathered to watch the new canal fill, and as the water sped into it we saw a human corpse floating toward us: the decayed, bloated body of a man. It had the look of a huge sculpted statue perched on the surface of the moving water. The swollen limbs, the penis — the “statue” looked grotesque, and a strong stench emanated from it. I felt it should be taken out of the water, and I said so to the adults in the crowd. They shut me up, saying, “Let others downstream worry about it.” Anomie in India was already in full bloom.
Now the canal looked so much smaller than it had appeared to that grade-six child. Its banks were overgrown with tall grass. As we rode past Virkaan, the noise of a chuckee , a flour-mill engine, filled the air. Once, during the monsoons when the cattle-pulled kharaas was inoperable, Jajo milled our atta by hand for seven days straight. I tried to help her, but I couldn’t even budge the stone. But I poured grain into the chuckee as she rotated the grindstone holding the handle, first with one hand and then the other as her arms got tired. The work was so difficult that, historically, it was part of the sentence of hard labour endured by convicts. Guru Nanak had once offended the Mughal emperor Babar, and as a consequence was sentenced to hard labour of the chuckee in prison. Offending is the fate of all great reformers, of course. Men like Nanak and Gandhi viewed it as their dharma to offend against the evils of their time. Perhaps Jajo’s own husband, my Nanaji, had felt the same about the hard labour he endured in the British prisons of colonial India.
By now, we were on the Grand Trunk Road that passed through Phagwara, taking travellers on to Delhi on one side and to Amritsar and Lahore on the other. The textile mill by the railroad tracks was the largest year-round employer in Phagwara. The sugar mill farther down the road provided seasonal employment. Some men from Dosanjh worked in these mills, cycling to and from work every day. Finally we reached the intersection of the Grand Trunk and Banga roads. Turning right would take us back to Dosanjh. We turned left instead, arriving at the rail station a stone’s throw away. Chachaji’s cousins from Virkaan had come to see me off. Bhaji went to purchase train tickets for Chachaji and me while others carried my bundled quilt to the platform.
11
THE POWERFUL STEAM ENGINE sounded ominous. Its noise lent an air of finality to my fate. There was no turning back now. Those who had gathered offered me hugs and words of reassurance. It was one of the few times I have ever witnessed my brother cry. Chachaji and I boarded the train, and the engine spewed steam as the train pulled away. Bhaji waved one last time, and then I could see him no more.
As the train found its rhythm, the fields alongside appeared to be dancing to it. Acre upon acre of hay, sugarcane and other vegetation glowed green in the dusk. Farmers were ploughing and levelling the earth, and the dust from the hooves of their oxen seemed to touch the heavens. As night fell, sounds took over: the steam engine and the wheels clacking along the steel tracks. Most of the passengers were dozing by now. As the train slowed at various stations, lights from homes and from tea and peanut stands punctuated the sleepy darkness. Dogs barked, disturbed by the activity. Inside lit-up factories, I could see people working away. Cities and towns never completely rested, I was learning. Chachaji slept on and off, every now and then glancing at me. He was worried, no doubt, about whether I would be able to make a go of it out there in the world.
It was still dark when we got off at Ghaziabad. The station was in need of repair and a thorough cleaning. Probably not much had changed in the city since the British left it in 1947. Dosanjh had its own share of filth, with raw sewage accumulating in puddles and ponds, but at least it had open fields one could escape to. In Ghaziabad, I soon saw, there was no escaping the crowds, the filth or the general pollution. Chachaji and I took a rickshaw to Siso Bhenji’s home, which had a big enclosed yard with a machine shed on one side. In one corner of the yard was a four-room house with a kitchen and a bath. Scattered everywhere were the machines and parts worked on by my Bhaji Sardara Singh, an expert machinist. Everybody managed to find a place to sleep.
The next morning we went shopping. Chachaji selected the fabric for my suits, which would be made by the fabric store’s tailor. I would soon be the proud owner of two woollen suits, my first ever. I also bought some toothpaste and a toothbrush, another first; I’d been told England did not have thorny kikar , acacia karroo, or cockspur thorn, trees whose thin branches had served as toothbrushes and tooth cleaners all my life.
Chachaji also bought me a small suitcase to put my clothes and toiletries in. I didn’t have much in the way of toiletries. I was a turbaned Sikh boy with virgin whiskers — nothing you could call a beard yet. I had never heard of deodorants. Natural body odour was fine as long as one was clean, we thought. And instead of body creams and lotions, we had mustard oil.
It had rained a little, and the puddles gave the paved roads an ugly, pitiful look. Traffic splashed the muddy water around, with bus, car and truck passengers avoiding the airborne mud only if their windows were shut. Travelling around as we were — in rickshaws, by bike and on foot — made us prime targets for mud’s fury. Chachaji’s outfit of naturally white khadi — homespun cotton — did not retain its pure whiteness for long.
That evening, Chachaji, Bhaji Sardara Singh and I visited Con-naught Place, perhaps the poshest commercial section of Delhi at the time. The rain-washed marble on the buildings, floors and pavement shone whiter than ever. Shops and stalls were full of the merchandise the elite of Delhi splurged on. The area was filled with expensive restaurants and emporiums; beautiful, colourfully bedecked women accompanied “kaala sahibs” in their London-style suits and boots. It appeared as if many of these “Mahatmas” had just returned to India after completing their dinners at the inns of the court in England. Certainly they had not gone to South Africa to be thrown out of first-class train compartments as coolies. This was the Indian idea of England. I wondered what the actual England would be like. Did the English people there hate doing their own chores, polishing their own shoes, cooking their own meals and doing their own laundry?
My
