racing. A part of me longed to be like the rich of Connaught Place, though I knew intellectually that it was wrong to be consumed by the lust for wealth. I was travelling to greener pastures, and like all beating hearts, mine was a battlefield of competing influences. How would I navigate those influences to figure out what and who I would be? At that moment I had no business passing judgement on kaala sahibs. At least they were not abandoning India.
As the hour of my departure drew nearer, my fear of the unknown grew stronger. But Chachaji did not need to be burdened with the knowledge that his soon-to-fly son was ill prepared for the journey and beyond. The next morning was filled with love, food and laughter. Siso Bhenji made delicious pranthas , mango achaar (pickle) and homemade yogurt. As usual, I overate. Most human beings are blessed with a satiety mechanism. Within a few minutes of beginning a meal this mechanism sends signals to their brains to slow down and eventually to stop eating. I have never received such signals. We are all related to animals, and in this trait I am definitely related to dogs.
An old-model Ambassador taxi waited outside the front of Siso Bhenji’s house. Baggage tucked away in the trunk, our goodbyes said, Chachaji and I sped away in the cab through the descending fog. The turbaned sardarji driver artfully negotiated the traffic, offering a running commentary as we drove past places of historical interest. A mosque here and a fort there; he regaled us with stories of kings, queens, courtiers and intrigue from centuries long past. My head was spinning. My ancestors had struggled along with millions of others to free India from British rule. Now I was going to the home of our former colonial rulers in search of something better. It did not occur to me at the time that I was running away.
The Delhi airport was a building with a few high-ceilinged rooms. After I checked in, Chachaji and I sat down in the waiting area. I had three British pounds with me — all the money a person was allowed to take. That and the very restrictive controls on passports were Nehru’s way of encouraging Indians to stay in India. My leaving would be no loss to India, I was sure, but Nehru did have a point. He wanted Indians to stay and build their own country instead of providing cheap labour to the world. He was acutely aware of the history of indentured and other Indian labourers working on sugar plantations or building railways in other countries under exploitative conditions. In purely personal terms, though, I felt India was lucky not to have to expend any more resources on me. There were millions of others who were abler, keener and more useful for the future of the country than I was. I was not good at sciences or calculus, and I was more interested in politics than in engineering. India already had too many people interested in politics, not as a noble calling but as a means to power and influence for personal profit and glory. Had I stayed, the same fate might have befallen me.
At two hours past midnight, my fellow passengers began filing out to the airplane on the tarmac. “Get up, Bhai Ghunattha Singh, time to go,” Chachaji said. When he was feeling tender and affectionate, that was his favourite name for me: Mr. Ghunattha Singh. He hugged me tightly, then motioned for me to leave. Overcome with emotion, I focussed on climbing the mobile stairs reaching into the plane. But as I lifted my foot to the first step, a voice rang out, “Bhai Ghunattha Singh, come here.” It was Chachaji, a few feet away on the other side of the rope divider, standing among the relatives and friends of other passengers. “If you want to cut your hair, you may,” he told me. “When in Rome, do as Romans do.” He enunciated the latter in crisp English, employing the Indian accent later made notorious by the inimitable British actor Peter Sellers. “If you feel like drinking,” he continued, “it is all right. But don’t drink too much. And if you ever smoke I’ll kill you. Go. Run now. You are going to be late.”
Looking back, I am amazed at these words of wisdom from a father to his going-away son. Chachaji’s advice was at once liberating and arresting. He who had cherished his unshorn hair all his life and would have preferred me to follow his example had freed me from this Sikh religious stricture in an instant of foresight. He had never been out of India, but he had the wisdom of a seasoned world traveller. All those days as I was getting ready to leave, he must have been pondering the life and the challenges in store for me in England.
I settled in my seat. My feet were no longer touching the soil of my forefathers, and the plane was readying for takeoff. I had not even seen an airplane before. Once, a plane had landed in the fields near a village a few miles from Dosanjh, and the kids who saw it said it was larger than many guddas put together. Now I was not only seeing one for myself, I was sitting in one. By the old stored in our brain’s magic box of memory, we measure the new.
The plane’s interior was spotless white with a blue tone. The contrast with the earthy homes and streets, the dusty roads and fields of Dosanjh, was stark. It was as if I had entered an uninhabited and sterile part of the universe. I paid full attention to the flight attendant’s seatbelt and life jacket demonstration, struggling with her Aussie accent.
Though there weren’t many other passengers on board, they were all, as far as I could see, goray (white). I had seen few gorays in my life to date, and no gorian (white women) at all. Miss Jacob, the Anglo-Indian headmistress at our Dosanjh Girls’ School, was the first white-looking person I had ever met. There were a few Dosanjh girls who looked white as well.
The awareness of being among strangers now coursed through my head. To my left, across the aisle, sat the only other Indian passenger on the plane. He was deep in conversation with the gora beside him, and every now and then they would turn to look at me.
When the plane took off, my eardrums were ready to explode. I’d felt a similar but much less painful sensation when I’d played on the swings tied to a tall old banyan tree at Bahowal. This was no mere swing, however, and the skies no banyan tree. We were in a colossal machine ascending to float in the air. There was no rope to hold onto, just the armrests of my seat.
To distract myself, I tried to memorize the features of each of the white people on the plane, including the hostesses, as they were called then. All the hostesses had pinkish skin, some paler than others. In the hormonal department, the sexual repression and prudery drummed into my young head were in full control; nothing to worry about there. When my gaze fell upon an English newspaper in the seat pocket in front of the Indian man across from me, I asked in my broken and previously untested English if I could borrow it. He smiled and handed me the paper. I was still looking through it when the Indian asked if he could sit next to me for a while.
He turned out to be a professor at the University of London. His gora friend in the seat next to him was also a professor, and he soon joined our conversation. The Indian quickly realized I was more linguistically challenged than my request for his newspaper might have led him to believe. We spoke in Hindi until the gora joined us, then we switched to English. The two men were returning from a conference in Australia, they told me. I wish I could recall their names, because I have never forgotten the kindness they showed me during that flight and all the way past immigration and customs at London’s Heathrow Airport. It was undoubtedly clear to them that I hailed straight from the village and was untouched by the sophistication of big-city life.
The Indian man took me to the back of the plane to show me how to use a flush toilet. One could not squat on it, Indian-village style, he told me. That aspect of my education completed, the men turned their attention to my table manners. Breakfast had just arrived, and they sat me between them to explain the use of a knife and fork. I had never come across these utensils, and my natural inclination was to hold the fork in my right hand to convey the food to my mouth. To my amazement, however, the fork was to be held in the left hand. Both men showed me on their own plates repeatedly how to cut a piece of meat and then carry the pieces to your mouth. Finally, a light went on in my head, and it was smooth sailing thereafter. (Years later, when my wife-to-be, Rami, had to tutor me in the art of chopsticks, I found my apprenticeship with the professors on the plane had lit the path. She was an army major’s daughter, and good table manners were considered a prerequisite for marrying into many a military family.)
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