13
I TOOK A CAB to Chacha Chain Singh’s house on Depot Street. It was early afternoon on a Sunday, and Chacha and his sons Resham and Ajaib were at home. Theirs was a typical row house of five rooms, with the toilet outside at the end of a small walled backyard. Each of the two bedrooms had two single beds. I was given the only unoccupied bed in the house. There was no bathroom; instead, my new housemates went to the nearby public baths once a week. Chacha was a foundry worker. Workers in the foundries and factories, where work was physical and hard, had bathing facilities at work, I would soon learn. In Chacha’s household, people occasionally heated up water on the stove and took a quick bath in the kitchen, which had a brick floor with a drain under the sink that carried water to the sewer.
Chacha was a member of Chachaji’s generation, and he belonged to the same patti as we did of the five there were in our village, which made him closer to us genealogically than many other Dosanjhes were. He was a tall, heavy man who had been in the U.K. for more than ten years. He had returned to India to visit in the late fifties bearing Terylene shirts, shiny suits and a reel-to-reel tape recorder deck that looked like a small suitcase. Ajaib and Resham had not yet immigrated to the U.K. with their father, and we had a whale of a time with that tape recorder. We would borrow an iktara , an Indian one-string instrument, to accompany ourselves. I sang my own poems, and I loved hearing myself replayed. Others laughed at my lousy performances.
In those days, when you went job searching or even shopping in a city centre, you dressed in your Sunday best. But there was a problem. There was no facility that starched turbans in Derby — nor had there been in Bedford. In Punjab, in the bazaars and along the roadside, there were countless places that did this for a price.
A starched turban is like a crown that you can take off and put away to wear the next day and the day after. A starchless turban usually loses its shape once it is taken off — and that, indeed, is what had happened to mine. In desperation, I tried to starch the turban myself, but the visible gobs of starch destroyed its beauty. There was only one solution. I thanked Chachaji in absentia for allowing me the choice to cut my hair, and one Saturday afternoon the deed was done.
It took me a couple of long weeks to land a job with British Rail. The railway had a large goods yard in Derby and they provided on-the-job training. The job was twelve hours a day, six days a week, starting at 2:00 PM . Sundays we had off. I made good money: twenty-two pounds a week after taxes.
I had been introduced to two neighbourhood pubs with names ending in “Arms.” I did not see any arms of the dangerous kind there, only the warmth of family-owned establishments. They served great draft beer, and everyone told me a beer a day did not hurt anybody. I learned it was in the pubs where working-class people met and en-tertained themselves in the evenings. But on weekdays I didn’t get home from the railway until three in the morning, so I visited the pub for a beer at lunchtime, walking to work afterwards with the food I’d packed for the night. On the way I would pick up a newspaper, which kept me busy in the intervals between trains being shunted.
For me at that time, everything was new: new country, new language, new culture — and now, the totally new experience of working for an employer in an industrialized country. I wanted to learn everything quickly, and the walk to and from work gave me time to be alone with my impatient thoughts. I hungered for knowledge.
My co-workers at the rail yard came from Pakistan, India and the West Indies. We worked on the grounds, coupling, uncoupling, slowing or stopping the wagons. All the other jobs were held by whites. Chanan, a teacher from Punjab, was the longest-working person at the yard at our level. Another worker, Aslam, was from Azad Kashmir, as he called it. (I called it Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.) Aslam always exchanged good-natured repartee with Bhatti, a Pakistani from Lahore, who claimed he had a BA from the University of the Punjab in Lahore and walked around with an air of superiority. The India-Pakistan War of 1965 happened during the time we were all working together, but we kept our passions inside us.
Shunting was not always safe work. One day a Pakistani co-worker not much older than I was fell while slowing down a wagon as his wedged bat slipped. He lost his right ankle and foot when they were crushed by the wagon. Chanan Singh had made sure I bought a pair of steel-toed work boots, but even those, I knew, would not prevent a leg from being chopped off.
The coal-burning stoves in the cabins in the yards were handy for warming our Indian food or for frying eggs and heating beans. The cabins served as lunchrooms and resting places when there were no trains to shunt. I read as much as I could when there was quiet: newspapers, books and magazines. There were heated debates among the men as well. For the West Indians, cricket was the thing. For Indians and Pakistanis, it was field hockey; cricket had not yet assumed the gigantic role in the life of these former colonies that it has today. The West Indians talked sports; we of the Indian subcontinent talked mostly politics. Religion in Pakistan had not yet poisoned minds, and there was no resurgent Hindu or Sikh militancy in India. We all knew stories of families maimed and butchered during partition on either side of the border.
One temperamental West Indian co-worker, though, often picked quarrels with others. Everyone tried to avoid him, but one day, when I had the misfortune of being in his company, the man made a vulgar remark about my sisters. I had not yet dealt in my mind with the question of violence, but I let the man know my culture didn’t appreciate that kind of talk. He flew into a rage and lunged at me with a knife he was using to peel an apple. The third person in the cabin intervened, and when the foreman heard the commotion, he ran into the cabin and led me away. It took me some time to learn that walking away from a principle is wrong, but walking away from an idiot is not.
Derby was not far from Nottingham, where Biraji’s brother-in-law Pushkar lived. He had helped me with the draft of five pounds I’d needed for my British college application, and now I was hoping he could provide some advice. I was questioning where my life was heading and why I had come to England. Pushkar had been to college in India. He might help me find some answers.
It was early evening, cold and getting darker. As I waited for the bus to Nottingham, anxiety engulfed me. (I’d experienced the same feeling on Indian winter evenings, and many years later I self-diagnosed my condition as seasonal affective disorder.) Seeing me waiting alone on this dark and dingy evening, a motorcyclist stopped and, hearing my destination, offered to drop me directly at Pushkar’s in Nottingham, since he was going that way. I accepted the ride, but the resulting wind chill made the miserable cold much worse. My hands and ears felt ready to fall off. But as we passed through Nottinghamshire, I remembered that Sherwood Forest had been the hideout of the legendary Robin Hood, known for plundering the rich to give to the poor. The Englishmen who came later colonized, plundered and divided India. I thanked the biker when we reached my destination, and he waited until Pushkar’s door opened.
Pushkar, in his forties and balding, had an endearing smile. He welcomed me in and turned on a heater, and the warmth gradually brought my limbs back from the dead. I thanked him for the draft he had sent me and told him of my dilemma. His advice was to find a way of going to college as I worked. Being a bus driver and active in the trade union movement, he supported the Wilson government. We talked late into the night.
The Britain of the sixties was a class-conscious and rigidly stratified society. There were working-class areas in most cities, as well as posh enclaves where the rich lived. In between lived the middle class and a small number of nouveau riche who mimicked the aristocracy, hungering for entry into their ranks. Indians, like the other visible minorities, were on the outside looking in. I was an alien in every sense of the word in Britain, an interloper. But giving up and running back to Daddy just wasn’t an option.
And truth be told, I, too, was trying to rise. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was an economic immigrant, in that it was the very affluence of the West that had attracted me here. Our poverty had not pushed me out
