Some time after I had been weaned, my father came to Hadali to take my mother and elder brother to Delhi, where he and his father had secured some building contracts. I was left with my grandmother. For the first few years of my life she was my sole companion and friend. Her name I later discovered was Lakshmi Bai. We called her Bhaabeejee. Like her, my mother also had a Hindu—Maharashtrian—name, Veeran Bai. The children knew her as Baybayjee.
I have hazy recollections of my childhood years in Hadali. The village consisted of about three hundred families, most of them Muslims of Baluch extraction. They were enormous men, mostly serving in the British Indian army, or having retired from it. A fair proportion of the Viceroy’s bodyguard came from Hadali. Till recently, a marble plaque on a wall alongside the railway Station Master’s office stated that Hadali had provided proportionately more soldiers from its population for World War I than any other village in India. There were about fifty Hindu and Sikh families engaged in trade, shopkeeping and moneylending. My ancestors—I can only trace them back to my great-grandfather, Inder Singh, and his father, Pyare Lal, who converted to Sikhism and became Sohel Singh—were tradesmen. They had camel caravans which took rock-salt from the Khewra mines, and dates, the only fruit of our desert homeland, to sell in Lahore and Amritsar. They brought back textiles, kerosene oil, tea, sugar, spices and other items to sell in neighbouring towns and villages. Later, my grandfather and father got into the construction business. They laid a part of the small-gauge railtrack and tunnels on the Kalka-Simla railway.
We were the most prosperous family of Hadali. We lived in a large brick-and-mud house with a spacious courtyard enclosing a buffalo shed and had a well of our own. The entrance was a massive wooden door which was rarely opened. It had a small aperture to let people in. A number of Hindus and Sikhs served us as clerks, and hired Muslim camel-drivers took our wares to the markets. Many Muslim families were our debtors.
Our family’s prosperity was ascribed to a legend. It is said that one year, when it rained heavily on the Salt Range, flood waters swept down the rocky ridge, carrying with them a Muslim holy man named Shaida Peer, who had climbed on to the thatched roof of his hut. By the time he floated down to Hadali, he had nothing on him except his loin cloth. My grandfather, Sujan Singh, gave him clothes, made a hut for him near the Muslim graveyard and sent him food. Shaida Peer blessed him: ‘I will give your two sons the keys of Delhi and Lahore. They will prosper.’ And prosper they did—my father as a building contractor in Delhi; and his younger brother Ujjal Singh as one of pre-Partition Punjab’s biggest landowners. He later became a member of the Legislative Assembly and, after Independence, finance minister of Punjab and still later its Governor. He ended his career as Governor of Tamil Nadu.
We Sikhs and Hindus of Hadali lived with the Muslims in an uneasy but peaceful relationship. Though we addressed their elders as uncles or aunts as they did ours, we rarely went to each other’s homes except on marriages and deaths. We lived in slight awe of the Muslims because they were more numerous and much bigger built than us. Fortunately for us, they were split into different clans—Waddhals, Mastials, Awans, Janjuas, Noons and Tiwanas—and were often engaged in litigation over land, frequently murdering each other. We kept ourselves at a safe distance from them.
I recall passing their men striding down the village lanes. Most of them were over six feet tall and made as if of whipcord. They wore their well-oiled hair curling out behind their ears, stuck with small wooden or ivory combs. They normally twirled spindles with the fleece of sheep or camels to make yarn, or took their hooded falcons out for airing. Their women were also tall, slender and well proportioned. They could carry two pitchers full of water balanced on their heads, and one pitcher caught between the right arm and waist. Water splashed on their muslin shirts and ankle-length lungis, displaying the outlines of their taut, shapely, black-nippled breasts as well as their muscular, dimpled buttocks. They never looked up from the ground as they glided past, aware of men eating them up with their eyes. Though barely four years old, I became an inveterate voyeur.
Nothing very exciting happened in Hadali. Life had a soporific routine. My grandmother rose well before dawn to milk the buffaloes and put the milk in an earthen pot over smouldering embers of pats of buffalo dung. She went out into the open with neighbouring women to defecate. She pulled up a couple of buckets of water from the well and bathed herself under starlight as she mumbled the morning prayer, Japji. She spent the next half hour churning butter and butter-milk, reciting her prayers as she did so. Then she woke me up. I was allowed to defecate on the roof-top where the hot sun burnt up everything exposed to it. I washed myself. She combed my long hair and plaited it: being Sikhs we did not cut our hair. I got out my wooden takhti (slate) smeared over with yellow gaachnee (clay), my reed pen and earthen soot-inkpot. She got a bundle of stale chappatis left over from the previous evening’s meal and wrapped them in her dupatta. We set out together for the Dharamsal-cum-school. Pi dogs awaited us at our threshold. We took turns tearing up pieces of chappati and throwing them to the dogs. We kept a few in reserve for our return journey.
The Dharamsal was a short distance from our home. I was handed over to Bhai Hari Singh who was both Granthi and teacher. I sat on the floor with other Hindu and Sikh boys and chanted multiplication tables in sing-song. My grandmother went to the large hall where three copies of the Granth Sahib were placed side by side on a low table. Beneath the table was an assortment of spectacles discarded by worshippers for the use of anyone they fitted. After chanting the tables, Bhai Hari Singh wrote the letters of the Gurmukhi alphabet on a board for us to copy. Though bent with age, he had a terrible temper. Any mistake he spotted on our wooden slates was rewarded with resounding kicks on our backsides. Mercifully, the lesson did not last more than an hour. My grandmother and I walked back, giving the village dogs all that remained of the chappatis. While she busied herself sweeping the floor, rolling up beds and cooking the midday meal, I went out to play hop-scotch or tip-cat (gullee-dundaa) with boys of my age.
What we did in the afternoons depended on the time of the year. Desert winters could be very cold and the days very short. There was more to do and less time to do it in. But the real winter lasted barely forty days. After a brief spring, the long summer was upon us. It became hotter day by day with temperatures rising to 125°F. We hardly ever had any rain. Our tobas (ponds) were filled with brackish rain-water coming down the Salt Range. Some of it percolated into the wells. Only a few of these wells, which were brick-and-cement lined, yielded potable water fit for human consumption. For some reason brackish wells were referred to by the male gender as khaara khoo; those which yielded sweet water were known by the diminutive, feminine gender as mitthee khooee. Most of us had pale yellow teeth with a brown line running horizontally across the upper set. This was ascribed to the impure water we drank. No matter what time of year it was, my grandmother spent her afternoons plying the charkha while mumbling Guru Arjun’s Sukhmani—the Psalm of Peace. My memories of my grandmother are closely linked with the hum of the spinning wheel and the murmur of prayers.
The long summer months were an ordeal. The hot sands burnt the soles of one’s feet. Going from one house to another we had to hug the walls to walk in their shadows, deftly avoiding blobs of shit left by children who too had found the shadows the coolest places in which to defecate. We spent most of the day indoors gossiping, or drowsily fanning away flies. It was only late in the afternoon that camels and buffaloes were taken to the tobas for watering. The buffaloes were happiest wallowing in the stagnant ponds. Boys used them as jumping boards. At sunset the cattle were driven back, the buffaloes milked and hearths lit. The entire village became fragrant with the aroma of burning camel-thorn and baking bread. Boys formed groups to go into the sand-dunes to defecate. While we were at it, dung beetles gathered our turds into little marble-sized balls and rolled them to their holes in the sand. We had a unique way of cleansing ourselves. We sat on our bottoms in
a line. At a given signal we raised our legs and propelled ourselves towards the winning post with our hands. By the end of the race called gheesee, our bottoms were clean but full of sand. Later, in the night and during the early phases of the moon, we played kotla chapakee, our version of blind-man’s buff. Full-moon nights on the sanddunes remain printed in my memory. We ran about chasing each other till summoned home for supper. The one threat that worked was that we might be kidnapped by dacoits. We were familiar with the names of notorious outlaws like Tora and Sultana who had spread terror in the countryside because of the number of murders and abductions they had committed.
Next to dacoits we most feared sand storms. We were used to living with dust-raising winds and spiralling dust-devils, but haneyree or jhakkhar were something else. They came with such blinding fury that there was little we could do besides crouching on the ground with our heads between our knees to prevent sand getting into our nostrils, eyes and ears. There were times when so much sand was blown that the rail track was submerged under it, and no trains ran till it was cleared. But it purged the air of flies and insects, and for the following day or two the air would be cleaner and cooler.
After the evening meal we went to our roof-tops to sleep. My grandmother, who had already said her evening prayer, Rehras, recited the last prayer of the day, Kirtan Sohila. She rubbed clotted cream on my back. If her gentle ministrations did not put me to sleep, she would tell me anecdotes from the lives of our Gurus. If I was still wide awake, she would point to the stars and reprimand me: ‘Don’t you see what time it is? Now chup—shut up.’
The nicest time in the summer was the early morning. A cool breeze blew over the desert, picking up the fragrances of roses and jasmine which grew in our courtyards. It was the time for half sleep and fantasizing. It was all too brief. The sun came up hot, bringing with it flies and the raucous caw-cawing of crows. The blissful half hour that Urdu poets refer to as the baad-e-naseem—zephyr of early dawn—came to an end all too suddenly.
Little happened in Hadali to relieve the tedium of our daily routine. There was a murder or two every other year. But since murders were confined to the Muslims, we never got overexcited about them. Once a year there were tent-pegging competitions on the open ground near the railway station. Competitors lined up on their horses and, at a given signal, galloped towards the stakes waving their spears and yelling ‘Allah Beli Ho’—Oh Allah is my best friend. After piercing the stakes they waved their spears triumphantly for all to see. They often raced passing railway trains and kept pace with them till their horses ran out of breath. I remember the first time a Sikh brought a bicycle to Hadali. He boasted that he would outrun any horse. Before a horseman could take up his challenge, we boys decided to take him on. Hadali had no metalled road and the cyclist was still wobbly on the wheels. He fared very poorly as his cycle got stuck in the sand. He became the laughing stock of the village and was thereafter mocked with the title ‘Saikal Bahadur’—brave man of the bicycle.
I returned to Hadali three times after shifting to Delhi. The first time, to be initiated into reading the Granth Sahib. My elder brother, a cousin and I were made to read aloud the Japji in front of the congregation and asked to swear that we would read at least one hymn every day. None of us was able to keep our promise for very long. I went there next when practising law in Lahore. I drove to Hadali with a friend whose cousin was the manager of the salt mines. As we pulled up near the railway station tears welled up in my eyes. I resisted the urge to go down on my knees and kiss the earth. I walked up to the Dharamsal and to the house where I was born. A man who was Risaldar in the Viceroy’s bodyguard recognized me and spread the news to the village. By the time I left, there was a crowd to see me off.
My last visit to Hadali was in the winter of 1987. The partition of India in 1947 had brought about a complete change in its population. Not a single Sikh or Hindu remained. Our homes were occupied by Muslim refugees from Haryana. Our family haveli was divided into three equal parts, each shared by Muslim refugees from Rohtak. A new generation of Hadalians who had never seen a Sikh were then in their forties. I was uncertain of the reception they would give me. My only contact with this generation was through meeting a few young soldiers taken captive in the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 in the prisoner-of-war camp in Dhaka. I had sought them out and written to their parents that they were safe and in good health.
I drove from Lahore and reached Hadali early in the afternoon. Village elders awaited me on the roadside with garlands of silver and gold tassels with the words Khoosh Amdeed—welcome—inscribed on them in Urdu. I did not recognize any of the men whose hands I shook. I was escorted to the High School ground where a dais with the Pakistan flag fluttering over it had been put up. Over 2,000 Hadalians sat in rows on chairs and on the ground. Speeches in badly pronounced, florid Urdu were delivered acclaiming me as a son of Hadali. My heart was full of gratitude. I sensed that I would make an ass of myself. I did. I started off well. I spoke to them in the village dialect. I said that just as they looked forward to going on pilgrimage to Makka and Madina, coming back to Hadali at the time of the Maghreb (evening prayer) of my life was my Haj (big pilgrimage) and my Umra (small pilgrimage). And as the Prophet on his return to Makka as Victor had spent his first night wandering about the streets and praying beside the grave of his first wife, I would have liked nothing better than to be left alone to roam about the lanes of Hadali and rest my head on the threshold of the house in which I was born. Then I was overcome by emotion and broke down. They understood and forgave me. I was escorted to my former home with the entire village following me. Fireworks were let off; women standing on rooftops showered rose-petals on me. Who was the author of the perfidious lie that Muslims and Sikhs were sworn enemies? No animosity had soured relations between the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs of Hadali. Muslims had left the Sikh-Hindu Dharamsal untouched because it had been a place of worship for their departed cousins.
The Rohtak families living in what was once our home had done up the haveli with coloured balloons and paper buntings. The elders of the village who once knew my father had a feast laid out in my honour. There was little that I saw of Hadali that I recognized. The sanddunes which had been the playgrounds of my childhood years were gone. A canal had greened the desert. The tobas had become swamps full of reeds. The marble plaque commemorating the services of the men who had fought in World War I had been removed. I left Hadali a little before sunset, aware that I would never return to it again.
Simba
I returned home to Delhi. Once again I was without a job and with very little money in my pocket or in my bank account. All I had on the credit side was a collection of short stories which brought me some good notices but no money, a short and, unsatisfactory Short History of the Sikhs which was condemned by orthodox Sikhs, and a novel which brought me money which I had spent. And the manuscript of a second novel which had yet to be accepted by a publisher.
Among those who greeted me at home was a one-month old Alsatian pup presented by a friend of my father’s to my daughter, Mala. To start with, he resented me as an intruder in his tight little human family consisting of my wife and our two children. He slept in the same upstairs bedroom in my father’s house and used the roof of the porch as his lavatory. Till then he had no name. I decided to name him Simba after the marmalade cat we had abandoned in Paris. As with most Alsatians, Simba was a one-person dog. He belonged to my daughter, my wife fed him, took him to the vet for his shots and for any ailment he had, but he adopted me as his master. He was as human a dog as I have ever known and shared our joys as he did our sorrows. By the time we moved into our own ground-floor apartment in Sujan Singh Park, he had got over his frisky puppiness and grown into a powerful full-sized German Shepherd. He still shared our bedroom, where he had his own cot. And for his sake more than ours we had an airconditioner put in the room. Often at night he would sniff into my ears and ask me to make room for him. I did. He would heave himself on to the bed with a dee
p sigh of gratitude, and take over more than half of my bed for the rest of the night.
We would talk to him. If we pretended to cry, he would sniff soothingly in our ears and join us wailing: booo, ooo ooo. If he was naughty, we’d order him to the corner. He stayed there with his head down in penitence till we said, ‘Okay, now you can come back.’
Simba developed a special relationship with Mala’s ayah, the seventy-five-year-old Mayee. ‘Vey Shambia,’ she would greet him as she opened the door to let Simba out in the garden. She waited for him to do his business in the garden before going to the neighbouring gurdwara to say her prayers. He knew he was not allowed inside the gurdwara and sat outside guarding her slippers. Just as the morning prayer was about to end, he would take one of her slippers in his mouth, trot home and hide it under a bed. Mayee would follow him pleading, ‘Vey Shambia! Where have you hidden my slipper?’ He followed her from room to room wagging his tail till she found the missing slipper.
Simba was always impatient for his evening walk. He would put his head in my lap and look appealingly at me: ‘Isn’t it time?’ his eyes asked. ‘Not yet,’ I would reply. Then he would bring his leash and put it at my feet. ‘Now?’ I would tell him not to be so impatient. Next he brought my walking stick and dropped it on the book I was reading. ‘Surely now!’ There was no escape. He whined and trembled with excitement as we left. As he jumped on to the rear seat of the car his whining became louder. He liked to put his head out of the window and bark challenges to every dog, cow or bull we passed on the road. He had to be let off at the entrance of the Lodhi gardens. He raced the car, stopping briefly to defecate, and resumed the race to the parking lot. At that time there used to be some hares in the park. He would sniff them out of the hedges and then go in hot pursuit, yelping as he tried to catch up with them. They were too fast and dodgy for him. But he became quite adept at hunting squirrels. He learnt that they ran to the nearest tree and went round its bole to evade pursuit. He would steal up to the tree and then go for them. In the open ground they had no escape. However much I reprimanded him and even beat him, he could not resist killing harmless squirrels.
Not a Nice Man to Know Page 24
