To Rami, who has unflinchingly stood with me; to my brother, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles; to my children, who love me despite the long periods of neglect I visited upon them; to my six grandchildren, Solaina, Alexie, Suhani, Iyla, Mila and Damon, for whom I continue my fight and pen my life’s story; and to the countless friends and supporters who have helped me stand up, speak out and fight on.
INTRODUCTION
I was born in Dosanjh Kalan, a dusty village in rural Punjab. I exited my first home, the womb, on October 14, 1946 — exactly ten months before Pakistan was tragically partitioned from India, its mother, on August 15, 1947 — making me a child of midnight.
I spent the first eighteen years of my life in India, fled briefly to Britain and then came to Canada, where I have remained for close to five decades. I am indebted to India for giving me its ancient civilization as a birth gift and for nurturing me before I fled as a fugitive from its battles. I am grateful to England — which I despised as a former colonial power, until I landed in London — for what it taught me during my short sojourn in its embrace, though I felt like an interloper there. Afraid to go back to India as a failure, I embarked for Canada, where I was able to drop anchor. Together, these three countries have given me a life filled with more victories than defeats, more joys than sorrows. The world has done much to help make me a better man, and some may say I haven’t done too badly.
Why should my story matter? It does not seem important in the larger scheme of things. But our own stories always matter to us, and to the generations that follow. Merging with the stories of so many others, they give meaning to our lives and to the lives of nations.
Everything may not have happened exactly as I recall it in these pages. Memory is a magician that plays tricks on us. We remember the mundane but often forget the profound. Memory saves pleasures past but deletes many episodes of pain. Nonetheless, I have remained faithful to the truth as I see it and have done my best to make this a fair accounting.
As I approach my final years, I am impatient with life, but also at peace. I am content, but still in search of the next challenge. I come by my activism honestly. My inner determination is fuelled by what I learned from my heroes, the fighters for freedom I most admired: my father, Master Pritam Singh Dosanjh; my maternal grandfather, Jathedar / Jarnail Moola Singh Bains; and Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation I deserted to make Canada my home.
My father used to say, “One may walk fewer steps in life, but one must always walk with dignity.” His personal credo has sustained me on this journey after midnight, from the dusty roads of rural India I so vividly remember to the full life I continue to enjoy. The inspiration I draw from my heroes is responsible for any good I may have done. For the mistakes in my life, more than a few, I alone am responsible.
1
I WAS BROUGHT INTO A WORLD in turmoil. The Allies had decisively defeated the Fascist / Axis armies, but the world had witnessed the first atom bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Several million Jews, half a million Roma and innumerable others had been killed by Hitler. The League of Nations was consigned to the history books, and the United Nations had been launched. A victorious but weakened Britain was in the midst of leaving India.
Dosanjh Kalan, the dusty village in Punjab where I was born, had been settled by my ancestors about five hundred years earlier. Dosanjhes, like most Punjabis, are believed to have travelled initially from Rajasthan. My ancestors lived a few miles away in Puadhra before moving to a new spot to create Dosanjh Kalan. From a recent study of last names published in a major Punjabi daily, I discovered that a minor princeling in Rajasthan had five sons: Dosanjh, Malhi, Dhindsa, Sangha and Dhaliwal. Since then, we Dosanjhes have grown to number several thousand in India and across the world. Of course, “Dosanjh” was a first name at a time when people in India usually had single names, so perhaps princelings were not the only fathers to name their sons Dosanjh. So though some of us lay claim to a “royal” lineage, I make no such claim. I have no doubt I come from untainted peasant stock: people of the soil who through the centuries worked their small plots of earth to eke out the most meagre of livings.
My father, Pritam Singh, along with his only surviving sibling, Joginder Singh, our Tayaji (father’s elder brother), owned a mere five-acre parcel of land. We lived together as one household; my cousins, my siblings and I were cared for by our Taeeji (father’s elder brother’s wife), Bhagwant Kaur, and our mother, Surjit Kaur, whom we called Biji (a family term for mother or grandmother). Even now, our ancestral land is owned jointly by the extended family. The bond between the Dosanjh cousins and our children and grandchildren is still strong.
My paternal great-great-grandfather, Dunna Singh, had two sons, Nand Singh and Bhola Singh. His brother had two sons as well. One was Jamait Singh; the other’s name remains unknown to me. Jamait’s brother married and had two sons. Eventually the sons married, and both of them died without issue.
One of the widows left behind by those sons was Bachint Kaur. Her husband died before muklava , the time when a new bride returns from staying with her parents for a short period following the wedding — a custom that likely arose because girls were married so young and needed to grow up a bit more before being muklavaed to their in-laws. Because Bachint’s husband died during this period, his family, the Dosanjhes, rebuffed her as a bringer of bad luck. From then on, she lived the life of a rejected widow, with no prospect of remarrying. I am unable to fathom the depths of pain and despair she must have gone through, sitting in her parents’ home. Once they too had died, she was dependent for her basic needs on her brothers and their wives. In her village, she would never have been able to escape the hungry eyes of the men, yet she was forbidden from sleeping with a man for the rest of her life.
When my brother Kamal had occasion to see Bachint late in life, she happily relinquished any right or title to the ancestral property in Dosanjh Kalan. She was a Dosanjh, and she wanted the Dosanjhes to prosper, she told my brother. She wanted to do this last “good deed” for the family that had rejected her. There was no question Dosanjhes were every bit as backward as their contemporaries.
The other widow, Basant Kaur, lived a long life and was an important part of my childhood. She was my father’s Taeeji, and we mimicked him by calling her Taeeji, too. The contours of her face were a reminder of the beauty of her youth. Her deep wrinkles were evidence of her years of struggle. She lived alone, directly across from us, in a several-hundred-year-old brick house with intricately carved wooden doors. On either side of the entrance, indented spaces had been created for divas , earthen lamps fuelled by mustard oil. I would stand in front of those doors and try to understand their place in our family’s history. Why were the doors of our household not as ancient or as expensive-looking as Taeeji’s?
My Pardada (paternal great-grandfather), Nand Singh, had two sons. The younger son died at an early age. The surviving son, Harnam, my paternal grandfather, or Dada, married Bishan Kaur, one of six children from Virkaan, a village about three miles from Dosanjh Kalan. The historic Grand Trunk Road that traverses the subcontinent from Peshawar to Delhi, built by King Sher Shah Suri in the sixteenth century, runs less than a mile away from Virkaan and connects the village with the nearby industrial and educational centre of Phagwara. Being near such a centre, and perhaps thus more aware of the rest of the world, may have inspired my Dada to go to Singapore, looking for work. Before he left, he and Bishan, my Dadi (paternal grandmother), had three sons: Pritam, my father; his elder brother Joginder, my Tayaji; and their brother, Raju, in between. My Dada stayed in Singapore for some time before falling ill and returning to India. The details are sketchy, but this much is known: he died in 1910, when my father was just four and Tayaji was twelve years old; Raju too had died by this point.
Bhola Singh, my great-grandfather’s brother, had two children: one named Budh Singh and the other a girl whose name, sadly, no one seems to remember. Budh was a handsome,