had no photographs of anyone in the family prior to my father’s generation, watching Budh as a boy I used to try and imagine what his first cousin, my Dada, would have looked like. From all accounts Dada had been tall, handsome and very strong. His father, Nand, had been nicknamed Ghora (horse), for being so tall, strong and handsome himself.
Tayaji, by contrast, was short, and so was my father (whom my siblings and I, following our cousins, always called Chachaji — father’s younger brother). We all blamed our Dadi Bishan for the deficit in this department, because she was a few inches shy of five feet. But what she lacked in height she more than made up for in courage and toughness. Dadi ran a tight ship. She had to, in order to raise Chachaji and Tayaji on her own. She managed it by dispatching Tayaji into her family’s care in Virkaan, and Chachaji into the care of her sister, who lived a few miles away at Badala. Chachaji finished four years of primary school there. Free of child-rearing duties, Dadi managed what little land Dada had owned. It was mere subsistence.
After some years, Chachaji and Tayaji reunited with Dadi at Dosanjh. Tayaji started working on the land, helping Dadi, and Cha-chaji was enrolled at J.J. Government High School in Phagwara. He would wake early in the morning to feed and water the cattle, then swing his cloth book bag over his shoulder, run the few miles to school and make it to class on time. My father was a bright child, learning English, Urdu, Punjabi and math, among other subjects. He was particularly interested in history and in the ongoing political drama of India’s struggle for independence.
Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915. The First World War was underway, and the Komagata Maru , a Japanese steamship taking prospective Indian immigrants to Canada in defiance of the Canadian government’s exclusionary direct passage law, had been turned back in July 1914 under the menacing shadow of the Canadian warship HMS Rainbow. An Indian patriot named Baba Bir Singh, who had been living in Canada, sailed for India on August 22, 1914, at the head of a group of revolutionaries from the North American Ghadar Party, determined to overthrow British rule in India. The news of their departure for India to create “trouble” was duly cabled to the British colonial government in Lahore, which captured and hanged Bir Singh and forty-two others in March 1916, in the so-called Lahore Conspiracy Case. Bir Singh’s older brother’s son, Moola Singh Bains, in his early twenties at the time and working as a security guard in Shanghai, was my maternal grandfather, Nanaji.
To my impressionable and impoverished father, still a student, the world must have seemed full of turmoil. His own small world of Dosanjh Kalan was certainly no haven of stability or financial security. It did not help that Tayaji, though he worked hard on the land, began to squander the family’s savings on oxen, which he occasionally showed off as they outperformed and outran the oxen of the neighbours.
Dosanjh Kalan had no mechanized agriculture in the 1950s. Oxen and water buffalos were used to plough and sow our land holdings. To irrigate the soil, farmers used a Persian wheel — a chain of buckets mounted on a large wheel rotated by oxen. The buckets emptied water into a trough, from which it flowed into a network of channels.
Our lives revolved around the seasons and festivals. Some of the festivals included Persian wheel races; the largest of these was Vaisakhi, a harvest festival celebrated in northern India that has long held a special meaning for Sikhs. It was in 1699 at the Vaisakhi festival in Anandpur (now referred to as Anandpur Sahib as a sign of reverence) that the last Guru, Gobind Singh, created the Khalsa, an army of followers with strict rules for a simple life. From then on, Sikh men wore a sword, a steel bracelet, special utilitarian underwear, a comb, and turbans over unshorn hair. (The words for these five requirements all started with K; hence, they are known as “the five Ks.”) My ancestors, too, became part of the Khalsa.
When I was a child, we occasionally attended the month-end Sangrand celebrations, and we almost always attended the Vaisakhi mela , or fair, at Baba Sung Gurdwara, the temple built at the site where Baba Sung, a prominent religious figure of his time, lived and died in the service of the people of the area. The gurdwara was about six miles from our village, and we would usually walk there, pay our respects, and then eat and rejoice with the crowds before returning. At Baba Sung, the Dosanjhes were treated royally, because we were believed to be the descendants of Baba Sung’s daughter from the time of Guru Arjun Dev, fifth in a line started by the first Guru, Nanak Dev, a great poet and philosopher. The line ended with the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, creator of the Khalsa and a great poet-warrior in his own right. Baba Sung’s importance in the annals of Sikh history is evident from the reference made to him as a contemporary and revered follower of Guru Arjun in the works of Bhai Gurdas, perhaps the greatest chronicler of the Sikh Gurus.
2
BY THE LATE FIFTIE S , our family’s economic condition was better than it had been in the 1940s. As Chachaji was finishing his education, my cousin Harbans, born in 1919, was growing up. The family was in debt, and Tayaji had mortgaged most of the ancestral lands. That meant there was almost no land the family could farm for subsistence; under the land laws and customs of the time, the lender would take possession of the land until the debt was cleared. Together, Chachaji and Biraji (older brother, as we called Harbans) turned the family circumstances around. Tayaji had never let Biraji go to school. Chachaji would enrol him, but Tayaji would go to the school and physically yank him out, insisting that Biraji help him full time on the land. He claimed that Chachaji had been “corrupted” by education.
Biraji left for the U.K. in 1956. By then Chachaji was teaching at the Dosanjh School, which he and some friends had founded in 1932. Its official name was Guru Har Rai Khalsa High School, named after the seventh Sikh Guru but open to people of all faiths without conversion. Siso, the eldest of my other three cousins, was married and had settled in Ghaziabad, near Delhi. Her husband, Sardara Singh Johal, was a mechanic who ran a successful machine shop out of their home, which also served as the resting stop for family members on their way to England.
My first clear memory is of getting a brass kalmandal of water filled by someone at our neighbourhood well and carrying it home to my mother, Biji. From it she would have made a fresh lemon drink or perhaps the delicious white concoction called shardayee , made of ground seeds, water and milk, which she served in small brass glasses. In my mind’s eye, I recall that I was naked except for a thread around my waist, perhaps to ward off evil spirits. At that age for children, if you were simply running around the neighbourhood, no one worried about clothing you. Nakedness had its advantages: the calls of nature were easier to contend with. I remember defecating in the nearest open space and rubbing my bottom on a grassy patch of earth before I resumed playing with the other kids.
I don’t know whether Biji tied that thread around my waist because she was truly superstitious. Chachaji wasn’t. And I do know that while my mother was growing up, her father, my Nanaji, used to run astrologers and palmists right out of the village if he spotted them plying their useless trade door to door. But my mother may not have been as liberated as I like to imagine she was.
There was a well beyond the compound behind our home where our neighbourhood got its drinking water. The families of the caste of water bearers, jhirs , serviced different areas of the village. Twice a day, my Dosanjh School classmate Balbir and his family would manually draw water from the well, fill two earthen pitchers and leave them at our home. In the morning and the evening, the well’s busiest times, jhirs competed among themselves to be the first ones to draw water for the households they were responsible for.
In my early years, I did not realize the jhir caste was one of many that Indian society had divided itself into. The caste system is one of the most pernicious and sinister divisions of people on earth. The Sikh religion evolved partly to fight its insidious inequality. The Muslim faith also espouses egalitarianism. But even today, most Muslims and Sikhs continue to fall prey to caste divisions. When I first learned the word jhir , I thought it described someone’s occupation, just as my father was called Master for being a teacher. I knew nothing of the prison of caste that existed in India or of the pain and injustice it perpetrated.
I played with the neighbourhood children in the vehda — the compound — behind our home. We fashioned our toys out of broken or discarded bricks or made small guddian (carts) and oxen from simple mud. Sometimes