Journey After Midnight. Ujjal Dosanjh

London to see the Parliament Buildings and 10 Downing Street. The London bobby, a permanent fixture in front of the prime minister’s residence, obligingly moved over so we could snap a picture.

      I had applied to several universities on the off chance one would grant me admission as a mature student, and only the University of Keele at Newcastle-under-Lyme, which offered a four-year degree in politics and law, showed interest and invited me for an interview. The interview, with the dean and two others, lasted an hour. Initially our conversation focussed on British politics, including constitutional conventions dating back to the Magna Carta, the “Great Charter” of liberties England had introduced in 1215. I felt I answered their questions fairly well, but then they narrowed in on further specifics of British history, which in truth I had not studied at all.

      Following the interview, the university offered me provisional admission for the following year if I passed the British history O level in the interim. I had huge doubts about being able to fulfill this requirement, and I spent every available minute studying history, reading nothing else for the next two to three months. A new teacher at Elstow even gave me his history notes from high school, and I studied those, too. In the end, though, I still could not distinguish one Queen Elizabeth or one King George from another. I decided not to sit for the history O level after all.

      I was not making much money at Elstow School, and my education appeared to be going nowhere. So I found a job with Armco, a company that made auto parts in Letchworth, a few miles from Bedford. Malkiat Rai, a dear friend of mine, worked there too. Another Armco employee drove us there and back, and we contributed to his petrol expenses for the week. The job was physically demanding. I was making more money, but my body ached from the hard physical labour, and my heart ached at my failure to find a way to educate myself. I spent the weekends with my friends.

      A friend of Biraji’s, a man from Taeeji’s village, had a daughter who was barely twenty, a school dropout and clueless about life. Her father floated the idea of my marriage to her, and Biraji, thinking like many Indian parents of his time, felt marriage might give direction to my life. Malkiat ridiculed the idea among our friends, and the man never forgot the insult he perceived Malkiat’s remarks to be. A few years later, after I had left for Canada, Malkiat was severely beaten by the man’s friends. Malkiat was an orthodox Sikh, and his beard was also forcibly shaved. He was humiliated in this way because he was a Dalit; in the minds of his abusers, he was a lesser human being.

      Caste, in all its ugliness, was alive and well in Britain. Another Dalit in Bedford, Meehan Singh, a handsome elderly man, was assaulted because someone’s relative had lied about some money he had already paid them. Nobody in the community stood with Meehan Singh. Because of caste’s millennia-long spell, the spectators and perpetrator alike were numb to Meehan’s humanity and his suffering.

      Malkiat and a friend named Gurdial Ryat had been discussing the idea of launching a news and literary weekly. It was to be named Mamta , a term evoking a mother’s love for her child. When their plan firmed up, Malkiat asked if I was interested in helping put the weekly out. I would receive a salary equivalent to what I made at Armco, and I would have free room and board at Gurdial’s home in London. I accepted. Whatever the uncertainties, it would be an environment of letters. I was named the assistant editor of Mamta Weekly, and once more I bundled my belongings, this time for a move to the capital.

      For the next twelve weeks I lived as a member of the Ryat household, which included Gurdial’s wife and two young children. Malkiat and I spent several weekends travelling in his brother’s car to different parts of England, signing up subscribers and ensuring that Punjabi shops and other establishments displayed and sold Mamta.

      Many details about Mamta now escape me, but I do remember writing an editorial on the death in March 1968 of the first man to enter outer space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. My view was that we should use the resources on earth to improve the human condition instead of “conquering” space. I have not changed my mind about that; the space race for most countries is one of those “nice to haves.” For most people, more earthly needs beckon.

      The other big news story of 1968 that I wrote about was the execution of five black prisoners on death row by the regime of Ian Smith in what was then called Rhodesia. I have followed with keen interest the developments in that country over the years, from Ian Smith’s white regime to Robert Mugabe’s corrupt brutal dictatorship in what is now Zimbabwe. I still remember the hopes the world cherished of a resurgent Africa throwing off the yoke of colonialism and of Africans taking their rightful place among the peoples of the world. With some exceptions, the dream has turned into a nightmare. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s successors are small men not up to the task of building a prosperous, compassionate and inclusive country.

      At the time Mamta was launched, there were already two well-established Punjabi newsweeklies in the English market: Des Pardes and Punjab Times. That made ours an uphill struggle. Tarsem Purewal, the editor and publisher of Des Pardes, made a scathing attack on Mamta ’s quality. I telephoned him to suggest we could disagree without engaging in personal attacks, but I should have known that the man who’d invented abusive and extortive Punjabi journalism would not be receptive to reason. Purewal was known to warn men about upcoming negative stories, offering the suggestion that there was nothing a little hush money could not suppress.

      Every week I took the original proof of Mamta to the printers in central London to have several thousand copies made and then carried the printed paper home on the tube. The Ryats and I would fold the papers and prepare them for mailing. But the paper’s narrow focus and limited readership, along with the suffocating nature of the Punjabi news culture of the day, soon made me lose interest. The crowds of people on the underground seemed to move purposefully, in sharp contrast to the meaningless drift of my days.

      The state of British race relations also made me angry and discouraged. During the Notting Hill riots of 1958 in London, white youths had attacked immigrants from the Caribbean. In 1963, the Bristol Omnibus Company imposed a colour bar, refusing to employ West Indian or Asian crews; only after a lengthy boycott did the company agree to hire people of colour. Britain’s Race Relations Act, passed in 1965, made discrimination in public places on grounds of colour, race or ethnic or national origin against the law. A Race Relations Board was set up to handle complaints the following year. But the act was weak, and it did not deal with employment. The lack of jobs in immigrant communities brought colour prejudice into their homes, and unemployment pitted white workers against workers of colour. During the Bristol boycott, the Transport and General Workers’ Union had threatened that all wheels would stop if one black man stepped onto the platform; the union opposed apartheid in South Africa while supporting the colour bar at home. That’s how ugly and schizophrenic the response of even the so-called progressive Left was to discrimination at the time. Activists among the minorities and a significant section of the political class realized things had to change. The housing issue was also rearing its racist head. Blacks were at the bottom of the heap. Asians weren’t treated much better, but some Indian immigrants considered themselves “superior” to the black people anyway (I was finding that my companion on the bus had been right). Few recognized that equality for blacks would bring equality for us all.