Soon after Lahore, the landscape comes alive. It is green as far as the eye can see: field after field of wheat, broken only by orchards of citrus trees. Are they oranges, grapefruit perhaps? This is the Punjab, once the breadbasket of British India, in the days my Sikh mother, Dip, lived here. Since I was young, Dip has spoken wistfully about those days, and about how, when Independence came, she was displaced and lost her home.
She has always said her home was paradise: a lavish mansion, its floors decorated with mosaics of Italian marble, set in grounds filled with fruit and scented flowers. All communities – Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians – lived together, until politics tore them apart and divided the country. Dip, as I’ve said, now lives in Sussex. The seventieth anniversary of these events stirred up memories long buried, as well as my interest in her past. She gave up air travel long ago, so I have come – not at her request, but with her consent.
From Lahore, I am being driven north-west, at some speed, into the heart of the Punjab. We cross the Chenab River. I have seen it on maps in the British Library, but, thrillingly, here it is. As it’s April, the river bed is almost dry. But it is not hard to imagine that when the snows melt on the Himalayas and the rains begin, the river rises and becomes a brown torrent that once broke its banks.
After half an hour, we turn off the main road. Here, people make their way along a quieter, tree-lined stretch, groups of children in crisp school uniforms, men and women carrying heavy burdens on their heads or backs. As well as cars, there are bullock carts, which amble along, slowing the traffic. Motorbikes rev past. Lady passengers in colourful cotton saris, heads covered, tuck their legs demurely to the side.
Sooner than expected, there is a tired-looking sign, its colour fading: ‘Welcome to Sargodha’. I lean forward to ask the driver to stop, thinking that Dip would appreciate a photograph. But by this time, we have picked up an escort. They are heavily armed: three commandos are in front, another three bring up the rear. They are dressed in black and lean from their trucks, flaunting machine-guns. I come in peace: I am looking for what, in these parts, is called an ancestral home. But I am a ‘foreigner’ and considered a kidnap risk, so security is tight. We pick up speed.
As we drive past I note down the names of shops and businesses – the Ambala Medical Complex, the Al-Rashid Hospital, the Mubarak High School, landmarks I can report to Dip. Then it dawns on me that what I am doing is futile. We are on the outskirts of a large city – the eleventh largest in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. As such, it is unrecognisable as a part of British India, which Dip’s father, my grandfather, Harbans Singh, helped to found and then was forced to flee. So I put down my notebook and carry on looking out of the window.
For about half the year the weather in Sargodha was perfect – bright days and cold nights. The summer months, from May to August, were among the hottest in India. Temperatures could reach 115 degrees. Dip’s home was in Civil Lines, an area on the edge of town, reserved for government officials and persons of standing. The house was at its best in the early morning.
As the sun rises and the birdsong becomes insistent, Dip tips herself out of bed and crosses the inner courtyard to join her father. Papa-ji never missed his morning walk. At the edge of the gravel path, they slip off their chappals (slippers), and lay them side by side. Stepping onto the lawn, she feels the cool dew between her toes. Papa-ji takes her hand. For Dip, the youngest child of five, it is a special time. Her busy father, whom she worships, is all her own.
Papa-ji loved to grow things. Near the house, flowerbeds the size of a tennis court were packed with narcissi, their white and orange blooms giving off a rich and honeyed scent. Mulberry bushes, six foot high, heaved with fruit. When the berries fell, everything around was stained deep red.
At the far end of the lawn, they follow the path towards the vineyard. ‘I loved the grapes,’ Dip tells me. ‘The mali [gardener] used to fertilise the plants with goats’ blood.’
‘You mean powdered blood, like we use?’
‘No, proper blood. From the animal. Thick crimson red.’
Further on, they come to the orchard. Papa-ji circles the trees and points out proudly the good-sized fruits – the malta oranges and grapefruit – which some said were the prize of the district.
Returning to the house, they pause to pluck branches of jasmine, delighted by the sweet, gentle aroma. From a distance, as they approach, they see the household waking. The kitchen, largely the preserve of servants, opens onto a gravel pathway where local labourers stop on their way to work. Eight or nine have gathered. They hold out their earthenware tumblers, which a servant fills with buttermilk. Another hands out chapatis.
Close to the house now, a servant comes shuffling up. He takes the branches of jasmine, which he will put in a vase. A tray with a pot of tea is placed on a low table. Dip’s mother, Bei-ji, arrives to chivvy her. ‘There is no time for tea. You must get dressed for school. Come now, Beta.’
Papa-ji starts to issue instructions. ‘Yes, Sahib.’ ‘Very good, Sahib.’ He asks whether the munshi (clerk) has come. ‘No, Sahib, he has not come. Soon he will be coming, Sahib sir.’
Although still in his nightwear, Papa-ji commands respect. He is slender and of medium height. There is no waste or excess about him. He speaks when necessary but otherwise generally not. His eyes are clear and in repose his expression is a little stern. ‘My father didn’t even need to raise his voice. You could see from his face if he was displeased. I would immediately dissolve into tears,’ Dip would tell me.
This morning, Papa-ji is not displeased. Quite the opposite. He will take his tea, and maybe a little papaya, on the veranda. Once he has dressed and tied his white turban, he will be driven (very few in the town had cars) to a meeting of the Municipal Committee where he presides. He anticipates this event – and the coming day – with satisfaction.
Papa-ji was born in the 1880s in the Shahpur District of West Punjab. The Punjab, located midway between Kabul and Delhi, was for centuries a gateway for traders and invaders from Central Asia. Afghans, Arabs, Mongols, Persians, all came. Some enriched the area, others plundered towns and laid them waste with fire.
For two centuries the Mughals ruled. Later, the Sikhs achieved political power and for forty years, under the direction of a one-eyed, charismatic ruler, Ranjit Singh, the Punjab flourished. After his death, dynastic feuding weakened the Court and it was likened to a snake-pit.
The expansionist East India Company saw their chance. The company was no longer just focused on trade but intent on amassing land and control. In 1849 its mercenary troops invaded the Punjab, making it the last province to be annexed to the British Indian Empire.
Although defeated, the Sikh Army had been a formidable foe, as Papa-ji was wont to say, and the British respected it. No sooner was it disarmed than it was, in effect, called on to help. In 1857 North Indian troops mutinied and murdered their European officers, triggering a major rebellion against British rule. They were joined by peasants and aristocrats and northern India, from Delhi to Bihar, was engulfed. When Dip was growing up in British India this was known as the Mutiny. Indian nationalists call it ‘the First War of Independence’ even though many of those who took up arms did so to restore Mughal rule.
After Delhi fell to the ‘rebels’, in desperation, and with some trepidation, the British sent a force of Punjabi soldiers, mainly Muslims and Sikhs, to recapture it. As they had hoped, historic antipathy prevented the troops from siding with Hindus from the northern plains, who dominated the army at that time.
The rebellion quashed, the Crown assumed direct control of India from the East India Company. The Punjab had saved the Raj, and thereafter was a favoured province. Soldiers who had fought were rewarded with permanent employment in the British Indian Army.
Dip and I talk a lot about books and current affairs. Irrigation is a new topic. Due to the heat and uncertain rainfall, Dip says, the Punjab had vast tracts of uncultivated fertile land. ‘The British put in place a programme to irrigate the land. They built a huge network of canals. Some they built themselves. Or they persuaded important, wealthy landowners to build their own.’
In the British Library I found out more. In the Asian and African Studies Reading Room, I came across a book that, once I opened, I couldn’t put down. I read for hours, under a portrait of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and took too many notes (I was excited and a novice at research of this kind), so I came back the following day. And the next.
The book was the Gazetteer of the Shahpur District. After the Crown took over from the East India Company, colonial officers in the Indian Civil Service wrote detailed accounts of the areas they governed. The Shahpur Gazetteer described the place where Dip grew up. It recounted in lyrical, self-congratulatory prose how building the Lower Jhelum Canal transformed the surrounding area:
In place of open shrub-land and struggling wells it is now a great expanse of ‘squares’ all fertilised by the silty waters of the Jhelum. The fields are all laid out with almost geometrical accuracy, in squares of 73 yards each way and tree-planting is proceeding with fair rapidity. In a word, the spacious hunting ground of the untamed cattle-thief has become a parcelled land of wheat and oil, of prosperous farmers and expert horse-breeders of tidy villages and shaded waterways.
These irrigated areas, known as ‘canal colonies’, were linked together by postal and telegraph systems, railways and roads. The North Western Railway was extended via Sargodha and from there huge quantities of wheat, cotton and sugar were sent south to the port of Karachi.
Papa-ji’s family were among the tens of thousands, mostly Sikhs, who migrated to the canal colonies looking for work. The town where Papa-ji was born, Shahpur, was too close to the banks of the Jhelum and prone to flood. By the turn of the century, its public buildings – the district court-house, treasury, police ‘office’ and jail – were crumbling, so a new district centre was built. This was Sargodha. A high-lying uncultivated tract, safe from floods.
Sargodha was a well-planned town, divided into blocks with a handsome municipal garden in its centre. Papa-ji played a part in its design. He was a qualified doctor with a strong interest in public health and advised on sanitation.
It was plain from the Shahpur Gazetteer that the colonial town planners were highly focused on hygiene. They disliked cattle tethered to houses in narrow streets and rubbish heaps next to crowded homes. So in Sargodha they built straight wide streets, which were thought to provide better ventilation and general cleanliness. Good drainage was also essential to stop stagnant water collecting and nurturing disease. Trees were planted, because they were pleasing to look at, but also to protect eyes from dust and glare.
Outbreaks of plague were frequent and deadly. Dip tells me stories, told to her in childhood, about how Papa-ji used to tend to the sick. ‘When sickness struck, the victims were moved, by cart, to well outside the town. My father would get on his horse, tie his medical bag to his saddle, and ride through sand and scrubland, to reach them.’
I consulted the Shahpur Gazetteer. Papa-ji’s trips, it appeared, took him to the desert-like Thal, and still further west to the edge of the Salt Range, an area of ragged cliffs and peaks of rock, home to leopards and hyenas, wolves, wild pigs and porcupines. ‘When he rode through the forest, he would take care to vary his route to avoid the gangs of dacoits [bandits]. They would place piles of sticks at the bend of a path to bring down a horse and its rider.’
Papa-ji’s selflessness and daring brought him to the attention of the colonial authorities. For his efforts he received a Sanad – a commendation from the Government of the Punjab. The certificate reads: ‘Dr Harbans Singh, member Municipal Committee, Sargodha for his willing and active assistance in anti-plague measures during the year 1915.’ He received another in 1917. I learn later that imposing anti-plague measures touched all sorts of sensitivities. Quarantining the diseased and confiscating corpses could lead to violence.
Sargodha’s affairs were handled by a Municipal Committee of six eminent citizens, three nominated and three elected. Papa-ji began as a committee member and rose, in time, to be its president. Roads, sewage and drainage were routine items on the agenda. Another, according to the Gazetteer, was the experimental cultivation of fruit trees in the town’s orchards and nearby villages. Papa-ji, I know, would have loved that part. He was keener on drainage than most of us, but surely he would have rejoiced when the committee moved from plumbing to plum trees? And it wasn’t just plums. They grew peach, grapefruit, mulberry, pomegranate, apricot, walnut and almond trees too.
Fruit trees and drainage became less important after the Great War broke out in Europe. At the outset, in 1914, Punjabis volunteered enthusiastically for military service with the British Indian Army. As the war progressed, local landowners like Papa-ji helped to recruit additional troops.
Recruitment was concentrated in areas like the Salt Range, where land was harder to cultivate and income from it insecure. In forest areas, where irrigation was mostly absent, dispirited Muslim peasants joined up in force. Regular pay, possibly a pension, and perks like free travel on the railways were a draw.
The Sargodha District had twelve thousand men in the army. Mostly they took up support roles such as tending horses or driving camels. Sturdy, handsome mares were reared at the Remount Depot, on the edge of town, and supplied to the army.
Papa-ji’s contribution to this recruitment drive was recognised by the award of another Sanad. The framed certificate, dated October 1917, reads: ‘This Sanad was bestowed … with a Khillat of a Silver Watch by order of His Honour The Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab.’ The word Khillat is unfamiliar but the meaning is clear. Papa-ji got a silver watch as a reward for recruiting troops to fight in a conflict in which scores of young soldiers were slaughtered. Hmm. I am not sure what to think of this. Was the watch an object he treasured? Did the soldiers go willingly? Did they ever come home?
The following year, Papa-ji received another Sanad for his service in battling influenza. This was a terrible global pandemic that killed a hundred thousand people in the Punjab alone.
In Europe in November 1918 the guns fell silent, but in India there was no respite for soldiers of the British Indian Army. This was the era when Britain and the Russian Empire sparred to protect their areas of influence. Britain feared a Tsarist attack on its Indian Empire through Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier. The previous century, British colonial forces had invaded southern Afghanistan and occupied Kabul, and in May 1919, Afghan forces in turn invaded northern India.
By August, when the invaders were pushed back, many lives had been lost in combat, but also to raging disease. Papa-ji served as a medic in this third Anglo-Afghan campaign, battling a deadly outbreak of cholera among the troops. Another landowner and neighbour from Sargodha fought in the same campaign – Malik Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana, future leader of the Punjab. For their service, both men became Honorary Captains and received the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
Just as Mughal and Sikh rulers had done before, the British generously rewarded families who gave them military support. The most coveted reward was the grant of agricultural lands. After the 1857 rebellion, land was given to old families who were considered loyal. Service during the Great War and the Afghan campaigns was similarly rewarded, as our family found.
Papa-ji did not come from an old illustrious family, like the Tiwanas. But by early adulthood he had become a landowner and established himself as a professional man, strongly committed to public service.
‘She was not beautiful. Actually I don’t think you’d say she was especially good-looking.’ This is Dip’s verdict on her mother, my grandmother, Bei-ji. ‘She was of average height and her mouth was quite prominent. But my father always told us it was love at first sight.’
Theirs was a marriage arranged by the families. Ranjit Kaur was the sister of one of Papa-ji’s friends. Almost nothing is known about her family – just that she came from a more socially elevated family than she married into. I’d love to know more. ‘Might there be photos of the wedding?’ I asked my cousins. ‘A date maybe?’ Sadly, no.
In childhood I acquired a sense that Bei-ji was gentle and devout. In fact, Dip was emphatic: her mother was a ‘saint’. The Sikh faith was central to Bei-ji’s life. Its founder, Guru Nanak, drew some elements from Hinduism and Islam and rejected others. He adopted reincarnation but not the caste system or idol worship. Like Muslims, Sikhs believe in just one God. Nanak famously said, ‘there is neither Hindu nor Muslim’ to underline that all humans are equal and more unites than divides them.
Bei-ji was literate, but less well educated than her own mother, Mata-ji. Mata-ji was a handsome, fair-skinned woman from Kashmir, who was proficient in Persian. Like Papa-ji, she could be fierce, but she was more admired than feared. Unusually, when widowed, she chose to live in her daughter’s house. She had sons but couldn’t abide their wives. So she moved in, insisting that she pay a weekly sum for ‘board and lodging’ and accepting that Papa-ji, not she, ‘ruled the roost’ (as Dip put it).
Long before you could buy bottled echinacea on the High Street, Mata-ji was on it. She knew about traditional medicine, which she recorded in a hard-backed book. Dip says she had a remedy for every minor ailment, including removing a wart. Whether she had mastered English is unclear. If she had, she didn’t care to speak it. She was fastidious about hygiene, claiming to come from Brahmin stock, and considered Europeans unclean. ‘If an Englishman came to our house,’ says Dip, ‘which was rare, and unwisely greeted Mata-ji with an outstretched hand, she would shake it. But she would immediately withdraw to the bathroom to wash.’
In 1917, during the Great War, Papa-ji and Bei-ji’s first child was born, a daughter, named Amarjit. After the war, four children followed. Another daughter, Anup, in 1923. Then, after five years, two sons, Gurbaksh (known as Bakshi) in 1928 and Pritam (Priti) in 1930. My mother Kuldip (Dip) was born in November 1932. Her name, as I’ve said, is pronounced Deep. Strictly speaking, the ‘D’ is a ‘the’ sound, but wisely she doesn’t demand that, living in the West.
Bei-ji did not share her mother’s forceful personality. She understood English, but she was too shy to speak it. She played an active part in Sargodha community life, which, for her, centred around the Sikh gurdwara. Each day, Bei-ji would cover her head with a dupatta (long scarf) and walk to the gurdwara. Leaving her shoes outside, she sat cross-legged on the floor and listened to prayers from the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. But the focus of the trip was the langar – a free, collective meal, served to anyone who wished to receive it, whatever their creed or caste. Sunil Khilnani describes the langar as a protest against humiliating caste rules about who can and can’t prepare food, and who is allowed to eat with whom. Dip says it is central to what Sikhism is all about and embodies its core principles: humility, equality and service.
Bei-ji was not used to cooking or preparing meals herself. This was the job of cooks and servants. But at the gurdwara, she put an apron over her salwar kameez (loose-fitting traditional trousers and tunic), and joined others to chop, slice, mix, grind, clear away dirty metal plates or do whatever task was needed. She also made sure that each week her household delivered to the gurdwara kitchen a cartload of grains and lentils, stitched in muslin sacks.
The town of Sargodha was mainly Sikh, but as well as gurdwaras it had mosques, temples and a church or two. The population of the surrounding villages was mainly Muslim (Mussalmans, as they were called then), their numbers swelled by Hindu converts. These were the ‘Untouchables’, people condemned by the Hindu caste system to live at the bottom of a rigid social hierarchy, ostracised and despised. Conversion to Islam was relatively simple. They were still looked down on, but Islam’s commitment to equality helped them rise in the social scale.
Sunni or Shia, the difference only seemed to matter once a year, says Dip. This was during the Shia festival of Muharram. Before the move to Civil Lines, the family lived in a crowded quarter in the centre of town. On the day of Muharram, while the martyrdom of Ali and his sons was commemorated, Dip and Priti were ordered to stay inside. As the procession passed, the children pressed themselves to the window and peered down. ‘There was an unforgettable wailing and people tore at themselves with sharpened knives. Of course they drew blood. Priti and I were both fascinated and appalled.’
In 1937, when Dip was five years old, the family moved to Civil Lines. Dip says the house was one of a kind, designed by Papa-ji to his taste. It was a single-storey structure with a wide veranda skirting the outside perimeter. In the centre there was a brick-floored courtyard, open to the sky. Around this the rooms were all arranged – formal rooms with high ceilings and marble floors, bedrooms with fireplaces, a study, storerooms, servants’ quarters, on and on it went. The main entrance to the house was through a covered porch, a few steps up from a gravel path.
Opulent, magnificent, it seems to defy classification. I establish from Dip it was larger than a bungalow or a haveli, but not quite a palace. If you include its extensive grounds, I decide, it’s a homestead. I admit I’ve never heard anyone use the term, but it appears in documents of the time, so I adopt it.
Every few months, Chinese traders cycled to Civil Lines. They travelled with towering bundles balanced behind the saddle. These inscrutable, slight-framed vendors would dismount and seat themselves cross-legged on the veranda. They untied their sacks and shook out their wares. Shawls and tablecloths, yards of embroidered cloth and silks, were spread out to view. ‘I would stand and watch,’ Dip tells me, ‘as Anup and my mother called for him to pull out more. Anup always picked the finest fabrics.’ Anup was a beauty with a stylish sense of dress. Later the tailor would be summoned to stitch the fabric, according to the latest fashion.
Papa-ji also owned agricultural land at Handewali about an hour’s drive outside the town. There he grew wheat, sugar cane and other crops farmed by a retinue of tenants. In lieu of rent, a share of the produce was brought to Civil Lines by camel. After the camel’s burden was unloaded, Dip and Priti would clamber on its back. ‘It would slowly lift its body, the back first then the front. We clung on tight as it jerked and lurched. We were sure one of us would fall!’
On Sundays, the family visited the Handewali lands together. ‘In those days cars were new to the Punjab and my father was one of the very few who owned one. So going on a drive was a big event.’ It was especially memorable because they almost always ran out of petrol, or so it seemed to Dip. ‘My father used to get really angry. They were the rare occasions when I heard him shout. I can still remember the driver – his name was Desa (goodness, how did I remember that?) – setting off down the road, shoulders hunched, clutching a petrol can.
‘Once we got to Handewale,’ Dip recalls, ‘all was well and our spirits lifted.’ Farmhands darted here and there. Stalks of sugar cane were brought and peeled, then fed into an enormous press. A pair of tethered buffalo circled it, squeezing out the juice. At dusk they set off home, before jackals appeared to take their turn to feed on maize and sugar cane. ‘We were usually quiet on the journey back. If you had too much, the sugary nectar made you feel sick.’
In place of private practice, Papa-ji ran a medical clinic for the poor from Civil Lines. Muslim women in purdah often came. They would tell Bei-ji their trouble, which she would relay to Papa-ji. Inside the house, they took off their burkas, and hung them up in the hall. ‘My brother Bakshi was a great joker,’ Dip recounts. ‘I remember him taking one off the peg, climbing in and skipping away into the garden. Priti and I couldn’t stop laughing, but he got a terrific scolding from my father for his disrespect.’ Dip shakes her head and looks away. She has told me the story about Bakshi and the burka before. She does so ruefully.
In the driest heat, enormous blocks of ice were sent to Civil Lines. They arrived in bath-like tubs from an ice factory that Papa-ji owned in the centre of town. Placed in the middle of a room, near a fan, the air became moist and cool. ‘These summer months were so hot. We would have dinner in the courtyard at a table on a raised semi-circular terrace. We also slept outside. The servants would drag out charpoys [wooden beds strung with rope] and drape them with mosquito nets.’
Once a year, Dip’s eldest sister came to stay. Amarjit had married and moved away when Dip was just two. During her visits Amarjit laid down the law.
Anup’s bedroom was the best in the house, with a walk-in closet and full-length mirror. Bei-ji dressed simply in salwar kameez. Anup wore saris and, she argued, a full-length mirror was essential to tie them properly. She also had the only ‘modern’ lavatory: a hole over which to squat, flushed clean with running water. Others in the house used a commode, emptied by the sweeper. When Amarjit came, Anup vacated her bedroom and the maids were reassigned.
Unassuming Priti was most irked by this sibling interloper. ‘My elder sister used to shut him in the cupboard,’ Dip explains, ‘because he refused to say he loved her more than he loved Anup.’ After this happened once too often, Priti and Dip hatched a plot to steal the elder sister’s jewellery, the afternoon before a party. ‘I was reading Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves at the time. The plan seemed so perfect. We filled a pillowcase with her jewels. She screamed when she discovered they were missing, but after that the fun rather went out of it.’
Papa-ji gathered the household together and said he was calling the police. ‘We had forgotten, or didn’t realise, that when things go missing, suspicion falls first on the servants. I suppose it’s the same now – the police “investigate” by thrashing the suspect until they confess.’ Dip pauses. ‘Well it was torture, really,’ says the former Amnesty International researcher.
Dip continues: ‘My mother was such a wise person. She suggested, without contradicting my father, that the thief should be given time to return the jewels. If the thief placed the jewels in the prayer room (from which people would come and go all day), under the Sikh Holy Book, the Guru Granth Sahib, within the next twenty-four hours, there would be no questions asked.’ The Granth was opened (woken) every morning, prayers were read, and in the evening it was ceremonially closed and put to bed on a low table curtained with gold-embroidered fabric. At the end of the day, when Bei-ji pulled back the curtain, she was relieved, but not surprised, to find a mound of jewellery.
After a month or so, Amarjit returned to Delhi where her husband’s family had a mansion of their own. They were a prominent, wealthy family originally from Hadali, a village to the west of Sargodha close to the Salt Range. One son, Ujjal, stayed behind in the Punjab to manage their land, while the other, Sobha, went to Delhi with their father, where they were engaged as senior builders of Delhi’s new Imperial Capital.
The horse is led out from the stables. Brushed so that it almost shines, the patient animal waits. The stable-hand strokes its neck and tightens the final fastening to the tonga. Dip appears first, with Bei-ji behind her still chivvying gently. Priti stayed too long in bed, but now he comes. They climb into the carriage, clutching their school books. The tonga driver cracks the whip and they are off. ‘As soon as we had turned the corner and were out of sight of the house, we would jump up to sit beside the driver.’ At their urging, he cracks the whip again. They squeal happily as the horse shoots forward, as eager as they are to pick up speed. ‘I don’t remember being afraid at all.’
Dip is dropped off first at Government Girls High School, a small building in the centre of town. In the district, fewer girls than boys went to school. But with Papa-ji, there was never any question – his daughters were to be educated to the same standard as his sons. This suited Dip. She was bright and curious. Classes were taught in Urdu and English, and Punjabi was spoken at home.
Dip was fond of school, she says, but some things were ‘decidedly odd’. ‘We had those books, primers used in English schools with John and Jane. They were forever at the beach, building sandcastles and filling their buckets with sand and sea water. Living in a land-locked area, I had never seen the sea or a beach.’ History was also a bit bewildering: endless tales of kings and queens sparring with noblemen in a foreign land. ‘I think that’s what made me a republican,’ she muses. ‘It made no sense to me.’
Dip’s scholarly spark was kept alive by someone else’s setback. The school’s principal was a Miss Salek. When Miss Salek’s home needed major repairs, Papa-ji offered her rooms in a wing of the house in Civil Lines. Miss Salek moved in with the largest collection of books Dip had ever seen. Shelf after shelf was filled.
‘There were no books I was forbidden to read. There were some I suppose I didn’t fully understand, but I feasted on them all.’ Through these stories she glimpsed, and could better understand, a world beyond her own.
Miss Salek was an anglophile Christian convert who travelled to England once a year. The church arranged for her to stay with a family there. ‘When she came back,’ Dip tells me, ‘she had many tales to tell. She seemed to dwell longest on ones that showed the importance of politeness and good manners.’
Children of all ages would play together. In the company of her brothers, Dip was free to roam. On their bicycles they covered long stretches of open country. ‘Priti was my playmate, and Bakshi my protector. If an older boy tried to snatch my bike, he got a slap from Bakshi.’ Dip doesn’t recall any English or foreign children. If there were, she says, she did not register them as ‘different’. If not with her brothers, Dip played mostly with Paul, the daughter of the Civil Surgeon, an Indian, who lived one house away. Paul and Dip were keen to wear earrings and, one afternoon, they lobbied the Civil Surgeon to pierce their ears. Surgical spirit was applied and a painless piercing performed. ‘We were both delighted, but when I got home my father was livid. Sikh girls, he said, should not have their bodies pierced. He claimed it was a sign of bondage.’
Some summer days, high winds and dust turned the sky brown. During these storms, when daylight gave way to darkness, the children were kept indoors. So, too, when locusts came up from the dry south-west, causing panic among the farmers.
In the days before quinine, as an antidote to mosquito bites and to avert malaria, the children were administered a bitter, foul-tasting potion made with ground neem leaves. At the appointed time, Dip and Priti would invariably disappear, until dragged by the servants out of hiding. Other times, when there was no need to hide, they could be found by the small canal that ran alongside the estate. Generously populated by frogs, it was endlessly absorbing. ‘We would lie on the bank of the canal and pick stalks of clover, which we flicked into the water. We would then watch the leaves turn silver. I remember it all so clearly,’ Dip says as she describes this languid summer scene and mimics the flick with her slender fingers and long painted nails.
In winter, the temperature in Sargodha could drop to freezing. ‘On winter evenings, we would sit around the fireplace in our parents’ bedroom, munching at dried fruits and roasted nuts.’ Papa-ji sat too. He enjoyed being by the fire, says Dip, but he felt compelled to point out its perils by recounting a story about dacoits. A gang of dacoits robbed a house nearby, but delayed their escape to sit by the fire. Its soothing warmth lulled them to sleep and so they were caught.
Although they have heard the tale before, the children listen respectfully. From their chairs they watch the flames rise and fall, lick and spit, as their cheeks grow hot. Dip shakes the pan of pine nuts. She knows that a brief moment of neglect will see them burn.
Dip’s world, as she recalls, was ordered and calm. It was also sheltered and privileged. ‘Can you imagine,’ she says, ‘before the age of fifteen I had never handled money? I had never been in a shop or to the cinema.’
In her and her father’s lifetime, West Punjab experienced an agricultural revolution that brought wealth and development. Sargodha was at the forefront of this transformation. Important and favoured though the Punjab was, it was not immune to stirrings of nationalist sentiment in the wider country.