Crossroads after Crossroads after Crossroads

SHEILA SANDHU In 1940, with the supreme assurance of anyone who is sixteen, I thought I had fully understood my very ordinary circumstances and become the sort of person that I would remain for the rest of my life. My world was defined by my ethical, painfully plain-looking father, Professor Rajinder Singh, and his very beautiful and flighty wife, Ajit Kaur. Their austere Gandhian household filled with my four younger siblings. I knew my place as the eldest in a home with barely enough for everyone. I could recite Gurbani, spin the charkha, wore white khadi and rode fifteen minutes on my cycle to The Government School for Girls, only to be awarded mediocre marks that were a source of persistent disappointment to my father. That cycle ride used to be the nicest part of my day. I enjoyed the feel of the crisp sun of Lahore’s famed winter on my face, and heard only the wind trapped in my hair and dupatta. My father hardly ever spoke about his grandfather, Ghuda Singh, a preacher at a gurudwara in Talwindi and his father, Chattur Singh, headmaster of The Mission School for Girls in Gujranwala. He stayed with this minor erudite tradition and, under the influence of the rift between Gandhian and Akali politics, was forced to resign, moved to Lahore and, along with five or six others helped found the The Sikh National College. A singularly unambitious man, he was liberal with an undercurrent of asceticism, secular and undogmatic as perhaps only the deeply religious can be. Astronomy, poetry and music could be an alternative to religion for him. He invited Kabir, Ghalib, Nanak, Tagore and Iqbal into our home and introduced them to me. Perhaps this laid the ground for my life-long romance with words and prepared me for my role as an understudy to wordsmiths in the future! When Gandhiji announced a campaign against untouchability, Bhapaji requested Bacchana to cook rotis for the evening meal in our kitchen. His wife suffered this in silence, but when he adopted swadeshi, she could hardly endure the remains of her smouldering clothes — a heap of ash lying in her small, cold vera. Dark clouds of the deep incompatibility between my parents gathered over my adolescence, tingeing it with foreboding. I had no inkling of the cataclysmic storm that was to tear apart this small household in Tagore Gardens. Through an unhappy and confused mist I knew only this much—that I was destined to protect my father, two younger sisters and brothers from the disastrous consequences of the imminent desertion, guilt- ridden return and the final, irrevocable departure of his wife who preferred to make a separate, perhaps less difficult life, for herself with his friend. Her new life did not include the six of us. Bhapaji shared his intimate sorrow with me and I responded with uncritical devotion, I can now see his quite natural limitations but still find it difficult to fault him. My mother, I never forgave. I felt imprisoned by the thick curtain of unhappiness that fell around us after she left. In desperation, I wrote to the All India Students’ Union and volunteered at a ration depot to help in the war effort. By 1946, I had already qualified the B.T.; stood firstin the university for my M.A. from Lahore College for Women and wrested from my father the right to be wooed by Hardev, an emaciated English literature graduate with empty pockets and a head full of revolution, romance and cricket. I had accidentally crashed my squeaky cycle into him in 1943—and when he helped me gather up my books and emotions, I could never have suspected that this was the man with whom I would spend the better part of over half a century! Later, he visited me in jail when I was arrested along with the young radicals of Preet Nagar— Navtej and Uma— for singing anti-British songs composed by Sheila Bhatia. Hardev had already joined the Communist Party at the age of nineteen, dropped out of college and home three years after his westernised, civil engineer father died. Biji, his forty-two year old widowed mother lived in reduced circumstances with four children in the now impoverished splendour of 81- G Model Town, My father knew of my half-hearted political activity, but his real objection was to the “unhealthy-looking communist for whom ends justify the means”. I somehow conveyed to Bhapaji that I could no longer “see” any more prospective grooms nor be inspected by their families. I held out till my younger sister was married; when this wore down his resistance we were wed, despite his political, ethical and emotional reservations about an unsuitable boy—in his eyes, a most disreputable suitor for anybody’s daughter. On August 3, 1947, I lowered my head, completed the Anand Kara and, without a backward glance, left my home forever. In the blinding glare of noon, the delicate trellis of streets and galis of Lahore began to reverberate with terrifying, never-heard-before roars from the atavistic belly of prehistoric monsters that now stalked it— Hurr-Hurr- Mahaaaa-Dev!— Allaaaa-Hooo-Akbar!— BolaySonay-Haaaal! My heart shrank with fright. Every day the radio crackled ominously with news about Hindu-Muslim violence, conflict even between Sikhs and Muslims. There was talk of Independence, the partition of our beloved Lahore. My father, who could not hurt a fly, was charged with inciting communal passion, arrested along with many others and locked away in Lahore Central Jail. On the 19th, oblivious to dangers lurking in the bylanes of Lahore, Hardev and I took a tonga to meet him and to collect house keys and instructions about the children. He looked tired and sad. The party office on McLeod Road was clogged with people and rumour. We stayed that night at the home of Frank Thakurdas in F.C. College as he opened up his arms and household to the beleaguered, but his wife was al- ready at her wits end with all the chaos and disruption. The next morning wemoved to Khalsa College with Dr Amrik Singh. In such times, the status of prisoners and undertrials was precarious to say the least. One day they were proven guilty, the next day they were heroes, convicted, to be released... Confusion and chaos reigned. A pall of strange lethargy and apprehension hung over the courts. Everything was uncertain. We crossed the border to Amritsar in a military truck along with foul agricultural produce in the quietness of the afternoon of the 23rd. Crowded amongst comrades in the melee at the party office, I felt safe and happy as if on a brief holiday. Like hundreds of others caught unawares, I had left the keys to my father’s unhappy home with loving Muslim neighbours. I felt like returning again and again to try and salvage something of the life we had spent there, but more and more, felt a growing dread that this madness may never pass. Three days later, on a turbid afternoon that terrible, terrible year, when we returned “home” we were told that some prisoners had been acquitted and released and that “some violence” had occurred. No one had any news... We rushed blindfold into a maelstrom and were swept into a vortex where all hell had broken loose. When I found my bearings I was told that my father, like others with him, had been acquitted, released on an unscheduled day and hacked to death in Lahore on the steps outside the courtroom in “a riot- like situation”. Much later, in November 1948, I made one last journey out of Lahore with Randhir Singh and Dr. Inderjit Singh. I was on a sentimental mission to rescue a bugtian—a modest ornament abandoned but safe in my father’s bank locker, bequeathed to me by my grandmother. For the last time, I looked sorrowfully at the house of my childhood while Kulsoom Bano, the nubile, ninth bride of our neighbour pleaded in a frightened and ashamed voice never to return again. She could no longer vouch for the conduct of the male members of her household. It was a hopeless, wasted, dangerous journey and had yielded nothing. Madness brimmed over in the trains, in the refugee camps, in the city and the countryside. Within twenty days of being wed, I inherited all my mothers’ children. No one knew about Ajit Kaur’s whereabouts and no one spoke of her anymore. I heard from her again only 45 years later when she was dying, but I never saw her again.