Delhi (48 page)

I stayed with my brother for the ten days of mourning and then returned to Delhi with my wife and children. A few months later my wife bore our last child, a son. And a few months after that I bought a secondhand car, an Oldsmobile, from an English engineer who was due to return to England in a few weeks. Since he had helped me secure contracts, I gave him the price of a new car for his old one. He more than compensated me by passing all my inflated bills.

I did not know how to drive. I hired a Muslim chauffeur who had a teaching licence to teach me as he drove me to work. I stuck to my resolve that I would drive myself to the Qutub Minar in my own car.

It took me a month to learn how to drive. Being an honorary magistrate I got a driving licence without having to pass a driving test. The great day came. I told my family that we would have a picnic at the Qutub Minar the following Sunday. My wife made great preparations and filled baskets of
parathas
stuffed with potatoes and fruits. There was enough to feed twenty people. When I took the wheel, we were nearly a dozen in the car. The driver cranked the handle (there were no self-starters those days) and the automobile throbbed into life. My wife and children and maidservant crammed into the rear seat. My head clerk and chauffeur were in the front with me. Four servants, (two on either side) stood on the footboards of the car. We started off with a loud cry of ‘
Sat
Sri
Akal’
. One servant standing beside me blew the bulb horn all the way. We passed by Safdar Jang tomb and hundreds of other ancient buildings, strewn about the wilderness near Yusuf Sarai and Hauz Khas. And suddenly the Qutub Minar came into view and everyone shouted, ‘Look there’s the Qutub Minar!’

While the servants spread
durries
in the gardens and laid out the food, we went up the Minar, climbed all its steps and looked down at the ruins lying below us. I came down and walked round the mosque and tried to embrace the Iron Pillar standing in its midst. I did not know much history, the names of the builders or the things based on the place. My elder son told us about the first Muslim city of Delhi, of Qutubuddin, Altamash and Alauddin. I was pleased he had learnt so much in so short a time at school.

We ate our potato-stuffed
parathas
. The children went round looking at the monuments. I lay on my back on the
durri
gazing at the Minar which seemed to sway as wisps of clouds blew past it. I wondered how much the contractors had made out of the job. It was obvious they had stolen a lot of stone and marble from older buildings. Did they pass it off as new? Did they have to bribe architects and overseers to get their bills passed? How was it that without cement or concrete they had been able to make buildings last a thousand years? Would the buildings I was making last five hundred years? Would anyone know I had made them? Or would they only be known as the handiwork of Lutyens and Baker and the Viceroys in whose times they were begun or ended. Somehow these thoughts did not depress me because for me it was a day on which one of my ambitions had been fulfilled. I had driven to the Qutub in my own car. Soon I would be able to buy a new car every year. I was well on the way to becoming a rich man, a millionaire. What more could anyone aspire to in life?

In January 1921, the king’s uncle, the Duke of Connaught, came to visit New Delhi. At this time Delhi did not look like an inhabited city. All it had were a few bungalows along broad avenues lined by young trees. The Viceregal palace, the two Secretariats and the War Memorial Arch were well behind schedule. Nevertheless the Viceroy was anxious to commemorate the Duke’s visit in some permanent way. So he was asked to lay the foundation stone of the new legislative building which included the Princes Chamber and was to be located close to the Secretariats. It was also announced that New Delhi’s main shopping centre half-a-mile northwards of the Secretariat would be named Connaught Place. At the time there was only a circular road without a single building. I was among the contractors presented by the Viceroy to the Duke. The Viceroy had been informed that I had bought more land in the future city centre than anyone else. So he told the Duke in front of me, ‘This man is going to build the first shopping arcade, cinemas and restaurants in the shopping centre to be named after Your Grace.’ Till then I had no idea what I was going to do with the land. There were not enough people in New Delhi for it to have shops or restaurants. But I knew that so broad a hint dropped by no less a person than the Viceroy was a command which had to be obeyed. As if to encourage me, at the king’s next birthday, I was given the title of Sardar Sahib.

A few words about the contractors’ families. We came from different parts of the Punjab and had not heard of each other till we met in Delhi. I was the only one of them who had been to school and had picked up some English; the others were a rustic lot and few could not even write their names in any language. It made no difference. We were Sikhs and began to look upon each other as members of one clan. There were a few Sikh engineers and overseers as well. Although they kept their distance from us and extracted their percentages for passing our bills, they felt a part of us. In times of tension (such as times when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in the city) we guarded each others’ homes. If any of our boys got into trouble with the police we exerted joint pressure to get him out. One afternoon when an eighteen-year-old daughter of a Sikh engineer eloped with her Muslim music teacher, her father alerted the community. We posted our men on every road going out of Delhi and on all platforms of the railway station. Before nightfall the couple were nabbed in a car heading for the Jamna bridge. The girl was handed over to her father to be dealt with as he deemed fit. The Muslim boy was given a thrashing he would not easily forget. To forestall his reporting the incident to the police and claiming the girl had been converted to Islam and had married him as well as getting his fellow Muslims to take up his cause, we told him that we had already lodged a report charging him with abduction and rape. The fellow decided to get out of Delhi as fast as he could.

Sudden wealth creates its own problems. We were far too busy making money to be able to keep our eyes on how our sons spent it. We also derived some pleasure in spoiling our boys. When I say we, I really mean the others; because I was very strict with my sons. While others gave their sons cars to drive about in, I gave my two elder boys bicycles. As a result while my sons went through school and college, theirs went to the bottle and the prostitutes of Chawri Bazaar. The eldest son of one who was a most devout Sikh acquired a veritable harem of women from different parts of India and sired dozens of children through them. Another who had five sons was lucky in having one who was sober who helped him with his building contracts. The others just had a good time going for
shikar
, having nautch parties and getting drunk. One of them became the most notorious whoremonger of Delhi. He used to boast that he had three different women every day and before he died he would fuck every prostitute in the city. Nobody knew how far he got in achieving his ambition but one night after he had finished with his third assignment for the day he got into a brawl with some Muslims at a
panwalla’s
shop. One man struck him with an ice pick which pierced his chin upto his mouth. He grabbed his assailant by the scruff of his hair (he was very strongly built) and marched him to the police station. Then he went to the emergency ward of a hospital and had his wound stitched and bandaged. Having done this he walked to his home which was four miles from the hospital. Before going to bed he felt blood oozing out of the bandage and went to the bathroom to wash it off. As he bent into a tub full of water he collapsed into it. His servant found him dead with his head in a tub full of blood. His father did not shed a tear. When I went to condole with him he said without any emotion: ‘He died a dog’s death. He asked for it.’

My lifestyle changed. I began to wear European clothes. On formal occasions I wore a black frock-coat, grey striped trousers and spats on my shoes. I was amongst the select few Indians allowed membership in the Gymkhana Club. I never learnt to dance and sensed that Englishmen did not like Indians dancing with their women unless they brought their wives to dance with them. My wife, despite my attempts to get her to learn English from an Anglo-Indian woman, failed to pick up more than a few words and would even confuse ‘good-morning’ with ‘good-bye’. As for dancing, she would have sunk into the ballroom floor if asked to fox-trot. I went to the Gymkhana Club once every week to keep up appearances. I offered drinks to English members who cared to accept them. They seldom returned the hospitality. For relaxation I sought the company of Indians. I felt more at home with my Muslim and Hindu friends than with Sikhs. A Muslim engineer had Delhi’s most famous singer as his mistress. I found her a flat to live in and was often invited to listen to her singing. Another Hindu friend had the prettiest Muslim girl as his concubine. We often met in her apartment for drinks and a chat. As far as possible I avoided going to parties in the prostitutes’ quarter.

Lord Chelmsford was succeeded by a sixty-year-old, Lord Reading, as Viceroy. He had no
picchha
(breeding) being the son of a fruit-seller and a deck-hand on a ship. Being a Jew, he had brains. Also being a Jew he wanted to prove he was more British than the English. When he arrived in India in 1921 there was an agitation amongst the Sikhs to liberate their gurdwaras from hereditary priests. Gandhi and his Congresswallas were also demanding self-rule and the Muslim Moplahs of Malabar had risen against Hindu moneylenders. Reading first invited Gandhi over for a cup of tea to be able to size him up. A few months later he jailed him as well as the two Nehrus, Motilal and his son, Jawaharlal. All of them had called for a boycott of the visit of the Prince of Wales. (Incidentally with the Prince came the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, who became engaged to Edwina Ashley at a party given by Reading). He sent the army to Malabar to crush the Moplahs. Reading was that kind of man: he only befriended Indian politicians to know their minds. However, he couldn’t do much to stem the Congress tide. The party swept the polls in the 1923 elections and Motilal Nehru became its main spokesman in the Central Assembly.

Reading was more interested in Indian politics than in the building of New Delhi. Nevertheless, it was during his tenure that the city began to take shape. The Viceregal palace was completed and only needed furniture and fittings. The two Secretariats were in the last stages of completion; the Legislative Assembly building was completed; so were a large number of bungalows and clerks’ quarters. I had built a block of shops with apartments above them and was well on the way to giving New Delhi its first cinema house, restaurants and department stores.

A sense of urgency was given to the building operations with the arrival of the new Viceroy, the forty-five-year-old Lord Irwin. Since he had only one arm, he was known amongst Indians as the
tunda laat
. Being very religious minded, he was also known as the padre. We were told that all the work on the Viceregal palace and the two Secretariats had to be completed by a certain date as the new Viceroy intended to inaugurate the new city. Work went on round the clock in three shifts.

With the Viceroy being so friendly with nationalist leaders we felt that Englishmen and Indians would work hand-in-hand as partners. The real trouble was that the nationalists were split into many factions: some were willing to cooperate with the English; others wanted to drive them out of India, by force if necessary. I was witness to one such attempt.

One morning in April 1929, having obtained a pass, I was seated in the visitors’ gallery of the Central Assembly. It promised to be a very lively debate as the Congress party was to open up with all its guns against the passage of the Public Safety Bill introduced earlier by the government to combat terrorism. I was looking down into the hall to see if I could recognize any of the members from their pictures I had seen in the papers. I did not take any notice of the others in the gallery except two young men who took seats on my right. They wore no coat or tie and looked like boys from college. The debate was not as exciting as I had expected. There were a lot of long-winded orations which I could not hear distinctly. I had brought a newspaper with me and began to scan its headlines. Suddenly I heard a loud explosion. I looked up and saw the two young men who had been sitting next to me firing shots at the members. Smoke was rising from the hall and everyone was running towards the doors or taking shelter behind the benches. The visitors’ gallery was empty; only I remained seated where I was with the boys shooting into the pit of the assembly. They took no notice of me. I saw one of the boys slapping his gun with his hand. It had jammed or run out of ammunition. Then policemen with pistols in their hands surrounded us. ‘Hands up,’ ordered an Anglo-Indian sergeant. We put up our hands. The boys smiled at me before handing over their weapons. Since I was an honorary magistrate the policemen recognized me and escorted me out of the building.

What those boys wanted to achieve by killing legislators was beyond me. I knew they would hang for it. (They did for the murder of an Anglo-Indian sergeant committed earlier. Bhagat Singh, Sukh Dev and Rajguru were hanged on 23 March 1931). What I found more appalling was the attitude of the Congress leaders who talked of non-violence in one breath and condoned political killings in the other. Even padre Irwin was disappointed at their reaction. In a statement he said, ‘To condemn a crime in one breath and in the next to seek excuse for it by laying blame on those against whom it is directed, is no true condemnation.’

I was out of step with the times. I believed that British rule was good for India; we Indians never had nor ever would be able to run an administration which was just and fair to all communities. But there was no one who seemed to agree with my views. My old mother who had at one time lit incense in front of a picture of Queen Victoria now spent her time praying and spinning her
charkha
and once gave me a bundle of yarn she had spun to be presented to Gandhi. Two of my elder sons when they went to buy material for their school uniform came back with
khadi
(handspun, hand-woven cloth) because Gandhi had proclaimed a boycott of British fabrics. I knew that behind my back my Sikh employees called me a
jholi
chook
(one who stretched his apron for alms). Many a time when I was on duty with the police to prevent a riot, the mob yelled
todi-baccha
(son of a toady) and beat their breasts shouting
hai, hai
. I persisted in my belief that the English would stay in India as rulers in my lifetime. I had eaten their salt and was not going to betray them.