India (70 page)

While the driver of my hired car manhandled the wheel with the split tire, traffic roared and rasped by, the brown smoke from unmuffled exhausts mixing with roadside dust. Within the split tire there was, surprisingly, an inner tube. I hadn’t seen one for years. Over this tube the driver, an unturbanned Sikh, then squatted with the repair man, and after they had pumped the tube up they passed it through water in a red plastic basin. (There was another red plastic basin in which glass tumblers and heavy china cups were soaking on a stand outside the cooking shed.) The flaw in the tube was found, the spot was dried and rasped, some adhesive solution was applied, and a bandage was stuck on. The procedure sent me back to my childhood; it made me think of the way we used to mend bicycle punctures; I had thought it was something that had passed out of my life forever.

Stepping down from the greasy brick platform, where they had been working on the tube, the driver and the repair man selected, from a small collection, a tire so worn it had been finally abandoned. They cut two sleeves out of this tire, one sleeve out of the thin part of the tire, the other out of the thicker part. Both sleeves were then fitted into the tire where it had split; the mended inner tube, pink and deflated and flabby, was also fitted in; and then
somehow the driver and the repair man hammered and malleted the whole thing together, pumped the tire up, and bumped it up and down professionally a few times on the grease-blackened earth. Finally, like a man more fulfilled than irritated by the accident, Bhupinder the driver set the nose of his car towards Chandigarh, and we didn’t stop until we got there.

The traffic was of all sorts: buses, trucks with towering loads, packed three-wheeler taxi-buses with about 20 people each (I counted), mule carts, tractors with trailers, some of the trailers carrying very wide loads of straw in sacking, or carrying logs placed crosswise, so that they occupied a good deal more of the width of the road than you thought from a distance. There seemed to be no limit to a load. Metal, being metal, was deemed to be able to carry anything that could be loaded onto it. Many bicycles carried two or three people each: the cyclist proper, someone on the cross bar, someone sitting sideways on the carrier at the back. A motor-scooter could carry a family of five: father on the main saddle, one child between his arms, another behind him holding on to his waist, mother on the carrier at the back, sitting sideways, with the baby.

Always in India this feeling of a crowd, of vehicles and services stretched to their limit: the trains and the aeroplanes never frequent enough, the roads never wide enough, always needing two or three or four more lanes. The overloaded trucks were often as close together as the wagons of a goods train; and sometimes – it seemed to depend on the mood or local need of drivers – cars and carts came in the wrong direction. Hooters and horns, from scooters and cars and trucks, sounded all the time, seldom angrily. The effect was more that of celebration, as with a wedding procession.

Chandigarh, when I first saw it in 1962, was a brand-new city. It had been built as the capital of what was then the state of Punjab. It was an empty, still artificial-feeling city in 1962. It was full of Punjabi tourists, running up and down the modern concrete towers Le Corbusier had built for the state assembly, the high court, and the secretariat. The city was now full, built up. It was squabbled over by the two states into which Punjab had split.

Le Corbusier’s unrendered concrete towers, after 27 years of Punjab sun and monsoon and sub-Himalayan winter, looked stained and diseased, and showed now as quite plain structures, with an applied flashiness: megalomaniac architecture: people
reduced to units, individuality reserved only to the architect, imposing his ideas of colour in an inflated Miróesque mural on one building, and imposing an iconography of his own with a giant hand set in a vast flat area of concrete paving, which would have been unbearable in winter and summer and the monsoon. India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself.

Grass grew now between the blocks of the paving. Armed policemen guarded the buildings in the evenings; visitors were driven off. The people of Chandigarh, following a more natural Indian inclination, promenaded in the afternoons on the lakeside, far from the dreadful public buildings. The city over which people squabbled was without a centre and a heart.

But the air was clean. It was still cool; in the evenings it was cold. The hotel garden was full of flowers, and the big shaved lawns, soaked by a fat hose every day, were bright green.

Gurtej Singh was famous as a Sikh who had resigned from the Indian Administrative Service – the highest branch of the Indian civil service – because of his commitment to the Sikh cause. He was represented to me as someone who would give me some understanding of the Sikh alienation. On a number of mornings he came to the hotel, after he had taken his sixteen-year-old daughter to her school in Chandigarh, and we talked. I didn’t know then that he had been acquainted with Bhindranwale; that he had gone underground for four years after the army assault on the Golden Temple in June 1984; that he had been charged with sedition, and was still technically on bail.

He was forty-one, tall, just over six feet, slender, with sombre, intense eyes. He was carefully dressed, in pale colours. There was an elegance about his manner as about his physique – nothing of the big-eating Sikh or Punjabi there. It was hard to imagine that he had come from a farming family and a village background, and that he was the first in his family to have received anything like a formal education.

He wanted, the very first time he came, to talk about the importance of water. Punjab depended on the water of its rivers; it didn’t like sharing its water with other states. Since 1947, he said, more people had died quarrelling over water than had died during
the upheavals of partition. ‘The water problem is the crux of the matter.’

But I could hear about water from many other people. I felt, too, that it was a simplification, something to be put forward at a first meeting. Fundamentalism and alienation would have had other promptings as well; and I was more interested, at this first meeting with Gurtej, in understanding how his ideas of religion had come to him.

The first ideas, he said, had come to him from his grandfather. From his grandfather he had also got the idea of ‘gentlemanliness’.

‘We don’t have many rituals. My grandfather taught me the simplest form of prayers. It’s just a simple prayer for the well-being of the entire world. It lasted from half an hour to 45 minutes. Every morning my grandmother would get up for the household chores – and that included churning the morning milk – and she would keep on repeating the prayers while at work. She was not an educated person, and she remembered only those things she had heard, the simplest of couplets from the scriptures.

‘She got up at four. After she had got up I couldn’t sleep, and then I gradually got interested in those prayers of hers. My grandfather would pray in a more formal manner. He would wash himself in the morning and sit with the holy book in his hand. We have a small version, with the daily prayers, and he would carry that with him all the time. The last thing would be the
ardas
, the conclusion of the prayer, the supplication.

‘My parents were living in a different village. There was no school in that village, so they had sent me to my grandparents’ village, where we had a school next to the house. I went to that school until I was big enough to go away to Dehra Dun, to a boarding school.’

I wanted to hear more about the ‘gentlemanliness’ of the grandfather.

Gurtej thought. He began to remember; his intense eyes softened. ‘He always dressed properly, in clean clothes, and a white turban. He always had his watch with him. He was conscious of time, which no one else in the village was. He was a progressive man. He was the first man to get a radio, the first man to buy a jeep in the village. And he kept a daily diary. He had a contact with some saint, who had taught him to make anti-snakebite medicine. This he religiously used to make before the onset of the
rainy season every year, and he would distribute it to the neighbouring villages. People used to come to ask for that medicine whenever there was a case of snakebite.

‘Sometimes I used to go with him on a camel to the neighbouring market town. When we passed through a place where the village elders used to sit he would ask me to greet them loudly. And I never heard him shouting at anybody. When he thought the worst of a person he would say
‘Dusht!’ –
‘Wicked man!’ – and then we knew he was very angry.

‘He used to give pocket money to me and to his son – who was my uncle – wanting us to be on our own, not depending on him for anything. He would help anybody who came. He was the only person to have a horse carriage, and when people wanted it – for a wedding or to go to hospital – he let them have it. He was widely respected. He was one of the better-off farmers.’

From this protected life Gurtej was taken away when he was sent to the boarding school in far-off Dehra Dun.

‘I was in a different sort of culture, and there must have been a yearning in my heart to be in touch with my land, my culture, my people. I began to read the poems of Sohan Singh Seetal. He’s a poet and a writer. He is still living in Ludhiana. The books I read at that time were ballads, concerned with Sikh history in the Mogul period and the British period.

‘I still remember several poems – which were full of the suffering of my people. One poem was about the general order of massacre given by two or three Mogul governors – that every Sikh should be hunted down. And the mothers from whom the children were snatched, to be cut up to pieces. Young boys being murdered. Women being incarcerated, tortured. The torture of the companions of the ninth Guru – that was in 1675. They were killed in front of his eyes. One was set on fire. This was in Delhi, in Chandni Chowk. Another was sawn alive – put into a wooden casket and cut into two. You see the helplessness and anguish of people at that time. They were doing no wrong. They were just following God according to their own lights.’

His eyes misted over. He found it hard to bear the details of physical pain, which he was yet stressing. Then he related what he had said – almost mythical suffering, but with real, historical dates – to the problems of the present.

‘Consciously or unconsciously, a Sikh is all the time trying to
avert a situation like this.’ Religious persecution. ‘And this is what made me support this agitation for justice in the Punjab. It was more of an emotional identification with my people – in the days of the Punjabi Suba, 1957 to 1960.’ The agitation then by Sikhs for a Punjabi-speaking state: Gurtej was ten in 1957. ‘The intellectual reason came afterwards. What I recall is that as soon as a Punjabi Suba was formed, Hindus started agitating against it. They burnt a gurdwara’ – a Sikh temple – ‘in Karnal. They attacked a gurdwara in Delhi. Stoning took place. And all over the Punjab towns there was a bit of a commotion.’

So present suffering linked to past suffering. The heroic past ennobled or gave a different quality to the trials of the present.

Gurtej said, ‘The fifth Guru was burnt to death.’ In 1606, by the order of the Emperor Jehangir, Akbar’s son. The fifth Guru, the organizer of the faith, the founder of the Golden Temple. ‘The best human being I can conceive of is the Guru’ – the singular or the collective noun is used by Sikhs for all the 10 Gurus – ‘and I believe them to be motivated sincerely by the good of all the community. Why should they suffer like that?’

‘Did you ask your grandfather? Did you talk to him about this problem of suffering?’

‘I don’t remember having asked him. I think the first time I talked about these things was with Sardar Kapur Singh in 1965–66.’

This man, Kapur Singh, was important to Gurtej. He was born in 1911 to a farming family. A gifted and unusual man, he completed his education at Cambridge, and he gained entrance to the Indian Civil Service, the ICS, the predecessor in British times of the Indian Administrative Service. But then at independence in 1947 there was some trouble about money meant for refugees and also trouble about buying an expatriate’s car, and Kapur Singh was dismissed from the service. Kapur Singh claimed that he had been wrongly dismissed, and it might be said that for the rest of his life Kapur Singh fought and refought his case; mixing this grievance with regional Sikh politics, the writing of poetry, and the writing of difficult books about the Sikh religion. This was the man who became Gurtej’s mentor. He opened Gurtej’s eyes to the position of Sikhs in India.

I wondered whether, before this meeting with Kapur Singh in
1965 (when Gurtej was eighteen), Gurtej had noticed any discrimination against him as a Sikh. He said yes; he remembered that once, when he was queuing up to buy a railway ticket, the booking clerk had been rough with him.

‘When you first talked, what did Kapur Singh tell you about suffering?’

‘He told me it was an eternal fight between good and evil, and by their suffering the Gurus have only shown that people should identify themselves with good causes. He used to say that a measure of man is the sense of commitment he has. It’s the only thing important in man. Otherwise, it’s an animal existence. And he would say it’s the only way to salvation, serving mankind. And Sardar Kapur Singh’s words carried conviction because he had suffered much, and he had no regrets.’

In this way Gurtej had arrived at some idea of the Sikh religion: a special idea of the Gurus, a special idea of the Sikh God.

Of Guru Nanak, the first Guru, who had had the illumination that there was no Hindu and no Muslim, Gurtej said, ‘I see him as a man who’s conscious of the sufferings of his people, and having an intense desire to change the situation.’ He didn’t see Nanak simply as another rebel against Hinduism. ‘He’s not a reformer, he’s not a philosopher, he’s not a poet – though he expressed himself in poetry. He’s a prophet of God.’ This idea of the prophet – a Muslim idea, a Christian idea, a Jewish idea – was not held by every Sikh. But Gurtej was firm. ‘There’s no doubt in the minds of Sikhs. We look upon all the Gurus as
one.
’ In this account, therefore, over the first 200 years of their history the Sikhs had a line of 10 God-sent prophets.