It was around four ‘o clock in the afternoon that my grandfather used to come home from the courts. We would eagerly await his arrival since he always brought home fresh sweets from the Bengali hunchback’s shop. As he approached the wooden gate of the house he would clear his throat, and this was a signal of sorts. His daughter- in- law would quickly cover her head; my grandmother would go to the kitchen and put water on for tea; we, his grandchildren, knew that it was the last round of dice in our afternoon game of Pachisi before the scores were tallied. This family routine persisted right through the 1940s.
My grandfather had other uses for his harsh, grating cry . When he cleared his throat in his office, his client knew that the interview was over, not unlike the government officer who signals the end of a meeting by noisily pushing back his chair. Occasionally, my grandfather would strike terror in the witness’s heart with the same piercing sound in the middle of an interrogation.
As we settled down to tea, my grandfather would ask, ‘So, what’s happening?’
‘Nothing much’, my uncle would reply nonchalantly, ‘Gandhi and Nehru were arrested again today ’.
My grandfather would grunt and the conversation would move on. We were a professional, middle-class family, not particularly given to patriotic enthusiasms. We were more interested in the latest scandal in our neighbourhood that had been uncovered by my uncle. Men like my grandfather were typical of a new professional middle class that had emerged in the late 19th century in the Punjab with the introduction of western education. It consisted of lawyers, post masters, railway engineers, medical and forest officers, and of course, bureaucrats and clerks.--all the new professions that were needed to run a province. Since passing an exam was the only barrier to entry, its members came from various castes and backgrounds. Although opportunities were open to all, the upper castes were the first to seize them. Once you learned English, cleared an exam, rewards and prestige were showered upon you. You became the new westernized urban elite whose rise matched the decline of the landed gentry.
My father was a civil engineer with the Punjab government and he spent his days building irrigation canals and bringing water to the parched land. I shuttled as a baby on the lap of my mother between canal colonies and my maternal grandfather’s sprawling home in Lyallpur. Most of Punjab was arid, but over three generations, the vision and toil of engineers like my father had created a network of canals that irrigated the land and turned it into a granary. The lower Chenab canal was one of the first to be built in the last quarter of the 19th century. With it came the orderly and planned town of Lyallpur, named after Sir James Lyall, the Lt. Governor of the Punjab. My grandfather proudly moved there in the early part of the twentieth century to start a law practice. And it was where I was born soon after Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British to ‘Quit India’ in 1942.
In the middle of Lyallpur was a brick clock tower from where eight roads emanated and a town spread out in concentric circles. Our house was off one of these roads called Kacheri Bazaar and the district courts were located there. Our road connected the tower with the sumptuous gardens of the Company Bagh which sprawled over forty acres. Since it was hot in the summers and cold in the winters, our daily life varied considerably with the seasons. We spent most of the day in our open courtyard where most of the business of the house was transacted. In the summers, we moved from the courtyard to the covered veranda before the sun rose too high. By midday, it was very hot and we went deeper into the cooler rooms inside. The bamboo shades came down after lunch as the house prepared for sleep. We returned to the courtyard in the early evening after the mashkiya had sprinkled cool water on it from his bag of goatskin. We even slept in the courtyard on hot summer nights and watched the brilliant stars high above. In the winters, this process was reversed. We slept inside and came out gradually with the morning sun. We spent most of the day in its luxurious warmth, shifting our chairs and charpais according to the sun’s path, and only returned inside at sunset.
Grandfather’s house was one of the first to come up in Kacheri Bazaar. He had been young and ambitious in the early years of the century with all the confidence of a man on the way up. He was filled with hope, thinking that the British were doing some good in India. Their railways had bridged the country and their canals had made a huge difference to the economy of the Punjab. But their best contribution, he felt, was the rule of law. As a lawyer he had experienced English justice first hand, and he reminded us more than once that English magistrates were mostly fair and decent.
As we sat drinking tea in the courtyard, grandfather would tell us of his latest case in court. My uncle would sometimes interrupt with an appreciative remark about the quality of the hunchback’s sweets. Conversation was the great pastime in our house. If two persons were together they would not read or work, they would sit down with a cup of tea and talk. And they could talk for hours about people they had never met. One day to our dismay, grandfather did not back bring sweets. He brought fruit instead. The house immediately rose up in revolt. Grandfather explained patiently that sweets were bad for us, and in the end he had to pull out all his lawyer’s tricks in order to persuade us. So, we switched reluctantly to eating fruit, and the air began to smell of mangoes and leechies in the summer and oranges and maltas in the winter. But for months we talked nostalgically of the hunchback’s sweets.
Grandfather valued routine, and at five o’clock his friends would arrive to play bridge. Some of them smoked the hookah while they played. Soon afterwards the family barber appeared and he gave give each bridge-player a shave, and would even oblige with a haircut if needed. After playing a few rubbers, grandfather would get up, ask for his cane and leave with his friends for the Company Bagh. As they walked, they talked about the politics of Lyallpur and of India, and in particular the growing distance between Hindus and Muslims.
In the gardens, grandfather was drawn to the odours exhaled by the exotic plants. Although his friends preferred the colourful beds of English flowers neatly laid out during our brief spring season, he was pulled by the fleshy, erotic scents of the magnolias, the jasmine and other decadent vegetation. He told us one day how he had been filled with nausea on learning that they had found the corpse of a Hindu boy in the carnation beds. The innocent boy had been stabbed by a Muslim youth and had come here to die all alone amidst the fragrance of the magnolias. They had found him face downwards, his face covered in vomit, his nails clinging to the soil. They had turned him over and he had covered the handsome face with his white handkerchief.
‘What did he die for, this poor boy?’ grandfather exclaimed when he returned home.
There were increasing incidents of violence between Hindus and Muslims throughout my childhood. One day when I was four my aunt had pulled me away from the window, and closed the shutters because a Muslim mob had begun to throw stones at our Hindu neighbour’s house. Grandfather talked about the madness of Hindus and Muslims killing each other ever since Jinnah had brought the possibility of a homeland for Punjab’s Muslims. Who would have thought, he said, that this would be the consequence of India’s struggle for freedom from colonial rule? His bridge friends reassured him that Hindus and Muslims had lived together for hundreds of years and they would continue to do so for hundreds more. It was merely a temporary insanity. After all, they were the same people--Indian Muslims were mostly converted Hindus. But we feared the worst.
After returning from the Company Bagh, grandfather would sit in his cane chair and watch the fading summer light in the courtyard. I sometimes joined him. We would watch my grandmother lead the women to the roof of the house in order to perform the sandhya. With lighted earthen lamps the women would chant Sanskrit verses in praise of the evening and the setting sun. Listening to them from below, grandfather had once observed with a smile that not a single one of them understood what she was saying.
My grandfather’s status had risen gradually over the previous decade as he had gradually married off his daughters, one by one, to Class I officials of the colonial bureaucracy. The eldest had married an official in the Indian Railways, who had impressed us with his luxurious salon-on-wheels in which he once came to visit us in Lyallpur. The second girl had married a professor of English in the prestigious government college at Lahore. He was an accomplished tennis and bridge player and this gave him an entry into a social world denied to the rest of the family. When he came to visit us in Lyallpur, he did not fail to drop important names casually in his conversation. The third, my mother, married a civil engineer in the Punjab government’s department of irrigation; and the fourth an officer in the Indian army. By marrying his daughters shrewdly to high-ranking professionals rather than to landlords, who were in fact wealthier than these officials, my grandfather bought social status and security for his family. And so we rose from the middle to the upper middle class within a generation.
As he rose in the world, grandfather became more finicky about his clothes. I would watch him change before he went out in the mornings. The servant would bring him polished shoes and helped him to put them on. Then he assisted him with his coat. Finally, it was time for the turban, an important moment, when all conversation was suspended. He wore his turban in a particular fashion, which he had learned from a stylish lawyer who had recently returned from Lahore, the capital of fashion. He made one, two, and then three turns around his head with the starched white cloth, and it was done. The servant offered him a silk handkerchief and his gold watch. He saw himself in the mirror and twirled his moustache. He looked a man of substance as he opened the gate and strutted off to his chambers.
After he left, my grandmother would get ready to do her social rounds in Lyallpur. She would be dressed in a starched white sari and she would often ask me to join her. We would set off at ten or eleven in the morning in our horse-drawn carriage, sometimes to mourn a death and other times to celebrate a birth or even an engagement. On the way we had to sometimes go through Civil Lines where the small British community and westernized Indians lived. The avenues would become broader and the bungalows more spacious. We passed the imposing Government House where the District Collector lived. It was a dazzling white building surrounded by colonnaded verandas set amidst acres of green lawn. Against the boundary wall there was an occasional splash of red or white bougainvillaea. The overall effect befitted the dignity of the district’s highest official. Next to it was the equally imposing government college surrounded by playing fields.
My grandfather had other uses for his harsh, grating cry . When he cleared his throat in his office, his client knew that the interview was over, not unlike the government officer who signals the end of a meeting by noisily pushing back his chair. Occasionally, my grandfather would strike terror in the witness’s heart with the same piercing sound in the middle of an interrogation.
As we settled down to tea, my grandfather would ask, ‘So, what’s happening?’
‘Nothing much’, my uncle would reply nonchalantly, ‘Gandhi and Nehru were arrested again today ’.
My grandfather would grunt and the conversation would move on. We were a professional, middle-class family, not particularly given to patriotic enthusiasms. We were more interested in the latest scandal in our neighbourhood that had been uncovered by my uncle. Men like my grandfather were typical of a new professional middle class that had emerged in the late 19th century in the Punjab with the introduction of western education. It consisted of lawyers, post masters, railway engineers, medical and forest officers, and of course, bureaucrats and clerks.--all the new professions that were needed to run a province. Since passing an exam was the only barrier to entry, its members came from various castes and backgrounds. Although opportunities were open to all, the upper castes were the first to seize them. Once you learned English, cleared an exam, rewards and prestige were showered upon you. You became the new westernized urban elite whose rise matched the decline of the landed gentry.
My father was a civil engineer with the Punjab government and he spent his days building irrigation canals and bringing water to the parched land. I shuttled as a baby on the lap of my mother between canal colonies and my maternal grandfather’s sprawling home in Lyallpur. Most of Punjab was arid, but over three generations, the vision and toil of engineers like my father had created a network of canals that irrigated the land and turned it into a granary. The lower Chenab canal was one of the first to be built in the last quarter of the 19th century. With it came the orderly and planned town of Lyallpur, named after Sir James Lyall, the Lt. Governor of the Punjab. My grandfather proudly moved there in the early part of the twentieth century to start a law practice. And it was where I was born soon after Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British to ‘Quit India’ in 1942.
In the middle of Lyallpur was a brick clock tower from where eight roads emanated and a town spread out in concentric circles. Our house was off one of these roads called Kacheri Bazaar and the district courts were located there. Our road connected the tower with the sumptuous gardens of the Company Bagh which sprawled over forty acres. Since it was hot in the summers and cold in the winters, our daily life varied considerably with the seasons. We spent most of the day in our open courtyard where most of the business of the house was transacted. In the summers, we moved from the courtyard to the covered veranda before the sun rose too high. By midday, it was very hot and we went deeper into the cooler rooms inside. The bamboo shades came down after lunch as the house prepared for sleep. We returned to the courtyard in the early evening after the mashkiya had sprinkled cool water on it from his bag of goatskin. We even slept in the courtyard on hot summer nights and watched the brilliant stars high above. In the winters, this process was reversed. We slept inside and came out gradually with the morning sun. We spent most of the day in its luxurious warmth, shifting our chairs and charpais according to the sun’s path, and only returned inside at sunset.
Grandfather’s house was one of the first to come up in Kacheri Bazaar. He had been young and ambitious in the early years of the century with all the confidence of a man on the way up. He was filled with hope, thinking that the British were doing some good in India. Their railways had bridged the country and their canals had made a huge difference to the economy of the Punjab. But their best contribution, he felt, was the rule of law. As a lawyer he had experienced English justice first hand, and he reminded us more than once that English magistrates were mostly fair and decent.
As we sat drinking tea in the courtyard, grandfather would tell us of his latest case in court. My uncle would sometimes interrupt with an appreciative remark about the quality of the hunchback’s sweets. Conversation was the great pastime in our house. If two persons were together they would not read or work, they would sit down with a cup of tea and talk. And they could talk for hours about people they had never met. One day to our dismay, grandfather did not back bring sweets. He brought fruit instead. The house immediately rose up in revolt. Grandfather explained patiently that sweets were bad for us, and in the end he had to pull out all his lawyer’s tricks in order to persuade us. So, we switched reluctantly to eating fruit, and the air began to smell of mangoes and leechies in the summer and oranges and maltas in the winter. But for months we talked nostalgically of the hunchback’s sweets.
Grandfather valued routine, and at five o’clock his friends would arrive to play bridge. Some of them smoked the hookah while they played. Soon afterwards the family barber appeared and he gave give each bridge-player a shave, and would even oblige with a haircut if needed. After playing a few rubbers, grandfather would get up, ask for his cane and leave with his friends for the Company Bagh. As they walked, they talked about the politics of Lyallpur and of India, and in particular the growing distance between Hindus and Muslims.
In the gardens, grandfather was drawn to the odours exhaled by the exotic plants. Although his friends preferred the colourful beds of English flowers neatly laid out during our brief spring season, he was pulled by the fleshy, erotic scents of the magnolias, the jasmine and other decadent vegetation. He told us one day how he had been filled with nausea on learning that they had found the corpse of a Hindu boy in the carnation beds. The innocent boy had been stabbed by a Muslim youth and had come here to die all alone amidst the fragrance of the magnolias. They had found him face downwards, his face covered in vomit, his nails clinging to the soil. They had turned him over and he had covered the handsome face with his white handkerchief.
‘What did he die for, this poor boy?’ grandfather exclaimed when he returned home.
There were increasing incidents of violence between Hindus and Muslims throughout my childhood. One day when I was four my aunt had pulled me away from the window, and closed the shutters because a Muslim mob had begun to throw stones at our Hindu neighbour’s house. Grandfather talked about the madness of Hindus and Muslims killing each other ever since Jinnah had brought the possibility of a homeland for Punjab’s Muslims. Who would have thought, he said, that this would be the consequence of India’s struggle for freedom from colonial rule? His bridge friends reassured him that Hindus and Muslims had lived together for hundreds of years and they would continue to do so for hundreds more. It was merely a temporary insanity. After all, they were the same people--Indian Muslims were mostly converted Hindus. But we feared the worst.
After returning from the Company Bagh, grandfather would sit in his cane chair and watch the fading summer light in the courtyard. I sometimes joined him. We would watch my grandmother lead the women to the roof of the house in order to perform the sandhya. With lighted earthen lamps the women would chant Sanskrit verses in praise of the evening and the setting sun. Listening to them from below, grandfather had once observed with a smile that not a single one of them understood what she was saying.
My grandfather’s status had risen gradually over the previous decade as he had gradually married off his daughters, one by one, to Class I officials of the colonial bureaucracy. The eldest had married an official in the Indian Railways, who had impressed us with his luxurious salon-on-wheels in which he once came to visit us in Lyallpur. The second girl had married a professor of English in the prestigious government college at Lahore. He was an accomplished tennis and bridge player and this gave him an entry into a social world denied to the rest of the family. When he came to visit us in Lyallpur, he did not fail to drop important names casually in his conversation. The third, my mother, married a civil engineer in the Punjab government’s department of irrigation; and the fourth an officer in the Indian army. By marrying his daughters shrewdly to high-ranking professionals rather than to landlords, who were in fact wealthier than these officials, my grandfather bought social status and security for his family. And so we rose from the middle to the upper middle class within a generation.
As he rose in the world, grandfather became more finicky about his clothes. I would watch him change before he went out in the mornings. The servant would bring him polished shoes and helped him to put them on. Then he assisted him with his coat. Finally, it was time for the turban, an important moment, when all conversation was suspended. He wore his turban in a particular fashion, which he had learned from a stylish lawyer who had recently returned from Lahore, the capital of fashion. He made one, two, and then three turns around his head with the starched white cloth, and it was done. The servant offered him a silk handkerchief and his gold watch. He saw himself in the mirror and twirled his moustache. He looked a man of substance as he opened the gate and strutted off to his chambers.
After he left, my grandmother would get ready to do her social rounds in Lyallpur. She would be dressed in a starched white sari and she would often ask me to join her. We would set off at ten or eleven in the morning in our horse-drawn carriage, sometimes to mourn a death and other times to celebrate a birth or even an engagement. On the way we had to sometimes go through Civil Lines where the small British community and westernized Indians lived. The avenues would become broader and the bungalows more spacious. We passed the imposing Government House where the District Collector lived. It was a dazzling white building surrounded by colonnaded verandas set amidst acres of green lawn. Against the boundary wall there was an occasional splash of red or white bougainvillaea. The overall effect befitted the dignity of the district’s highest official. Next to it was the equally imposing government college surrounded by playing fields.
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