Punjab

Navtej Sarna is the author of the novels The Exile and We Weren’t Lovers Like That as well as the non-fiction works The Book of Nanak; Folk Tales of Poland and a translation of Guru Gobind Singh’s Zafarnama. His short stories, recently published in the collection Winter Evenings, have been broadcast over the BBC World Service. A member of the Indian Foreign Service since 1980, he has served as a diplomat in several capitals and most recently as India’s ambassador to Israel. Having grown up in Punjab, he might have moved on to other lands, but his recollections of the land of his childhood are still vivid.

Return to innocence

I Have A FavourIte dream, a waking dream. And I call upon it unconsciously, on the days that the mind needs a break from an overweening present, to transport me back half a century to a small town in Punjab. to the town of Nangal at the feet of the Shivalik hills on the banks of the silvery Sutlej and to a time when that most iconic of the Nehruvian temples of modern India—the Bhakra dam—was being built.

In this dream I am the free and unfettered five-year-old wanderer of Bungalow number 5, Circular Avenue. It’s a large, sprawling bungalow of shaded rooms with wire mesh doors that don’t hold back the fragrance of jasmine, of verandas that seem designed for lying on string cots in the warm yellow winter sun and listening to folk tales from a rosy-cheeked grandmother, and of long corridors that tunnel into the house to first a mysterious pantry and then a kitchen. the back garden is a quilted patchwork of cauliflower and dill, radish and tomato. the front lawns are taken up by flowers, and I learn to recognise zenias, sweet peas, dog-flowers. Beyond the badminton court with its lines drawn in fresh white chalk is the throbbing, fragrant centre of the bungalow—a circular rose garden. Above it sweeps away a pebbled path to a large wooden gate on which my young mother in two plaits leans in a black and white photograph taken on my father’s box camera. that gate was the boundary of my wanderings, beyond which I could not venture except in the company of grownups. But I had another escape route—through the hedge that led to the neighbouring bungalow and the company of three young children; the hedge though hid a barbed wire which easily tore through a young toe.

the world outside, beyond that gate and the peepal tree where three roads met, was an exciting one: the Sutlej was being dammed, the huge reservoir named Gobindsagar was filling up and valuable electricity was being generated by massive turbines as the white water roared through the sluice gates. It was a world of men in yellow metal helmets blasting the hard rock of the gorge, of pick-up trucks and executive engineers, of scary, dripping, dimly lit inspection tunnels that took you deep under the rushing waters. It was a world where one could set the clock by the siren from the Ganguwal powerhouse. or by the train that disgorged the workers back to their houses when the shift at the dam ended.

It was also a world of the Basant gatherings at the gurudwara where we sat on the sunlit black and white marble floor and ate sweet yellow rice in the shadow of the low Shivalik hills. this was a world watched over by the Jalfa Mata temple and the Bhabour Sahib Gurudwara, the place where Guru Gobind Singh meditated for many months and wrote poetry, including the inspirational Chaupai. A world in which Sohan, our cheery servant boy would sing the folks songs of Jugni and Jindua loudly as he picked me up from school on his bicycle or took me to the dairy with its smell of frozen fish and meat in the Circular market. An unforgettable world in which a full moon rose up into a clear winter Punjab sky one night as I sat tightly ensconced between my parents on a cycle rickshaw to see the latest raj Kapoor movie—Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai…

I am told that Nangal is still as green and flat stones can still be made to bounce many times on the surface of the lake before they sink. Yet I keep putting off my inevitable return visit: perhaps I don’t want to find that bungalow looking smaller, the white gate closer, the Circular market refashioned, the children all grown up and grey.