The Patient Assassin

by Anita Anand

  CHAPTER 14

  AMERICAN DREAMERS

  Punjabis had been trickling into America since the late 1800s. Most landed in Vancouver, a British dominion territory, and stayed in Canada to work the lumber mills. Some travelled south across the border, making their way towards Oregon, Washington and northern California, where the Western Pacific Railroad cried out for cheap labour. For a while, that is where they stayed.

  However, by the 1900s, men started to tire of the railroad. Drawn to the warmer climate and more lucrative work offered by southern California, they drifted towards its orange and lemon groves. Many of these early Punjabi émigrés came from farming stock, and fruit picking was work they knew and were good at. They toiled and saved until they could afford land of their own, moving from the margins towards cities like San Francisco and San Jose, where they established ‘independent ethnic agrarian communities’.1

  From 1913, however, any efforts to put down deeper roots fell on stony ground. Groups like the ‘Asiatic Exclusion League’, a political organisation existing solely to keep Asians out of America and Canada, warned that ‘brown men’ and ‘Hindoos’ – their generic term for Indians of the subcontinent – would take jobs, homes and even women from God-fearing Christian folk. Powerful newspapers in both America and Canada further whipped up tension, talking of ‘An Asiatic Invasion’.2

  Though the number of Indians seeking to live in America represented a fraction of the overall melting pot, they were swept up in new and draconian legislation. The California Alien Land Law of 1913, also known as the Webb–Haney Act, prohibited ‘aliens ineligible for citizenship’ from owning agricultural land or possessing long-term leases over it. Overnight, Indians, Chinese and Japanese migrants were lumped in the same ‘alien’ bracket and stripped of rights and property.

  Hispanics, in contrast, were still allowed to own land, and that, coupled with the difficulty Indians faced in bringing in their own wives and children to America, led to many marriages between Indians and Mexicans. These were relationships born of loneliness, love and simple expediency. Punjabis attempting to circumvent the racist laws bought land and property in the name of their Mexican wives, a risky transaction which, if challenged, could see them lose everything they had ever worked for.

  Indian men married young, so these new American marriages could be bigamist in nature. Wives and small children were often left behind in Punjab. Men promised to send pay packets; they promised they would be back soon. If their husbands chose to stay in the New World, it would send the Indian women’s existences crashing down around them.

  The ‘new-wives’ in the developing ‘Mexican Hindu’3 demographic were just as vulnerable. If guilt or economic hardship got the better of their Indian husbands, they too could find themselves deserted without warning or recourse. The new laws unleashed a spectrum of human cruelty and women invariably suffered most of all.

  Pritam and Udham reached Mexico in January 1924.4 Their ship finally docked in Tampico, a port in the state of Tamaulipas5 in Mexico’s north-east. Close to their American dream, it must have looked and felt much more like a nightmare. A vast oil terminal sprawled alongside the Panuco river, tankers and refineries smeared land, sky and water.

  The air was thick with pollution, but also with intrigue. Thanks to its oil reserves, Tampico had become supremely strategically important; war had taught everyone the fragility of supply lines and as a result the place crawled with foreign agents, each attempting to stake a claim on its natural resources. Alongside the state operators, local Mexican warlords vied for territory and power, too.

  Udham, serving in Basra during the war, had seen with his own eyes how brutally men could fight over oil. He would not have been fazed by what he saw in Tampico, but for a boy like Pritam, who had never ventured out of Patiala, it must have been immensely overwhelming. Dragging his wide-eyed ward behind him, Udham made for the place Gurbux Singh had told him about. El Paso would be better. El Paso would get them both into America.

  Texas on one side, Mexico on the other, the towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez nestled against one another, connected by a bridge. When Udham and Pritam arrived on the Mexican side of the border, the atmosphere was particularly tense. Prohibition was strictly in force in El Paso, yet Juárez was awash with nightclubs, cabarets and dance halls. Smugglers flourished, trafficking drugs and liquor into America while lawmen peppered the air with bullets trying to stop them. The border territory was a place of gunfights and gangsters and the younger of the two men, already stressed by the hostility of this new land, must have been more anxious than ever to get into America.

  All Pritam wanted to do was open his books and begin a new chapter in his life; however, he would find himself stuck in El Paso for the next ten months. Days after his arrival, the student was detained by American border guards as he tried, legitimately he thought, to gain entry to America. Clutching his documents of acceptance from Michigan University and supporting letters from Riggs, he was told that not only would he not be allowed into America, he would also be held in one of the burgeoning new detention facilities springing up on the border. There he would have to wait until the Americans were ready to deport him back to India.

  Professor Riggs did his best to help Pritam from Ann Arbor, remonstrating directly and repeatedly with the Department of Labor, begging them to reconsider his student’s case, but he found his government immovable on the matter. Congress was in the process of passing the Labor Appropriation Act of 1924, officially establishing the US Border Patrol as an independent law enforcement body. There seemed little appetite to overturn one of their first decisions. As Pritam’s plight became progressively more pitiful, Riggs turned to the press, sharing the Indian student’s situation with sympathetic reporters. This was no hardened criminal; he was a bright young boy who wanted to learn. Michigan readers would become familiar with ‘Pritam’s adventures’,6 and the sporadic updates on his case were received with interest and compassion.

  One reporter even described Pritam as a stranded ‘Indian Prince’,7 an uncharacteristic misrepresentation of the boy, especially since it was so easy to disprove. Udham, on the other hand, would happily claim to be Indian royalty on a number of occasions in the future. If Pritam had, in desperation, temporarily suspended his own judgement and taken Udham’s advice to augment his identity, it showed just how much of an influence his mentor was having on him.

  Professor Riggs continued to apply pressure and the publicity he drummed up about the government’s intransigence finally caused the authorities to reconsider, but only if Pritam could provide a bond of $1,000. The sum was supposed to ensure that he would not simply enter the country and disappear into a sea of undocumented aliens. It was astronomically high for a man of no means.

  Pritam might have despaired at the insurmountable hurdle, but Riggs came to the rescue once again, convincing a handful of American businessmen to stump up the cash.8 Though he had never even met Pritam, Riggs was not about to give up on the boy on the border. In October 1924, the money and paperwork finally secured Pritam’s entry. When the border guards in El Paso let Pritam out of detention and into America, they stamped his official papers, noting that the teenager was travelling alone.9

  Not for the last time, Udham Singh appears to have jettisoned someone who relied on him. There can be no doubt that some level of affection must have developed during the long months they spent together. On Udham’s assurance, Pritam had travelled to the other end of the world; yet just when Pritam needed him most, Udham appears to have dumped him and run. These were the actions of a man who would let nobody get in the way of his revenge, not even a young lad he must have felt some responsibility towards.

  Bizarrely, Pritam never seemed to bear a grudge against Udham. When he finally arrived in Michigan and came face to face with the reporters who had been covering his story for months, Pritam made no mention of his delinquent guardian. Nor did he criticise the American authorities who had caused him so much misery for so long.
Instead, Pritam turned all his built-up frustration on the Raj:

  ‘Justice for Indians and Europeans is not equal in India,’ said Pritam Singh, Michigan’s most recent arrival from India. ‘If an Indian kills an Englishman he is hung, but if an Englishman kills an Indian the English judge sitting on the bench fines him £100 or sentences him to one month’s imprisonment . . . The British government is doing all within its power to maintain its rule in India.’10

  The voice coming out of Pritam’s mouth was unmistakably Udham’s. But where was the rest of him?

  Pritam had chosen to enter America legally,11 having no choice but to gain official stamps before the University in Michigan could accept him. Udham had no such compulsion. There was no friendly professor waiting for him, no bond of money, and no promise of work. Pritam had been a means to an end, and when he got himself detained, he lost his value to Udham. If there was no ward, there was no need for a chaperone.

  Ghadars had been operating an illicit corridor between Mexico and America for some years. Though it was well known to the British police and secret service, they had been unable to stop even those Indians on their ‘wanted list’ from getting into the United States illegally and disappearing into the Ghadar fog. The United States had morphed into a nursery, raising a new breed of anti-colonial hybrid – the Indian Bolshevik.

  Sir David Petrie, the director of the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi, described his new enemy as the ‘Sikh Comintern’, a phrase he himself had coined to describe the worrying alliance between Indian militants and Russian Communists. No matter what Petrie did, or how he tried to get ahead of the problem, Indian insurgents were slipping through his fingers and falling into the arms of the Russians.

  These included dangerous Ghadars who had been showing up in Moscow since the early 1920s. British spies could only watch in impotent alarm as the Bolsheviks armed and trained these young disaffected Punjabis and, like a regiment of toy soldiers, wound them up and sent them back to the Raj. Petrie knew it, but could do little to stop it.

  Aside from his Sikh Comintern, another line of dangerous traffic was developing: a web connecting Russia, India, Mexico and the United States. A Bengali named M. N. Roy, who had been on a British watch list since the start of the war, had already forged powerful links between himself and Moscow’s Communist government.

  Based in Mexico in the 1920s, Roy had been invited to the Second World Congress of the Communist International, where he had been received by Lenin himself. It was Roy who founded the Mexican Communist Party, the first such entity to exist outside Soviet Russia. He counted prominent Comintern agents like Mikhail Borodin, an adviser to Lenin and later Mao Zedong, as close personal friends.

  Another Indian nationalist, Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje, a founding father of the Ghadars, was also using Mexico as his base in the 1920s. Petrie knew of Khankhoje from his involvement in the Hindu–German Conspiracy of 1915, the ultimately doomed Berlin-backed attempt to trigger a mutiny within the ranks of the British Indian Army during the First World War. Khankhoje had slipped through British fingers with frustrating ease, travelling to Russia and consorting with the Bolsheviks at the very highest levels.

  Ever since 1919, the year of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the Russians had been telegraphing their interest in provoking an Indian uprising as a means to spreading Communism around the world. Four months after Dyer’s actions, Trotsky had presented his Eastern doctrine in a secret memo to the Communist hierarchy:

  There is no doubt at all that our Red Army constitutes an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain of world politics than in the European terrain . . . The road to India may prove at the given moment to be more readily passable and shorter than the road to Soviet Hungary. The road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal.12

  While Udham sought his way across the border in 1924, Khankhoje was back in Mexico, formulating high-level plans to destabilise the Raj. Others in his orbit took on the more mundane job of human trafficking. A Sikh named Teja Singh regularly smuggled Ghadar sympathisers into America from Mexico, and it is likely he had some hand in Udham’s illegal crossing. One year later, Teja Singh would be caught and deported back to India to face trial as one of the masterminds of the Ghadars’ people-smuggling operation.13

  What his route was, we do not know, but once safely on the other side of the border, Udham made his way to Claremont in California. It was a new town, barely older than he was himself.

  Carving a route between Chicago and Los Angeles, the Santa Fe Railroad company had gouged Claremont out of Native American land in 1887. There were rumours of gold in the surrounding hills, prompting the railroad to splash out on a rest stop complete with a handsome high-end hotel in the new town. The Claremont Hotel became known locally as ‘the castle’, and would prove to be a monumental and expensive mistake.

  The rocky soil at the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains contained neither treasure nor nutrients for arable farming. For a while, Claremont, like the failing crops around it, withered, until a nearby college stepped in to give the place a new lease of life. A group of Protestant churchmen wishing to create a University of Oxford on the west coast of America bought up the hotel, repurposed the shell and added to it.

  The railroad continued to snake its way into the distance while Pomona College sprouted from Claremont’s soil. Other colleges grew around it and very quickly Claremont was reborn as a handsome college town. When Udham arrived in 1924, he would have been able to walk down Oxford Avenue and Cambridge Street, surrounded by new buildings and the buzz of young people, their hopes and ideals.

  By the time Udham reached Claremont, it had also started to gain a reputation for fruit. The soil, though useless for cereal crops, was perfect for orange and lemon trees. A cooperative of fruit farmers, who would later become known as ‘Sunkist’, bought huge tracts of land and brought in bumper harvests. Fruit picking was a labour-intensive affair, and Mexican families came to Claremont in their droves to work in the citrus groves. So too did Punjabi itinerant labourers. Udham would have seen a town of two halves: one white and one brown; one with money, the other with muscle. It was perfect territory for a Ghadar to do his work.

  Ghadars had been active in American university towns for almost a decade. Two of the first to report on the phenomena were British intelligence officers F. C. Isemonger and J. Slattery. Their reports had made for uneasy reading: ‘On the 10th May there was a series of meetings at Fresno, Upland, Oxnard and Los Angeles. Weekly meetings were also held at Claremont during May at which the audience was exhorted to shed its blood in expelling the British from India.’14

  Ghadar meetings were also being held in Astoria, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, as well as in Stockton, Jersey, and Elton in California. It was becoming difficult for the British to keep up with the activity. Michigan, where Pritam had finally taken up his place, was also fertile territory. Another Indian student studying for his Master’s degree in economics and political science at Michigan State University reported that the first time he came into contact with Ghadars was when he was a student in America. His name was S. Pratap Singh Kairon, and he would one day become the chief minister of Punjab, in a free India.15

  Udham, having smuggled himself into the country, was immediately put to work by the Ghadars. He became their driver, ferrying Indians arriving on the Pacific Coast to secret destinations around the United States.16 When not behind the steering wheel of his car, Udham read Ghadar literature and studied the men around him even more carefully. One of them, Jawand Singh,17 divided his time between El Paso, Pomona and San Francisco, the very Ghadar corridor that had brought Udham into the United States. Another, Sudagar Singh, had travelled to the United States from Japan in 1921, and spent most of his time in Berkeley, the very epicentre of Ghadar activity.18

  Part of the American Ghadar brotherhood at last, Udham was now among men who knew nothing of his tragic childhood and cared little that he was Kamboj. He could be
anything he wanted to be. In the land of opportunity, all he wanted to be was an assassin.

  In Claremont, Udham found the space and opportunity to practise the art of disguise: walking with a straight back in a smart suit in one half of Claremont and disappearing into the brown half in his labourer’s clothes. Without meaning to, the university town was giving him the very education he had been craving, but it was also giving him status. One academic has suggested that Udham was something of a minor celebrity in Indian circles when he arrived in the United States: ‘It seems likely that Udham Singh was sponsored by the Ghadar Party to visit [numerous cities in America] to give them a first-hand account of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, to promote the growth of local branches of the party, and to raise funds.’19

  As for his own income, if he needed money, Sudagar and Jawand gave him what they could,20 but before long Udham’s tastes were outstripping what they were able to provide. Out of the grip of poverty, surrounded by people who had more money than he had ever dreamed of, Udham began to aspire to be more ‘American’. He developed a taste for the finer things – nice clothes, good shoes, and better cars.

  To supplement his Ghadar pin money, Udham found himself a job as a mechanic in a garage selling Hudson motorcars.21 The company was young and pushy, trying to force its way into the market between Ford and Chevrolet, giants of the motor industry. Hudson cars were distinctive, flashy, and came in bright colours. Like the cars he worked on, Udham too was becoming more ostentatious, dressing in the high-lapelled, slim-fitting pinstripe suits that were the height of fashion in the 1920s.