Scintillating Sydney and Guru ka langar with the three-hundred-strong Sikh community of Coff ‘s Harbour are among the high spots of the second half of the sojourn. Sydney is Australia’s largest city - its real commercial, political, social and cultural capital. Sydney is to Australia what New York is to America, Bombay and Calcutta to India. Canberra is like Washington and New Delhi - a babu city with lots of greenery basking in a small-town atmosphere.
Sydney scintillates with life. In some parts, like King’s Cross, there is traffic all twenty-four hours: brothels, striptease joints, blue cinemas, junkies and streetwalkers. What makes a city a city is the fragrance of stale beer, cigar smoke and perfume; a little bit of sin is like a drop of Angostura in a tot of gin. Sydney has a big dollop of sin in its cocktail. I had asked to be allowed four days in Sydney.
My hosts are Captain Mohan Singh Kohli, the man who put nine Indians atop the Everest, and his wife, Pushpa. From the airport I go to his garden house in the suburbs. The guests include our consul-general, Virendra Pal Singh, Hemant Gup te and I.C. Khanna of our Tourist Office and John Foxlittle, PRO of Air-India (that really is his name). There is also Sridhar Rao, head of the Tea Board, and his very Telugu filmstar-looking wife Saraswati, granddaughter of ex-President V.V. Giri. If all the Giris’ grandchildren look like Saraswati, I am glad the Giris gave India sixteen sons and daughters.
I try and gather statistics of the Indian community in Australia. It is estimated that there are about twenty thousand Indians and over one lakh Anglo-Indians who no longer acknowledge their Oriental ancestry. Gujaratis are the most numerous, followed by Punjabis (mainly Sikhs), Tamilians, Mangaloreans and Goans. All of them are doing well. A few names are mentioned as outstanding: Balwant Singh Saini, head of the department of agriculture, Brisbane University, Professor Raj of the department of history, Queensland University, Gurcharan Singh Siddhu of the CSIR and Dr Hariharan, son-in-law of the late Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Aiyar.
However, the professions do not give the same sense of belonging as does shopkeeping and more than shopkeeping, working on the soil. That distinction goes only to the Sikh farmers who have taken root in Australian soil. Their success forms a subchapter of the Indians’ success story. And they are the ones who make light of all they have earned by toil and sweat.
This Sardarji story (variations of which you might have heard elsewhere) is narrated to me. Two new emigrants, Santa Singh and Banta Singh (popular names for characters in Sardarji jokes), arrived in Australia. A few days later Santa Singh was seen driving a Mercedes Benz. ‘Oi, Santeya! How did you come by this fancy motor?’ enquired Banta. Replied Santa: ‘There was this golden-haired mutiar who picks me up at a traffic light. She drives me into the jungle and parks the car. She strips herself and says, “Take whatever you want to take.” So I take her car. Wasn’t that something?’ Banta is not impressed. ‘Why did you leave her clothes? We could have sold them and had a good meal.’
As may be expected, where there are Indians, there is a proliferation of Indian associations. There is the India League of Australia, the Indo-Australian Society, several Sikh, Bangla, Gujarati and Goan associations. None of them gets on with the others.
My window looks down upon the massive Sydney Bridge and the petal-shaped Opera House, the pride of Australia. It is an ugly building which has become the Mecca of Australian ballet and classical music. The Australians are a remarkable combination of talents - the world’s best cricketers, tennis players, swimmers and now hockey players as well. They have also produced some of the world’s best singers, ballet dancers and writers. Opera singer Melba was Australian. So are Joan Sutherland and ballet director Sir Robert Helpman. Morris West (Devil’s Advocate, The Shoes of the Fisherman), Patrick White, Nobel Prize-winner for literature in 1973 (Happy Valley, The Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot, The Living and the Dead, Voss, The Aunt’s Story), Alan Moore-Head (The White Nile, The Blue Nile, No Room in the Ark), the brothers Colin and Graham McCinnes, Judith Wright and a host of others rated tops in the world of English letters are Australian. Nolan and Drysdale, painters of international repute, are Australian. I muse over all this as I watch the sun come up over Sydney Harbour.
The morning is wasted in a television studio telecasting the woman’s hour. I am sandwiched between two lovelies from Air-India, Sidhwa and Turner. They demonstrate the art of wearing the sari, the excellence of Indian tea. In between the wrapping and unwrapping of saris, I explain the Janata-CFD victory and the downfall of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi. I don’t know how the Australian shrimatis take this cocktail of garments, politics and chai. However, the next hour I am put through a gruelling cross-examination by Caroline Jones over the radio network. By the time I emerge from the studio there is a sheaf of messages from listeners, many of whom I had known forty years ago, asking me to ring back. Among the callers is Peggy Holroyd, wife of Derek, who was BBC representative in Delhi twenty years ago and is now settled in Perth. It would appear that Australians keep their transistors going while they work.
My notion of a holiday abroad is to stroll about the streets, look at the shop windows and ogle at pretty girls. They leave me little time for this indulgence. I manage to give the slip to my escorts and walk across Sydney Bridge, through Hyde Park (a small, squarish plot of green) into the main shopping centre. I pick up the statuesque Leila Siddhu - Norwegian-born blonde wife of a Sikh engineer - and with her help buy bras and panties for a variety of Indian ladies.
Then comes the ordeal. I am scheduled to deliver a lunch-hour talk to the students of Sydney University. I am mentally prepared to speak to a small group of Indians and their Australian girlfriends (or vice versa) in a small classroom. What confronts me is a vast sunlit quadrangle with a thousand boys and girls swilling beer, munching sandwiches, gossiping or cuddling. It requires marketplace oratory which vendors of herbal medicines and Christian missionaries practised half a century ago. I yell over the microphone. I fight a losing battle against beer and smoking. By the time I finish, I am a nervous wreck.
A few hours later I am subjected to a reverse experience at the New South Wales University. I am scheduled to speak on the Sikhs. I prepare myself for mass oratory. I find myself at one end of a table alongside Professor Mukerjee with a dozen very scholarly-looking academics, including Marie Munster who has written a thesis on the Sikh community in Australia. The experience is more unnerving than the lunch-hour nightmare. I ramble on and on interrupted only by a kookaburra which alights on the window-sill and mocks my academic pretensions with its jackassish laughter.
From the quantities of liquor I put down in the faculty canteen, Mohan Singh Kohli guesses my need for compensation for what he has put me through. He drives me down to King’s Cross and says, ‘I know you like an after-dinner stroll.’
So we saunter round the lovely thistle-bloom fountain, past sex shops, underclad ladies with cigarettes hanging from their lips and their hands on their hips. Past blue cinema houses and striptease joints.
Then we dive into one of them to see ‘how Aussies do it’. The lady stripping herself looks more Oriental than Australian. Of the audience of about a dozen men, at least ten are Chinese or Malays. The lady on the stage takes a painfully long time to denude herself and then only a miserable second or two to show what she has. The second and the third do much the same. I feel cheated of the money that Kohli has spent on me. The final coup de grâce is delivered by a youngster sitting in the front seat. He turns round and greets me with a very knowing ‘sat sri akal’. It is time to go to bed.
As the sun rises, a Fokker Friendship plane takes off from Sydney and heads northwards. It flies along the Pacific coast over a succession of cities interspersed by green hills, rivers and lakes. An hour and a halflater it lands at Coff’s Harbour. Warm, damp air floods into the plane. You are in tropical Australia where grow banana, avocado and pineapple. At Coff’s Harbour, a bearded, beturbaned Sikh is a familiar sight; so is his Sardarni in her salwar-kameez wheeling a trolley in the supermarket. In
the region live about 150 families of Sardar farmers. Their coming to the region and their prosperity make a heart-warming fairy tale.
Some time in the 1880s one Inder Singh, a Jat from village Malpur Arkan in district Jalandhar, looking for a living happened to find his way to the Pacific coast where white settlers were trying to grow cane and bananas. Inder Singh worked as a labourer. He saw that wages were plentiful, land even more so. He returned to his village and spread the word. He came back with a few friends and relatives. They worked as labourers and as soon as they had saved up enough, they bought land which would yield harvest to their tillage. Most of these Sikh farmers or their parents migrated to Australia between 1880 and 1890. In 1901 the Australian government introduced the visa system based on the White Australia policy - Italians, Greeks, Turks, etc., were welcome. Indians; Chinese and Blacks were not.
The welcome is in Indian style: marigold garlands and clasping of both hands synchronized with a ‘sat sri akal’. Then we drive in a cavalcade through Coff’s Harbour and into the open country along the Pacific Highway which joins Sydney to Brisbane. We have the banana-covered hills on our left and the Pacific on our right. Tall tapering eucalypti, massive banyan and pine. Motels and gas stations are all very American-looking. And suddenly atop a hill on the right is a snow-white square building with a small onion-shaped dome. Beside it is a flagpole drapped in yellow with the Khalsa emblem of a quoit and crossed swords fluttering in the ocean breeze. A signboard announces, Guru Nanak Sikh Temple, Woolgoolga.
There is a line of swarthy, bronzed men armed with garlands. Some sport turbans and beards, others are ‘mechanized’. More ‘sat sri akals’ before we enter the clean, spacious temple to make obeisance to the Granth Sahib and a copy of its translation in English which shares the pedestal with the holy book. Teja Singh Garewal, who performs the functions of a priest, chants an appropriate hymn from the Granth, says a few words of welcome and we are off.
As is well known, where there are two Indians there are two factions: where there are two Sikhs, there are three factions. The minuscule Sikh community of Woolgoolga (three hundred) has two temples and is split into sub-factions too numerous to count. A visitor must not offend anyone - if he has breakfast with one, he must have lunch with the other and a small Scotch accepted from one must be compensated for by a double from his rival. The results can be devastating for the stomach and the liver.
Kulbir Singh Atwal takes over. He came nine years ago as a son-in-law. Now he owns his own plantation called Golden Glow, a lovely bungalow and three cars. He first takes me to visit his mother-in-law. Beneath the shade of a banyan tree, a grey-bearded patriarch puts down three cans before he finally wipes the froth off his whiskers.
Our conversation is in rustic Malwa Punjabi and Australian English. It takes me some time to catch on that nime is name, kine cane, try tray, bison basin and snikes snakes. No wonder they call the Australian language Strine (Australian)!
We report for lunch in the home of Tejpal (Paul) Atwal in Sandy Beach. The ladies in salwar-kameez are baking chapatis - the men, including the aged patriarch, resume swilling beer. I go out to spot a kookaburra: it looks somewhat like a cross between our roller (neelkanth) and a white-breasted kingfisher. Its call is reminiscent of the laugh of a villian in Hindi films - hence the popular name Laughing Jackass. The lunch is an enormous spread of pulao, chapatis, chicken, matar paneer followed by pineapple cake. The patriarch washes each morsel down with a healthy swig of beer and while I top my lunch up with black coffee, I see him open another couple of cans for internal irrigation. There’s a Punjabi peasant for you! Beer is the next best thing to lassi.
At 5 p.m. we reassemble in the gurdwara. Once more there is recitation from the Granth and singing of hymns. We are about 150 people in the tiny chapel atop a green hill. There is a clap of thunder and lightning and rain - the avocado, pine and cypress blow in the gale. A loneliness envelops me. Then a sense of pride in these manly men and their handsome women who, ten thousand miles away from the land that gave them birth, keep the flag of their faith flying. They want me to make a speech. I can barely wish them to be of good cheer (charhdi kald) - may the Guru’s hand always rest on their shoulders.
We adjourn to the ‘Guru ka langar’ in the refectory beside the temple. The women are busy in the kitchen. On the refectory table in the main hall are dozens of tumblers; in the corner a barrel holding fifty-eight gallons of beer. For me they have a bottle of Scotch and a dozen bottles of soda. It is not long before our voices rise and we begin to shout at each other. I tell them some bawdy jokes in Punjabi, they explode with laughter. They sing bawdy songs. I double up with a bellyache of laughter. They recite a doggerel in my honour alluding to me as the jathedar of the weekly akhbar. Within one hour the barrel of beer is empty - it is more than a gallon to each man. I plead for dinner, threaten to walk out, sulk. They give me dinner. What would the great Guru think of such a langar!
It is time to say farewell. I turn to one of the ladies who has been busy in the kitchen to thank her. I ask her how she likes being thousands of miles away from her village. She replies in Australian-Punjabi: ‘Bhai itthe libbing (living) bada good ya.’ Bless her soul!
There always comes the last day when you ruminate over what you could have seen and done - and didn’t. I have neither seen a kangaroo nor a wallaby, neither a koala bear nor the duck-billed platypus. I haven’t ‘done’ an opera or a ballet. All I saw was an exhibition of Chinese treasures. Not a picture likely to be banned in India; nor a blue film. Not even the Lady Jane beach (remarkable choice of name after Lady Chatterley) where everyone goes naked. Captain Kohli compensates me by driving me to Bondi beach which is near Sydney airport. But after what I was expecting, the girls appear obscenely overdressed in their bikinis. ‘If you stayed a little longer I could have driven you to Lady Jane,’ says the mountaineer. I can’t stay any longer because Air-India had trouble in finding me a seat on their flight to Bombay. Mercifully, a party cancelled its bookings at the last minute and so I am on.
The economy class is again packed with Greeks, Turks and others on their way to Europe. Many take Air-India to go on to England or the United States. If only Bombay airport had more to offer than its morgue of duty-free stores and a shorter halt for onward-going passengers, Air-India could run a daily Jumbo service between Australia and New York and mint a fortune in foreign exchange for India.
Captain Dhillon invites me to join him in the cockpit as we begin our descent over Perth. I recognize some of the landmarks: the Swan River, the bridge, the parks and hotels. In the transit lounge I find myself in the arms of Peggy Holroyd and her husband Derek. They are English by birth but their heart is in India. Every time Peggy talks of Delhi and her many Indian friends her lovely eyes are clouded. ‘I am homesick for India,’ she says as the flight is called. ‘Give everyone my love,’ she adds, giving me a sample of what she is sending to 600 million Indians. I am also homesick for India. So farewell Australia.
Pakistan: Sweet and Sour
I return to the country where I was born, brought up and sustained for the first half of my life as a stranger. If its people had turned hostile towards me I would not bother to go back to it: what is a country if not its people! However, despite the three bloody wars we fought with them, and despite the fact that our leaders spit abuse at each other and the air is thick with rumours of a fourth war, I go to Pakistan as a Hindu goes to Varanasi, a Muslim to Mecca. It is my teerthsthaan where I perform my Haj and my Umra. This is where my roots are. I have nourished them with tears of nostalgia and sheltered them from venomous winds of hate with my bare hands.
I am not alone in my resolve never to let hate overcome my love for my neighbour. What if years ago we divided our patrimony and parted company? There are millions of others who though they do not share my senile sentimentality for the land of their birth are tortured alternately by love and hatred towards it. There is my ninety-year-old mother who demands: ‘Has some hakeem ordered you to go to Pakist
an? These Pakistanis are a bari zaalim qaum [very cruel people]; they’ll kill you. When you get to Lahore, give my love to Asghari, Akhtari, Jameela, Rabbia, Nusrat, Yasmeen. Sister Allaha Rakhi has been dead for some years but if you meet any of her children tell them their maasi [aunt] sends them her love. How I miss my village Mitha Tiwana! I wish I could see it once before I go. But must you go to Pakistan? They are very zaalim. . . ‘ And so on.
The start is auspicious. The police officer at Palam frisks me with his bare hands and then goes over my body with his metal detector. He pays special attention to my turban - I could be concealing a revolver in its folds - and to my side where I could be carrying a kirpan. The detector passes over my head and sides in silence. But as it is run down my frontage it lets out a loud bleep of complaint. The officer tries again. And again the tell-tale bleep. What could I possibly conceal in my trouser front? Prem Bhatia, editor of The Tribune who is in the queue behind, offers an explanation: ‘Fauladi hai! [What he’s got there is made of steel].’ Everyone around bursts out in laughter. The culprit is my zip fastener.
After clearing security at the airport we line up along the PIA jet on the tarmac. It is a bitterly cold winter evening but we have to await our turn for a second body search. Two fierce-looking, hook-nosed Pakistani commandos in awami suits re-examine our handbags and give us another frisking before they let us in the aircraft. Pakistanis are more vigorously researched and re-frisked than us Indians. They are not afraid of us but of their own countrymen owing allegiance to Bhutto’s Al Zulfiqar.
I judge airways’ companies by the looks of their stewardesses and their clientele by its manners. I am glad to note that Indian Airlines girls look better than their Pakistani hawaii sisters but the manners of Pakistani passengers are as deplorable as those of Indians. Where the Indian girls score is with their smiles. In Pakistan a girl who smiles is still regarded as wanton. (It is the same with their television announcers: waxen, frozen-faced with no animation in their voices.) Where Indian passengers score black marks for ill-behaviour is in the liberties they try to take with air hostesses. Recently a fellow MP was reportedly unable to resist the temptation of letting his hands stray on the shapely figure of a lass taking something out of an overhead locker. Such behaviour in Pakistani aircraft could entail risk of the errant hand being lopped off and its owner’s backside being subjected to a few well-deserved lashes. Consequently, ill-mannered Pakistani passengers content themselves by being rude to stewardesses.
Sex,Scotch and Scholarship Page 11