by Amrit Chima
“He never said a word, only cried like a baby,” the head guard told them as Vakash loosened the chains. He then tossed Avani’s elephant at Ranjit’s feet where it landed with a clatter. “Oi, get out of here, Ranjit baby. Time to go, unless you want to stay for more.”
Vakash nodded at Baba Singh. “No Bansals here,” he said, following the head guard down the hallway, heels clicking on the cement floor.
“Baba?” Ranjit said faintly. “Did you come for me?”
Baba Singh’s knees went weak and he grabbed the cell bars to steady himself. “God,” he whispered, face to face with a fate that should have been his. “Wait,” he cried out to the guards.
They stopped.
“The doctor was brought here in the year 1912,” he repeated, his voice loud and panicked. “You might remember. He had a chipped tooth, and his hair was always combed, and he spoke strangely, his mouth was red from too much paan, and his favorite sweets were ladoos.”
“Don’t recall.” The head guard shrugged and moved on down the corridor.
“Is this what I have done to him?” Baba Singh choked, turning back to his brother.
Ranjit picked up the elephant with his bloody fingers as Khushwant and Desa rushed in to help him stand. “No, Baba,” he said, misunderstanding. “These were my choices. You were right. I should have stayed with you.” He started to cough.
“What did I tell you, Ranjit?” Baba Singh said, standing next to his brother. “You were just running. I did not want you to go.” He slid his hand around Ranjit’s waist, speaking softly, “I am much worse. What I did was so much worse. And all this time I have hated you.”
Ranjit smiled weakly. “I know, Baba. I have hated myself.”
~ ~ ~
A son was not the sort of penance Baba Singh had expected for his crime, but when Manmohan was born he fully comprehended the enormity of what he had done. He had ruined his own child with a legacy of violence and brutality, had brought him into a world of greed and cruelty. Over the next two years, Baba Singh handled his son at a distance, watched him grow with an increasing concern that the social and political threats continuing to brew around them would one day turn Manmohan into the enraged and lost man that he had become.
And he could hardly bear his wife’s discerning eyes, her intuitive understanding that something was wrong, that something had changed despite his obliging smiles. He had also ruined her, had sentenced her to a life with a murderer. He could not touch her the way he once had. He was tentative, worried that he would be too rough, thinking all the time that she would not be able to stand his hands on her if she knew.
Guilt for all measure of things now filled Baba Singh’s days and months and years. He spent a great deal of time with Ranjit, asking questions about his search for Kiran and Avani, those sleepless nights in which he had huddled in corners, fending off rats, searching for leads, starving for food. He asked about his brother’s time in prison, about those many meetings in San Francisco, about how the Ghadar party had incited poor, rash men to rise up without reason or logic, about how Ranjit had been led by rich men, equally as rash, who had caused so many to die, who had allowed torture without ever coming to rescue those who sacrificed everything. “Cowards,” his brother muttered, touching his eye.
Every detail was critical, every second Ranjit had experienced hopelessness and sorrow had to be examined, pitted against all those years of Baba Singh’s self-righteousness. Yet he eventually realized that Ranjit would rather not have relived any of it, that his brother shared his stories only to atone for what he believed were his own failings, and that too increased Baba Singh’s guilt. He would have tied himself to a tree if he could have, would have beat his own body for the penalties he had not paid, for the dues he owed.
Indeed, it was his secret hope that the British officer would return to arrest him, would brandish his pistol and cart him away to prison. Yet, although the officer had visited the neighboring villages in recent years, he had no reason to set foot in Barapind. After Ratan, the villagers had agreed to work more cooperatively. Prem’s insistence on sinking a new well and Ranjit and Khushwant’s willingness to venture regularly into Amritsar—where the earnings for the harvests were better—had staved off further calamity for their small community. Still, they could sense another wave of unrest approaching.
Gandhi was touting peace even as British war recruiters continued to flash their shiny uniforms in Amarpur and the surrounding villages. After more failed monsoons and a major outbreak of influenza, they ruthlessly sponged up nearly every remaining, able-bodied Sikh peasant warrior willing to fight for the British crown. With many on the brink of starvation, peace was becoming more and more problematic to master. Farmers and peasants all anticipated glorious appreciation for their sons’ defense of the British, but instead their problems were compounded by yet another unsympathetic increase in taxes and a resurgence of floggings in neighboring villages for nonpayment.
When the Great War finally ended in 1919, the countryside held its breath with collective relief, and grief for those who had died. Yet after the soldiers returned—expecting to be hailed, to be garlanded with flowers and riches—to discover their farms in ruin despite the savings they had sent home, pillaged by the British for whom they had just won the war, the mood again shifted. The people breathed steam and fire, enraged by too much abuse. They protested, burning post offices and banks and derailing goods trains.
Though a difficult task, Gandhi, with his considerable influence, managed to calm the public. He appealed to a purer sense of patriotism. Stop the violence, he reasoned. Join his peaceful march. Determining their voices would best be heard from the Golden Temple, Northern India’s holiest of shrines, he called on them to assemble there, and over five thousand disillusioned Indian citizens began their trek to the meeting place in Amritsar.
“I have to go, Baba,” Ranjit said. He had come to Barapind, had asked Baba Singh to step outside the mud hut so they could speak. “Ishwar asked me. After what happened to Tejinder, I have to go. He thinks Tejinder died for nothing.” He crossed the lane to stand in the shade of a small rosewood tree.
Baba Singh reached up to grab a tree branch, his kurta feeling too big around his shoulders when he stretched out his arm. He had not eaten much since Ishwar had come to tell them about Tejinder. “They will not allow this protest,” he said. “After everything that has happened you should know that much.”
“Khushwant is going with us,” his brother replied.
Manmohan peeked his head through the front door curtain, searching for them.
Ranjit beckoned to him. “Come,” he said, and the boy sprinted across the lane toward his uncle. “Baba, you should bring him. There will be many other children. Ghandiji’s message is clear. None of us will have weapons. There will be no fighting.” He smiled.
Baba Singh released the branch. “Ranjit, haven’t you had enough?”
His brother made a wry face, picking Manmohan up and settling him on his hip. “I am not trying to save the world anymore, Baba. I just want a place in it.”
Manmohan grinned happily in his uncle’s arms.
Ranjit returned the smile, but after a moment it faded. “He is so little. Avani was this little the last time I saw her.”
“I cannot remember what she was like,” Baba Singh replied, his guilt returning. “Or Kiran. But I like to think they are still this little, safe and happy, on some great adventure, not here, never knowing what will come next.”
“What about him?” Ranjit asked, indicating Manmohan. “What will happen to him if he stays here in the middle of this madness? How can we do nothing for him?”
Baba Singh looked gravely at his brother’s scarred face.
Ranjit pulled Avani’s elephant out from a loose, hidden pocket in his kurta. “You can keep this until I get back,” he told his nephew. “I will not be long.”
Baba Singh watched as his son took the elephant. Then, with a smile, toy in hand, Manmohan offered it t
o his father.
“No, son,” Baba Singh said. “It is your job to keep it safe.”
The next day, Baba Singh—standing with his wife, his son, Desa, and Yashbir—waved to his brothers, Ishwar, and many others as they were carried away on tongas down the road leading to Amritsar.
~ ~ ~
Khushwant had lost his turban somewhere along the way home, but in his hand he clutched Ranjit’s. It had taken him nearly a day and a half, following the train tracks to Amarpur on foot. He was dehydrated and blubbering, his face gritty and tear streaked. His feet were blistered as he crossed the threshold into Hotel Toor. Desa relayed an urgent message to Baba Singh, and when he and Sada Kaur arrived in town, Khushwant was shivering on his charpoy in Yashbir’s arms, mumbling that he and Ishwar had been separated on their way back home. His clothes were stained a reddish brown and carried on them a familiar smell, assumed forever plastered shut in the back room of the hotel.
Gandhi’s peace it seemed had been ineffectual against British General Reginald Dyer’s order to fire indiscriminately into an unarmed crowd marching around the Golden Temple. Ceasing only when out of ammunition, Dyer left behind the stench of several hundred dead. The smell drifted with the breeze until it blanketed the Punjab flatlands. Ranjit’s turban reeked of his own death, and also of gunpowder and metal bullets.
Desa was incapacitated by grief. She had always been quiet in mourning, keeping the intensity of her loss private, born from the intensity of her love. She lay in her room in a near coma, a trance that was broken only when Sada Kaur began to brush her hair. Then she began to silently cry.
When Manmohan asked where his uncle was, Baba Singh gently took away Avani’s elephant and gave him Ranjit’s turban. He hoped it would make the boy understand that his uncle was not returning. Manmohan held it for a moment, then dropped the cloth to the floor and ran to his mother.
No body to cremate, Baba Singh found himself in his old room with only the folded yards of Ranjit’s turban and Avani’s wooden elephant. He opened the drawer of his bedside table and pulled out Dr. Bansal’s vial of mint extract. As he closed the drawer, he spotted the dark corner of something sticking out from behind the table and leaned forward to retrieve it. It was a leather book of some sort. He opened it and stared at the columns of numbers and names, of interest percentages scratched out and recalculated.
It was one of Mr. Grewal’s debt ledgers.
He slowly closed the book, remembering now that he had taken it, intending to erase at least this small portion of the region’s debts, to allow men to hold firmly to their land and to their families. He remembered the moment he had hidden it there, at some black point between running home and hearing that Dr. Bansal had been taken away for murder. He stared at the ledger, gripping it in his hand, confronted with the evidence about his own person, the sort who was not only physically able, but possessed the disposition to choke a man with his bare hands.
He took the ledger, the elephant, the turban, and Dr. Bansal’s vial to Lal’s room. Entering without knocking, Baba Singh found his father passed out on his charpoy, opium pipe on the bedside table, a line of spittle trickling from the corner of his mouth.
“Oi!” He shoved Lal with his foot, trying to nudge him awake. He kicked his father again, harder, but Lal was dreaming of something now, consumed by unconscious pleasures that reality no longer provided. Drool continued to trickle, oblivion apparent in his slack limbs. Lal had no clue of Ranjit’s death; in his dreams his son was still tall and handsome. Baba Singh opened his father’s storage chest and laid the items atop Harpreet’s sari, salwaar kameez, wooden comb, and ivory wedding bangle. He carefully arranged everything neatly before securing the chest shut, closing in the scent of death and a hint of still lingering gunpowder and metal bullets.
Colonial Police Batons & Pistols
1920–1922
Family Tree
The flyers posted in Amarpur’s open market were charcoal drawings of a turbaned Sikh constable astride a horse. He was dressed smartly in a police uniform—pressed khaki trousers and a knee-length, double-breasted overcoat with a thick leather belt at the waist—and his beard was neatly combed, the fierceness of a warrior in his narrowed eyes. In one hand he wielded a lathi, the iron-tipped bamboo baton brandished by policemen to maintain public order. In his holster was a pistol side arm, his other hand placed on it as if ready to draw. In Gurumukhi print, the flyers read, Constables Needed.
Baba Singh could not help but stare at the one tacked to the wooden post where he, his brother, and sister had positioned themselves to sell produce. He gritted his teeth, tearing his eyes away. Spreading a blanket on the market floor, Khushwant looked at the flyer and then at Baba Singh with unmistakable reproach. Their gazes fixed for one moment, then Baba Singh followed Desa to unload the tonga full of potatoes he had brought in from Barapind.
These particular flyers had been posted for several months now. Each time Baba Singh happened across them while on his way to visit Yashbir or the hotel, or to pick up supplies at the sundry shop, he found himself drawn to them. The severity of the constable’s gaze cast spells, eyes twisting in kaleidoscopic tunnels. In his rigid spine, in the way his leather-booted feet held the stirrups taut, poised for battle, in the scrawl of words across the bottom that stated the impressively high wage of sixteen rupees per month, there was a promise of escape, of freedom. But it meant uniting with the enemy, with the men who had killed Ranjit.
Tempted to the devil, Dr. Bansal had once said.
Baba Singh carried in and emptied a sack of potatoes onto their blanket. He knelt down to help Desa arrange them, wondering how he would tell his family what he intended to do. They would have arguments against him joining: the Amritsar massacre would be their strongest, but there was also Ishwar, who had gone home to Harpind after the war to find his family besieged by taxes, and Tejinder dead, and Ratan strapped to that tree.
They would not see the greater benefits, the money Ishwar and Tejinder had earned as members of the British armed services. Unlike Ratan, who had recently fled, abandoning his wife and son to poverty and shame, his cousins had avoided borrowing from the moneylender despite the taxes, a pressing threat that Baba Singh and Prem spoke of daily. Sixteen rupees a month was a sound solution to their many worries, was a means to protect Sada Kaur and Manmohan, to protect the new baby that was coming.
“Baba,” Khushwant said.
Baba Singh averted his eyes.
“How can you consider such a thing?” his brother asked as Desa began haggling with customers.
Baba Singh brushed a potato clean. “We should not have to worry all the time, to wonder when—not if—we will be ruined.”
“None of us are starving.”
“Not yet.”
Khushwant’s jaw tensed. “Ranjit would not be happy.”
“It is foreign patrol, police work, nothing dangerous. The war is over.”
“Many would disagree.”
Baba Singh lips tightened. He stood, ripped the flyer off the post. “Pride is not the answer. Pride is what killed Ranjit. This,” he pointed at the wage, “is the only important consideration.” He ran his finger down the list of requirements. “We have secondary school education. We are honorable, come from a race of warriors.”
“No, Baba.”
“What is the problem?” Desa asked.
Khushwant snatched the flyer from Baba Singh and gave it to her.
She took a moment to read it, then furiously crumpled it in her fist.
Baba Singh gently unclenched her fingers and removed it, careful not to let the paper tear. “I refuse to wait for another tax or drought. Or another war.” He looked at his sister. “You told me once that Ranjit was better than us because he did something.”
“I was wrong,” she said. “It is not enough to do just anything.”
“There are no other solutions,” he replied.
“What about your wife and children?” Khushwant asked. “And Yashji? How can yo
u leave him now, after everything he has done for us?”
“I will talk to Sada,” Baba Singh said, his tone blunt. “And Yashji knows why I need to do this.”
But Yashbir had no patience for Baba Singh’s relentless guilt. He had grown older, had begun to stoop and shuffle. His once sinewy arms were now frail, his hands spotted with age. “I need you to stay, Baba,” he said firmly.
“I have a chance to make things right,” Baba Singh told him.
“What you cannot face here, you will not be able to face elsewhere.”
“That is not what this is about. I can prevent—”
“Life happens, Baba. You cannot prevent it. You might not come back.”
“You told me to think of my family.”
“I am also your family, Baba.”
“Yashji—”
“I do not have lifetimes to wait,” the old man said.
Baba Singh looked sadly at his friend. “I am sorry, Yashji. I have to protect them.”
“I think you will find that Sada also sees it very differently than you.”
Indeed, Sada Kaur felt much the same as the blacksmith. When Baba Singh showed her the flyer, she quickly skimmed it then folded it in half, ran her thumb and forefinger along the crease and said, “I do not understand. Singapore, China, South Africa, Fiji.” She glanced at Manmohan who was asleep on a mat in the corner of their room.
“We spoke about this once.”
“I do not recall speaking of this.”
“You know what happened to my father. I cannot allow that to happen to us.”
“But nothing has been lost.”
“It always feels as though we are about to lose everything.”
She straightened her arm toward him, the paper in her hand like a fluttering white flag. “We have been doing fine. It is not necessary.”