A sweet and short visit

I HAD never heard of Pehowa (pronounced Pehva) till a few years ago when I ran into Swarn Chaudhary, Principal of D.A.V. College. "It’s hard to persuade busy people to come to a small town but our town people will be happy to meet you," he said. I fell for the bait. Exactly at 3 p.m. two young teachers from Chaudhary’s college, Ashok Chaudhary’s college, Ashok Chaudhary and Lakhvinder Singh Tarar, picked me up and we were on our way.

There was a time when I drove up and down the Grand Trunk Road (now Sher Shah Suri Marg) at least a dozen times during the summer. I knew names of towns, villages and landmarks which lay along the route like the back of my hand. No more. It was bumper to bumper driving on a two-lane highway. Whatever remained of Kipling’s Kim had disappeared a century ago. Now even what could be seen 10 years ago: green wheat, sugarcane fields, ponds full of buffalo heads and mounds of dung cakes have been obliterated by factories, fancy dhabas, temples and gurdwaras on either side of the road. It has also become homicidal. Barely 20 km from Delhi, I noticed cars ahead swerve around to avoid what seemed to be a traffic island. It was a handsome young man lying in the middle of the road dead as a marble statue. No one pulled up, no policeman was in sight. The car or truck which had killed him had left him where he was. So did all others. How callous have we become! Who wants to report a death on the road to the police ! They would question him first and he’d have to appear in court a dozen times. I wondered when the family of the young man would discover that one of them was gone forever.

These thoughts accompanied me all the way to Kurukshetra. I spent a few minutes with Principal Chaudhary, gulped a few spoonfulls of daal-chaawal and went to bed. I had a very disturbed night: vision of the young man lying in a pool of blood haunted me.

The raucous honk of the peacock woke me up. I pulled aside the curtains. The sun was streaming over a dew-washed lawn.

An hour later Lakhvinder Sngh arrived to take me to Pehowa. He was keen that I should see the campus of Kurukshetra University where he had studied and the town where he lived before we left for Pehowa. Kurukshetra University campus bears comparison with the best in the country: its acres of spacious lawns, playing grounds, college and administrative buildings are beautifully laid out. And adjoining it is the huge Brahma Sarovar where millions of pilgrims come on religious festivals to bathe. He also took me to the temple which marks the site where Sri Krishna gave sermons to Arjuna. And then we were on our way to Pehowa.

There are no dhabas or factories on the Kurukshetra-Pehowa road. It is a stretch of canary-yellow of the mustard in flower, tractors ploughing fallow land, trucks loaded with sugarcane on their way to factories. Half way to Pehowa there is a crocodile farm with over a dozen crocs basking in the sun with their jaws wide open. Pehowa is a small town with two cinema houses, two colleges, a lot of schools, temples and gurdwaras.

DAV College was all decked up, teaching staff in black gowns bordered with red or gold lined up on either side of the road armed with marigold garlands. We took our places on the dais: the over-thousand strong student community sat on chairs or stood on the sides. It was their day of the year. Stacked on the tables on the side were parcels of books and trophies for those who had distinguished themselves in studies or sports. They had to put up with speeches and the annual report before they could get their prizes.

The function lasted two hours. I had to forego the kind offer of advocate D.P. Dastoor to show round the 8000-year-old town with innumerable temples where people come in thousands to celebrate shradhs of their dead forefathers, have their genealogies traced by pandas, more rapacious than those to be found in Hardwar or Varanasi.

The return journey was more cheerful. A few miles from Pehowa our car had to pull up to let a marriage procession pass by. It was like any other Punjabi-Haryanvi affair: brass band, drums with bhangra dancers, men in pink turbans. Yet unlike another Ihave seen. The centre of everybody’s attention was the bridegroom with his face covered with a string of jasmine flowers. He was not riding a horse, a horse-pulled chariot or a flower-bedecked car, but a Hero Honda motor cycle (no doubt extracted as a part of his bride’s dowry) being pushed by his sarbala — younger brother. The spectacle was worth eight hours of car-ride from Delhi to Pehowa and back to Delhi.

Out of evil is goodness born

In November, 1984, when anti-Sikh violence broke out in Delhi among the areas where Sikh lives were lost and Sikh property looted included East Nizamuddin, an upper class residential area. Here lived Virendra Mohan Trehan in a large, air-conditioned bungalow, with a horde of servants and a fleet of motor cars. He was a self-made millionaire who had made his money in the telecommunication business. He was a Shimla-born Punjabi Hindu, one of the descendants of the clan to which the second Sikh Guru, Angad, had belonged. He was mortified by what he saw and immediately got a circle of friends — Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and Hindus — to set up the Foundation of Amity and National Solidarity (FANS). He was the moving spirit behind it and its sole financier. That one tragic episode changed his entire outlook on life: there was more to it than making money; one should do one’s bit to uproot evil from society and teach human beings to live in peace and harmony as brothers. Trehan drew me into his circle of friends.

In the last 15 years Trehan’s organisation has expanded its activities to organising seminars, peace-marches, training camps, publishing books and a magazine. It has also instituted a handsome annual award to be given to someone who has made outstanding contribution in the promotion of communal amity and national integration. Among the awardees are Nani Palkhiwala, Maulana Wahiduddin, Jathedar Umranangal and Nirmala Deshpande. Last year’s recipient was Faroukh Abdullah who received the award from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Trehan’s close circle of advisers now include two serving governors, retired judges of the Supreme Court, retired generals and civil servants. Trehan continues to make his millions and spends them on good causes.

Haryanvi Mughals

Where are you Mughals? Come you here,
You nawabs and kings of yesteryear,
Your pomp and show, your royal splendour
Compare with ours, if you dare.
And hang your head in shame
When you find how tame
Was your fun
When it came to the marriage of a daughter or a son.
The minister, the bureaucrat and the rest
The entire state was our guest,
Thirty thousand people and thirty crores,
A pandal like the White House with eighty doors
The sky illuminated, and every side,
A helicopter in service for the bride.
A servant of the people, I am proud to say,
Om Prakash Badhana
I am an M.L.A. from Haryana

(Contributed by Kuldip Salil, New Delhi)