Among the Badals

ONE of the oldest forts in northern India is in Bathinda. The name should be spelt Bhatind, because it was built by Bhatti Rajputs around 1000 AD. It was a massive fortification designed to defend their country against invaders from the north-west. Today, it stands deserted. Its walls brood over a bustling town fast growing into a city of crowded bazaars, four cinema houses and a huge statue of Bajrang Bali (Hanuman). It boasts of a huge oil refinery, a branch of Punjab Agricultural University — and much else. I knew it only as the home town of my friend and Punjab’s most eminent playwright Balwant Gargi.

It takes five hours in the train to reach Bathinda from Delhi. The train goes through flat, dusty plains of Haryana and Punjab. We arrive there as the sun is about to set. With me is Divya and her mother, Dr Nalini Dutta. Divya is the heroine in Gurdas Mann’s film Shaheed-e-Mohabbat. People in the train eye Divya. Expression on their faces show uncertainty. "Where have we seen this pretty girl before?"

It is the same when we alight from the train. I introduce the Duttas to our host Manpreet Singh Badal (MLA). He has seen Shaheed-e-Mohabbat, but is unable to identify Divya as the star of the film till I tell him. Of the others with us, he knows Ashok Chopra of Picus Publishing House. Ashok introduced him to Chander Raj, who has prepared a music cassette of Gurbani to mark the tercentenary of the Khalsa, and to organisers in charge of showing Train to Pakistan in Bathinda, the next day. The only ones missing are the producer R.K. Pandit and the director Pamela Rooks.

I get into Manpreet’s fancy Honda. Divya and Nalini take the rear seat. Manpreet is very proud of the achievements of the state. He tells me that apart from providing foodgrains to most of India since Partition, the state will be supplying water and electricity to neighbouring states. The Thein Dam is nearing completion. We pass through several villages which are brightly lit by solar power. In an hour, we drove into Badal village. It does not look like any Indian village I have seen. It has large mansions, a huge public school for girls, a very elegant guest house with air-conditioned rooms and dining halls. It owes its eminence to a succession of Akali politicians coming from the same family. There is Manpreet’s father, Sardar Gurdas Singh, who has been an MLA and MP; there is his uncle Parkash Singh Badal, who has been an MP and for the third time Chief Minister of Punjab. His chief claim to political fame is that Congress governments in the Centre and Punjab had put him in jail for 16 long years. These Badals are Dhillon Jats.

Where there are so many successful politicians, there are bound to be favour-seekers. At the dinner hosted by Manpreet and his American wife Veena, their spacious lawn is full of peasants and civil servants. As soon as Parkash Singh Badal arrives, they surround him. He spends a few minutes with me before he attends to more serious business.

I get into a contentious argument with Manpreet’s mother-in-law Shavinder Kaur who migrated from Bahawalpur. She is a very devout Sikh and did not approve of Parkash Singh Badal honouring a self-proclaimed agnostic like me with the Nishaan-e-Khalsa, at Anandpur Sahib.We get on very well.She is somewhat uneasy that others may not approve of women hogging the attention of the chief guest: however westernised the family may be, this is simply not done in a Jat household. I insist she sit beside me. Veena serves me dinner. I relish it and take my leave. I know others will enjoy their meal much more after they are rid of my presence.

Bansi Harbans Singh

I have a few readers who regularly send me their poems to solicit my opinion. I write back and tell them I know very little about poetry and my opinion will be of no consequence. If some of these poems are short, witty or malicious, I use them in my columns. There are other readers who ring me up and recite their compositions on the phone. I am a patient listener and dutifully applaud them with wah! wah! I have to pay a heavy price as then they go on and on. One of my friends, Kishen Lal, owner of Rajdoot Hotel, rings me up at least once every day to regale me with couplets from Mir, Ghalib, Zauq, Faiz and Ali Sardar Jafri, appropriate to the situation in the country. He has an incredible memory and never needs to read them out of a book. The latest amongst my poet-acquaintances is Bansi Harbans Singh. She writes in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. She is a Lahoria, now in her mid-seventies, has lived in Australia and is now settled in Versova, Mumbai. None of her works has yet been published but she hopes to see them in print soon. She came to see me armed with three young women. Then proceeded to ignore them, took a moorha beside my chair and began to recite her poems. I took one of them entitled khiddoo, Punjabi for a ball. A rough translation reads as follows:

I am a ball,
A plaything,
To be tossed about by your hands,
To be kicked about by your feet,
Whenever you felt like doing so.
You played with me,
Whenever you felt like it,
You kicked me away,
I kept rolling, stumbling, falling,
Being tossed around.
Whenever I stopped, somebody gave me a kick,
I rolled and fell into a ditch.
I was taken out
Washed and cleansed of the dirt,
You took me in your hands,
And tossed me in the air.
I flew like a bird,
You caught me falling down,
I was just a plaything to be rolled on the ground,
I was just a ball.
I was just a ball
My life is no kind of life,
I go on rolling, stumbling, falling and being knocked around.
At times I am in the air,
Climbing higher and higher,
Then come crashing down on the earth.

Playing games

Then again, it is not as if I never questioned anything on court. I remember playing with Akhtar against a Sikh pair in the Punjab State Championships at Amritsar once. We won the first set and were on our way to closing out the match when I noticed that the same Sikh player was serving two games in a row. I was shocked. I walked up to the net and shouted: ‘Mr Singh, It’s your partner’s turn to serve’. Without so much as blinking an eye, Mr Singh replied, ‘I have been serving throughout the match. My partner has a bad shoulder.’ I was stunned. Through a whole match, we had been unable to tell our opponents apart!

(Ramanathan Krishnan in A Touch of Tennis — Penguin)

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An Irish corporation passed the following resolution: A new jail should be built. This should be done with the materials of the old one. The old jail can be used until the new jail is completed.

(Contributed by Shivtar Singh Dalla, Ludhiana)