A Life Incomplete Read online

  A Life Incomplete

  (Adh Khidya Phul)

  NANAK SINGH

  Translated by

  NAVDEEP SURI

  HARPERPERENNIAL

  NEW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • NEW DELHI • AUCKLAND

  CONTENTS

  More Fact than Foreword

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  40

  Translator’s Note

  List of Books

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author and the Translator

  Photographic Insert

  More Fact than Foreword

  I like to escape to the verdant hills to put the finishing touches to my novels. In keeping with this annual pilgrimage to the Himalayan foothills, I reached Dalhousie on 15 September 1940, carrying with me the manuscript of my latest novel Jeevan Sangram. But the solitude that I craved proved elusive. Just too many people, too much noise. This was not the Dalhousie of yore.

  Within a couple of days, a feeling of restlessness enveloped me and I decided that there was no point in staying on. On 20 September, I hired a porter who could carry my modest belongings and we started walking with no particular destination in mind, simply a vague notion that we would drop anchor when we reached a quiet, scenic spot. I wanted to spend four or five days in a place like that so that I could gather my thoughts and perhaps scribble a few pages.

  I started the descent from Dalhousie along the lush green banks of the Raavi as it hurtled through the valleys. Inappropriately nicknamed Skinny, the porter was a burly, loquacious fellow and a native of these hills. Over the next four days, we happily traversed vast meadows, climbed narrow trails and chatted about anything that came to mind. My hill mate had a vast repertoire of local folk songs to keep me entertained. His favourite, clearly, was one titled ‘The Brahmin’s boy’ which he sang with a particular verve.

  Looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed myself as much as I did during those four days. True, my legs and knees often got bruised over the steep climbs and slippery descents. True also that the soles of my shoes pretty much gave way. But the sheer joy and abandon of those days will forever linger in my consciousness.

  On the fifth day, we crossed the Raavi to enter Chamba district, rested for the night and resumed our journey the following morning. Skinny belonged to Chamba and his simple songs seemed to acquire an extra note or two as he approached his birthplace. We took a narrow track that afforded magnificent views of mountains covered with foliage and adorned by a multitude of flowers. Looking down, we could see a string of crystalline streams snaking their way across the slopes. Labouring under the substantial load that he was carrying uphill, Skinny was now sweating profusely. But unmindful of his exertion, he continued to sing the local melody:

  Lost is the damsel’s mind

  In the brooks of Chamba

  Yea in the brooks of Chamba

  It rains and she finds joy

  In the arms of her lover boy

  Yea, lost is the damsel’s mind.

  And the Prince of Chamba

  He wants special tribute

  A look, a glance

  From the damsel’s eyes so cute

  O lost is that damsel’s mind.

  Lost in the melody of his favourite song, he appeared oblivious of the fact that the ascent was becoming precarious. His foot slipped only for a brief second but this was enough for the weight on his back to unbalance him completely. I saw him as he toppled over and tumbled a good ten or twelve yards down the slope. It must have been his lucky day because a rock protruding across our path broke his fall and stopped him from plunging into the unknown depths of the ravine where he would have vanished without a trace.

  Reaching out to him, I removed the load from his back and saw that apart from several nasty bruises, he also appeared to have fractured his right arm midway between the shoulder and elbow. The poor fellow was in severe pain and to make matters worse, we were in a remote area with not a soul in sight. I pulled out the tincture iodine that I always carry in my baggage and applied it to his cuts and bruises. Using a small towel, I also bandaged his fractured arm and helped him lie down in a soft area near a bush before setting off to look for help. I hadn’t walked for long before I chanced upon two local boys who seemed to be coming up the hill in our direction. Telling them about our accident, I offered them a generous reward if they could help us out of our predicament.

  The boys spoke of an exceptionally pious soul who lived in a cottage some two and a half miles away. The saint was deeply respected for his knowledge of both Western and traditional medicines which he dispensed free of charge to anyone in need. That would be the place for our patient, the boys said.

  One of the boys picked up my baggage, while the other gave a hand to Skinny as we set off for the saint’s abode. The path was difficult and it took us over two hours to get there. As we walked, the boys spoke in hushed tones about the saint. ‘His selfless devotion is just out of this world…he goes around to the homes of the poorest to treat them…day and night, he tirelessly visits the sick and the destitute, offering treatment to some, solace to others…’ And so on.

  Upon reaching the cottage, we set our patient under an ancient tree. I gave a generous tip to the boys for their efforts and, after bidding them farewell, paused to take in the surroundings. It was like a small corner of paradise itself. The romance of the verdant hills and valleys around me was enhanced by the beauty of the saint’s simple abode.

  His cottage was not particularly large. But clad in vines and creepers and set amidst a variety of fruit trees, it seemed blessed with a very special charm. ‘What a lovely setting to complete my novel,’ I thought as soon as I set my eyes on this place.

  Before entering his cottage, I had visualized the saint as the usual mendicant with matted hair and saffron robes. To my surprise, he appeared a perfectly regular sort of person, around fifty years old and possibly belonging to the Sikh faith. Dressed in a simple, khadi attire, a hint of grey in his flowing beard, it was his eyes that gave a sense of the extraordinary. They were sparkling, alive and vibrant even as they radiated that rare tranquillity which very few attain. He was surrounded by a largish group of patients, a crowd that was perhaps larger than usual because of a recent outbreak of malaria in the district. I greeted him with folded hands and he responded, not with the gesture of blessings so typical of saints and holy men but with a polite ‘Sat Sri Akal’ that reflected his Sikh background.

  Turning to my patient, he gently cleaned his injuries, bandaged his arm and arranged for him to lie down on a bed. He then opened the door of an adjoining room and asked me to relax while he completed his work. The room was full of shelves and cupboards lined with all manner of medicines – the kind of stuff one would be lucky to find in a reasonably well-stocked city clinic. How did he manage to assemble all of it in such a remote location? I wondered.

  After spending the entire day amidst his patients, the saint walked into the room just as I had finished eating my dinner. Sitting down in front of me, he looked closely at my face and asked, ‘Are you Nanak Singh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘How did you recognize me?’

  ‘All your earlier books carried your photograph,’ he replied. He added that he had read quite a few of my works.

  He paused for a while before saying, ‘I’ve really been looking forward to the opportunity of meeting a writer like you. I am fortunate that you have come here because I want to tell you my own tale. I believe that once you have heard me out, you will probably have enough material for a new novel.’

  What does a blind man want but two eyes? Instead of putting together a story from my own imagination, I was being offered one on a platter. Readily accepting his proposal, I sat down to listen to his narrative. It took well over three hours for him to complete his fascinating story and when he finished, both of us had tears in our eyes. He then got up and took me across to the first room. Opening a cupboard, he handed me a small wooden box and said, ‘Here! That’s the rest of the material for your novel.’

  Opening the box, I saw an old notebook, its cover on the verge of separation from the rest of the body. Every page, every available space of the notebook had been used to write. Even the insides of the covers were filled with jottings from top to bottom. It looked like pages from someone’s diary, each section clearly marked with the year, month and date. The writing was in neat, clearly legible Punjabi script and it seemed to have a certain feminine touch.

  The box also had a small photo, of a young lad, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old. The photo was in a terrible condition, as if someone had torn it into small pieces and then tried to put it together like some sort of jigsaw puzzle. The effort had succeeded only in part because it looked like a couple of small pieces were still missing. In addition to the photo
, the box also contained a few letters, a plain kerchief and a paper that looked like someone’s will. A closer look at the document revealed that a gentleman by the name of Ganga Vishan had decided to bequeath a fortune of some twenty-five thousand rupees to his son-in-law. It was dated February 1923.

  Reflecting on the contents of the box and the three-hourlong narrative of that noble soul, I instantly knew that I had enough material for a full-fledged novel. After handing over the box to me, he approached the bottom shelf of his cupboard and pulled out a small sketch, a portrait. ‘I made this,’ he said. ‘Although it does pertain to your future novel, I can’t part with it. Some of my most precious memories are embedded in it.’ Sighing deeply, he closed his eyes, possibly to hide the fact that they had again become moist.

  The portrait carried the title ‘Adh Khidya Phul’.

  That portrait and the story behind it also had a profound impact on me and, as I started to absorb everything I had heard, my mind drifted to another set of events that I had myself experienced. The vicissitudes of life over the last few years had temporarily erased those pages from my mind’s diary but that day those painful memories were revived. A similar flower had blossomed in my life too, at a time when I had just about crossed over from childhood into youth. But it had withered away before it could bloom fully.

  The powerful effect of that noble soul’s narrative, and the revival of my own distant memories, persuaded me to set aside my nearly complete manuscript of Jeevan Sangram and I started to work on a new novel which I tentatively titled Adh Khidya Phul.

  The title of the portrait was not the only inspiration behind the name of this novel. Some eighteen years ago, I had started to write a similar story. This was in 1922, when I had been imprisoned by the colonial authorities for participating in the Guru ka Bagh agitations that sought to free the management of Sikh shrines from British cronies and restore their traditional independence. Some 1500 of us were incarcerated in Borstal Jail in Lahore for persisting in our campaign. While in prison, I ran into a prisoner who had been recently transferred from Gurgaon Jail. He had been imprisoned for his involvement in the Satyagraha that had been launched by the Indian National Congress. He was carrying a set of novels by the legendary Munshi Premchand. Reading his absorbing works provided me the motivation that I too could start putting my thoughts on paper and perhaps strive to become a novelist. I contrived a simplistic sort of structure and started writing my first novel, which I called Adh Khidya Phul. But in a search carried out by the prison authorities, my manuscript was confiscated and I could never again lay my hands on it. The abrupt loss of my first effort also nipped my literary ambitions in the bud and it was years before I could pick up the threads again.

  And as I started to write this new novel with that old title, I also started to remember the storyline of my first effort. I spent around three weeks in that hermitage to write this novel, which draws less on imagination and more on actual events.

  NANAK SINGH

  Amritsar, 1940

  1

  May 1922. It is around midnight and pitch dark. Not a leaf stirs. And the occasional puff of breeze that has lost its way and entered the confines of the prison, too, is scalding, like the heart of a jilted lover.

  The forbidding walls of Borstal Jail hold thousands of prisoners within their grim perimeter. Many of them languish in hundreds of tiny funereal cells. Burglars, dacoits, fraudsters and murderers are the denizens of this township, locked up in its cages, reaping the punishment for their crimes. Of late, however, a new kind of inhabitant has come to occupy this parish. Innocent of any wrongdoing, the fresh arrivals have cheerfully stepped into the ogre’s den as reward for their unflinching commitment to their country and to their religion. Numbering in their thousands, they are the activists of the Guru ka Bagh campaign.

  Ward No. 3 is the temporary abode of these valiant patriots and defenders of the faith. Sentenced for terms ranging from six months to two and a half years, they spend interminably long, sleepless nights and count the days. Hot, humid and stuffy, the night is nothing short of hell for the prisoners. Most people would be sleeping soundly in the comfort of their beds at this time. But only a person who has spent a precious part of his life in captivity can understand how long a prisoner’s night can be. The searing heat and buzzing mosquitoes are of course a nuisance even if you are sleeping out in the open. For the unfortunate prisoners lying on coarse blankets in cramped, ten-square-foot cells, however, the tortures of these summer nights are of a different magnitude.

  Around 8 in the evening, the prisoners are rounded up into their cells, which are then closed with large padlocks. They say that after a day’s hard labour even a bed of nails can look inviting. It may hold true for those who can go to bed and wake up according to their free will, whose hearts are not being constantly pierced by the barbed arrows of forced separation from their loved ones, for those who are outside the depressing confines of the prison. The prisoner’s sleep, however, is quite different; he lies on the hard floor of his cell, painstakingly counting every day, week and month since his separation from friends and family, measuring how many have gone by and how many remain. When he closes his eyes, he sees the day’s hard labour in the prison compound, hears the constant grind of the flour mill, the screeching and whirring of the oil seeds crusher on which he has toiled countless hours. The body is uncomfortable and the soul restless. Eyes ache from the unending wait for that moment when the sleep fairy will come and gently carry him away in its lap.

  It is around midnight, the time when guards start their third shift for the night, when the prisoners can fly on the wings of the sleep fairy, leaving the confines of their gloomy cells to visit their loved ones, to fleetingly embrace them. When sons hug their mothers and try to quench the pain of separation, husbands join their spouses and become oblivious of their hardship and suffering, and sisters are dumbstruck as they listen to their brothers’ plight in prison.

  For the guards, it is the time of the night when prisoners appear to be sound asleep. With one exception, however. The occupant of Cell No. 13 is a young man of around twenty-five. Hands gripping the iron bars of his cell, he is peering intently into the impenetrable darkness of the night outside.

  The young Sikh is light skinned and of a slender build, with a short auburn beard on his handsome face. His restless gaze suggests a certain fickleness of mind, raising doubts about the courage of the heart beating under his firm chest. Of course, it is probably easier to guess the dimensions of the pearl without opening the oyster than it is to figure out what the human heart is capable of. Only the rarest of souls are blessed with the ability to discern the contents of a letter without even opening the envelope and it should come as no surprise if an ordinary mortal fails in this task.

  The courtyard outside is dark and deserted but the prisoner’s intense concentration suggests that he sees something. He is clad only in baggy shorts and a short-sleeved tunic with regulation prison stripes, and his hands frequently leave the iron bars to itch a rash, to shoo away a mosquito buzzing around his ears or to extract his revenge by swatting at one camping on his neck and merrily feasting on his blood. Visibly restless and uncomfortable, he seeks escape from the mosquitoes by backing away from the bars and wrapping himself in the blanket. But this only takes him from the frying pan into the fire. Within minutes, the effect of the blanket on a hot and muggy night has him sweating and feeling suffocated. Casting aside the blanket, he moves around in the cell for a while before resuming his vigil at the bars.

  A large mulberry tree stands a short distance away in the courtyard. With not a leaf stirring in the still of the night, it vaguely resembles a shapeless mound. Gazing intently at it, a thought crosses the prisoner’s mind, ‘Isn’t this tree a prisoner like me, standing for years at the same place, waiting for liberation from its endless captivity?’ He looks at the dark form of the tree with sadness and trepidation. Hearing the sound of a sparrow emanate from the direction of the tree, he thinks, ‘Perhaps this unfortunate one is also missing the companion who left their nest after a squabble and hasn’t yet returned.’ The bird’s cry sounds to him like the wailing of a young bride who has been separated from her husband.

  He sees a young maiden of around twenty, bright eyes brimming with tears as she pines for her lover. Juxtaposed to this image, another scene flashes in his mind’s eye. This one shows a newly married girl of about eighteen, silky eyelashes hiding a dreamy-eyed expression as she thinks of her husband and of the joys that marriage has brought her. Long hair cascade all the way to her slender waist, her arms – adorned with the red bangles of the newly wed – look like they are straining to embrace her loved one. In a flicker, however, his mind shifts to another image – this one as disturbing as it is heart-rending. The comely face is now ablaze with anger; those loving eyes smoulder like embers, and flames of jealousy leap from every pore of her delicate frame. Her words are like deadly arrows aimed straight at the hapless young man who faces her. ‘I’ve seen the true colours of your love…who would have thought that you would turn out to be such a fraud…nectar on your lips and poison in your heart…go and marry her if you want…oh, my fate…couldn’t the nurse have given me poison the day I was born and spared me this misery…I must be accursed…’