‘Conversations’: In search of the Dilliwallah-IV

Delhi indeed received millions of outsiders after partition. They came here in search for a shelter after being displaced in the most unfortunate manner, uprooted from their origins and thrown into an almost foreign land. The Punjabi refugees came from the cities and the hinterland that lay on the other side of the border. These were largely Hindus and Sikhs who had opted not to stay in the newly created Islamic state of Pakistan. Thousands and thousands of them boarded the trains shuttling between cities like Lahore and Amritsar, and ended up in different cities across northern Indian. The first few years were tough. There was barely enough space to live in. Work, too, was hard to find. Some of the wealthiest families of undivided Punjab had been reduced to paupers, with no claim on the properties they had been forced to give up and come away and no assured means of livelihood in the new country they had been brought to.

The Guptas are among the hundreds of thousands of families that migrated to Delhi post partition and now live in Lajpat Nagar. Mrs. Girija Gupta (name changed on request) was born to a father who served in the army, and had been forever on the move as a child, owing to his transferable job. She was thirteen at the time of partition, stuck with her family on the wrong part of strife-torn Punjab. When they first heard about the possibility of partition, they rushed to their newly-built house in Rawalpindi. The town was ablaze with riots and her father decided to hide the family in their ancestral house located in rural Punjab. He couldn’t accompany them as he was required to report at his duty. The house the family hid in was owned by Mrs. Gupta’s uncle who was a reputed lawyer and much respected in the year. Rioters may have known about their presence but didn’t come for them because of his influence. Owing to her father’s efforts, they were rescued and flown out of Pakistan, to the safety of Amritsar, managing to complete the most difficult part of the journey quite safely. Once peace was established, her father’s job resumed its transferable nature and they continued moving from city to city. She was married to Mr. KP Gupta in 1955, after which she came to live in the Lajpat Nagar house. More than fifty years have passed since then. Her memories of the years gone by include those of the Indo-Park wars with instructions on how to carry out blackouts. The houses in Lajpat Nagar were double-storeyed, not five storeyes high like today, with lifts and the other paraphernalia. Everything was cheap and affordable. Travelling from Karol Bagh to Lajpat Nagar would cost something like ten paise, she recalls longingly.

Mr. KP Gupta (name changed on request) has a far more heart-wrenching story to share. He was fifteen at the time of partition and lived with his rather well-off family in Lahore. Problems and disturbances had begun simmering since 1946 and they knew something wrong was underway. In ’47, Mr. Gupta’s school was attacked by ‘bottle bombs’ – glass bottles filled with kerosene, with a wad of paper stuffed in the mouth and lit, spreading fire wherever they fall. Many of the houses were attacked with these bottle bombs all through the partition-induced riots. The attack on the school was indicative of the more difficult times that lay ahead. As the days went past, violence directed at Hindu families escalated. The whole of Papad Mandi, a prominent market in Lahore, was burnt down one day, and it broke the spine of the Hindu merchant committee. It was around those days that Mr. Gupta was confronted by four burly Muslim boys on his way to school, who had probably come to beat him up, but he escaped. As rumours about imminent clashes grew, people started smuggling out their valuables, like jewelry, to India. He managed to escape with his family to the other side of the border as part of a convoy of about fifty cars. He ended up in Delhi in 1949 after brief stopovers in Amritsar, Jallandhar and Dalhousie, where he had to deal with ill-resourced refugee camps, lack of livelihood and treacherous relatives, completing his matriculation exam along the way.

Mr. Gupta’s father had reached Delhi a few months before his family. He was a lawyer, though he never had to practice back in Lahore because of all the wealth he had inherited. As the family arrived in Delhi, they rented a room in Khari Baoli. The Indian government was making partial compensation for the monetary and material loss that the refugees had faced. For instance, families that had left behind properties worth Rs 8-9 Lacs were paid a Lac and those that had lost something like 35-40 Lacs were given 2 Lacs. The Guptas belonged to the latter category. Remembering the Delhi of those days, he says that the posh areas of the city included the Lutyens’ zone, Civil Lines and Sujan Singh Park. Old Delhi had a tram service running from Daryaganj to Red Fort and further down to Sadar Bazaar via Chandni Chowk. There were also many yellow-and-black taxis plying through its streets.

It was frightening, how the rich merchants of Lahore who had come to Delhi as refugees had been reduced to paupers. To survive, they had started selling things at roadside kiosks. They would buy commodities, like sugar, at wholesale rate from big shops and resell them sitting a short distance away, for a marginal profit per kilo. Everything, from shops to house, was available through the ‘Pagdi’ system, wherein you got a place on lease in lieu of a large sum given to the owner, with reselling rights to the lessee and a cut assured for the original owner. A little while later, Mr. Gupta’s family moved to a small flat in Jangpura which they shared with two other families. Delhi didn’t look bad now. Their business had picked up. But the relations of the refugees with the residents – established merchants and old families – of Purani Dilli were rather formal. They didn’t like the loud, non-vegetarian refugees, and the latter, too, kept away from them, choosing to populate the newer Delhi that was coming up on the periphery of the old one.

The Guptas, then, moved to Lajpat Nagar. They had bought the double-storey house for eighteen thousand rupees, where two thousand was for the land and sixteen for the house – hard to believe in today’s context. Almost everyone who came to live in Lajpat Nagar was a refugee. The colony initially had community taps, personal ones came much later. Parts of the central ridge were blasted off to make space for the expansion of the colony and for a long time, jackals lurked in the colony’s outer reaches that touched the thickly forested ridge. The Gupta family’s first few businesses failed, but they gradually started doing well. All the refugees did, and it was observed resentfully by the old residents of Delhi. Mrs. Gupta agrees that it was a good move to have migrated to India in retrospect. She can’t imagine herself as a part of Pakistan’s conservative society. She points out to her daughter, Megha that she could not have enjoyed such opportunities, exposure and freedom being a woman, were she born in Pakistan. The refugees generally don’t like to talk about Gandhi and Nehru with the same reverence as is the norm. They have only grabbed the limelight, they say. “It’s us, the migrants who had to pay the price of their decisions”. It was they who have made the journey from a sprawling haveli to a two hundred square feet house.

Ms. Megha Gupta (name changed on request), their daughter is in her early forties, was born and brought up in Delhi and now teaches at a prominent South Delhi School. She shares how life in Delhi today is different from her own childhood and adolescence. She tells that her family, like millions of others from Delhi’s middle class, journeyed from a chulha to a heater, to a stove and, finally, the cooking gas. Kerosene was sold door-to-door in those days and every nook had a tandoor where you could take kneaded dough to be made into fresh rotis. Milk used to be available in exchange for the aluminum tokens issued by the Delhi Milk Scheme. There would always be a shortage of it in summers, and then the government would issue an order prohibiting the use of milk to produce sweetmeats so that the yield may be diverted to the general population. There weren’t many houses with refrigerators and the ones that did mostly had Allwyn. Housewives stored milk and other eatables in netted cupboards placed in the kitchen. In summers, slabs of ice were bought and used for cold water and soft drinks. Theirs was the second or third television in the colony. She remembers how people just walked in to watch programs being aired and nobody would mind. People in Delhi, she feels, have now become a lot more competitive and envious of each other’s accomplishments. This wasn’t the case earlier.

Ms. Megha feels that childhood was a lot more fulfilling back then. Children would gather every evening without fail to play in the neighborhood park. Now, it’s difficult to tear them away from their video games and Facebook profiles. There is barely any curiosity left in them. There are so many things about their city that has been lost and they’ll never have an exposure to it. Delhi’s stock exchange or the share market used to be at the Asaf Ali Road, next to the Turkman Gate and, in the absence of electronic methods of keeping track of market trends, people would shout out their bids to the brokers there, lending the place an infectious energy. She remembers a doctor who used to sit at the weekly market close to her house with a table and a microscope, waiting to carry out blood tests for customers. She, then a child, would stop by to observe the man and strike up a conversation with him, even managing a peek into the eyepiece at times. That kind of openness to people and experiences is not found in Delhi now.

According to Ms. Megha, it was her family members’ decisions – big and small – that have shaped them.  Her elder sister, for instance, was selected for an MBA course at Delhi University’s incredibly reputed Faculty of Management Studies back in the eighties. But she gave that up because it was an evening course and she didn’t want to risk travelling from the north campus to Lajpat Nagar daily at nine in the night. Ms. Megha had decided to pursue Economics Honors and had even secured an admission at the Rajdhani College but she withdrew after witnessing the student politics, bordering on hooliganism, which was rampant in the college. She studied Mathematics instead. It was the educational exposure that really divided Delhi. But the quality of education was better. The government schools used to do a great job. Today, education means so much more than the syllabus and that has only broadened the divide.

Talking about the Punjabi spirit, she quotes some more personal examples. Her younger sister wanted to get admitted to a reputed English medium school that catered almost exclusively to students from the Tamil community. She was politely declined an admission, but she cheekily responded that it was the school’s loss because by not letting her join, they were giving up on the girl who would go on to become the topper of the school. She  was eventually accepted. When her father, a few years before the incident, had gone to seek admission for the same sister at the Lady Irwin School, he was told that the school doesn’t have any seats left. He offered to buy them five-six seats with desks! “So, that’s how it is with Punjabis,” she says. “We try to get things done by hook or by crook. We are not too finicky about ethics.” Ms. Megha shares the story of another neighbor who was very thrilled to discover that she teaches at a famous South Delhi school. The neighbour wanted to know the amount she’ll have to bribe her with in order to get her ward get admitted in the elite school. “So, there is nothing called subtlety here,” she explains wryly.

Talking about the issue of women’s safety, she says that Delhi, like every other city, has its safe and unsafe areas. There are places where you can feel free and others where you shouldn’t let your guard down. Sometimes, you don’t feel safe in the very neighborhood where you grew up. Lajpat Nagar, today, has many people from outside moving in. These are people from less affluent parts of the city who made it big in their businesses and, therefore, could afford buying property here. Their sense of accomplishment comes through as aggression and brashness. They feel that they’ve finally arrived and are superior to the old timers. She recalls one such incident where a man in his late twenties picked up a fight with her over something trivial and, then, went on to tell her that she is a mere teacher while he is a rich businessman, not realizing that she’s standing on a property six times the size of what he owns. She dropped the fight because she didn’t see the point in engaging with the uncouth man. The new arrivals have a lifestyle that is flashy and in-your-face. She can now understand how the Old Delhi residents must have felt when they looked at the refugees who had arrived after partition.

Though the Gupta family’s earliest links with Delhi were through the walled city, Ms. Megha never thought of it as home. When younger, she loved visiting it for its shops and eateries but deep down was scared of having to move base to the area again. She didn’t fancy living amid the squalor, and struggled with a baseless fear that she, too, would be forced to wear a burqa as a consequence of the shift. She enjoyed watching ‘Buniyaad’ and so did the rest of her family because it brought alive the tale of loss and bereavement that they understood too well. Tamas hit them harder. But her father was always dismissive about these shows. His attitude is representative of that of the average Punjabi refugee who tried to crush his emotions under the crudeness because that was the only way to survive. Her father couldn’t even have food the day he – then a fifteen-year-old boy – hopped on to a car and fled across the border. What he misses is not the wealth that they had to leave behind but more valuable possessions like his kite collection or the notebook in which his father wrote his Urdu poetry. So, you could either brood over what is lost or gear up to claim what lies ahead. The choice they made is apparent.