Against the Grain

Stories of Ji

I grew up hearing stories about Ji. These were told mostly in our home and in our village. The stories were told by the many members of my extended family, but especially by my mother. These stories were all I had for the first five or six years of my life because he wasn’t there. I could say that he was an unseen presence in our home. He was certainly an influence on everyone including myself.

The stories of Ji were of a good man. Everyone spoke of him with respect and even admiration. Our community was close and talking about others in the village was a popular pastime. At first I wondered who he was. I soon learned two important facts about Ji: he was my father and he was far away in another place called vilayat, a Persian term which gave rise to the term blighty, meaning England. As a young boy, my horizons only went as far as my village and I had no idea what ‘far away’ really meant. He was actually Munshi Ji but everyone referred to him as Ji.

Most of the children I played with had their fathers at home. I learned in later life that it was not unusual for fathers in our district to go away to England. They sometimes came home for a visit, but would then return back to this foreign place. Having these men away from their country had many advantages; the money they sent to their family benefited the whole community, even the whole district of Mirpur. No wonder people have come to refer to the area as ‘Little England.’

Because of Ji sending us money, we were the first family in our village to build a pukka, brick, house. I had so much fun with the builders. They had come from parts of Pakistan I had not even heard of. They would stay for many months and would occasionally go to visit their families. Our village was a bit like their vilayat. While they were building our house, we had to feed them two meals a day. I looked forward to all the delicious meals my mum made.

I remember a visit from the police at this time. They came to investigate where we had bought the timber; had we bought it from the ‘black market’? All I could see was that they stayed for a while and had a cup of tea or a meal . . . Then they went away. I never did discover the origins of the timber but one thing was for sure: they won’t have been satisfied with just drinking tea. In such situations, I discovered later, officials always expect and get chaa-paani, something to line their pockets with.

Then, one day Ji came back and stayed. When was Ji going back to England? became one of the most frequent topics for the village gossips to chew over. Ji seemed to be above it all. He certainly didn’t see the need to conform to the norm or the expectations of the rest of our family or the village. He was of a different mindset. In a community such as ours, being different wasn’t always approved of. Although Ji seemed to be turning his back on England, it didn’t alter the respect that everyone gave him. He was different.

Whenever I had the courage to ask him, he filled in the details of some of his life’s story. For me, learning about his life was instructive and enlightening. As I grew older, the more I understood. I began to see that Ji was a special man. I learned from him that it was fine to be different so long as you were being true to yourself and not a slave to the opinions or customs of others.

Ji was only six months old when his father had died. There was no point in asking how he had died. If I had asked, I’m sure he would have said He was ill, or He had a stomach ache. People in our world then rarely knew anything more than this. Many illnesses were a mystery; you were sick and if you recovered, it was God’s will. If you didn’t recover, this was also God’s will.

When he was about eight years old, Ji’s mother married again. After this, all he would say was that his life was very difficult. Apparently, the new husband did not want Ji because he was the son of another. Better to reject him now; who knows how things may turn out to be or how much of a burden he might become. He might be bad luck or he might dishonour the family. Why take such a risk for a boy that is not your own flesh and blood? So the little ‘orphan’ boy, as Ji was known, lived in whatever house he could find food and a bed for the night. What his mother felt about this was not important. Her priority was to survive as best she could and the customs of their community allowed her to be another’s wife, but not to dictate to the new husband, whatever her feelings were. This was how life was and she had to accept it.

When he was considered old enough, Ji was married off to a first cousin-brother’s daughter. Given that he was the only son and his father’s brother had five sons, he was advised to marry into their family. This was seen as a way of building family alliance with people who would no doubt have their eye on his land. After all, he had as much on his own as they did between the five of them.

They had three daughters. This must have been extremely disappointing for them, given how people relish having boys and commiserate at the birth of girls. Soon after the birth of the third child, Ji’s wife died. Again we don’t know why or how. Having three girls to look after must have seemed an impossible job for Ji. This was particularly so because he spent many days away from home earning a basic living by transporting goods for people with his donkey. At first this was in pre-partition India and then, after 1947, in our newly formed nation of Pakistan.

One time he came home from one of his long journeys and discovered that his daughters had gone to sleep without eating as there was no food in the house. He was not prepared to allow his children to be neglected, even if they were girls. He decided that getting married again was the only answer. His second wife was also the daughter of a first cousin-brother, one of the other ones. I have no idea how well the new wife looked after the girls, except that in a culture where being a step child, especially a step daughter, has given rise to some horrendous tales of abuse. What we do know is that she failed in her most important role. She not only failed to produce a much-needed son for Ji, she bore no children at all. According to the culture, a woman’s main function was (and still is!) to produce lots of children, especially boys. She had obviously failed to deliver. Of course, this was seen as her fault.

According to the culture, Ji now had grounds to divorce her and marry again. However, given the extremely low status for divorced women, Ji would have been under immense pressure to marry another without divorcing her. Her parents had off-loaded their izzat, their honour, onto him; they didn’t want her back. I grew up hearing people saying that daughters should leave their parental home in a bride’s dholi, and only return when they die.

So, Ji married Bey. Yes, you’ve guessed it, she was also a first cousin-brother’s daughter. The alliance between him and his first-cousins was well established after these three rishtays, marriage relationships. This was especially as he had agreed to stay married to his second wife. She would stay next door to her parents. This way they would look after her but symbolically, her izzat would remain Ji’s responsibility. It was also handy for her brothers because they would have a readymade carer for the parents when they reached old age. So it worked well all round.

Hey presto! Bey soon gave birth to me and then, afterwards, my brother. The family must have been in seventh heaven and Bey was a seen as a very special woman married to a very special man. Sadly, my brother did not live long and died through some illness; it must have been God’s will. Later, after Ji’s return from England, Bey bore two daughters.

Around this time the government decided to build a large dam in the area. This was to provide water to the people who needed it, for themselves and their land. It was also to produce electricity. For some reasons, our area didn’t see any benefits, just lots of heartache.

The dam had caused many thousands of people to become displaced. They were encouraged to resettle in other parts of Pakistan, but this was easy to say for the government officials who had little appreciation of what it means to belong to a place and a community. To walk on paths which have been walked by your ancestors for generations or to eat the fruits of the soil which has been in your family for ever or to breathe the local air; these were things they could not understand or appreciate.

The world in which we lived was not used to people moving house as happens in other places. The place you are born is your family’s inheritance. It has been there forever and it will go on being there forever. People would be willing to kill for their land. This was part of their whole being. So being told to leave their land and relocate elsewhere in Pakistan would have been an unimaginable concept. The dam had submerged whole villages. They had heard about people becoming muhajir, refugees, as a result of the partition of India but now they were being made muhajir by their own government. Would they be welcome in their new place? Who would be living next to them? Whose land would border theirs? Would there be apney loag, our people, or foreigners? Would their girls be safe? Would there be schools for their boys? Would they have to be taken to school rather than allowed to walk with their friends as now? And what about the family home and land they were leaving behind? This was their family’s heritage. This was where the previous generations were buried, in the village graveyard. What would happen to these graves? What about those buried inside them? Will they still be able to go to heaven on the Day of Judgement? On and on the list of questions went.

People affected by the dam were paid compensation. For poor people, used to surviving from one day to the next, with a few rupees in their pocket, to suddenly be given many thousands of rupees was too much to take in. They didn’t know what to do with these large sums of money.

Some thought they might be better off going to England. If you have to leave your home and set up anew somewhere in your own country, why not go a step further and go to another’s country? After all, they knew these gorey loag, white people, to be decent folk. They were honest people who didn’t take bribes. If you deserved something and were able to explain it to them, they would let you have it. Who you were, which quome or caste you were, did not matter. You could be king or a servant, they would treat you the same, with respect and decency.

Before this time, there were some isolated people who jumped ship and decided to make a life in England. However, the bulk of the migration from Pakistan began in the 1950s. This was at a time when, soon after independence, people in our new country were looking for work and it just happened that post-war Britain had plenty of such opportunities. There were many jobs which the locals could not or would not do because they were seen as too dirty or menial. There was no such problem for the Jat men from our community. No job was too hard for those who had proved their strength in the fields of the Punjab. Nor did they mind doing dirty work as long as the pay was right. Every one pound they saved and sent home could be exchanged for twenty rupees by their family. Compared with the hard living they toiled for in Mirpur, this was wealth indeed.

Word soon got out that someone had decided to use their compensation from the dam construction to go to vilayat. In our world, the hardest thing is to be different, to be the first one to do something courageous. People look to each other to take the initiative. What would people say! Now some brave soul had started the process which others could follow.

People talked about a man, Baba Zaman, from our area who had gone to England a long time ago, before anybody else. He had done so well that he was able to send for others. Apparently, he had persuaded the Queen to give some passports for his relatives. What did he have to do to win favour of one so high and mighty, they wondered. Anyway, he managed to get some passports and give them to his family men. Was this how Ji went to England?

I was about one year old when Ji left us for England. He returned when I was about six years of age. He didn’t talk much about his time away other than that he lived in a relative’s house. I was to live in the same house myself many years later. He also said that he worked in a factory. He talked about how he used to go to the park and see English people going about in their white t-shirts and shorts.

The only other thing he used to talk about from his five years in England was a visit they had from a man who went by the name of Sirsimon. He had come to find out how the Pakistanis were doing. "He asked us questions, in a strange accent, the way Gora Sahib loag talk Urdu. We told him ‘No problem,’ meaning we were okay. He walked around the house and wanted to see how we lived, where we cooked, slept. He even wanted to see the toilet. He kept saying: boht khoob, boht khoob, very good, very good, as he walked around. He also asked a few of the men theek ho, OK? One of the men offered him a cup of tea but he declined. We then realised that it wasn’t English tea, it was pukki, proper, tea, the way we have it; not the way the goray loag have it. Later, through research, I was to discover that this Sir Simon was the British Representative in Pakistan. On a visit to the UK, he had been asked to look into the situation of the Pakistani community here. In his report, he pointed out that, knowing the sort of conditions under which people live in the villages in Pakistan, their housing conditions in the U.K. were not as bad as he had feared. He went on to point out that, on the whole, the Pakistan immigrants are a good lot, well disciplined and respectable. They have a good police record and employers like them." Sir Simon explained that he did not find any evidence of racial discrimination. He felt that the reason some Pakistanis were not getting jobs was more to do with their being unskilled and lacking English and less to do with their colour.

In England, the men (their women did not join them for many years) lived a minimal existence. They would share whatever accommodation they could access. Often this was in houses which had been bought by some pioneer entrepreneur in the family as they did not like paying rent to strangers. They saw this as money down the drain. Outsiders don’t always appreciate the overwhelming instinct of our community to keep all their money, property, sons and daughters in the extended family, even if this family is part in Pakistan and part in England. The family ties and loyalties are rarely broken and this is why most Pakistanis marry a first cousin.

In our extended family, there was one such entrepreneur who had bought a house soon after men in our family began to arrive in England. The property had three bedrooms but, in those days, any space that had potential for someone to sleep in was counted as a bedroom. There were men sleeping in the front living room, the back living room and the dining room. The sofas in the living room would double up as beds as would any available floor space. Even the table in the dining room was used at times. In fact, on one occasion, they had someone sleeping on top of it while another slept underneath. The kitchen floor was similarly used when there was a need for such space. Sometime, they would take turns to sleep in the beds. There were times when men would be standing by to get into the bed as quickly as someone got out of it so they could benefit from the bed being warm. Most of the men in our extended family had begun their life in England in this house. This was where Ji lived the five years he was in England. The house was there long enough for me to spend my early days there many years later.

In their new country, the Pakistanis helped the factory owners get even more out of their investments. Having invested their money into machines and buildings, they wanted to keep the factories and foundries open all the time, each and every day of the week. I am told that the three shift system, 6am-2pm, 2pm-10pm and 10pm-6am, would not have existed were it not for the willingness of these immigrant men who were willing to work all the hours God had given them. They worked any shift where they were needed. Some even worked double shifts. The local men did not like to work the night shift and there was a law that prohibited women from working at night! So this became the ‘immigrant’ shift. In some factories they even managed to establish a two-shift system, a day shift and a night shift, each 12 hours long.

For the Pakistani men, the night shift had many advantages. It paid more; time and half during the week and double over the weekend. Some working the night shift were also happy to have someone sleep in their bed while they were at work. So now even more men were crowded into the houses where they lived, many rented but occasionally bought by the pioneer entrepreneurs in our community. They had no alternative. It was a choice between sleeping outside or in an over-crowded house, owned by a relative. In many towns and cities, they could not get on to the waiting list for a council house, never mind receive one. This was a time when immigrants, especially those who visibly stood out, were not welcome. I am not sure how common signs such as ‘No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ were outside pubs and lodgings but until the 1970s there was no law against it. So landlords were able to turn potential lodgers away because they were the wrong colour. According to an Irish friend, there was a time when the signs simply excluded dogs and the Irish; the word Black was added later when people from the Caribbean and Indo-Pak sub-continent began to arrive.

In those early days of immigration, there was no access to Pakistani-run shops. There was rarely any mention of religion. These men, away from the prying eyes of their families, were more interested in letting their hair down whenever they had the opportunity. However, there was some talk of their struggle with not being able to find halal meat. But they found a way round it by slaughtering the chickens in the back yard. This didn’t endear them to their neighbours. It also led to the occasional story in the local papers, alongside stories about overcrowding, as well as a few jokes told by the locals and the comedians in the night clubs; some of them not very pleasant. In a spirit of forgive and forget, it is not worth recording them here.

Life may have been tough but it was better than before. They didn’t know much about the white people around them but compared to their own lives in the mother-land, they were now living a life of luxury. They had running water, as much as you needed, for it never ran out. They had a toilet inside the house, unlike some people in our community who had an outside toilet. They also could cook by simply turning a knob on the cooker; no having to fetch firewood for the tandoor oven.

Although they had some hot water which came out of a tap, it was never enough, certainly not for the weekly bath for over a dozen men who had been working in dirty factories and foundries. This was when they would resort to the local baths where you paid some money and were able to have plenty of hot water. If you wanted more you could get the key from the kala, black, man. One day some enterprising person decided that it was cheaper to pay the man a little more and be allowed to keep the key. So now there was a key hanging up in their kitchen. They worked out a rota for using it.

Soon, the number of Pakistani owned houses increased, usually in the same street or nearby. Slowly but surely the foundations of the community were laid.

The men would save every shilling and send it back home to their families. As new jobs became available they would call for other men in the family, sending them money for the journey. While I was growing up, I recall once the family were distraught because my uncle’s camel had been killed by other camels in a fight. This put paid to his ability to earn a living. Soon after, he was called to vilayat. Every few years the men would go back to visit their families. They would stay long enough to get married, have children and attend to any family business. While they were away their relatives in England would group together and take care of their factory job so they could return to it afterwards.

One day Ji received a letter from home about some important business he needed to attend to. Had something actually happened? Was it just idle gossip? Perhaps it was a bit of both? He dropped everything and took the next flight back to Pakistan. People tried to persuade him not to go but he wouldn’t listen. This was one of the earlier stories I heard about Ji which told me what kind of man he was. Once he had decided on something, no one could persuade him to do otherwise. He possessed great determination.

I heard another story about Ji which gave me further clues as to the type of person he was from a very early age. I learnt about his refusal to tell a lie to save the skin of a close relative who had committed murder. Had Ji done as asked and provided an alibi for the man, he would have been able to stay out of prison. We don’t know how this would have affected events; whether this would have prevented the murderer being killed himself by his victim’s family when he came back from prison and then his son taking revenge many years later by killing his father’s killer. It is obvious, however, that for Ji to refuse such a request from his extended family as a teenager must have taken some courage. It told me about the importance of telling the truth and not lying simply because of convenience.

Under normal circumstances Ji would have returned back to England after a two year stay in Pakistan. However, things didn’t work out, I am glad to say. A little while before the maximum time allowed for his stay was up he was injured while racing his bulls in a competition. This sport is one of the ways that the farmers passed the time in between working their farms. When he recovered from his injuries, he packed his suitcase and off to the airport he went.

When he was about to board the plane, the security people stopped him, thinking he was the man they were looking for who was involved in ‘black’ money. This was an illegal system the men in our community used to send their hard-earned English money back to their families. They kept him in custody for a few days and then let him go, having realised he was the wrong man. He was put on the next flight to London. When he arrived there, the immigration authorities refused to let him in because his two year period had lapsed. Her Majesty’s immigration officers are not known for their flexibility or sympathy; they abide by the rules.

Around this time, the situation concerning immigrants had begun to change. Until this point, Pakistanis and other immigrants from the countries of the British Empire were welcome to