‘Take me back to India’: my father’s

last journey
Conducting funeral rites at his ancestral home in Punjab, sifts
through the layers of his identity
Main image: Stained glass windows at Singh Dhillon’s family home. Photograph: Handout

T
Tue 11 Sep 2018 06.00 BST

he liver took the longest to burn. That’s where the disease

had likely lodged itself, the maid’s six-year-old grandson
explained. I was carrying my father’s remains. The boy
walked beside me, already a veteran of the funeral pyre.

Only hours earlier, he had ridden his rickety bicycle to the

front door of my ancestral house, which was an act forbidden in normal
times. Sweat dripped from his palms; his face and ears looked hot. It
was not yet time to return, he said, his voice almost out of range. The
boy lived on the outskirts of the village near the cremation ground. He
seemed to know something I didn’t: the body can burn for a long time.

Dressed in white, men and women from low castes arrived and
congregated in our courtyard. We drank tea from the same cups. They
had promised not to wail, giving the occasion a western sensibility. So
we waited, mostly in silence, except occasionally a relative would walk
over with specific advice. An aunt handed me a white cotton bag. “Ash
can be heavy,” she said. “Hold it from the bottom like a full grocery
bag.”

This was Punjab in 2013, where in villages such as Khanpur, a seven-

hour drive from Delhi, a variation of feudalism has remained intact. The
villagers considered the entire place my family’s jagir, a land reward we
had received from Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the early 1800s, placing us
at the top of the hierarchy. Farmers and workers called my father
Sardar, their lord. For three generations, the men in my family had
lived primarily in the west, but had returned to Khanpur toward the
ends of their lives.

“Take me back to India,” my father had said to me on a rainy London

evening as we drove home after his last hospital appointment, bumping
along Fulham Road, whose bends had become familiar. Deciding where
to die was a test of his immigrant loyalties, and he chose India. He was
unfazed by the fact that essentials such as oxygen tanks and nurses
were unavailable in rural parts of the country. Morphine shortages
risked turning a cancer death into a brutal ordeal.

So from spring to summer, I relocated to Khanpur. I resented the

disruption this posed to my career and personal life. I worried mostly
about what my father’s sickness might reveal about me.

As I waited for the pyre to cool down, I escaped to the rooftop, from
which, as children, my sister and I used to peek into other people’s
homes. A tight world of rooftops, some lit, some eclipsed by shadows.
You could still hop, climb one wall and jump off another. We sensed the
asymmetry then, in the height and sizes of homes, between our world
and our neighbours’.

Around midday, the boy returned with an update: the earth was cool
enough to collect the remains. I grabbed the empty white bag and
walked out the front door. The women stayed behind and the men
followed me.

I walked down an uneven path that cut through the village square. I
reached the village periphery, turned on to an unpaved path and
walked past a school largely built by my family. I could see the dusty
imprints of children’s feet.

When I arrived at the cremation ground, a dry patch of land surrounded

by verdant fields, the maid’s grandson was sitting on a low-hanging
branch. He had remained there until dawn, watching my father’s body
burn slowly and keeping the vultures away. Now he watched me as I
took a stick and sieved through the ash, discovering a layer of pale gray
powder first, and then some of my father’s nails.

The scent of sandalwood and ghee rose from the ground. Tractors
roared in nearby fields. I was glad for the noise. Relatives and village
elders stood around, awkwardly waiting for me to invite them to pick
the remains, to turn this into a communal act. “Come,” I said, and they
all stepped forward.

I went off toward the lower body, squatted and dug my hands into the
pile of residue. The ash was paste-like, thick and soft, altered by the
gallons of butter we had poured on the pyre. Even in the gentle breeze,
it adhered to the ground.

At the right arm I found my father’s silver bangle, the one he had worn
most of his life. “Mr Singh, could you please remove that,” the nurses
would say to him back in London during each treatment.

It was a short walk back. Family and villagers had gathered in the
village square. My aunt explained that the house was empty so I could
complete the last ritual. I would take my father’s remains back to the
house, walk through every single room, and ask him to come with me.
“Speak to him loudly and tell him it’s time to leave the house,” she said.

I entered the house with one hand on top of the bag and one on the
bottom so the sediments wouldn’t blow in the wind. Three crows sat on
the outer wall. It was quiet.

Standing alone in the courtyard, as I was about to whisper the words, I

stumbled. This place, seemingly at the edge of the world, had been an
important nexus between India and the west for my family for more
than a century; first, for my great-grandfather, who emigrated to the US
in the early 1900s; then for my grandfather, who left for England; and
finally, for my father. I was up against the multiple legacies of my
ancestors, who had gone abroad and returned to die here. This
property, where I now stood, had been their cure to what Edward Said
called “the crippling sorrow of estrangement”.

I reminded myself of my other life. I wasn’t a sardar, and the US was my

home. I was in a same-sex relationship, and the fact that my partner
was a Muslim American whose parents were born in Pakistan meant the
Indian authorities would not readily give him a visa. In fact, he wasn’t
at my side now for this very reason.

I began to close the bedroom doors, the wooden doors with rusted
nails, unsure as to how and when I would ever return.

O
ur house in Khanpur was built in two phases. The older
part, a red brick tower with arched windows and stained
glass built in the early 1920s, was designed with specific
purposes: to showcase the family wealth, to place the
men of the house so high that others would need to look
up, and to encase the women of the house so they could
gaze out but not be seen.
Family patriarch Puran Singh, in artwork by Jules
Arthur. Photograph: Jules Arthur

Growing up, I heard stories about its construction: how the brick had
come from Multan, the peacock murals from Amritsar, and the stained
glass from Delhi. Most importantly, the money was sent from some
rural farm in Yuba City, California, where my great-grandfather, Puran
Singh, worked as a peach farmer. He was among the first south Asians
to set foot on American soil in the early 1900s.

As our house was constructed, people travelled on foot from nearby

towns and villages to marvel not only at the building but at the
abundance and opportunities a brush with the US could bring. For a
long time, our house was known as Amerika-wallan da Kar, the house
of the Americans.

The second part of the house was built in the late 1950s with my
grandfather Bawa Singh’s earnings from his work at a Dunlop factory in
Coventry, in the British West Midlands. Just as the dollar-funded tower
was tall, the sterling-funded house was sprawling, as if my grandfather
were saying to his father: You built high, now I will build long. Soon our
house became England-wallan da Kar, the house of the English.

I
was six years old when I first came to Khanpur, in 1984. Faced
with old age and early dementia, Bawa Singh had asked my
father to take him back to India. He obliged, and since my
mother didn’t want to leave us behind, the entire family
relocated from Coventry.

I remember walking into the courtyard and meeting a woman who was
sitting cross-legged, cleaning her glasses with the ends of her dupatta.
She was my step-grandmother, and this was the first I learned of her
existence. A short, fierce woman, she married into the family in the
1930s. She bore no children, and was left behind after the rest of the
family emigrated to England. So when we showed up on that hot
summer’s day, exhausted by the travel, it was no surprise that she
didn’t get up to offer us even a glass of water.

We called her Mataji, meaning “respected mother”. That was how she
had been known to the village for so long that even my parents couldn’t
remember her actual name. She didn’t like the adults we came with, but
she took to my sister and me. During our seven-year stay in India, we
attended a boarding school several hours away from Khanpur. When we
returned for summer holidays, Mataji would stand at the doorstep of
the house, ready to pour a few drops of mustard oil by our feet to ward
off evil spirits, welcoming us as if we had returned from a long exile.

This role, of waiting and welcoming, was familiar to her. The story of
this house and of Punjab, she would say, is not about the men who left
but the women who stayed behind.

Through those long years as the sole occupant of the house, night after
night, she was the one who lit the oil lamps and left them by the door.
She would climb the tower every day and gaze out of the stained-glass
windows, updating her mental map of the village. She built a wide
network of patronage, slotting each person into their deserved role.

As a child, I had this sense that the world was fractured. Every day,
people showed up at our front door with their troubles. This
desperation, which unfolded on our doorstep, was often met with
benevolence, but was never to be mistaken for intimacy or trust. We
were not them, and they could never be us. I could play with the
children of the village, but I was prohibited from eating with them,
from drinking milk from their cows, from ever talking about my family.
And they were never allowed into our courtyard and bedrooms. “Some
people have you in their prayers, most have you in their curses,” Mataji
would remind me every time I struck up a friendship with a kid from
the village.

M
y father was 16 when he got on a plane to England, in
1962, but no one came to receive him on the other
side. He searched the airport for hours, looking for an
uncle who should have been waiting at the terminal.
Two pounds was all he had in his pocket – a
customary amount that newcomers from the
subcontinent carried. He also had the address of a distant relative who
lived in London.

He followed the crowd out into the damp night and stood outside long
enough to realise the black cars that came and went were taxis. He got
into one and arrived at the only address he knew. When the door swung
open, a Jamaican man asked my father his name, and informed him
that the relative was at work and would return in the morning. My
father waited. The next day, he sent a telegram to his parents, asking
them to come and get him. An uncle eventually showed up. In a
borrowed Morris 1100, my father arrived a week later in Coventry, the
town that supplied Jaguars to the world.

I’ve often wondered if that was the moment when his relationship with
this adopted country soured. Dislocation of time, of place and language,
experienced so acutely on arrival. To have waited and watched the
quiet agony in the faces of arriving immigrants gaining a foothold in a
strange land. To have told himself he was different: that it was
ambition, and not desperation, that had compelled him to get on that
plane. After all, although he was a worker here, he was the son of a lord
back home.

The Jaguar factory in Coventry, 1962. Photograph:

Terry Fincher/Mirrorpix

England was not a place with which one fell in love instantly. Coventry,
one of the English cities most bombed in the second world war, was still
recovering. The terraced house on Coronation Road, where my father
lived with his parents and two brothers, along with a roster of newly
arrived immigrants, was shockingly underdeveloped. There was no
central heating in the house; a fireplace in the living room was the only
source of heat. My father quickly realised that outer appearances
mattered in achieving assimilation, so he cut his hair and dispensed
with his turban.

One day, at the age of 21, he came home to learn that his marriage had
been arranged. My mother would soon arrive from India. She was light-
skinned and from an equal family. They had not met before. It was to be
a marriage among migrants, a bet on two outsiders finding their own
solace.

Success meant full adaptation at every important milestone. Unable to

find a venue willing to host his religious wedding ceremony, he picked a
pub instead, clearing the smell of booze with incense and convincing a
priest to bring the holy book to a bar.
With the rise and fall of the British car industry – the golden age of the
60s, the slump of the late 70s – career trajectories changed. There were
promotions in our family. My father became a foreman, another uncle a
supervisor, and there was movement within divisions from the
assembly line to managerial work.

However, in these turbulent political times, my father’s interior life was

largely inaccessible to the rest of us. My family emulated the three-
tiered structure of British life: the home, the factory and the pub. These
domains rarely overlapped – except on a warm July day in 1981, when
Charles and Diana got married. My father had the day off, and aunts and
uncles came to our house to watch the wedding, wearing their finest
clothes, as if they were invited. It was a rare day when we seemed to
belong to the same reality as our English neighbours.

As the family became confidently middle class, my father’s turban

reappeared. By the early 90s, he and his brother ran a grocery store.
Because this was a family business, it became a family space, and I got
to see my father interact with the rest of British society. It was
mandatory for the children to spend a few hours in the store after
school, stacking shelves, counting produce and ordering inventory.

It all seemed to be going well until one day, at the age of 13, I happened
to be alone with my father at the store when a teenager kicked the door
open. His name was Danny. He was a council estate kid who wore a gold
chain around his neck. He scouted the lanes, picking up a few items
here and there as my father tried to keep an eye on him; he had stolen
before.

Danny placed two packets of Opal Fruits on the counter and waited for
my father to ring him up. “Take out the chocolates from your jacket
pocket,” I remember my father saying, his voice calm but firm. “Fuck
off, Paki,” Danny said before he ran out.

The two of them brawled outside the shop. My father’s turban

unravelled. I watched him fall to the ground and wished he would pick
himself up, fast, before someone from my school saw him. Danny
bolted in the direction of the estates. My father returned to the shop
with a Cadbury’s bar in his hand, reclaimed from Danny. The chocolate
had broken in two; it was damaged goods. He ate one piece and then he
went to the back of the shop to fix his turban. Soon the front door
opened and we moved on to serving the next customer. We never once
talked about the incident.

We never spoke about race because we believed that class could erase
our exclusion. We couldn’t change the colour of our skin, so we worked
harder to become more prosperous.

Strategies for class mobility were my father’s area of expertise. He

turned up for every national and local election. He signed my sister and
me up for the Labour party, asking us to pay our dues because a day
would come when we would need representation. He lauded the British
for their industriousness, marvelled at how small they were in size as a
country and how large an empire they had ruled. Nevertheless, every
time a newly elected British prime minister visited India, he would
register his usual lament: “Will they ever apologise for their colonial
crimes?” English pride and Indian nationalism went hand in hand:
although he was a “midnight’s child”, born in 1947 in a free India, the
British loomed large in his psyche. They were the masters, and they had
taught him that power itself was a value, worthy of respect, even if it
was grudging.

Surely this was ordinary interplay between real and imaginary homes,
the kinds of conversations that took place in every immigrant
household. Nearly all my uncles at some point considered returning to
India, but none had followed through.

I had expected my father to be similarly pragmatic. I didn’t realise his

attachment to his original home was so deep that one day he would be
willing to accept a more painful death over remaining in England.

Fifty years after his first arrival, three months before he died, he was
back at Heathrow airport, bidding farewell to England.

C
oming out to my parents in Punjabi had proved nearly
impossible. The words for it didn’t exist in the language.
Resorting to English would make my sexuality feel like a
western construct. When parts of myself were translated
into different tongues, a wedge seemed to be driven
through me.

But duality was not unfamiliar to my father. It had seeped into his
parenting. He would moralise in Punjabi and transact in English. He
didn’t care how I chose to live my life in the west. He was mostly
concerned about India, that nothing would come in the way of its
enduring pull. It was only after his stage-four cancer diagnosis that
something changed: each time I left the UK or spoke to him on the
phone, my father would say in English and in Punjabi, “Be happy,” and,
“Don’t worry.”

Acceptance was not immediate. For a short while my father thought my

partner, Muneer, a law professor, had all the markings of a Muslim
terrorist. An avid newspaper reader, he started saving specific types of
articles. One such clipping traced the journey of a UK-born, Ivy League-
educated Muslim man involved in a terrorist plot.

I told my father I was sure of one thing: Muneer was not into blowing
himself up. A few months later he mentioned another story he had
read, about a same-sex couple becoming parents. “You should have a
child,” he said to me one day, as I accompanied him to his
chemotherapy treatment. “In fact, have twins, since you are starting so
late.”

In 2012 my father asked me to visit India and to bring Muneer with me.
I resisted; London would be easier, given India’s restrictive visa policy
for anyone with ancestral ties to Pakistan. He pushed, and we relented,
aware that we were being asked to demonstrate how this relationship
would not hinder my heritage.

We waited for several months, but the visa never arrived. I called my
father to give him the bad news. “With your education, I’m confident
the two of you can find a way,” he said, taunting us.

We arrived late on a warm, humid afternoon, and my parents were

standing at the door. I watched nervously as they hugged Muneer. My
father’s face lit up as he heard Muneer speak in Hindustani. They
hugged again.

The next morning, over breakfast, my father pointed in the direction of

the Wagah border, about 100km from the village. In good times, one
can take a taxi from Amritsar to Lahore. He asked Muneer if he would
be willing to meet a few people, to talk about his work and share his
impressions of Punjab. So far our visit had been an intensely private
affair and I wanted to keep it that way.

But here was my father, living his true life, and it proved hard not to
respond to that. Over the years, he had become an important
powerbroker, collaborating with local politicians and businesses to
mobilise investments from the Punjabi diaspora.

We found ourselves walking into a cantonment in Nawanshahr, dotted

with offices once occupied by the British army and civil services.
Unbeknown to Muneer and me, in one of the offices, 10 journalists and
three TV crews were waiting. At the front of the room, a long table was
arranged with four chairs.

Navtej Singh Dhillon’s family home in Khanpur,

Punjab.

We watched more press pour into the room. My father tapped the table.
The room fell silent. He turned to his right and introduced Muneer –
professor of law, expert in immigration and first-time visitor to Punjab –
kicking off the press conference. The local press rarely had a chance to
interview someone with roots in Pakistan. They dwelled on what it felt
like to be a visitor in Punjab, and how different or similar it was to
Pakistan. I watched Muneer shuffle in his chair, clear his throat and
answer in Hindi, bending the language, reverting to English and
occasionally turning to me for help finishing his sentences. He’s an
American, I wanted to say. But that would have been lost on the press.
To them he was a Pakistani, both foreign and familiar.

“These kids need to see peace in their lives,” my father interjected. The
message seemed intended for the local policymakers.

The day we left, he handed us a binder full of clippings from the local
newspapers. “You are always welcome here,” he said to Muneer.

A
week before his death, in his hazy state, my father told
me about a box in his closet he wanted me to have. I took
it as an invitation and walked straight to his bedroom. I
found an old cardboard box on the bottom shelf, covered
in a layer of dust.

“Dad, these are old registries,” I said. Engraved on the first page was the
face of King George VI, the pink lips and bright eyes of the last emperor
of India. Below, in thick black ink, Urdu script ran in long symmetrical
lines, documenting debts owed to the family and proof of land
ownership.

Underneath the registries, I discovered a letter in Urdu. “America 1933,”

it said on the top left corner. I asked Nina, a family maid from Bihar, to
go around the village and find me an Urdu reader. But such was the
legacy of partition: there was no one left in our Punjabi village who
spoke the language of my great-grandfather.

From the rooftop, I could see the fertile fields and the dark soil, the kind
of topography my great-grandfather Puran Singh would have
encountered in the Sacramento Valley. Farming methods developed in
the fields of Punjab were in demand in California’s newly arable land.
These immigrants could harvest in the scorching heat. They also knew
fruit-picking needed delicate hands. It was easy to bruise a peach.

The money they saved arrived back in India through the imperial postal
system. Letters carried promises of families reuniting and making the
US their home. But the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited
immigrants from buying land. A 1920 report from the California State
Board of Control described Indian workers as unfit for association with
American people. Three years later, the supreme court ruled that Indian
men were ineligible for naturalised citizenship.
In 1946, Congress passed legislation that made the first wave of Indian
immigrants eligible for US citizenship. Had he been alive, Puran Singh
would have shared in the triumph, but also grieved its terms. The India
League of America had argued that Indians belonged in the US because
they “are anthropologically of Caucasian race”.

Erasing a part of yourself would be the only kind of progress available

time and time again.

I
n our house in the US, we talk about the house in India. I tell my
four-year-old son about the peacocks that visit our rooftop in
Khanpur, and how one day we will make oil lamps and leave
them by the wooden door. Hundreds of people will visit him
and they will send him any animal he wants. It’s that kind of
place: beautiful, but deeply unequal.

“Who lives there?” my son asks. I’m thrown off by the question, unsure
how to explain the hold of an uninhabited place.

In the middle of my night, text messages arrive from people in the

village. The banisters have cracked. The village temple needs a
generous donation. Nina’s back is crooked and she might return to
Bihar.

My mother tells me there is a special kind of blessing my son can only

receive if he visits the land of his ancestors.

We make plans to visit as a family but we falter. Muneer would have to

submit his passport for an unknown period and wait for the Indian
authorities to respond. Also buried in my resistance is not wanting to
submit a visa application for my son. The application will ask if one of
his parents or grandparents was born in Pakistan, perhaps prompting
the Indian authorities to treat him as a Pakistani American, marking
him for ever and limiting his access to India. Or perhaps realising that
he has two fathers, they will be inclined to recognise only me, his
Indian American father. Our visit is either a process of denying who we
are, or comes at the risk of banishment.

My mother often says I’ve changed the course of my son’s life by

hyphenating his last name, by adding Ahmad, a Muslim surname, to
Dhillon, a Sikh surname. The first time she saw my son’s passport she
didn’t speak to me for days. “They won’t like it in India, they won’t like
it in America,” she said.

‘I
always want you to be well,” Puran Singh wrote in a letter to
his son, penned from a rural farm near Yuba City in June
1933. “This is to say I wrote you three letters. Did you get
them? If you did why have you not replied?

“You may have heard, I hurt my leg so I am walking with a

stick. I think in five to six months I will return home. These days work is
very slow. It’s only hand to mouth.

“How are the people in the village? Send me an update on them. I want
to know if everyone is healthy.

“If Sham Singh had not tried to come to America it would have been
better. One he suffered losses and second my 2,000 rupees got lost in
the process. I had to come and go quite a few times which was
expensive and he hasn’t got anything from it.

“Answer me soon. I am reminding you. Answer me quickly. Write back.

“Where did you do your second marriage?

“Your well wisher, Puran Singh from America.”

I had carried the letter back to the US. Two years passed before I had it
translated.

A version of this piece appears in the fall issue of n+1

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