Proud to be a Punjabi

Sixty one years ago a well-heeled Punjabi hindu family based in Lahore started its long trudge back to India in the midst of the partition riots. Leaving behind a prosperous business, a house large enough to have stables for the horses and kennels for the dogs, the large group of old and young went through hell before reaching Dehradun. Here they confronted their new reality for the first time when the relatives they had hoped would take them in turned them down forcing them into the Government's hastily created refugee camps. Life was tough in these camps especially for the women used to a more genteel living and now having to use public spaces for their daily chores. Snake bites, malaria and hunger were a part of their existence.

Somehow they persevered eking out a meagre existence by selling food at the nearby railway station. Each morning the women would rise early and cook and the boys would go and hawk it at the station. Then the hunt would start for cheap rations. This continued for several years before finally the family migrated to Shimla and started its life all over again.

Through it there were two constants - they would not beg, ever. Not even to go back to the relatives who had turned them away. And they would not borrow because they knew they had no means of repaying the loans. The pain this caused was intense. One young son died of diarrhea and another grew up with polio. For the others, the teens were not an age to frolic but a time to put their shoulder to the family wheel. But they endured and passed on their lessons to another, more privileged generation.

I know this story because you see these were the families of my parents. I learnt two lessons from them - no work is below my dignity and debt is never an answer to any crisis. Often it worsens it.

To an America fattened, weakened and finally flattened by debt Obama says “yes we can”. Another generation of Indians, devastated by a partition they were not responsible for, said ‘no we won’t. They were tough men, often crude and unpolished, and mostly reviled for being grasping and unaesthetic. But today I feel proud of them, glad for the legacy of self-respect and hard work they have left me with.