Memories of tender years!
Desh Bir
At Kangoo, the village on the edge of the pine forest, life moved at a snail’s pace. Only one bus served the area. Every evening, it arrived around dusk from Hoshiarpur in Punjab and left again for Hoshiarpur the next morning at sunrise.
The service was shared by two transport companies namely Victory Transport and Shiwalik Roadways on alternate days. The day the bus gave a miss, all journeys up to the nearest bus connection, 3 miles afar, were made on foot. In the monsoon months there would be no bus at all as there were no metalled roads.
Only two persons in the area owned one truck each. One of these was a Chevrolet which we would very thoughtfully pronounce as ‘Shiver laitt’. The other was owned by one named Joginder who was its driver, too. Joginder would unload sandstone at a level site near our rented house once in a while for a proposed hospital which was a dream project of the rural elite of the Ilaqua. Yet, such a hospital never came up during the seven years while we lived there. One day, we, children, felt shocked when we learnt that Joginder was going to sell his truck for a paltry sixty-four hundred rupees.
As for a motorcycle, we saw one for the first time in 1960 when one, Retd. Honorary Capt. Vyapak Chand, of a nearby village made the village-town throb with the noise-cum-rumble of his Enfield acquired from the Army disposal sale.
We, as children, in the initial days of its entry into the usually calm tenor of the locale ,would assemble in a circle and watch the motorcycle in awe and appreciation. In the town of ten shops, its owner had obtained from a friend an enclosure of mud walls with vertical bamboo-rafts fixed with nails as its gate-cum-door to serve as a parking space. This parking shelter served more as a repair garage than a protective shelter, because the Captain’s proud ride was more often in need of repairs than of rounds on the road.
As the rumbling machine of Captain Vyapak Chand neared the town from the thick of nearby pine glades, it made the place feel proud of such a majestic presence. Equally proud was its owner , because eyes of all newcomers to the place would vie for a glimpse of the rugged beauty from the Indian Army’s bike-cade. The Captain always took a pillion rider with him, because no one knew when the motor may need someone to push it to the repair spot. May be the fuel tank could go empty and the nearest petrol pump was ten miles away. And he easily got such willing riders among rustic idlers.
In the summer nights, the pine forest would be engulfed by sporadic fires. We watched it with much awe, sitting in our beds in the courtyard, there being no electricity or electric fans those days.
Quite often, the spectacle was of a forest some five miles away along the side of a high hill range. However, very intriguingly, it often occurred only at night. Then, father once explained that such fires were caused by the forest contractor’s men to hide the illegally felled trees above and beyond the mandate of his purchase order.
So abysmal was the level of honesty even among the citizens of my India recently declared Independent! We ruefully watched the fires raging. We thought of the wildlife, of birds and their nests and nestlings. Amidst such depressing musings, we would be overpowered by sleep, God knows when.
During a visit to Kangoo in May ,1961 by the strong man of Punjab, Sardar Partap Singh Kairon, Chief Minister, Punjab , I , as a child of nine years and a half, got a chance to read out an Urdu Nazam ( penned that very morning by my father) to welcome him to our school. It went like this: Gharibon ka hamdard, pichhde logon ka ghamkhwar aya hai / Sunte hain ajj Kangoo mein ik bada Sardar aya hai…….. He was so overwhelmed by the delivery and the content of the poem that he called me to his seat and put all the garlands lying on the table around my neck. That was a rare moment for a lad of nine!
(The author is a Retired Principal Government College, Hoshiarpur Punjab)
