Bijnis Woman: Stories of Uttar Pradesh I Heard from My Parents, Mausis and Buas by Tanuja Chandra

Author:Tanuja Chandra [Chandra, Tanuja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mobilism
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2017-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Soldier

By the time Surinder Garg turned sixteen, his mother had stopped counting the rotis he ate by number; she calculated them by height. One baalisht, the span of her hand between outstretched thumb and little finger, was his minimum requirement, doubled up, doh baalisht, he could easily put away in the winter. Rice, one bada bhagona was needed on an average, and milk, as many glassfuls as he could lay his hands on. Because he was the eldest of his siblings, his parents didn’t mind feeding him like a horse; his father worked at a ration office where there was ample scope to make money in the black market and sneak food out. In fact, this might have been the most useful job one could have in the 1940s, when basic goods were rationed, and if one’s firstborn loved kushti.

Bodybuilding was the biggest pleasure of Surinder’s life, besides eating. He woke up at dawn for kasrat, and at night ran for several kilometres after his gigantic dinner, when a jug of milk was left by his bedside for his post-run pleasure. He was 5 feet 10 inches tall at the age of thirteen; his musculature always earned him compliments. Which was handy because his school report was always bad. Studies confounded him; no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t wrap his head around history, maths, chemistry. All his high-school years, he stood upon the threshold of failure, and in the tenth standard he finally crossed over. His aggregate score was nineteen out of a hundred.

His father beat him up as usual. This was not a noteworthy occurrence on account of Surinder’s leathery hide, but unlike earlier beatings, he did mind this one. This time, being thrashed in front of people—and having insults thrown at him by his mother while his younger brother and sisters watched—brought back the day a rusty, jagged piece of metal had sliced his thigh when he fell down during wrestling practice, only this time what was punctured was his pride. He resisted the urge to hit back. A blow from his large hand could cause serious injury (if not death) to his father. What he did do was come to a decision: to leave home. He stole rupee notes from under the clothes in the top shelf of the cupboard, a hiding place his parents hadn’t bothered to change since Surinder’s childhood, and sneaked out in the dead of night without a glance back. He walked brusquely to the train station. Fortunately for him, Kasganj had a steady flow of train traffic, and at dawn he stepped on to a train. It was going to Mathura. From there he travelled to Agra. He decided to stop at Kanpur. The Indian army was enlisting for World War II, and eighteen-year-old Surinder Garg was certain there couldn’t be a more appropriate thikana for him; from this day onward, he decided, there would be nothing khaas about ‘Khasganj’, its original name in the days of Mughal rule.

He

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