JOIN USSirdar Mohna Singh had as many sons and daughters as rooms in his new haveli in Moga, near Ferozepur. Thirteen, although he had counted neither. Mohna was afflicted with an unusual malady called triskaidekaphobia — fear of number 13. However, his sister Harinder Kaur from Lahore mentioned the room count to him. Rattled, he quickly evicted the eldest son Gurbax and sealed the room.
Well into his teens, Gurbax, too, had shown symptoms of a phobia: trichophobia; fear of hair. He buttered up aunt Harinder and begged her to take him away from that hairy town.
She spoke to Mohna about a good school for him and they decided he would shift to Lahore, funded by Mohna and eyeballed by Harinder. Gurbax was thrilled to join Sam Pepper High School. The hostel warden was a friendly bloke. So was Jugnu Singh, his roommate. It did not take the duo much time to discover Anarkali, Lahore’s pleasure zone famous and notorious for its razzmatazz. At night the bazaar resonated with the jingle of ghungroos emanating from the kothas of the anarkalis, the thrum of sitars and dancing fingers percussing on the tabla.
Soon the two were invited to join a frolicking group called the Kookaburras. The male members donned a yellow beret and the girls, a dupatta or scarf of the same colour. Gurbax and Jugnu, both turbaned, were given three months to ‘earn’ the beret. With all that ‘funtooshing’, Gurbax was soon low on the funds but unwilling to borrow even from the large-hearted aunt.
Mulling over several options, he decided on Operation Geometry-box. Pronto Mohna Sigh received a confidential telegram from Lahore: NEED GEOMETRY-BOX. SEND Rs 88. It was a huge sum in the 1920s. Unlettered, Mohna went into a huddle with the village elders who knew the box, but not geometry. Turbans shook gravely. Money was approved. Gurbax hit the jackpot. At the Diwali party Gurbax and Jugnu stunned the Kookaburras with their missing turbans and trimmed hairdo. They oozed with after-shave lotions. By tradition they were given 22 bounces, each one loudly counted, and then crowned with the yellow berets.
However, Gurbax’ s joy was shortlived. For three years he hadn’t been home, but that X-mas he had to; the hostel was shutting down for repairs, and aunt Harinder was off to Kandhar. Gurbax panicked. He stopped shaving and restored his facial hair but had no luck with the top crop. He even had a nightmare; indulging in a horseplay with kids, his turban comes off and Mohna Singh subjects him to a lathicharge. Finally, he decided to wear a tight patka, stuck a squash-ball on the head to fake the hair knot and headed for the station.
Gurbax was giving himself a final check in the WC mirror when the train reached Ferozepur. The bogey emptied in a jiffy as though everyone had taken purgatives. Looking every inch a Lahore dandy, he alighted last but found no one to receive him. The platform emptied and suddenly Mohna Singh made a grand entry with the tuck-tuck of his lathi. In the other hand he held some papers. His eyes encircled by panda rings pierced Gurbax’s confidence, and he began to quake in his corduroys.
Mohna Singh stopped a few steps away, thwacked the platform with his lathi and spoke, “I forgive you for your geometry-box trick, but not for THIS black deed,” he touched his son on the head with the stick. “Gurbax, you are no more my son, and I have dispossessed you of all my properties. It’s all here in legal documents,” he chucked the file at him. “And you will do me a favour. Don’t ever show your face to me and never enter our town.” Mohna Singh then turned around and walked away.
The man he left standing alone on the platform was my dad.