The FACT...........Manmohan Singh lived here

Manmohan Singh lived here

By Salman Rashid

Until ten days ago the world had never heard of Gah Bigal in the heart of the Salt Range country of western Punjab. Then came news that the soft-spoken Dr Manmohan Singh was to become the 13th prime minister of India and the world descended on Gah (local pronunciation Gai) in the Union Council of Bigal. Word was that he was born in this little village in the Punjabi highlands. There was some confusion about its location though. Friend Ayaz Amir, the renowned political analyst, wrote in a column that Manmohan Singh was a 'son of Chakwal'. But when I asked other friends (natives either of Chakwal or Jhelum district) there were confusing reports.

Gai was not far from Kala Gujran just outside Jhelum city. No, said another, Gai was by Sanghoi that lies south of Jhelum. Yet another spoke of it being near Chakwal. The confusion concerning Gai being near Jhelum was created, I understood later, by Dr Singh's purported interview where he said he was a native of Jhelum. Now that was true until the early 1980s. But with the upgrading of Chakwal to district level, he now was a native of Chakwal as Ayaz had written.

Deciding no one would know better than Ayaz, I called him up in Chakwal. Gai, he said was northwest of Chakwal. In fact, it was within walking distance of his own village Bhagwal. If I were to leave the motorway at the Balkassar interchange, his man would be waiting for me to take me to Gai. But, he warned, the proverbial pinch of salt was necessary for a visit because every man older than 60 years of age and within 50 miles of Gai was now claiming to be Dr Singh's childhood playmate and class fellow.

And so there we were, young Saeed and I, 30 minutes before schedule at the interchange. As we waited for Ayaz's factotum, I asked the teashop man if he knew anything about Gai and Manmohan Singh. He pointed me to a biggish man, fair of skin and with impressive whiskers, sitting in a car.

Friend Ayaz was so right: the man, scarcely 60 or so, loudly claimed that he was indeed a classmate of good old Dr Singh. But he was not up to "taking any interviews," he said, because he had no wish to be "that famous". All this in English while I spoke back to him in Punjabi.

I waked away. Five minutes later he came up to me and, now unsolicited, began waffling on about Manmohan Singh. We were rescued by the arrival of our young guides Shahid and Imran.

Past the Balkassar oil wells, the country road wound through freshly harvested wheat fields and isolated homesteads. Gai was like any other village in the Salt Range: stone-lined pond shaded by a spreading pipal (two ponds, in fact), mud-plastered and brick houses with spacious courtyards in front where goats with swollen udders kept the milk supply from spoiling. Winding streets, some brick-paved others not, with wandering cattle, women bearing water pots on their heads and dogs lolling in the drain by the side.

We spotted some men sitting under an acacia tree in an open space and turned the car in their direction. Shahid laughed and said they would already know what we were about. What with the various news agencies and TV networks descending like locusts upon poor unsuspecting Gai, we were no longer a novelty. Of the three elderly men, Ghulam Mohammed aka Mohammed Khan said he was indeed Dr Singh's classmate. Hadn't I been warned by Ayaz?

I tried to look sceptical and he described teachers Fazal Karim (from Jhelum) and Daulat Ram. The former taught classes three and four, the latter one and two. The young Manmohan Singh came to school with his hair tied in a bun on top and secured with coloured muslin. He was quiet and studious, very good at arithmetic, stood first in class and kept away from mischief. His family lived in the Hindu mohalla to the southeast side of the village. That was where his father also kept shop. Mohammed Khan could not remember what was sold in that shop, however.

The entire Hindu mohalla was sacked and burnt in the riots of Partition, he said. It was rebuilt later, but not one building that stands there today is from the old days. If Manmohan Singh were to visit his ancestral village now, there would be no home where the walls would still hold the memory of his family in that time before Partition. Mohammed Khan did not remember if Dr Singh and his family had already left before or after the rioting began.

We walked up the narrow street to the school. It looked new. This couldn't be the one where the child Manmohan Singh could have done his lessons, I thought to myself. But it turned out that while the current building as well as the gateway were indeed new, the old rooms that stood on the far side of courtyard had only recently been pulled down. Unknown to themselves the school management had severed Manmohan Singh's last connection with Gai Bigal. All that now bonds the Indian Prime Minster with this village are some distant memories and the few elderly men who went to school with him.

Iqbal the schoolmaster produced the register that is fast becoming famous. It was in tatters, but the paper had not yet turned brittle. The school started in 1926, but the first page beginning at serial 180 recorded admissions from the year 1932 onwards. Iqbal had inherited the register in this form. He had no idea how long the first few pages had been missing.

At serial 187 sat the name of one Manmohan Singh. He was born on the fourth day of February in the year 1932 to shopkeeper Gurmukh Singh of the caste Kohli. The inscription was in a very fine hand and singed by Fazal Karim. Mohammed Khan had after all not been talking through his hat.

This youngster joined school just after his fifth birthday -- on April 17, 1937, in class one. He left four years later on the last day of March. Since the Gai school had only four grades, Manmohan Singh moved on to another school in neighbouring Munday, it was reported.

Someone said Dr Singh was one of four brothers and six sisters. We looked through the entire register right up to the year 1947 for any other children of Gurmukh Singh. But there were none. Surely the lost pages of the register hold the secret of those of Dr Singh's siblings who also attended the Gai Primary School. But the secret will abide, at least for the time being.

Then the mystery deepened. There was another Manmohan Singh, the son of Aasa Singh, also a shopkeeper and a Kohli. No one could say which of these two of Gai's sons had risen to lead the government in India. Now, I had read somewhere that Dr Singh was 72. The other Manmohan having been born in May 1934 could not be it. Age pointed to the son of Gurmukh Singh being the anointed one: the child who was good with figures and who had risen to turn India's economy around as her very able Finance Minister.

Among the several names, the admissions page for 1937 also listed one Ahmed Khan. Iqbal, the school teacher, said this man was still alive and living in the village. We asked directions for his house and drove off. As we neared his home and were going past a pond an elderly man tending a herd of buffalos signalled us to stop. I got off the car and went up to him.

"I'm looking for Ahmed Khan," I said.

"I am Ahmed Khan and that's why I signalled you to stop," said the man.

As he saw our car appearing from behind the house, he said, he knew we were coming for him. Why and how, I wanted to know.

"I'm Manmohan Singh's classmate, aren't I?" Ahmed Khan made it sound as if I had asked a very foolish question.

It turned out that our man had been 'interrogated' by every single media person turning up in Gai on Manmohan Singh's spoor. But Ahmed Khan remembered precious little and, thankfully, he did not have a rehearsed spiel -- at least not thus far. He did not know how many siblings his now famous classmate had. Nor too could he recall his father's name. He echoed Mohammed Khan's verdict, however: Manmohan Singh was very quiet and studious and diligently kept away from mischief. Ahmed Khan said one very interesting thing. After finishing the four grades at Gai and eight at neighbouring Munday, Manmohan Singh moved on to Murid, a village very near Chakwal -- while Ahmed Khan and Ghulam Mohammed did not go beyond the fourth grade.

He did not remember if the family sold off their property and moved en masse or if it was young Manmohan alone who went for his education. Now, Ayaz Amir had already told me of some tenuous Murid connection. An Indian journalist, he had said, had written to him some years earlier saying that Manmohan Singh (already famous as India's Finance Minister) lived in Murid and did the daily back and forth trip to a school in Chakwal. Murid and Munday were not on our agenda, however. I knew the school register at Gai was a one time lucky fluke. The way we handle all sorts of record, it was a snowflake's chance in hell that we would find similar evidence at either of those places.

In the schoolroom I had asked the boys if they knew why all these media persons were visiting their village. One stood up to tell us that Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, had passed through this same school many years before them. I asked if that inspired them. There came a few shy nods. I might have sounded corny to them, but I told them to aspire to be a politician in the mould of Dr Manmohan Singh who, according to Gai legend, had received a monthly salary of only one rupee for his time as Finance Minister. They would do well not to emulate those who are tearing Jinnah's Pakistan to shreds.

As we were leaving, a man who had introduced himself as Javed, a retired soldier, said he wanted Dr Manmohan Singh to know that he was welcome to visit Gai.

"We will receive him like he has never been received before," he said. "He is a son of this village and he has done us proud by rising to the highest office in India."

Fine words. As time goes by Dr Manmohan Singh's ruthless honesty in political office and his dedication to the cause of his adopted country (the real country being which he left in 1947 for fear of his life) will perhaps become known. If the people of Gai are today proud of him, surely there will be some oddball youngster who would want to follow in Dr Singh's footsteps and serve his country (real for he was born here) with that same devotion.