Phantoms on the trail

They are the unwanted, the exploited and the discredited. They clog up the traffic. Many are foul mouthed alcoholics, ghutka chewers and drugs users. The people with charming little cabins, scruffy helpers, long haul assignments and sleepless nights. They drive the economy. The economy drives on their backs.

Baldev Singh was one of them. For 10 years between 1969-1980 he drove a truck from Kolkata to Assam, Nepal, Orissa hauling oil supplies to remote parts of the nation, notching miles, clocking deliveries, gathering stories. One day, he put them to paper and Sadaknama a unique chronicle of the 1970s trucking life was born on the pages of a Punjabi literary magazine, Nagmani, edited by poet Amrita Pritam. The sobriquet ‘Sadaknama’ stuck.

The stories he told were nothing like the Tata advertisements that posit driving as a desirable or aspirational profession. They cut close to the bone. Closer than the subject in the mirror may appear. He wrote of helpless sex workers, dhaba night culture, uncouth and corrupt cops.

“There was this park in Calcutta where truckers would gather between driving. Women would come by. Offer services for as little as ₹2,” he recounts. He spent eight years documenting their lives. In his telling, Sonagachi, became Lal Batti or the “Red Light”, a neon light crossing of shapeshifting lust, boorish exploitation, graceful resilience and above all, survival.

Years later, when he had built a trucking company of his own with seven trucks, four taxis and two trailers, and gave it up on his return to his hometown, Moga, in eastern Punjab, the phantom life sought him out again. He wrote on farmers’ pauperisation, drug addiction and the sex workers, the flipside of “I love my India” of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaenge (DDLJ) in Punjab.

“After spending eight years interacting with Sonagachi sex workers, who found their voice in my book, Lal Batti, my attention was drawn to growing number of women standing at bus stands in Punjab,” says Baldev Singh. He travelled through 15 Punjab districts, visiting homes, meeting these women.

“Everywhere I went, I ran into women whose husbands, sons and brothers, lay drugged and stoned at home while they tried to keep the home fires burning. These were educated women. Some had done BA, B.Ed. I would ask them, why flesh trade? They would say, what else can we do? I had no answer,” says Singh. This led him to write Mitti Rudan Karey (The Earth Laments) a play that has been staged across Punjab bringing his pen closer to the people.

“Baldev Singh, before he turned to historical fiction, wrote mostly about his personal experience as a truck driver in Bengal. Sikhs from the Malwa region in eastern Punjab have a long connection with Kolkata where they dominated taxi business since the early 20th century,” says Amarjit Chandan, noted Punjabi writer and poet, adding that “In recent years, his works on more contemporary social problems in Punjab such as Anndata (The Foodgiver) a novel on farmers’ suicides and a play Mitti Rudan Karey on drug problem have made him more popular, thus securing his place in the history of Punjabi literature.”

His historical novels do not carry the electrifying aura of Sadaknama, Lal Batti (which has been translated into Hindi and brought out in Urdu by Sanjha publications, Lahore) or Anndata (which is part of MA syllabus at the Punjab University, Patiala) but they are widely read among youth. Born of his desire to create role models for a dispirited and lost generation, he has tried to bring to life folk heros like Dula Bhatti (Toodon Dilli Ke Kangoore, which was selected for the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013), Bhagat Singh (Satluj Vaihainda Raha or Satluj Kept Flowing), Banda Singh Bahadur (Mahabali Soora) or Panchwa Sahabzada (about the Dalit, Jaita Ranghreta, who brought back Guru Tegh Bahadur Singh’s head from Delhi to Punjab after Mughal emperor had him beheaded).

The last of these, Baldev has some 60 odd books to his name, on Maharaja Ranjit Singh (Sooraj di Ankh or Eye of the Sun) earned the ire of Akali Dal trolls. “The recent controversy about his novel about Maharja Ranjit Singh was started by ill-informed Twitter and Facebooker gangs. Ironically fundamentalist Sikhs do not see Ranjit Singh as a true Sikh,” explains Chandan. To Baldev Singh ‘Sadaknama’, the rear mirror has two faces, the anxious and the riled. Both are human.