Since we had nothing to do except wait for Hailey’s letter my father decided to call on other officials–bank managers, property owners and heads of Delhi’s leading families. ‘You never know when one of them may prove useful. One must keep up with everyone who matters,’ he said very wisely. We also saw the Red Fort and the Royal Mosque and went round Sikh gurdwaras. These last were poorly maintained as there were not many Sikhs in Delhi and none of them very rich. Even on Sunday evenings the congregation at Sees Ganj did not exceed a hundred men and women. Everyone we introduced ourselves to as newcomers asked us if we had seen the Qutub Minar. They said it was the highest tower in the world and from its top storey you could see the countryside with its ruins for miles around. ‘One day we will hire a
tonga
and go to the Qutub,’ my father said to me. By then I had started having dreams of my own. I replied, ‘I will go to the Qutub driving my own motor car.’ At the time no more than a dozen of the richest Indian families of Delhi owned cars. I could see my father was pleased with my ambition and self-assurance. Nevertheless, he laughed and snubbed me: ‘
Bharooah
! learn to earn before you talk of buying a motor car. You know how much one costs?’
He let me buy a bicycle — a beautiful, dark-green Raleigh made in England. It did not take me long to learn to ride it. The Raleigh cycle was to be my Rolls-Royce and my Daimler for the next fifteen years.
Give it to the English, when they say they will do something for you, you can be sure it will be done. A month after we had called on Hailey, we got a note asking us to report at his office.
There were a lot of English officers present. He simply introduced us to the Chief Engineer of the Central Public Works Department (CPWD). Without bothering to reply to our greetings, the Chief Engineer said: ‘You can start with roads and clerks’ quarters. I’ll see your work first and then we can think of other things. See the Superintending Engineer tomorrow morning.’
My father went straight to the CPWD office to find out who was who. From a clerk my father got the names and addresses of every one who worked there from the SE down to his
chaprassies
. On the way back we stopped at the telegraph office. I drafted a telegram to my younger brother who was looking after our property in the village to send a few reliable men who could organize labour and keep accounts.
The next morning before going to the office of the SE we called at his residence with the usual baskets of fruit ‘from our orchards’. We gave handsome tips to his
chaprassies
. The SE did not see us; his chief orderly told us that the sahib never received Indians in his home. To this day I do not know whether the fruit ever reached him or was eaten up by his
chaprassies
.
We went on to the CPWD office. A few minutes later the SE drove up and sent for us. It was easier than I expected. He gave us a map of the roads to be laid round the temporary Secretariat building on Alipur Road. No tenders were invited. We were asked to submit in two days an estimate of the cost and the time it would take us to complete the work. We spent the afternoon working out the costs of hiring labour, stone, cement, sand and transportation. It came to a couple of lakhs of rupees. The next day my father handed over the estimate to the overseer with a thousand rupee note for him. The following day the overseer came to see us. He had scaled down our estimates very marginally still leaving us a handsome margin of profit. My father gave him another thousand rupee note and a bottle of Scotch. They embraced each other to cement an on-going business partnership. That became the pattern of our working life. Every Indian who had anything to do with our building contracts was given his cut in advance. Most Anglo-Indian officials also expected money or whisky. English officials who knew what was going on never accepted anything beyond baskets of fruit with a bottle or two of whisky thrown in on
bara din
.
It did not take me long to catch on to the business. We sent agents to hire Baagree labourers from Rajputana. This was not difficult as that desert land always suffered from drought and famines. They were happy to get half-a-rupee per day (less for women) and break stones, dig, mix mortar and cement from sunrise to sunset. Every evening they trooped back to their hovels with their women singing all the way. We who made money spent our time counting it and were miserable if other contractors were making more than us.
In April 1912 Edwin Lutyens, the architect approved by the king, and a team of town builders, came to Delhi to inspect the site of the new capital. They went by horseback around Kingsway Camp, the Ridge and along the river Jamna from above Majnoon Ka Tilla to Okhla. They went over the area several times again on elephants before deciding that Kingsway would not do because it was low-lying, too close to the river and swampy. They spent another fifteen days riding around villages between Paharganj and Mehrauli and from the Jamna behind Purana Qila to the Ridge before deciding that the most suitable site for the new city would be round village Malcha and that the Viceregal palace and the Secretariats should be built on Raisina Hill. Lord Hardinge who had earlier chosen the Kingsway Camp site agreed with them. It did not bother them that Their Majesties had laid the foundation stone at Kingsway. There was nothing sacred about the site, they said. The same foundation stone could be re-laid elsewhere.
And so it was. Hailey sent for my father (by now my father had become his most reliable contractor) and told him that he was to remove the foundation stone from Kingsway to its new site at Malcha. Not a word of this was to be breathed to anyone. He drove in his own car to the tomb of Safdar Jang and then took us on foot to a spot near Malcha where the stone was to be replanted. There was a barbed wire fence round the spot with a couple of armed policemen on guard.
Taking out the foundation stone and planting it in its new site was the first job my father entrusted to me to do all on my own. I was thrilled. First, I had a pit dug for the stone. Then I hired a bullock cart and selected half-a-dozen labourers for the job. We were given four policemen as our escort. Finally, one evening in May I rode my bicycle alongside the bullock cart loaded with labourers and policemen and reached Kingsway Camp an hour after sunset. I had the stone dug out and placed on a bed of straw spread in the cart. I covered it up with tarpaulin. We then proceeded on our journey led by a man carrying a petromax lamp. I walked with the rest of the party behind the cart. We looked like a funeral procession. It was a long distance to traverse as we had to skirt round the city. We reached Malcha after midnight. It took us another hour to fix the stone in the pit with mortar. I gave the labourers a rupee each as a reward. By the time I reached home it was daylight. My father interrupted his morning prayer to ask me how it had gone. I gave him the details. When I told him I had given the labourers an extra rupee, he called me a
bharooah
.
We were now making enough money to live in better quarters. (However, as we were used to going out in the open to relieve ourselves we found going to a dirty, smelly lavatory very constipating).
We did not get any contracts for the building of the temporary Secretariat which was almost entirely taken over by the CPWD and decided to move out to the site where the new city was destined to come up. With the labourers and the building materials available to us, it didn’t take us a month to put up a couple of rooms, kitchen and courtyard. This was close to an old flour mill. Following our example other Sikh contractors also built shacks alongside ours on what later came to be known as the Old Mill Road. Although we came from different parts of the Punjab and belonged to different castes, we soon became like members of one family.
Lutyens prepared a plan of the layout of the new city and where he meant to locate the Viceregal palace and the Secretariats. I heard that in his original plan Lutyens had wanted to dam the Jamna behind Humayun’s tomb and make a huge ornamental lake extending from the Red Fort to Purana Qila with a lakeside drive and waterways running through the city. This was not approved because of the enormous cost. Lutyens also wanted to drive a road from the Viceregal palace to the Jamia Masjid piercing the old Mughal city wall and the bazaars. This was also turned down. The rest was approved by the Viceroy as well as King George whom Lutyens met on his return to England. Lutyens got an old colleague, Herbert Baker, to share the work with him. In addition to the general layout of the city, Lutyens assigned to himself the Viceregal palace and the War Memorial Arch; Baker designed the Secretariats and the Parliament. The rest of the work was equally divided between them. They had known each other for many years. Baker had chosen Lutyens to be his co-architect for buildings in South Africa. Lutyens was returning the compliment by choosing Baker as his partner in the building of New Delhi. Everyone thought they were good friends. But envy of Lutyens’s genius and popularity with royalty and the Vicereine soured Baker’s mind.
Lutyens was a man of vision. Although neither he nor Baker had too great an opinion of our old palaces, mosques and temples, they agreed to give an Indian touch to their designs. What impressed me most about Lutyens was that even before roads were laid, he ordered trees to be planted along the proposed routes. A huge nursery was set up to raise the right kind of saplings. Lutyens wanted slow-growing but massive, long-living trees like banyans,
neems
and tamarinds. The official horticulturist imported some exotic trees like the Sausage and the African Tulip tree from East Africa. Lutyens talked of designing a city which would meet the needs of its citizens for two hundred years and forecast that one day the English would leave India and let Indians manage their own affairs. I am not sure whether he was like some crazy Englishmen who sided with Indian nationalists, but his wife was known to do so. It was rumoured that she had run away to Madras and was having an affair with a Hindu boy who had been proclaimed a messiah. All I can say is that though I saw Lutyens many times in his office and bungalow I never saw his wife. Also, the English didn’t like talking about Mrs Lutyens.
Our first summer in Delhi made us decide that we would make our home there. It was less hot than our desert village and the rainy season was very pleasant. Above all, we were making more money than we had dreamed of. By the autumn we had added more rooms to our home, hired a gardener and a couple of servants. My mother, wife and sons joined us. So did many other families from our village whom we employed as clerks, labour managers and storekeepers. Thereafter we only went back to the village to attend the marriages of relations or the funerals of people we knew.
Exactly a year after the royal
darbar
there was another. This time it was in honour of the Viceroy and Vicereine formally taking up residence in Delhi. Elaborate arrangements were made for their reception at Delhi railway station and the Red Fort. They were to be taken in procession on elephantback through the municipal gardens and Chandni Chowk to the Red Fort. As in the year before, there were many rehearsals and great precautions were taken to see that no untoward incident marred the solemnity of the occasion. Hailey who was in charge of the arrangements apprehended mischief and had Cleveland of the CID inspect every home and shop that lay on the route to make sure there were no terrorists lurking about. Armed policemen were posted on the roof-tops of Chandni Chowk. I felt that these precautions were overdone because till then I had not met a single Dilliwalla who had anything to say against the English.
As on the royal
darbar
so on the day of the Viceregal
darbar
we got up at 4 a.m. This was quite unnecessary as the Viceroy and Vicereine were not due to arrive till the afternoon. But such was the excitement and anxiety to find a place from where we could watch the procession that we were eager to get there well ahead of time. The morning of 23 December 1912 was cold and clear without a cloud in the blue sky. By the time the sun came up every flower and blade of grass was washed clean by the dew. It was as perfect a start of a day as I had seen since I had come to Delhi.
We set out from the house at 11 a.m. We hired four
tongas
to take us, our servants, our clerks and their families. Hundreds of labourers and their women kept pace with us as crowds on the road made the going very slow. We dismissed the
tongas
at Ajmeri Gate and walked through the prostitutes’ Chawri Bazaar, Nai Sarak and were in front of the Clock Tower a little after noon. Crowds had already started collecting there. We went down Chandni Chowk to Gurdwara Sees Ganj. The caretakers had been instructed to let in only Sikhs on that day. So we had a balcony facing the Fountain on the other side of Chandni Chowk all to ourselves.
The firing of cannons informed us of the arrival of the Viceregal train. At the railway station, the Hardinges were received by some maharajas; at the municipal buildings an address of welcome was presented to them on behalf of the citizens of Delhi. As the police band which led the procession marched past below us, we knew that the reception at the municipality was over and the Hardinges were on their way. The police band was followed by Highlanders playing bagpipes, Sikh cavalry and other troops. I could not see very far towards the Clock Tower but I saw the line of elephants slowly lumbering towards us. There were over a dozen of them. The Viceroy and the Vicereine were on the eighth, the biggest in India called Gajumat, which had been loaned to him for the occasion by the Raja of Faridkot.
Suddenly the procession came to a halt. A lot of people started yelling at the top of their voices. I am sure I heard a loud bang but I was not sure if it was a cracker or a bomb. The four elephants in the front row stopped some yards away from us. I saw men running away from Chandni Chowk into the side-streets. Those on the roof-tops had disappeared. Some men running down the street on the Clock Tower side were shouting: ‘
Bhago, bhago
(run, run).’ Other words I caught were ‘bomb’ and ‘
maar dala
(killed).’ Had somebody thrown a bomb at the Viceroy’s elephant and killed the Viceroy, his Vicereine and their attendants?