Pashaura Singh Dhillon

I am not aware if each kahani has a kavita behind it, but each kavita appears to have something to do with some kind of a kahani. Below is the Moving Image of “Umber Di Shehzadi de Naa: To the Princess of the Skies,” a kavita I wrote 41 years ago and which I recently set to images and my voice. This is the story of that kavita.

I first came up with the idea for Umber Di Shehzadi during the dead of the night in the rented front room of BDO, a friend and class fellow from Khalsa College, Amritsar, who was living in Southall, London.

Khalsa College, Amritsar

There were about half a dozen of us, all classmates from the same year of Khalsa College Amritsar, who by the quirk of fate immigrated to the UK in a span of a year or two of each other during the late 1960s. We all found our first jobs in factories or bakeries. And we were all single. That meant that over the weekends, we had no other obligations, and would often get together at each other’s  rented one-room accomodation. (none of us, fresh arrivals from India, owned homes yet).

That particular evening, we were all there to witness a historic moment: to watch the first human walk on the Moon. The Apollo 11 space flight landed the first humans on Earth’s Moon on July 20, 1969. The mission, carried out by the United States, was considered a major accomplishment in the history of exploration and represented a victory by the U.S. in the Cold War Space Race with the Soviet Union.

BDO’s real name was Surain Singh Sandhu belonging to Dibbi pura, a village on the border of Pakistan in district Amritsar, but we all called him BDO because before moving to England, he used to work as a Block Development Officer in Punjab. And this designation stuck (and he liked it) even though, after moving to England, he worked as a machine man in a factory making steel ropes for the shipyards in Middlesex and then as a postman in the main  Post office in London.

On this special evening, BDO entertained us with a deliciously cooked chicken served with English Cream Sherry and as usual his Punjabi landlady prepared the rotis for us. Wise desi landladies in those days used to let us single people cook our own daal, sabzi, and meat, but would not trust us with making rotis in the shared kitchen. They would politely offer to make and supply rotis free of charge because as much as we thought we were quite the experts in the kitchen now, we would make such a mess by spilling and spreading wheat flour all over the shared kitchen during kneading the dough. So they figured it took the same amount of effort to cook the rotis as it did to clean it all up later, especially from the hidden spaces around the cooking area.

As we sat glued to the BBC, an announcement came on telling us that the program would be delayed by a few hours from the time originally stated by the U.S. network, CBS News. We tried unsuccessfully to take a little nap in between, but remained very excited as the moment began to move closer to midnight, the expected landing time in London.

Neil Steps on the Moon

When it finally came on the television screen, we were mesmerized and hung on every word: Launched from Florida on July 16, the third Lunar Mission of NASA’s Apollo Program was crewed by Commander Neil Arden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the spot they named ‘Sea of Tranquility’. Identifying themselves as having landed at the newly made up name ‘Sea of Tranquility’ Neil Armstrong baffled the CBS News broadcaster back in the USA momentarily, who I think was Walter Cronkite, before he could fully comprehend what was going on. From a small one-room apartment in Southall, my friends and class fellows of Khalsa College, Amritsar and I watched Armstrong and Aldrin become the first humans to land and walk on the Moon. The magnanimity of what we had just seen is still fresh in my mind.

As soon as their space ship, “Eagle” touched down, we sat there speechless. Then we saw Neil Armstrong setting his first footsteps on the moon’s surface, the ‘Sea of Tranquility’. I wasn’t sure how everyone else felt about this electrifying moment as they watched this with jaws dropped; for me however, I was in a different universe now. It was a bigger magic or miracle than any religious or non religious stories tell us about our respective belief systems and which the respective followers may or may not fully believe. But this spectacle was the mother of all miracles, no less divine to say the least, as it was for the whole mankind to see for themselves what was happening before their very eyes.

This was kind of like a new religion which transformed my human experience enabling me to see and feel the universe in a different way. This was a miracle which no one, believer or non believer could deny had occurred.

Planting the U.S. Flag on the Moon

For a moment I forgot that Armstrong and Aldrin were busy collecting the soil samples, noting down the size and colors of the strewn off rocks and planting the American flag staff into the Moon’s surface in haste, in case the mission’s landing there was cut short for whatever reasons and the crew was ordered to return to Earth immediately.

The poet in me was looking beyond what we were seeing. In my mind’s eye, I was seeing a proverbial fairy tale . A magnificently beautiful magical fort like palace standing proud amidst this ‘Sea of Tranquility,’ where the human from the Earth has just landed. In this appearing and disappearing whimsical palace, living all by herself is the Earth’s sister, the untouched virgin Princess of the Planetary system who I called ‘Umber di Shehzadi’ (Princess of the Skies). Man has never asked for permission from the places or, in this case, the planet it wants to colonize. But if he did, I imagined what the Earth would tell her sister, the Moon, about the Man who had come to her planet.

The human from Earth walks to the palace and knocks at the palace doors. Soon the princess answers the door and gets wonder struck by what she sees standing in the door before her. Himself dazzled by her serenity and indescribable beauty, the human falters momentarily. Controlling himself the very next moment, he wastes no time in seeing her dilemma of being uncomfortable by his unannounced tresspassing and his completely camouflaged strangers’ looks. Before the door slams shut in his face, he quickly hands her the letter of introduction, which he takes with him as a sealed reference written by her planetary sister Earth; Written on the condition that only the princess and not the human should break open the seal to read it.

It was as powerful a moment as it was divine. The moment was a spectacle equivalent of imagining the Big Bang only in reverse. In millions of years, the violently separated planet Earth, for the first time had made contact back with one of its other planetary family members, describing her own fate as well as inquiring the wellbeing of others through a human!

In a far fetched and strange sort of way, in my heart it felt as though this was also about me. I had left my mother and my motherland, perhaps feeling the same way, behind in India. Looking for greener pastures, I had just landed here in England. A far distant strange land.
The princess, Umber di Shehzadi holds the letter in her delicate fingers, breaks open the seal and reads the letter silently to herself.

Dr. M.S.Randhawa, Hardyal Singh Johl, Pashaura Singh Dhillon

Forty-two years ago, in 1968, I wrote my maiden poem ‘Rooh Mere Punjab Di’ for the maiden Rose Festival in Chandigarh and won special appreciation from the local community, specifically from Dr. M.S. Randhawa, the then Chief Commissioner of Chandigarh. On the simple stage set up at the grassy lawn under a modest tent erected for the occasion at the Sector 16 Chandigarh Rose Garden, I sang this poem with a great passion. In my heart and mind I genuinely felt as if I was singing this poem to that wonder girl of unparalleled beauty sitting right in the front row, who came of the age of sweet 16 that day. Chandigarh, later to be known as “City Beautiful” was born when they laid the foundation stone in 1952.

Dr. Randhawa who was presiding over the function was so moved by the poem that he rose up from his chair, walked up to me while I was still singing and put the perfumed rose garland presented to him earlier, around my neck whispering some kind words which are still music to my ears. That simple gesture must have made a lot of residents think and ponder about their connectivity with their new city. Performing on stage assured me that I didn’t have to choose between my dreams of being a poet/singer and a Landscape Architect (which I did a few years later). Read more about my life here.

Returning to the first ever Rose Festival started in 1968, there was no police security or extra traffic hold ups in spite of crowd control measures, car park overflows or pushing and shoving of any kind. Most residents simply walked to the festival place with families and children, the babus and high officials used their bikes, vespas or lamberettas and a few cars that were tucked away in the adjacent car park. There were no blaring loudspeakers or high volume Dj’s run music system disturbing the next door residents or the serenity of the leisure valley of which the Rose Garden was the focal point.

That Rose Festival of course, has now grown into a national celebration with all of the associated pomp and grandeur, chaos and confusion. They even offer camel rides. It may now be more “fun,” but it must be a nightmare for the traffic police, security officials as well as ordinary local residents especially children and the elderly. Especially the elderly who has seen better days as things were much simpler back then.

The city of Chandigarh was envisioned by Lee Corbusier in human form. As indicated above, I perceived this human form as a wonder girl who at the age of sweet sixteen in 1968, was blossoming into a young woman. The poem describes her unparalleled breathtaking beauty, vibrant youthfulness, exuberance and spirited promise for Punjab, the land of five rivers and for its deserving people. Blessed and protected from the evil eye by the great Himalayas, bathed in Sukhna Lake, the poem describes her decadent adornments as being made entirely of unique landscape plant material used to beautify Chandigarh.

My background in ornamental horticulture certainly shaped my view of the universe and in so doing, my poetry. After graduating from Khalsa College, Amritsar, my first job was working as a Horticultural Inspector at the then picturesque Moughal Gardens in Pinjore from 1962-1966, followed by a brief term with the capital project Chandigarh, before leaving for the United Kingdom.  All these years I had the privilege of working closely under the inspiring supervision of Hardyal Singh Johl, now an accomplished landscaper of not only of Punjab but also of north India.

The Chandigarh of 1968 was not just any other city. It was the beautiful brand new capital city especially designed by the world renowned, French Architect Le-Corbusier, for Eastern Punjab. The Punjabis were filled with hope that it would somehow fill the void of losing its old crown Lahore, to West Punjab, now Pakistan, when in 1947 during the partition its soul: its people, land and waters were in fact, torn apart.

The Chandigarh of today is a different ball game for politicians. The curse of division on Punjab, which struck in 1947 does’nt seem to have gone away. Dark clouds of division have been looming large this time on its new capital city, when one of the neihbors, Haryana keep staking its claim also. Besides it is very quickly becoming a commercial hub with name brand stores like Armani and Gucci in Sector 17, overcrowded roads, parks and shrinking roundabouts, which once reinforced the sense of space, as garden city of the north and has already surpassed the population limits envisaged by Le-Corbusier.

People often ask me what inspired me to write ‘Rooh Mere Punjab Di.’ Any poet will find this a difficult question to answer because it can’t really be pinpointed to one specific inspiration. This is obviously a poem about Chandigarh, but it goes much deeper than that. Frankly speaking, I don’t know how and why I wrote it. Let the readers be the judge and arrive at their own conclusions. If you are interested to read it, download it at:  PashauraSinghDhillon.com/punjabipoems