Hadali is not an easy place to find on the map. Click the cursor after tracing Khushab and you have not reached it; shift the cursor forward a millimetre and you have missed it. The only way of locating it is by using eyes moistened with nostalgia and a heart installed with a homing instinct.

The Hadali of Khushwant Singh’s green days is now a nondescript small town, better known like Stratford upon Avon for its son that for itself. To reach Hadali, one has to drive 256 kilometres from Lahore, along the M-1 Motorway in the direction of Islamabad, then take the N-60, cross the river Jhelum, go through the district headquarters of Khushab until a small modest sign on a ribbon road marks the turning for Khushab.

Khushab is not the tiny hamlet Khushwant was born in a century ago, nor is it today what he revisited in 1987. It is a community determined to improve itself, to remould its rural vowels to make it sound more like a modern, urban babu.

I knew (who didn’t) that Khushwant Singh had an umbilical connection with Hadali.  When I met him for the last time in his Sujan Singh Park flat on 4 March 2014, he told me that he wanted his ashes interred in Hadali. He died a fortnight later. His dying wishes became less of a mission for me than an act of homage I, as one of his numerous acolytes, could offer him. To return him to Hadali was to complete the cycle of his life that began in a small brick house in one of Hadali’s congested lanes to end in the brick wall of his first school in Hadali.

When I spoke to his daughter Mala on 21 March 2014 to condole his death, she had just returned from the Lodhi crematorium with his ashes. I told her of Khushwant Singh’s last wishes. She and her brother Rahul agreed to save some of their father’s ashes for me to take to Hadali.

As a Pakistani, to visit Hadali, all I had to do was to speak to some-one senior in the Punjab Government who spoke to his subordinate, who instructed his underling, who ordered the District Coordination Officer (DCO) in the field to make the necessary arrangements.

I collected Khushwant Singh’s ashes from Mala in New Delhi on 18 April 2014, took the small steel urn which bore the label ‘Good Life’, travelled by train to Amritsar, crossed the border with them, and then drove on 22 April to Hadali to instal the marble plaque I had commissioned.

For rustics, local births, marriages and deaths are the protruding knolls in the barren landscape of their level lives. Visits of celebrities, like visits of royalty (in Malcolm Muggeridge’s words) are not to be expected but to be enjoyed when they occur.  For Hadalians, Khushwant Singh’s return in 1987 became an excuse for a public, civic celebration. All he wanted to do was to reconnect with his cradle in silent privacy. Instead, he found himself shedding his ‘tears of nostalgia’ in public.

My experience almost thirty years later with a younger generation of Hadalians proved to be no different. They flattered me with undeserved attention, feasted me, surrounding me with an unbroken ring of attention. I broke through it and shooing inquisitive onlookers away, I made the local mason mix Khushwant’s ashes in the cement and grout the marble plaque in the outer wall of the shabby but still functional school. The rest of the ashes I scattered in the slow-moving waters of the nearby river Jhelum.

I was all too aware that whatever obsequies I could perform for him were as a proxy for his natural children, Rahul and Mala. I was conducting no more than a dress rehearsal. In February 2015, they came to Lahore to attend the Lahore Literary Festival. I tried to repeat the bureaucratic rope trick of my earlier visit to Hadali. On this occasion, though, the harder I tried, the tighter the bureaucratic knots fastened. Didn’t I know that Hadali was located in a security zone? How could they as Indian nationals go to Hadali without specific authorisation? 

They returned to India disappointed. Within a few months, they made a second visit to Pakistan, this time armed with the requisite visa. Rahul, Mala, Niloufer Billimoria, my wife Shahnaz and myself drove to Hadali in a convoy. We took them first to the Boys’ School where the plaque had been installed. I had brought along some rose petals for Mala and Rahul to place on the narrow ledge at the base of the plaque.  Each of us stood before the plaque and honoured Khushwant in his or her own personal way. 

We toured the school, met classes of nonplussed boys and their distracted teachers, and were then escorted through the winding lanes to Khushwant’s Singh’s house. From my earlier visit, I had taken away a single brick as a memento for Rahul. At the KS Litfest in Kasauli, I presented it to him in a deceptively fancy red velvet box. In a sense, it was the nearest equivalent I could think of to the fragments of masonry that were once part of the Berlin Wall, dividing West and East Germany. 

Khushwant Singh had spent almost a full day at Hadali, leaving it at sunset.  He had much to remember. Our party left Hadali to have a late lunch with the DCO Khushab. For Rahul and Mala, the ruins of what had once been their father’s home and the dusty earth beneath his birth-village exuded no deep sentiment. Hadali from a distant name had become a visited place, grouted into their memory. For them, there was nothing left in Hadali, ‘but the weight, the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence.’[1]  

[Published in ‘Fresh Springs of Himalayan Thought’ Khushwant Singh Litfest Kasauli 2015, pp.70-72.    

[1] George Seferis, The King of Asine, (1940).