I wrote the piece after I got back from Patna, my hometown. While I was there in July, someone mentioned to me the state of the crematoriums and how bodies remained in the furnace, waiting for power to come back on. It was a story of struggle, of poverty and of indignity. An edited verison of this appeared in the Indian Express on November 30, 2009.
When death lingers on ...
In Bihar, even in death there’s a time lag.
Each time Shiv Dayal pushes a body inside his electric furnace at Gulbi Ghat crematorium in Patna, the crematorium operator prays that power doesn’t play spoilsport.
Given the erratic power supply in the state during the summer, families often had to wait for hours, even overnight, to cremate the dead. They sat in the hallway, their noses covered, eyes watering with the smoke that escaped through the chinks of the furnace room door, as time of death stretched into hours.
Inside the blackened furnace, partly burnt bodies waited, too, stripped of dignity, and short of a last few megawatts of power for the closure.
“What can we do but wait? Often families have waited it out for four to five hours,” Dayal said. “It is sad because even in death, there’s no respite.”
The average waiting time, according to the members of the Dom community, which traditionally engages in scavenging and live at ghats, stretched into at least 2-3 hours on an average.
According to a Dom community member these poor families are from the hinterlands that flock to the city's hospitals seeking medical care and then in the event of death have no choice but the crematoriums for the last rites. When the electricity tripped during summers, it is mostly the poor who hunched against the blackish walls and waited, while flames leapt from the wooden pyres outside.
Death is no leveller here.
"We are used to death but not like this. When we light the pyre, we also are relieved. But when you know the body is still there, you want to hold on. The trauma doesn't end," he said. "Once, a family was sitting outside for 6-7 hours in the night."
While the Gulbi Ghat electric crematorium in Patna sees more than 100 bodies per month, each consuming more than 260 volts per cremation, about 10 bodies end up at the ghats everyday for the more expensive, ritualistic cremation that consumes more than 400 kgs per person of wood pushing the cost upwards of Rs. 5,000 that most poor can’t afford, crematorium operators said.
The municipal corporation only charges Rs. 300 at the crematoriums.
With winters setting in, the power situation in the city has improved. But during summers, the power situation became a concern in the cities and towns as electricity was diverted from 10:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. to keep the pumps running so that crops don’t fail, Sushil Kumar Modi told The Indian Express.
That’s when power failed the dead, too, and the story of families waiting it out at the crematoriums is a story that often repeats every summer.
On a hot July morning, Malti Devi sat under a tin shed with her family waiting for the body of her sister-in-law. Fulti Devi died while giving birth and the women sat hunched gazing at the river front where black soot floated on the water and fat dogs patiently bided their time on the banks for chunks of flesh or bones that didn’t burn out. It was on the periphery of the ghats that Malti Devi mourned their poverty for the umpteenth time.
Power woes aside during the brutal summers, for the poor grieving families, it is the indignity that doesn’t leave their side even in the time of death, they said.
Barring the poorest of the poor, the unconventional use the crematoriums. But it is those who are without choice that suffer, Malti Devi, who waited that day with the body under that tin shed, sweating and sobbing, said.
“We can’t afford the expensive wood,” Malti Devi said. “But if there is no electricity now, we don’t want the body to be in limbo.”
The state’s power deficit - at 31.7 per cent of the state’s required capacity, according to the Central Electricity Authority’s June monthly report- left many dead and decaying bodies in a state of crematory purgatory while the state and central governments embark on ambitious plans to connect the various parts of India to central, state and private lines of distribution.
In fact, more than 70 per cent of villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar combined are still waiting for electricity.
Even the Municipal Commissioner KS Kumar admitted the situation was bad. It’s not just the power situation, where the deficits not only affected the departed, but also the equipment at the crematoriums that are old and non-functional, he said.
“We have received complaints about the crematorium situation where people have to wait. Power cuts and equipments, which are more than 20 years old, are a problem,” he said. “When crematoriums were set up, these were under some sort of schemes. Later, funds became an issue and enthusiasm died down. We have asked the state to give us money to upgrade the crematoriums.”
Only two out of four crematoriums in the Patna are fully functional. At the Bans Ghat crematorium where India’s first President Dr. Rajendra Prasad and socialist leader Jayprakash Narayan were cremated, out of the two furnaces, only one is working.
“It has not been working for the last one year,” Bans Ghat crematorium operator Ram Lakhan said. “But the bigger problem is electricity. What’s the point of GAP when crematoriums can’t even work properly?”
The crematoriums, their walls lined with soot, look grim. Scenes from Buddha’s famous journey where he saw the stages of death are painted in rich, garish oil colours look more pronounced in their placement and context. This is where the families wait, and mourn endlessly. It is always dark inside.
There are no generators here. Those wouldn’t be able to take the load, Dayal said. The Gulbi Ghat crematorium is one of the nine in the state built when the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi initiated the ambitious Ganga Action Plan to save the river from slow poisoning from the remnants and ashes of dead bodies that are dumped in the river for ritualistic closure.
The grotesque scene inside Gulbi Ghat is just one of the daily reminders of Bihar’s dire straits as a result of the state’s power shortfall. Both its target and generated power are the lowest in the country.
Peak demand in Bihar was 1,729 mw in September 2009, an increase from 1,730 mw in September 2008. However, supply has not been able to meet populous’ demands. Peak supply in Bihar was 1,438 mw in September 2009, an increase from 1,212 mw in September 2008, resulting in an addition of just half the demand needed to meet the growth margins.
Experts in Delhi said Bihar has reached this condition through its excessive dependence on central power supply.
It’s not just a tale of indignity in death and power crisis, but also of a mighty river that has been at the receiving end.
Patna and Kanpur top the list of the 29 cities that were identified under the GAP as the main polluters of the mighty river. The power crisis in Bihar has also ensured that efforts to save the river meet with roadblocks. Even if people were to shift to crematoriums, the load-shedding could drive them away.
And the river would continue to choke with the remainders of the cremation – the flowers, the wood, and parts of flesh and bone, too.
Kartikay Mehrotra contributed to this piece with power figures and quotes on Bihar's power situation.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The tale of the lost and found girl
Her twin sister held her hand, while Anjali talked to us about the time she spent in a home for destitute children. She returned home after 15 months. The family spoke about their reconciliation with the fact that Anjali was gone, and the bouts of hope, and how they never really gave up, and we listened to the fascinating story of faith and loss and of hope.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on November 18, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 17, 2009
Pastor Anil Johnson kept repeating hallelujah over the phone.
Amita Raj listened in, wondering why her pastor had called her on a Thursday afternoon. Then, in a soft voice, he told her that Anjali, her daughter who had been missing for 15 months, had returned, and she was with him at Aaya Nagar. They needed to come to the church right away.
She was safe, he added.
Anjali, who was 11 years old at the time, went missing one afternoon last August after she fought with her younger brother Abin. She went downstairs first to buy biscuits, then came back upstairs and took some money from her mother’s almirah and then disappeared into the narrow, winding alleyes of Block B in New Ashok Nagar in East Delhi. Abin sat at home, waiting. His mother and uncle were at work at the school for handicap children. Anjali’s twin sister Anisha was with them.
But Anjali never found her way back home. She walked to the bus stop, spent the night in a bus parked in the lot, and in the morning walked to the railway station and got into a train. She thought she would go to her aunt in Tamil Nadu, but there were too many trains, and she followed a stream of people and two days later, Anjali got down at the Secunderabad station.
A field worker from Aman Biradari, an NGO based in Hyderabad, found Anjali at the station. She had been standing in a corner, crying. They brought her to the Rainbow Home where Anjali spent a year among other destitute children. She would often cry, and sulk, and withdraw. She would not eat, and urge the NGO workers to take her home. But the teams that they sent out were not able to find the church in Aaya Nagar. The church that Anjali’s family attended relocated from a rented house in the locality. So, Anjali remained among the children in an alien city.
Three months ago, a field worker from Hyderabad accompanied her to Delhi and she started living in the NGO’s Kilkari Rainbow Home near Kashmere Gate with 65 other chidlren. Once in while, she would go with the NGO officials to the places she remembered. It was on one such trip to Aaya Nagar when Pastor Anil Johnson spotted her. He was at a shop, near the site of the former church, when he saw Anjali. At first he wasn’t sure if it was her. Her hair was cropped short, and she was with someone. But Johnson had prayed for her at the church, holding out her photograph to the congregation. He couldn’t be wrong. He called out her name, and she turned back to look at him. It was Anjali.
On Thursday, when their pastor called, Amita was at work, tending to disabled children at the Mata Bhagwanti Devi Chadha Charitable Trust, where Anjali’s twin sister Anisha is a student, too. She ran up the flight of steps to the canteen where her brother Wilson Raj was busy preparing meals. She hugged him, and wouldn’t stop crying. Anjali had raised her children on her own after having divorced her husband and moving to Delhi in 2000. It wasn’t easy, she said.
“It was awkward. Everyone was looking at us. At first, I thought one of the children fell down and got hurt,” Wilson said. “Then she said Anjali has been found.”
For 15 months, ever since Anjali, went missing, Amita has prayed, fasted for days in a row, never losing her faith in her god, hoping that her daughter will return someday.
On August 26, 2008, when Anjali went missing, their mother and uncle came home in the evening and waited for hours, combing the neighborhood for her, finally registering a complaint at the police station. But nothing ever happened.
“The police used to tell us if you find her, let us know,” Amita said. “We had no hope. We only had faith.”
For 13 days, Amita and Wilson went to most of the city’s NGOs asking about Anjali, showing her pictures to the officials.
In the nights, Amita made the bed for her missing daughter, spread the blankets, too. In the mornings, Anjali was the one who would bring tea to her mother, tug at her gently to wake her up.
“I would often turn over in bed and get angry,” Amita said, holding Anjali’s hand at the family’s residence. “After she was lost, I got up angry, and I told God I would never ever scold her. But he should give her back to us.”
Her twin sister Anisha prayed, too. They were born on December 21, 1998, in Kanyakumari. At 6 p.m., Anisha’s tiny feet appeared, and a minute later, nurses brought in Anjali into the world. They were identical twins an their mother dressed them in similar clothes. If it were not for a scar on Anisha’s stomach, even the sisters could not identify themselves in the pictures.
On Tuesday, a day after she returned home, Anjali flipped through an old family album, and asked her mother if she recognized who was who. Both sisters wore blue frocks that Amita made for them.
“Anjali never smiled. Anisha always did. So you can make out,” she said.
In the corner, sitting by the door because she can’t walk, Anisha smiled mischiviously. Last year, on their birthday, the family fasted, praying for Anjali. On Dec. 21, they will celebrate once again and Anisha will make her sister a card, and Abin will give her a doll set.
“She loves dolls,” Abin said. “At least she won’t run away again.”
Mehnaz Khan, the manager at the Rainbow Home in Delhi, said Anjali had ran away from home in the past, too.
“If someone says something to her, she wants to run away,” she said. “When she first came to us three months ago, she would hardly eat. She wanted to go home. But we couldn’t find the place.”
Last year, Amita moved to New Ashok Nagar from Badarpur to put Anisha in the school for the physically and the mentally challenged kids where Amita too would take up the nurse’s job. Abin and Anjali had yet to be admitted to a school. But then, 11 days after they moved to the new place, Anjali went missing.
Now, Amita doesn’t want to send her to school. Anjali has lost two years of her life, and the family would rather get her private tuitions and make her appear for the open school examinations later.
For Anjali, who hugged her mother tight and kept crying when she met her at the church, it is back to the familiar world.
“I was angry with my brother. I didn’t want to be at home,” she said. “But I wanted to come back home. I cried so much.”
In the home for the destitute children, Anjali learned to paint and draw. She even danced at times when she was happy.
Back with her mother and sister, Anjali is now trying to get back to a life that was lost. In the intervening year, she has outgrown her clothes. So, on Monday when the NGO handed her over to her family, they went to Sarojini Nagar to shop for new clothes for her.
After all, it is yet another beginning. She was lost and found.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on November 18, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 17, 2009
Pastor Anil Johnson kept repeating hallelujah over the phone.
Amita Raj listened in, wondering why her pastor had called her on a Thursday afternoon. Then, in a soft voice, he told her that Anjali, her daughter who had been missing for 15 months, had returned, and she was with him at Aaya Nagar. They needed to come to the church right away.
She was safe, he added.
Anjali, who was 11 years old at the time, went missing one afternoon last August after she fought with her younger brother Abin. She went downstairs first to buy biscuits, then came back upstairs and took some money from her mother’s almirah and then disappeared into the narrow, winding alleyes of Block B in New Ashok Nagar in East Delhi. Abin sat at home, waiting. His mother and uncle were at work at the school for handicap children. Anjali’s twin sister Anisha was with them.
But Anjali never found her way back home. She walked to the bus stop, spent the night in a bus parked in the lot, and in the morning walked to the railway station and got into a train. She thought she would go to her aunt in Tamil Nadu, but there were too many trains, and she followed a stream of people and two days later, Anjali got down at the Secunderabad station.
A field worker from Aman Biradari, an NGO based in Hyderabad, found Anjali at the station. She had been standing in a corner, crying. They brought her to the Rainbow Home where Anjali spent a year among other destitute children. She would often cry, and sulk, and withdraw. She would not eat, and urge the NGO workers to take her home. But the teams that they sent out were not able to find the church in Aaya Nagar. The church that Anjali’s family attended relocated from a rented house in the locality. So, Anjali remained among the children in an alien city.
Three months ago, a field worker from Hyderabad accompanied her to Delhi and she started living in the NGO’s Kilkari Rainbow Home near Kashmere Gate with 65 other chidlren. Once in while, she would go with the NGO officials to the places she remembered. It was on one such trip to Aaya Nagar when Pastor Anil Johnson spotted her. He was at a shop, near the site of the former church, when he saw Anjali. At first he wasn’t sure if it was her. Her hair was cropped short, and she was with someone. But Johnson had prayed for her at the church, holding out her photograph to the congregation. He couldn’t be wrong. He called out her name, and she turned back to look at him. It was Anjali.
On Thursday, when their pastor called, Amita was at work, tending to disabled children at the Mata Bhagwanti Devi Chadha Charitable Trust, where Anjali’s twin sister Anisha is a student, too. She ran up the flight of steps to the canteen where her brother Wilson Raj was busy preparing meals. She hugged him, and wouldn’t stop crying. Anjali had raised her children on her own after having divorced her husband and moving to Delhi in 2000. It wasn’t easy, she said.
“It was awkward. Everyone was looking at us. At first, I thought one of the children fell down and got hurt,” Wilson said. “Then she said Anjali has been found.”
For 15 months, ever since Anjali, went missing, Amita has prayed, fasted for days in a row, never losing her faith in her god, hoping that her daughter will return someday.
On August 26, 2008, when Anjali went missing, their mother and uncle came home in the evening and waited for hours, combing the neighborhood for her, finally registering a complaint at the police station. But nothing ever happened.
“The police used to tell us if you find her, let us know,” Amita said. “We had no hope. We only had faith.”
For 13 days, Amita and Wilson went to most of the city’s NGOs asking about Anjali, showing her pictures to the officials.
In the nights, Amita made the bed for her missing daughter, spread the blankets, too. In the mornings, Anjali was the one who would bring tea to her mother, tug at her gently to wake her up.
“I would often turn over in bed and get angry,” Amita said, holding Anjali’s hand at the family’s residence. “After she was lost, I got up angry, and I told God I would never ever scold her. But he should give her back to us.”
Her twin sister Anisha prayed, too. They were born on December 21, 1998, in Kanyakumari. At 6 p.m., Anisha’s tiny feet appeared, and a minute later, nurses brought in Anjali into the world. They were identical twins an their mother dressed them in similar clothes. If it were not for a scar on Anisha’s stomach, even the sisters could not identify themselves in the pictures.
On Tuesday, a day after she returned home, Anjali flipped through an old family album, and asked her mother if she recognized who was who. Both sisters wore blue frocks that Amita made for them.
“Anjali never smiled. Anisha always did. So you can make out,” she said.
In the corner, sitting by the door because she can’t walk, Anisha smiled mischiviously. Last year, on their birthday, the family fasted, praying for Anjali. On Dec. 21, they will celebrate once again and Anisha will make her sister a card, and Abin will give her a doll set.
“She loves dolls,” Abin said. “At least she won’t run away again.”
Mehnaz Khan, the manager at the Rainbow Home in Delhi, said Anjali had ran away from home in the past, too.
“If someone says something to her, she wants to run away,” she said. “When she first came to us three months ago, she would hardly eat. She wanted to go home. But we couldn’t find the place.”
Last year, Amita moved to New Ashok Nagar from Badarpur to put Anisha in the school for the physically and the mentally challenged kids where Amita too would take up the nurse’s job. Abin and Anjali had yet to be admitted to a school. But then, 11 days after they moved to the new place, Anjali went missing.
Now, Amita doesn’t want to send her to school. Anjali has lost two years of her life, and the family would rather get her private tuitions and make her appear for the open school examinations later.
For Anjali, who hugged her mother tight and kept crying when she met her at the church, it is back to the familiar world.
“I was angry with my brother. I didn’t want to be at home,” she said. “But I wanted to come back home. I cried so much.”
In the home for the destitute children, Anjali learned to paint and draw. She even danced at times when she was happy.
Back with her mother and sister, Anjali is now trying to get back to a life that was lost. In the intervening year, she has outgrown her clothes. So, on Monday when the NGO handed her over to her family, they went to Sarojini Nagar to shop for new clothes for her.
After all, it is yet another beginning. She was lost and found.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
"We live under the shadow of the tree that fell and the earth shook in 1984."
An edited version of the two stories on Sikh riots of 1984 appeared in the Indian Express on Nov. 1.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 28, 2009
They chose to return
On that day, murder leapt up from the ground, it was unleashed from the swords the men carried, it cavorted with the mob, and it danced shamelessly in men’s eyes. That day murder came a long way, making its way into small alleys, spilling blood, dismembering limbs, and broke all rules. It was October 31, 1984, the day former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
In the 25 years since the carnage, the worst the city experienced, the families have picked up the pieces and moved on. Many relocated to the resettlement colony in Tilak Vihar in Eest Delhi where the government allotted housing to them, but a few remained, returning to the area where the neighbors turned against neighbors, and each block bore the marks of tragedy that cut short many lives, killed dreams of going to college, and heaped them with a life where they woke up in the nights shrieking, angry, afraid and hurt.
The journey was littered, as was the neighbourhood with remainders from the past. But the few families had made their choices and tried to make the best of it – the nightmares, the stereotyping, everything, changing and adapting, often willing but mostly reluctantly.
Sardar Harminder Singh’s neighbor Bheem Singh who sheltered him in his house urged him to chop off his hair.
“For a Sikh, it is like dying,” Singh, 67, said, who has since grown back his hair. “But did we have a choice?”
His two sons – Charanjit Singh,39, and Inderjit Singh, 36 – too had to cut their hair for fear of being recognized as a Sikh. For their mother Kulwant Kaur, the sons died that day, and what remained were two boys who had no religion, no faith.
“Now I think I should have pushed them through the door and let the mob run their swords through them,” she said.
The 1984 carnage turned Kaur into a bitter woman. She had watched helplessly when the mobs knocked at their homes. And she first felt fear, the raw, gripping, and numbing force taking over all the anger that had built up inside her. She revolted. Till date, she is shameful of the day she hid, and let them cut her sons’ hair.
But then, life moves, in spurts and in bits. There’s regret but there’s hope, too.
When the grandchildren were born, she made sure they wore the turban and some of the guilt wore off.
“This is our legacy, this is our identity. They are Sardars,” she said. “We can’t let it all go. We need to claim our past and future.”
On the third day of the massacres that killed more than 450 Sikhs in Trilokpuri, an army truck picked up the family and took them to a refugee camp in Vivek Vihar and from there they went to Chandigarh to live at Guru Gobind Singh Bhawan but were later asked to leave and were given Rs. 500. The family with their two sons and a young daughter then went to Kapurtala in Punjab and lived there for around two years. The sons had to give up their education, and learned to stitch clothes like their father. If life had to go on, the dreams would have had to wait. So education was the first luxury the family had to toss away.
“We returned two years later and went to Tilak Vihar but the houses were small and it felt as if we were cowards,” Harminder Singh said. “Besides, I had been a tailor in Trilokpuri for years. How could I start all over again? I had a family to provide for.”
The tailoring shop in Block 29 of Trilokpuri, a a trans-Jamuna resettlement colony in the east of Delhi in set up in 1975, opposite the Madina Masjid too underwent a cosmetic change. From Sardar Tailors before the gruesome killings that went on for three days, it was rechristened “Happy Tailors”.
Charanjit Singh and Inderjit Singh could never go back to school. Even though, the situation had stabilised, they were teased, and even threatened. So they worked on the sewing machines in their space.
The sons went to the government senior secondary school in Block 27 but post riots, they didn’t find many of their friends there. His other friends who were with him in school have gone on to become journalist, and teachers and he often curses the day the tragedy struck.
“Who knows what I could have become,” he said. “Now I want my children to become engineers, or doctors, do what we couldn’t.”
The shop is doing well. But it is not like before when so many of their clients were from their community. After 1984, many in the area stopped coming to their shop.
“They discriminated against us because we were Sikhs,” he said. “Some people are nice but some are not. We still can’t laugh freely or crack jokes because you never know. We didn’t know then. We still live in fear but we can’t live. We can’t start afresh.”
Singh was married in 1996 and has three sons who attend the local government schools now.
Inderjit married in 2003.
Their sister Sukhwindar Singh was married off to a man in Gandhi Nagar in 1998, years after the family started looking for a groom. She was past the age but no family wanted to marry a girl from Trilokpuri.
It wasn’t a good marriage, Charanjit Singh said.
“She never went to school. She used to go to school in Block 27 but left her studies after the riots. We didn’t let her out of the house,” he said. “Her husband does some embroidery work and is uneducated. Nobody was willing to come to this area. They said who knows if they are mentally stable or if they are traumatized. This match was the one we didn't really like. We wanted an educated family. Even in our marriages, we encountered difficulty. No families were there in Trilokpuri. No families wanted to send their daughters to this area.”
Even 25 years later, fear hasn’t receded into a forgotten corner of the mind. Their own neighbors had helped them, packing three sardars into a tin trunk where they had poked holes for fresh air to get in, hiding them under the bed. Bheem Singh, a rickshaw driver, who had told the mobs to back off and guarded Harminder Singh’s house when the riots raged, is an old man now. Both men often sit outside the shop, reminiscing about those dark days.
And then several other neighbors drop by. In many ways, like the family, the neighborhood too transformed, its demographics changed and its spirit, too.
In Block 32, where Sardars owned more than half of the houses, the worst happened. In fact, it was the mob’s first stopover in a string of organized killings, where men had voters list in hand for reference. No Sikh family lives there now. Almost all those who remained, the widows and the children, relocated to the resettlement colony.
Houses that were not occupied were sold off for peanuts. Now, many Muslim families are settled there.
In other blocks, a few families chose to return. And so they have, battling the odds.
Parabjot Singh, nine-year-old grandson of Harminder Singh, often refuses to go to the nearby Municipal Corporation of Delhi school.
“They call me ‘joori’,” he said, shyly. “The teachers and the students call me names.”
But then, the family has limited options. Private schools are out of bounds for their limited means.
“They have to cope with it. They have to survive,” Charanjit Singh said. “We can’t turn our backs this time. We have to go on.”
On the door, a gash is still prominent. When the angry mod had come, shouting, torches in hand and brandishing swords and knives, they had struck the door. But then someone shouted “Come here, there are more Sardars here” and the mob turned, and that’s when Harminder Singh knew life would go on.
“It’s the pole.”
Nazar Singh can never get past the electricity pole outside his tenement in Block 36 of Trilokpuri.
At least not without going back 25 years when an angry mob had pulled out his father from the house, stabbed him, and then burned him alive. He had been away at his workshop in Mehrauli, and later when he returned, he had stood near the pole and wondered why it happened.
The family’s dog Jackie had not left the spot for three days, and while the city burned, the family debated whether they should leave like the rest, or if they should stay back, and fight the demons.
In the following days, his mother Naseeb Kaur sat outside their corner house and started at the pole. She hardly spoke, and she cried often.
In 1992, she died, too.
“She couldn’t take it. You couldn’t move on because the pole was right there in front of your eyes and it held you, stopped you, forced you to think about the tragedy,” Nazar, 46, said.
He had been only 22 at the time. And suddenly he had felt old, and without hope. But moving on wasn’t a choice. It was survival that was at stake. There was his family to be taken care of, his sisters had to be married off.
The house in Block 36, tucked in an alley near the gurudwara that was a site of many ghastly killings in 1984, was their only property. If they moved to what the government offered them in Tilak Vihar, it would be admitting defeat, and forsaking what their father had built.
So they lived on, with the pole in front of their house, trying to not look at it. But in denial too, the memories didn’t leave the family alone.
Now, Fauji is a sevadar at the gurudwara earning a mere Rs. 2,200 a month. The government’s promises of jobs and compensation never came through. And over the years, he felt too tired to pursue it. That would mean more humiliation, and it would hurt, he said.
“We are like beggars now and for no fault of ours,” he said. “They shouted when they came to kill us that Indira Gandhi was their mother. But we loved her, too.”
His young daughter Kirandeep Kaur stood near the door, watching her father as he recounted the horrors and narrated the family’s journey in the 25 years hence.
Fauji never discussed the gruesome and gory past with her. She is in high school and she didn’t need to know, he said.
But as she grew up, the past came to her in neighbour’s tales, haunting her, exciting her, and disturbing her. They pointed to the pole and told her this was where her grandfather had been killed, and she asked questions, uncomfortable, painful questions from her father.
“He told me little things and he sat in front of the pole when he told me how death came upon us,” she said.
In the same block, yet another victim is trying to shut out the past. But she can’t because forgetting is betraying her husband and her community that were punished for no fault of theirs, she said.
“The world forgot us. The government forgot me. When the tree fell, and the earth shook as Rajiv Gandhi said, we were buried in its cracks, we became zombies,” the 59-year-old widow said.
Gurcharan Kaur was in Karol Bagh when her husband Naik Teja Singh was killed outside the Gurudwara as he walked home with his three children. The children watched in horror as their father fell, blood colouring the streets, and his shouts piercing through the raging mob that wielded sticks and knives, and their eyes shone through the fire and the smoke.
The neighbors brought the children home and kept them in their house until the mother returned. Gurcharan was picked up in an army van that also carried her slain husband’s body. Four children were in her brother’s house at Karol Bagh when the curfew was imposed.
“My husband’s body was burnt, his one hand was cut off. It was terrible,” she said.
She opened a chai stall in the front verandah of her house and brought up her seven children. She married off her first daughter when she turned 16. The youngest is now studying in Australia, the son is employed in a private firm and lives in the apartment upstairs.
Kaur chose to stay back because her neighbors helped her get on her feet, helping with money, food and everything else. The gurudwara where she spent a lot of time in the aftermath of the riots helped her heal, and move on.
Her husband’s medals are now displayed in her house and so is his photograph in all his army glory. The young couple had moved to Delhi in 1982, hoping to bring up their children in the city. But then riots happened.
Kaur tided through her life with a meagre pension of Rs. 365, and her earnings from her tea shop raising her seven children on her own.
“There was no time to think, no time to point fingers,” she said. “I was too busy getting by.”
At the gurudwara in Block 36, the Sikhs, the few families that remain in the area, will organize a Shahidi Diwas beginning Oct. 31 through Nov. 2 for the men that were murdered during the three days of the carnage.
The tradition started in 1985 and has gone on since. For three days, the granthis will read the sacred texts and remember the “martyrs” and pray for them.
They haven’t forgotten. Because if they forgot, the betrayal would be too much to bear, more than loss itself.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 28, 2009
They chose to return
On that day, murder leapt up from the ground, it was unleashed from the swords the men carried, it cavorted with the mob, and it danced shamelessly in men’s eyes. That day murder came a long way, making its way into small alleys, spilling blood, dismembering limbs, and broke all rules. It was October 31, 1984, the day former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
In the 25 years since the carnage, the worst the city experienced, the families have picked up the pieces and moved on. Many relocated to the resettlement colony in Tilak Vihar in Eest Delhi where the government allotted housing to them, but a few remained, returning to the area where the neighbors turned against neighbors, and each block bore the marks of tragedy that cut short many lives, killed dreams of going to college, and heaped them with a life where they woke up in the nights shrieking, angry, afraid and hurt.
The journey was littered, as was the neighbourhood with remainders from the past. But the few families had made their choices and tried to make the best of it – the nightmares, the stereotyping, everything, changing and adapting, often willing but mostly reluctantly.
Sardar Harminder Singh’s neighbor Bheem Singh who sheltered him in his house urged him to chop off his hair.
“For a Sikh, it is like dying,” Singh, 67, said, who has since grown back his hair. “But did we have a choice?”
His two sons – Charanjit Singh,39, and Inderjit Singh, 36 – too had to cut their hair for fear of being recognized as a Sikh. For their mother Kulwant Kaur, the sons died that day, and what remained were two boys who had no religion, no faith.
“Now I think I should have pushed them through the door and let the mob run their swords through them,” she said.
The 1984 carnage turned Kaur into a bitter woman. She had watched helplessly when the mobs knocked at their homes. And she first felt fear, the raw, gripping, and numbing force taking over all the anger that had built up inside her. She revolted. Till date, she is shameful of the day she hid, and let them cut her sons’ hair.
But then, life moves, in spurts and in bits. There’s regret but there’s hope, too.
When the grandchildren were born, she made sure they wore the turban and some of the guilt wore off.
“This is our legacy, this is our identity. They are Sardars,” she said. “We can’t let it all go. We need to claim our past and future.”
On the third day of the massacres that killed more than 450 Sikhs in Trilokpuri, an army truck picked up the family and took them to a refugee camp in Vivek Vihar and from there they went to Chandigarh to live at Guru Gobind Singh Bhawan but were later asked to leave and were given Rs. 500. The family with their two sons and a young daughter then went to Kapurtala in Punjab and lived there for around two years. The sons had to give up their education, and learned to stitch clothes like their father. If life had to go on, the dreams would have had to wait. So education was the first luxury the family had to toss away.
“We returned two years later and went to Tilak Vihar but the houses were small and it felt as if we were cowards,” Harminder Singh said. “Besides, I had been a tailor in Trilokpuri for years. How could I start all over again? I had a family to provide for.”
The tailoring shop in Block 29 of Trilokpuri, a a trans-Jamuna resettlement colony in the east of Delhi in set up in 1975, opposite the Madina Masjid too underwent a cosmetic change. From Sardar Tailors before the gruesome killings that went on for three days, it was rechristened “Happy Tailors”.
Charanjit Singh and Inderjit Singh could never go back to school. Even though, the situation had stabilised, they were teased, and even threatened. So they worked on the sewing machines in their space.
The sons went to the government senior secondary school in Block 27 but post riots, they didn’t find many of their friends there. His other friends who were with him in school have gone on to become journalist, and teachers and he often curses the day the tragedy struck.
“Who knows what I could have become,” he said. “Now I want my children to become engineers, or doctors, do what we couldn’t.”
The shop is doing well. But it is not like before when so many of their clients were from their community. After 1984, many in the area stopped coming to their shop.
“They discriminated against us because we were Sikhs,” he said. “Some people are nice but some are not. We still can’t laugh freely or crack jokes because you never know. We didn’t know then. We still live in fear but we can’t live. We can’t start afresh.”
Singh was married in 1996 and has three sons who attend the local government schools now.
Inderjit married in 2003.
Their sister Sukhwindar Singh was married off to a man in Gandhi Nagar in 1998, years after the family started looking for a groom. She was past the age but no family wanted to marry a girl from Trilokpuri.
It wasn’t a good marriage, Charanjit Singh said.
“She never went to school. She used to go to school in Block 27 but left her studies after the riots. We didn’t let her out of the house,” he said. “Her husband does some embroidery work and is uneducated. Nobody was willing to come to this area. They said who knows if they are mentally stable or if they are traumatized. This match was the one we didn't really like. We wanted an educated family. Even in our marriages, we encountered difficulty. No families were there in Trilokpuri. No families wanted to send their daughters to this area.”
Even 25 years later, fear hasn’t receded into a forgotten corner of the mind. Their own neighbors had helped them, packing three sardars into a tin trunk where they had poked holes for fresh air to get in, hiding them under the bed. Bheem Singh, a rickshaw driver, who had told the mobs to back off and guarded Harminder Singh’s house when the riots raged, is an old man now. Both men often sit outside the shop, reminiscing about those dark days.
And then several other neighbors drop by. In many ways, like the family, the neighborhood too transformed, its demographics changed and its spirit, too.
In Block 32, where Sardars owned more than half of the houses, the worst happened. In fact, it was the mob’s first stopover in a string of organized killings, where men had voters list in hand for reference. No Sikh family lives there now. Almost all those who remained, the widows and the children, relocated to the resettlement colony.
Houses that were not occupied were sold off for peanuts. Now, many Muslim families are settled there.
In other blocks, a few families chose to return. And so they have, battling the odds.
Parabjot Singh, nine-year-old grandson of Harminder Singh, often refuses to go to the nearby Municipal Corporation of Delhi school.
“They call me ‘joori’,” he said, shyly. “The teachers and the students call me names.”
But then, the family has limited options. Private schools are out of bounds for their limited means.
“They have to cope with it. They have to survive,” Charanjit Singh said. “We can’t turn our backs this time. We have to go on.”
On the door, a gash is still prominent. When the angry mod had come, shouting, torches in hand and brandishing swords and knives, they had struck the door. But then someone shouted “Come here, there are more Sardars here” and the mob turned, and that’s when Harminder Singh knew life would go on.
“It’s the pole.”
Nazar Singh can never get past the electricity pole outside his tenement in Block 36 of Trilokpuri.
At least not without going back 25 years when an angry mob had pulled out his father from the house, stabbed him, and then burned him alive. He had been away at his workshop in Mehrauli, and later when he returned, he had stood near the pole and wondered why it happened.
The family’s dog Jackie had not left the spot for three days, and while the city burned, the family debated whether they should leave like the rest, or if they should stay back, and fight the demons.
In the following days, his mother Naseeb Kaur sat outside their corner house and started at the pole. She hardly spoke, and she cried often.
In 1992, she died, too.
“She couldn’t take it. You couldn’t move on because the pole was right there in front of your eyes and it held you, stopped you, forced you to think about the tragedy,” Nazar, 46, said.
He had been only 22 at the time. And suddenly he had felt old, and without hope. But moving on wasn’t a choice. It was survival that was at stake. There was his family to be taken care of, his sisters had to be married off.
The house in Block 36, tucked in an alley near the gurudwara that was a site of many ghastly killings in 1984, was their only property. If they moved to what the government offered them in Tilak Vihar, it would be admitting defeat, and forsaking what their father had built.
So they lived on, with the pole in front of their house, trying to not look at it. But in denial too, the memories didn’t leave the family alone.
Now, Fauji is a sevadar at the gurudwara earning a mere Rs. 2,200 a month. The government’s promises of jobs and compensation never came through. And over the years, he felt too tired to pursue it. That would mean more humiliation, and it would hurt, he said.
“We are like beggars now and for no fault of ours,” he said. “They shouted when they came to kill us that Indira Gandhi was their mother. But we loved her, too.”
His young daughter Kirandeep Kaur stood near the door, watching her father as he recounted the horrors and narrated the family’s journey in the 25 years hence.
Fauji never discussed the gruesome and gory past with her. She is in high school and she didn’t need to know, he said.
But as she grew up, the past came to her in neighbour’s tales, haunting her, exciting her, and disturbing her. They pointed to the pole and told her this was where her grandfather had been killed, and she asked questions, uncomfortable, painful questions from her father.
“He told me little things and he sat in front of the pole when he told me how death came upon us,” she said.
In the same block, yet another victim is trying to shut out the past. But she can’t because forgetting is betraying her husband and her community that were punished for no fault of theirs, she said.
“The world forgot us. The government forgot me. When the tree fell, and the earth shook as Rajiv Gandhi said, we were buried in its cracks, we became zombies,” the 59-year-old widow said.
Gurcharan Kaur was in Karol Bagh when her husband Naik Teja Singh was killed outside the Gurudwara as he walked home with his three children. The children watched in horror as their father fell, blood colouring the streets, and his shouts piercing through the raging mob that wielded sticks and knives, and their eyes shone through the fire and the smoke.
The neighbors brought the children home and kept them in their house until the mother returned. Gurcharan was picked up in an army van that also carried her slain husband’s body. Four children were in her brother’s house at Karol Bagh when the curfew was imposed.
“My husband’s body was burnt, his one hand was cut off. It was terrible,” she said.
She opened a chai stall in the front verandah of her house and brought up her seven children. She married off her first daughter when she turned 16. The youngest is now studying in Australia, the son is employed in a private firm and lives in the apartment upstairs.
Kaur chose to stay back because her neighbors helped her get on her feet, helping with money, food and everything else. The gurudwara where she spent a lot of time in the aftermath of the riots helped her heal, and move on.
Her husband’s medals are now displayed in her house and so is his photograph in all his army glory. The young couple had moved to Delhi in 1982, hoping to bring up their children in the city. But then riots happened.
Kaur tided through her life with a meagre pension of Rs. 365, and her earnings from her tea shop raising her seven children on her own.
“There was no time to think, no time to point fingers,” she said. “I was too busy getting by.”
At the gurudwara in Block 36, the Sikhs, the few families that remain in the area, will organize a Shahidi Diwas beginning Oct. 31 through Nov. 2 for the men that were murdered during the three days of the carnage.
The tradition started in 1985 and has gone on since. For three days, the granthis will read the sacred texts and remember the “martyrs” and pray for them.
They haven’t forgotten. Because if they forgot, the betrayal would be too much to bear, more than loss itself.
The fifth Beatle
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express Sunday Eye on November 1. This is how I wrote it, and felt it.
"Almost Famous ..."
Chinki Sinha
October 27, 2009
Pete Best almost made it.
For two years, when he was the drummer with the Beatles, he felt he was on his way to something, someplace out of the ordinary.
But then, on their way to fame and everything else that comes with it, the Beatles dumped him and replaced him with Ringo Starr. And for most fans, the Pete Best story ended in 1962.
And Best, 67, became the fifth Beatle, someone who could have been there, posing for the shutterbugs as the paparazzi chased the band, a legend like the rest. But he was forced to pick up the pieces and start all over again.
Although it was only from 1960 to 1962 that he played the drums for the Beatles, the tag, and the unfortunate split clung to his identity, overshadowing his own talent, and he could never completely shake it off. Forty-seven years later, he is still known as the “ex drummer for Beatles”. But there was never any bitterness, only sadness.
“No, I admired them for what they achieved. They took what we started to another level,” Best said.In their early years, when Beatles went by another name, they belted out some of their most memorable songs, including Love me do, My Bonnie , Ain't She Sweet , and Like Dreamers Do . When Best was the drummer, the band hadn’t signed any record deals.
On his tour to India this week, where he will play at the British Council as part of the Liverpool tourism promotion campaign for Visit Britain and The Beatles Story, it’s his connection with the Beatles that is the selling point. That he was the forgotten drummer for the band that then was only a start up band that began playing at Casbah, a basement café owned by Mona Best, Pete’s mother, is till date Best’s
claim to fame. When he plays for the first time in India decades after he left the country on the last troop ship out of India(his mother was planning a visit when she unexpectedly died of a heart attack and Best always wanted to come and relive the days when he was a child growing up in India), The Georgic, that carried the remainder of the British Major-General Gilmore Simms army, in 1945, it will be in a space that will be set up like Casbah where he first played with the Beatles, the
ceilings of which were painted by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. In another part of the city, at the Select City Walk Mall, the original wax works of Beatles from Madame Tussauds’ that were made in 1964, two years after Best was dropped, would be displayed. And Best would yet again be part of an association with Beatles.
“The Casbah Coffee Club is the Holy Grail of the Beatles trail. No true Beatle fan should miss seeing it. I'm happy it's open,” Best said.
Before the café closed in 1962, the Beatles were the last group to perform there. Three years ago Casbah reopened as a tourist attraction in Liverpool, one among a string of places the Beatles Story has taken over.
But years later, Best and many others including Bill Harry, the journalist who founded the Mersey Beat, a newspaper that focused on the city’s music scene for there was much going on, and the energy was infectious, and first featured the Beatles and introduced Brian Epstein to them in 1961, have themselves become a part of the story of the band, a piece in its history, an element of its legend. The band
itself is long gone. Lennon was killed, others moved on, but the ones
on the fringes got together to piece the story together, recounting
their moments with the Fab Four.
Best’s India ties date back to 1941. He was born in Chennai. His mother Mona Best was born in Delhi in 1924. Perhaps it was here in India, that he first began to experiment with the tabla.
“I remember playing with a tabla. I don't know if you would call it actually playing one, but they were around the house, the servants had them,” he said in an email. “I will get to see my mother’s birthplace which I'm very excited about.”
This is also Best’s first trip to India after he left for Liverpool from Bombay in 1945. Among the little treasures the family carried with it were a silver-christening rattle, a mini hand-carved sitar and a number of items Best inherited from his mother like Indian Buddhas, Tiger skins. Elephant tusks. Those are part of the family archives now.
And although he was too young at the time, Best remembers his long walks on the beaches with his nanny Lakshmi, and the lullabies she sang to him.
“I also remember Indian and Western music being played in the house. My mother had very cosmopolitan tastes,” he said. “My memories of the Indians we were with are of happy times. I remember them as hard working honest, happy people. Our house was always full of laughter. I'm expecting India to bring memories alive.”
Even at Casbah, where Best met the Beatles first in 1959, his mother’s nostalgia for her days in India was reflected in the Aztec ceiling studded with stars because it looked like a mosque.
“The name the Casbah was definitely something my mother remembered from India,” he wrote in an email.
The Casbah had closed on the 24th of June 1962 but became a tourist attraction three years ago. It started in the basement of Best’s house where Mona Best sold coffee, and sodas and sweets. The Quarrymen, the name Beatles went by at the time, helped decorate the café, painting its walls, drawing dragons, spiders and stars on them. They also played there on the opening night in 1960.
Cafes were important spaces then. That’s where people met, smoked, talked and played music.
“It was the start of Beatlemania,” Best recalled. “Nobody knew them at that time. They were a start-up band.”
In her café, Mona Best, who regaled the band members with stories of her India days, wanted an Indian element. She missed India and often talked about her happy days in the country. In fact she was planning a trip to India when she died of a heart attack in 1988.
“Yes, what memories I have are good ones and the stories my mother told us always left a yearning to return. I'm happy that I am returning and playing there,” Best said. “It was always one of her dreams to return. She would often get upset thinking about India because she had such happy time there.”
Mo Best
"People will learn how it was that Mo threw the pebble, that made the ripple, that caused the wave that shook the world." – BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Behind it all, the music scene and the Beatlemania that gripped the world, was a woman and her love for her son.
Mo, who had Irsih parentage, has more to her than just being the mother of the drummer who was sacked from Beatles. She was born in India during the Raj in 1924 and worked for the Red Cross. She married a army official Johnny Best who fell in love with her.
Later, when they left India, she carried back a lot of memories. She gave birth to her two sons – Pete and Rory.
The third brother, Roag Best, will be in India with Pete.
It was Mona Best who first made Casbah the Rock n’ Roll place, and let the Beatles play. Her son performed with the boys and those were good times. She had noticed his young friends who came over and started the café in the cellar first as a private club for him and later turned it into a café, which was also one of the first cellar clubs in Liverpool to play rock ‘n’ roll exclusively. It opened in 1959 two years after Mo Best bought the house in Haymans Green after winning a bet on a horse that was called “Never say Die”.
“Due to her upbringing in India she did attract a lot of attention, as many of her ideas were Eastern and not something that the people of Liverpool had come across before,” Best said. “Many of the Indian rhythms helped many years afterwards with my drumming. However, a larger influence with regards to the Beatles music came after my time with the group.”
The Beatles, then known Quarrymen, disbanded and George Harrison joined another band called the Les Stewart Quartet, but later got back to his friends and took up residency at Casbah and performed on the club’s opening night on
August 29, 1959. It was then that the Beatles were born.
When Pete joined the group as drummer in August 1960, his mother took up a more active role in his career and the band and helped them get bookings at other places.
When Pete was sacked, Mo tracked down George Martin, the recording manager for the Beatles to ask why her son was dumped.
Later, she told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies that she had helped the band get on its feet, even fed when, and was “far more interested in them than their own parents.”
In 1967, despite the unfortunate fallout, she lent John Lennon her father’s medals that he received in India after John Lennon asked her for it to wear them on the montage of the cover of the album ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’
Liverpool - the city, the man, and Beatles' music
It was in Liverpool, the family’s hometown that Best began his music career, at first wanting to play guitars but later settled on drums and at 16 years he started to drum in his bedroom above the Casbah.
“I saw the famous Gene Krupa playing drums and that was it, I wanted to be a drummer,” Best said.
He first started playing with Ken Brown and formed a band called the Black jacks.
Then the Beatles discovered him, and he went on to Hamburg for a tour that tested the band’s limits, the gigs often lasted for eight hours at a stretch. That was the start of something.
If the impossible had happened, it’d be a story of success, loads of it. But instead it became a story of hopes that crashed, of resignation and of a life in an “almost” phase. He was not where he was supposed to be.
“There has only ever been six (Stuart Stucliffe who played the bass guitar but left Beatles shortly after their Hamburg tour) members of The Beatles and I was the fifth member. I am very proud to wear that tag. Who wouldn't be,” he said. “The shadow of The Beatles hasn't left any former Beatle. None of us could shake it off. Who'd want to? It is what it is.”
In the later days, people told stories, put in their bits and came out with their conspiracy theories. They said Best was so good looking that others in the band felt insecure, felt he could easily overshadow them, that Best was never a Beatle, he was a loner, and he didn’t fit in. But who knows what really happened in the August of 1962. He was told the group had decided to let him go, and he drove back home and
broke the news to his mother Mo Best and girlfriend Kathy. It had hurt. The dumping he could have taken, but not the way it had been done. The manager had called him and said the group had decided to replace him.
“I was hurt because I felt I had been let down by my friends,” he said. “Ringo was a good drummer, not a great drummer.”
“It is one of the most difficult things we ever had to do,” Paul McCartney said in Anthology, a collection of Beatles’ compilations.
For days after the split, there were times when Best looked at Beatles as they walked up the stairs to the stage, and as he descended those steps in one of the cafes at Liverpool, the place where it all started, but never a word was exchanged. No explanations came his way.
“I saw The Beatles on two occasions after I was dismissed, but we didn't talk. Everyone looked embarrassed,” he said.
When Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, told Pete he was sacked, that the boys didn’t want him anymore, Best went to a pub, downed a few drinks and drove home to break the news to his mother and girlfriend Kathy.
“I just went off and had a few pints - numb, I'd been cut and dried and hung out on the line,” he later said in an interview.
Ringo even alleged Best was on drugs, Best sued him and won.
"It was nonsense," Best said.
The original members of the band were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and a painter Stuart Stucliffe who left shortly after the Hamburg tour and died soon after.
It wasn’t easy moving on when the world was going crazy over Beatles.
When a man falls, only the dark phases of his life resonate, and live long in public memory. That’s what happened to Best. In all his appearances on television, he was asked about the fallout. The uncomfortable truths never left him. All the years that he had worked through long hours to survive, he had witnessed the rise of the
Beatles. He never met them again, though he said John Lennon was his closest friend.
Best, after all these years, has left the door open. After all he shared memories with the band members and of the Fab four, only Paul McCartney is alive.
“I want to talk to him about our families and life,” he said.
Best tried to get on, but there was his young family and they had to be taken care of. After he was sacked, Best stayed home for weeks and then joined Lee Curtis & the All Stars, which then broke off from Curtis and became Pete Best & the All Stars. They signed to Decca Records , and released the single "I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door”.
Best moved to United States and the Pete Best Combo toured America with a combination of 1950s songs and original tunes and eventually released the Best Of The Beatles ; which wasn’t a complilation of Beatles’ songs but was a play on Best's name.
Best married Kathy in 1968. The couple had two daughters, Babs and Bonita. The only job he could find was of a baker on the loading dock of a large bakery in Liverpool, where he worked long hours and often during the nights.
And so Best lived, within the limits, with no higher destiny to chase.
He didn’t play drums for almost 20 years. All these years, he refused to talk about Beatles. He was never bitter, only sad.
In fact John Lennon once said in an interview that the band’s best works were in Liverpool and in Hamburg and other dance halls.
“I had to start again, which I did. I finally hung up my drum sticks because I had children and needed to provide for them,” he said.
“Because I had been a musician for so long nobody would employ me. They felt because I had been a Beatle that I would go back to show business. They were scared to employ me. The Baker job was all I could get.”
Later, the Civil Service employed Best.
He had made his choices and was making the best of what remained.
In 1988, he returned to his drums, trying to get back to what he loved doing best and formed the Pete Best Band, and gave interviews on television.
“I had been asked for about five years to do a one off date in Liverpool, I always refused, eventually my mother persuaded that one date wouldn't hurt. What about my fans. So, I agreed,” he said.
In 1995 when Beatles’ Anthology released, it included some of the tracks that had Best on the drums in those early days.
“The money was nice, but it was better to receive the recognition for
the years I played as a Beatle,” Best said.
Although it was a rough ride in the beginning, Best put it all together, bit by bit. A grandfather who adores his three grandchildren, Best has got back to music, drumming and writing songs yet again, touring the world with his band that includes his younger brother Roag on drums and percussion, Phil Melia, Paul Perry, and Tony Flynn, the lead singer. Haymans Green, the band’s latest release, has songs that Best and the rest of the band composed.
But even the decades that had come in between, didn’t really distance him from the music he once played with a band that moved on, and left him behind. His days with the band permeate his music. Perhaps those were the days when Pete discovered his own style of Rock n' Roll. But even now, his music is reminiscent of his Beatles' days.
“My current group captures my time with The Beatles. However, the group is a force in its own right. If you like The Beatles, you'll like this group. We are not a copy band. How could I copy myself,” Best said.
So, the man will once again go back in time, and beat on the drums. And in between, he will perhaps look at the ceiling with the stars, and wonder yet again. He is reconciled, has even expressed a wish to speak to the living Beatles’ member, is happy they made it that big, but he can’t help but go back to the old days and think why it happened, and why he became the fifth Beatle that was left behind. But
even in his tragedy, it was the Beatles’ who eventually resurrected him. The world will always know him as the shy, good looking drummer who played with Beatles and never said a word against those who left him to figure out his own life.
About the fifth Beatle
Pete has released various Cds after he got back to music including Back to the Beat, Once a Beatle Always, Casbah Coffee Club, and his latest Haymans Green, the name of the place where Casbah is located.
Her also co-authored two books, including The Beatles, The True Beginnings that traces the band’s beginnings and his mother’s influence on Liverpool music scenes. Best recorded several demos with group, which feature on the Beatles 1995 anthology album.
In 2007, Best was inducted into the All You Need Is Liverpool Music Hall of Fame as the debut Charter Member. Haymans Green was released on last year in the USA.
Back to Casbah
"I think it's a good idea to let people know about the Casbah. They know about the Cavern…but the Casbah was the place where all that started."
– Sir Paul McCartney forward in BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Casbah, a café that Mona Best started after she pawned her belongings, and operated from the basement of their house in Haymans Green, was also the place where the Beatles first performed. The coffee club is now part of The Beatles Story, a visitor attraction that seeks to recreate the life, times, culture and music of the Beatles.
It was here the Beatles when they returned from Hamburg honed their talents honed.
Visit Britain and the Beatles Story are organizing a festival called "Imagine Liverpool" at Select CITYWALK, Saket District Centre,Saket, New Delhi.
The festival will showcase Liverpool as a destination and will see musical performances, beatles memorabilia, souvenirs travel information on Liverpool etc.
Liverpool, home to 'The Beatles' and the famous Liverpool Football Club was voted the '2008 European Capital of Culture.'
"Almost Famous ..."
Chinki Sinha
October 27, 2009
Pete Best almost made it.
For two years, when he was the drummer with the Beatles, he felt he was on his way to something, someplace out of the ordinary.
But then, on their way to fame and everything else that comes with it, the Beatles dumped him and replaced him with Ringo Starr. And for most fans, the Pete Best story ended in 1962.
And Best, 67, became the fifth Beatle, someone who could have been there, posing for the shutterbugs as the paparazzi chased the band, a legend like the rest. But he was forced to pick up the pieces and start all over again.
Although it was only from 1960 to 1962 that he played the drums for the Beatles, the tag, and the unfortunate split clung to his identity, overshadowing his own talent, and he could never completely shake it off. Forty-seven years later, he is still known as the “ex drummer for Beatles”. But there was never any bitterness, only sadness.
“No, I admired them for what they achieved. They took what we started to another level,” Best said.In their early years, when Beatles went by another name, they belted out some of their most memorable songs, including Love me do, My Bonnie , Ain't She Sweet , and Like Dreamers Do . When Best was the drummer, the band hadn’t signed any record deals.
On his tour to India this week, where he will play at the British Council as part of the Liverpool tourism promotion campaign for Visit Britain and The Beatles Story, it’s his connection with the Beatles that is the selling point. That he was the forgotten drummer for the band that then was only a start up band that began playing at Casbah, a basement café owned by Mona Best, Pete’s mother, is till date Best’s
claim to fame. When he plays for the first time in India decades after he left the country on the last troop ship out of India(his mother was planning a visit when she unexpectedly died of a heart attack and Best always wanted to come and relive the days when he was a child growing up in India), The Georgic, that carried the remainder of the British Major-General Gilmore Simms army, in 1945, it will be in a space that will be set up like Casbah where he first played with the Beatles, the
ceilings of which were painted by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. In another part of the city, at the Select City Walk Mall, the original wax works of Beatles from Madame Tussauds’ that were made in 1964, two years after Best was dropped, would be displayed. And Best would yet again be part of an association with Beatles.
“The Casbah Coffee Club is the Holy Grail of the Beatles trail. No true Beatle fan should miss seeing it. I'm happy it's open,” Best said.
Before the café closed in 1962, the Beatles were the last group to perform there. Three years ago Casbah reopened as a tourist attraction in Liverpool, one among a string of places the Beatles Story has taken over.
But years later, Best and many others including Bill Harry, the journalist who founded the Mersey Beat, a newspaper that focused on the city’s music scene for there was much going on, and the energy was infectious, and first featured the Beatles and introduced Brian Epstein to them in 1961, have themselves become a part of the story of the band, a piece in its history, an element of its legend. The band
itself is long gone. Lennon was killed, others moved on, but the ones
on the fringes got together to piece the story together, recounting
their moments with the Fab Four.
Best’s India ties date back to 1941. He was born in Chennai. His mother Mona Best was born in Delhi in 1924. Perhaps it was here in India, that he first began to experiment with the tabla.
“I remember playing with a tabla. I don't know if you would call it actually playing one, but they were around the house, the servants had them,” he said in an email. “I will get to see my mother’s birthplace which I'm very excited about.”
This is also Best’s first trip to India after he left for Liverpool from Bombay in 1945. Among the little treasures the family carried with it were a silver-christening rattle, a mini hand-carved sitar and a number of items Best inherited from his mother like Indian Buddhas, Tiger skins. Elephant tusks. Those are part of the family archives now.
And although he was too young at the time, Best remembers his long walks on the beaches with his nanny Lakshmi, and the lullabies she sang to him.
“I also remember Indian and Western music being played in the house. My mother had very cosmopolitan tastes,” he said. “My memories of the Indians we were with are of happy times. I remember them as hard working honest, happy people. Our house was always full of laughter. I'm expecting India to bring memories alive.”
Even at Casbah, where Best met the Beatles first in 1959, his mother’s nostalgia for her days in India was reflected in the Aztec ceiling studded with stars because it looked like a mosque.
“The name the Casbah was definitely something my mother remembered from India,” he wrote in an email.
The Casbah had closed on the 24th of June 1962 but became a tourist attraction three years ago. It started in the basement of Best’s house where Mona Best sold coffee, and sodas and sweets. The Quarrymen, the name Beatles went by at the time, helped decorate the café, painting its walls, drawing dragons, spiders and stars on them. They also played there on the opening night in 1960.
Cafes were important spaces then. That’s where people met, smoked, talked and played music.
“It was the start of Beatlemania,” Best recalled. “Nobody knew them at that time. They were a start-up band.”
In her café, Mona Best, who regaled the band members with stories of her India days, wanted an Indian element. She missed India and often talked about her happy days in the country. In fact she was planning a trip to India when she died of a heart attack in 1988.
“Yes, what memories I have are good ones and the stories my mother told us always left a yearning to return. I'm happy that I am returning and playing there,” Best said. “It was always one of her dreams to return. She would often get upset thinking about India because she had such happy time there.”
Mo Best
"People will learn how it was that Mo threw the pebble, that made the ripple, that caused the wave that shook the world." – BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Behind it all, the music scene and the Beatlemania that gripped the world, was a woman and her love for her son.
Mo, who had Irsih parentage, has more to her than just being the mother of the drummer who was sacked from Beatles. She was born in India during the Raj in 1924 and worked for the Red Cross. She married a army official Johnny Best who fell in love with her.
Later, when they left India, she carried back a lot of memories. She gave birth to her two sons – Pete and Rory.
The third brother, Roag Best, will be in India with Pete.
It was Mona Best who first made Casbah the Rock n’ Roll place, and let the Beatles play. Her son performed with the boys and those were good times. She had noticed his young friends who came over and started the café in the cellar first as a private club for him and later turned it into a café, which was also one of the first cellar clubs in Liverpool to play rock ‘n’ roll exclusively. It opened in 1959 two years after Mo Best bought the house in Haymans Green after winning a bet on a horse that was called “Never say Die”.
“Due to her upbringing in India she did attract a lot of attention, as many of her ideas were Eastern and not something that the people of Liverpool had come across before,” Best said. “Many of the Indian rhythms helped many years afterwards with my drumming. However, a larger influence with regards to the Beatles music came after my time with the group.”
The Beatles, then known Quarrymen, disbanded and George Harrison joined another band called the Les Stewart Quartet, but later got back to his friends and took up residency at Casbah and performed on the club’s opening night on
August 29, 1959. It was then that the Beatles were born.
When Pete joined the group as drummer in August 1960, his mother took up a more active role in his career and the band and helped them get bookings at other places.
When Pete was sacked, Mo tracked down George Martin, the recording manager for the Beatles to ask why her son was dumped.
Later, she told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies that she had helped the band get on its feet, even fed when, and was “far more interested in them than their own parents.”
In 1967, despite the unfortunate fallout, she lent John Lennon her father’s medals that he received in India after John Lennon asked her for it to wear them on the montage of the cover of the album ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’
Liverpool - the city, the man, and Beatles' music
It was in Liverpool, the family’s hometown that Best began his music career, at first wanting to play guitars but later settled on drums and at 16 years he started to drum in his bedroom above the Casbah.
“I saw the famous Gene Krupa playing drums and that was it, I wanted to be a drummer,” Best said.
He first started playing with Ken Brown and formed a band called the Black jacks.
Then the Beatles discovered him, and he went on to Hamburg for a tour that tested the band’s limits, the gigs often lasted for eight hours at a stretch. That was the start of something.
If the impossible had happened, it’d be a story of success, loads of it. But instead it became a story of hopes that crashed, of resignation and of a life in an “almost” phase. He was not where he was supposed to be.
“There has only ever been six (Stuart Stucliffe who played the bass guitar but left Beatles shortly after their Hamburg tour) members of The Beatles and I was the fifth member. I am very proud to wear that tag. Who wouldn't be,” he said. “The shadow of The Beatles hasn't left any former Beatle. None of us could shake it off. Who'd want to? It is what it is.”
In the later days, people told stories, put in their bits and came out with their conspiracy theories. They said Best was so good looking that others in the band felt insecure, felt he could easily overshadow them, that Best was never a Beatle, he was a loner, and he didn’t fit in. But who knows what really happened in the August of 1962. He was told the group had decided to let him go, and he drove back home and
broke the news to his mother Mo Best and girlfriend Kathy. It had hurt. The dumping he could have taken, but not the way it had been done. The manager had called him and said the group had decided to replace him.
“I was hurt because I felt I had been let down by my friends,” he said. “Ringo was a good drummer, not a great drummer.”
“It is one of the most difficult things we ever had to do,” Paul McCartney said in Anthology, a collection of Beatles’ compilations.
For days after the split, there were times when Best looked at Beatles as they walked up the stairs to the stage, and as he descended those steps in one of the cafes at Liverpool, the place where it all started, but never a word was exchanged. No explanations came his way.
“I saw The Beatles on two occasions after I was dismissed, but we didn't talk. Everyone looked embarrassed,” he said.
When Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, told Pete he was sacked, that the boys didn’t want him anymore, Best went to a pub, downed a few drinks and drove home to break the news to his mother and girlfriend Kathy.
“I just went off and had a few pints - numb, I'd been cut and dried and hung out on the line,” he later said in an interview.
Ringo even alleged Best was on drugs, Best sued him and won.
"It was nonsense," Best said.
The original members of the band were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and a painter Stuart Stucliffe who left shortly after the Hamburg tour and died soon after.
It wasn’t easy moving on when the world was going crazy over Beatles.
When a man falls, only the dark phases of his life resonate, and live long in public memory. That’s what happened to Best. In all his appearances on television, he was asked about the fallout. The uncomfortable truths never left him. All the years that he had worked through long hours to survive, he had witnessed the rise of the
Beatles. He never met them again, though he said John Lennon was his closest friend.
Best, after all these years, has left the door open. After all he shared memories with the band members and of the Fab four, only Paul McCartney is alive.
“I want to talk to him about our families and life,” he said.
Best tried to get on, but there was his young family and they had to be taken care of. After he was sacked, Best stayed home for weeks and then joined Lee Curtis & the All Stars, which then broke off from Curtis and became Pete Best & the All Stars. They signed to Decca Records , and released the single "I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door”.
Best moved to United States and the Pete Best Combo toured America with a combination of 1950s songs and original tunes and eventually released the Best Of The Beatles ; which wasn’t a complilation of Beatles’ songs but was a play on Best's name.
Best married Kathy in 1968. The couple had two daughters, Babs and Bonita. The only job he could find was of a baker on the loading dock of a large bakery in Liverpool, where he worked long hours and often during the nights.
And so Best lived, within the limits, with no higher destiny to chase.
He didn’t play drums for almost 20 years. All these years, he refused to talk about Beatles. He was never bitter, only sad.
In fact John Lennon once said in an interview that the band’s best works were in Liverpool and in Hamburg and other dance halls.
“I had to start again, which I did. I finally hung up my drum sticks because I had children and needed to provide for them,” he said.
“Because I had been a musician for so long nobody would employ me. They felt because I had been a Beatle that I would go back to show business. They were scared to employ me. The Baker job was all I could get.”
Later, the Civil Service employed Best.
He had made his choices and was making the best of what remained.
In 1988, he returned to his drums, trying to get back to what he loved doing best and formed the Pete Best Band, and gave interviews on television.
“I had been asked for about five years to do a one off date in Liverpool, I always refused, eventually my mother persuaded that one date wouldn't hurt. What about my fans. So, I agreed,” he said.
In 1995 when Beatles’ Anthology released, it included some of the tracks that had Best on the drums in those early days.
“The money was nice, but it was better to receive the recognition for
the years I played as a Beatle,” Best said.
Although it was a rough ride in the beginning, Best put it all together, bit by bit. A grandfather who adores his three grandchildren, Best has got back to music, drumming and writing songs yet again, touring the world with his band that includes his younger brother Roag on drums and percussion, Phil Melia, Paul Perry, and Tony Flynn, the lead singer. Haymans Green, the band’s latest release, has songs that Best and the rest of the band composed.
But even the decades that had come in between, didn’t really distance him from the music he once played with a band that moved on, and left him behind. His days with the band permeate his music. Perhaps those were the days when Pete discovered his own style of Rock n' Roll. But even now, his music is reminiscent of his Beatles' days.
“My current group captures my time with The Beatles. However, the group is a force in its own right. If you like The Beatles, you'll like this group. We are not a copy band. How could I copy myself,” Best said.
So, the man will once again go back in time, and beat on the drums. And in between, he will perhaps look at the ceiling with the stars, and wonder yet again. He is reconciled, has even expressed a wish to speak to the living Beatles’ member, is happy they made it that big, but he can’t help but go back to the old days and think why it happened, and why he became the fifth Beatle that was left behind. But
even in his tragedy, it was the Beatles’ who eventually resurrected him. The world will always know him as the shy, good looking drummer who played with Beatles and never said a word against those who left him to figure out his own life.
About the fifth Beatle
Pete has released various Cds after he got back to music including Back to the Beat, Once a Beatle Always, Casbah Coffee Club, and his latest Haymans Green, the name of the place where Casbah is located.
Her also co-authored two books, including The Beatles, The True Beginnings that traces the band’s beginnings and his mother’s influence on Liverpool music scenes. Best recorded several demos with group, which feature on the Beatles 1995 anthology album.
In 2007, Best was inducted into the All You Need Is Liverpool Music Hall of Fame as the debut Charter Member. Haymans Green was released on last year in the USA.
Back to Casbah
"I think it's a good idea to let people know about the Casbah. They know about the Cavern…but the Casbah was the place where all that started."
– Sir Paul McCartney forward in BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Casbah, a café that Mona Best started after she pawned her belongings, and operated from the basement of their house in Haymans Green, was also the place where the Beatles first performed. The coffee club is now part of The Beatles Story, a visitor attraction that seeks to recreate the life, times, culture and music of the Beatles.
It was here the Beatles when they returned from Hamburg honed their talents honed.
Visit Britain and the Beatles Story are organizing a festival called "Imagine Liverpool" at Select CITYWALK, Saket District Centre,Saket, New Delhi.
The festival will showcase Liverpool as a destination and will see musical performances, beatles memorabilia, souvenirs travel information on Liverpool etc.
Liverpool, home to 'The Beatles' and the famous Liverpool Football Club was voted the '2008 European Capital of Culture.'
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