- Royal Enfield Bullet Showroom
- The distinct shop signs in primary colours, big print and pictures
- At night, men peeing everywhere
- A motorcycle with sugarcane shoots, or pathay (buffalo feed) strapped to the back sideways, making it treacherous to pass him too closely.
- Narrow roads meaning your car needs 2 wheels in the dirt to drive when a bus or tractor is oncoming
- Elegant solution: Planting flowers in the medians looks pretty and also stops the cars from high-beaming each other at night
- Going to action Dad’s will
- The Punjab civil servants are in the midst of a pen-down strike
- The civil service building has made cubicles out of concrete dividers with the ceiling being totally covered in fans
- No computers on the desks, just drawers full of papers
- Going to a baseekan bees - a private notary who writes documents on a typewriter
- Due to the strike we should’ve been screwed, but enough bribes gets you on the way
- I was the only son of a man with a will, so my case was simpler than most
- since the civil servant was on strike we found a backdoor via the local patwari
- We needed a Lumbardar’s signature so we tried to scrounge one up
- The first one we found was drunk at 11 am so we had to keep looking
- Then we asked a passerby and he found one from our area
- We took the paperwork to a notary who fished through a basket of stamps for find the right 4 for our paperwork
- Then we took the Lumbardar inside the building to sign an affidavit and take a group picture
- The desk needed to send me an OTP code but the system was down, then it came back up but they went to lunch so I had to stand there to hold my spot for 30 mins
- Punjab and Sind bank - founded in 1908 by 3 sikhs. In partition Sind fell entirely in Pakistan. So the bank only operates in Punjab but romantically keeps the name
- I see houses in the pind with maple leafs and the usa flag out front. In canada this is rare. Feels like immigrants are more outwardly prideful of their canadian identity. Ego in differentiating from local neighbours also plays in
- Mohan has no more land in Cheema. That land would go to estranged sons who haven’t bothered to reach out even after turning 18
- My dad’s generation had to cut their hair and change their names to blend in in canada. I could keep my hair and name, but had to assimilate into the culture to find meaning. New immigrants can live in giant enclabes and bring in all their foreign ideals without compromise. Immigration has a golden mean.
- Short story: A roadside food stall at Kiratpur Sahib where a poor man dines in the honour of a deceased man. Could be from his perspective or of the deceased man’s son
- Kiratpur Sahib: a white temple with a walkway to the riverbank lined with blue painted steps. A perch on a bridge with littered plastic bags from past scatterings. Unable to get the urn unscrewed but mamma ji has a screwdriver. We lay dad to rest in the river. The rain coming in just after. Then we get degh and get a death certificate written up. In the old days people passed in the village and this was the only official records. Dogs follow us to the car. We stop at a roadside stall and feed a old, poor person and buy chai for the ladies. We buy a metal cup in honour of my dad.
- Young farmers with a subwoofer on their tractor
- Taking a tractor into the city for errands
- Street hocker in the morning: “karaeeah lo, tubey lo, kourchenay lo, koorseeah lo”
- Driving into Delhi: “You see that big mountain? That’s a landfill”
- the constant float of birds above it
- Dislodging an old cumin seed from your teeth with your tongue and biting it to release intense flavour