Emotion: Sorrow Thought: I’m lucky Decision: Take charge Action: Enjoy
When he awoke the village had sunk behind them and the muddy fields of planted rice took over. Daddi had a field to his name in his village. In Mummi’s village, Mamma ji inherited half the land as the oldest boy of the family. Mummi ji signed her share away when she married and Minder’s land was in the care of his older brother.
Pinder Uncle told him about the crop cycles and what time of year they shifted from wheat to rice and then back. He told of how he’d worked the fields as a kid but now could pay the poorer migrants from madhya pradesh to do it for him. Happy thought of how the whites could rest now that the poorer migrants of India had come to do the work they’d tired of. The race to leisure was a global one.
The Punjab was changing at a pace Canada hadn’t in two generations. Pinder Uncle took Happy to his workplace, a hospital. He was the ambulance driver. His resume included driving ammo trucks during the 2nd indo-pak war, at night, with no headlights. This allowed him to secure a comfortable sarkari government job in his mid-life. The team there greated Happy warmly. Pinder took the opportunity to refill his first aid kid from the hospital stores. He was free to take anything expired, including the meds he was giving Happy. He told him that the medicine expiry only meant it had begun to wane in effectiveness, but that you just had to take more of it. That advice saved Happy hundreds of dollars over the years.
On the way into the city for the first time in weeks, Happy saw poverty incomparable to anything he’d seen before. Men with nothing to their name except a shanty made of garbage bags and twigs. And they were the lucky ones. No one claiming they grew up hard in Rexdale had any clue what they were talking about. He thought of some of the members of the gunz who grew up with present parents and in 2 story suburban houses and thought of them as crybabies instead of hardened now.
Happy saw endless suffering out the windows as they drove further to their destination. Happy felt sorrow for the all people who would be born into a life of huts made of garbage bags and die knowing nothing better. He thought of how he got when the AC was broken in a room at school in June. He would never complain about a hot room again he thought. He was a lucky man. It was to take charge of the lucky life he’d been born into.
Pinder was dead-set on taking a recovering Happy to the famous gurdwara in medhiana sahib for blessings. Good, he would bow to make peace with his past self there.
The sun was high and his spirits hoped to rise to meet it.