Displaced

I started writing this novel a few days after my father died in 1998. I was living in Zurich, Switzerland. The writing began with the aim of capturing a story of his life and times. My father was a fascinating man. He had survived the front in North Africa and Burma in World War 2. He was a devout Sikh and was very progressive. He was against caste, class, gender equality and the burden of giving dowries. My father was born in 2013. He was only five years old when in 2018 his own father died, from the Spanish flu. We are from a family of landowners - Jats, as they are called in the Punjab. He was married at the age of eighteen in 1931 to my mother, who was just thirteen at the time through an arrangement. The marriage wasn't consummated until 1936. In 1937, he ran away from the confines of a dominant older brother in an extended family and joined the British Indian Army. Sometimes he related to us as children his experiences of the war. After the war, in June 1945 he was invited to London to participate in the victory celebrations as a representative of the British Indian Army.In India, the movement for India's independence was always in the background and gathered pace after the war. My parents had lived in Lahore, Pakistan before partition. They also had a home in a small village in District Ludhiana. They were among and witnessed the mass displacement of millions of people during partition and the massacre of thousands of innocent Muslims and Sikhs. The horrific stories of the war and the bloodshed in 1947 told and re-told often when I was growing up.In 1963 my father emigrated to London. This allowed him escape from the hard life in India. After a few jobs as a Laborer, he was employed as a mechanic with British Rail in Acton, doing 12-hour shifts, until his retirement. We arrived in England in 1965. I benefited from a free British education and managed to obtain a PhD in Chemistry.I started keeping a dairy at the age of sixteen and recorded in it not just events of our lives, but also the turbulence and joys of living in 1960's and 1970's. Retrospectively those years were full of creativity and full of conflicts, with the Miners strikes, race relations, workers' rights. And of course, there was Enoch Powell and Teddy Boys. This novel, Displaced, is a journey through some of the great events of the last century. The background is real. The novel is real fiction.