People
Remembering
Raveena Kaur Aulakh
THE TORONTO STAR
At the end of May this year, Toronto Star’s award-winning global environment reporter Raveena Kaur Aulakh passed away.
She was a fearless, gifted reporter who was dedicated to her work. She loved nothing more than telling a great story and she told many. Here is an edited selection of her unforgettable ones.
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I
LESSONS FROM MY MAGNIFICENT AMMI
Wearing these hoops helps me recall my grandma’s wise words
Among the dozens of earrings I own is a pair of small gold hoops. They are dull-looking, slightly twisted and the clasp doesn’t quite shut for one. They are old, from the 1930s. They are always in a tiny red satin bag that sits in a corner of my closet.
I rarely wear them because I am terrified of losing them.
They were my grandma’s, the only thing of hers I now own.
My grandma died two years ago and I lost the person I loved the most in the world.
Her name was Harbhajan Kaur but few people knew that. Everyone called her Ammi, which means mother in Punjabi, a language spoken in Pakistan and parts of India.
Ammi was 19, married to my grandfather for three years, when Punjab and the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 to create India and Pakistan. As riots raged, towns were burned down and thousands killed within days, the two fled their hometown of Lahore in Punjab, now in newly-created Pakistan, with nothing but the clothes on their back.
They eventually settled down in Chandigarh, a small town in Punjab (the part given to India) near the foothills of the Himalayas, and Ammi had five kids over 12 years; my mother was her eldest.
I was her first grandchild. Ammi was there when I was born - small, wrinkly and two months premature. She was there when I was named and she was there, hovering, when the doctor gave permission to take me home.
But she wasn’t there a few weeks later when someone dropped me and I broke my elbow. Within hours, Ammi took me from my parents’ home and I never returned except for an occasional visit. I was 6 weeks old and became her sixth child.
Ammi was thin, barely five feet tall, slightly bent and always walked with her left hand on her waist. She had been young once - there are photographs to prove it - but as far as I can remember, her face was a crisscross of wrinkles that got deeper and silver hair that got thinner every year.
As a child, I would pester her over dinner every night until she told me the story about how she got married to my grandfather and then discovered he had 13 siblings, all of whom lived in the same house.
It took away the shock of being married to a man she had never met, she often said.
Only on rare occasions would she talk about her life in Pakistan. But when she did, she never complained, never lamented the things she had left behind.
She counted her blessings for making it to the other side of the border with her small family.
Ammi and I were good friends.
She taught me to cook, to sew, even knit, but rarely made me do any chores. Her philosophy was simple: “Life can throw surprises. Be prepared.”
The best part about being raised by grandparents is that they have become wiser with age and have learned lessons with their kids.
When I first cut my waist-long hair to shoulder length at 15, Ammi shed some tears but took it in stride and even saved me from my grandfather’s wrath. (We are Sikhs; it’s against our religion to cut hair.)
My grandparents were strict with their four daughters - there were curfews; sleepovers, makeup and skirts were out of the question; and certainly no boyfriends.
Sleepovers, makeup and skirts were a no-no for me too but I defied curfew persistently and Ammi always covered for me. And when I told her my boyfriend had proposed and I had said yes, she wept.
[May 12, 2012]
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II
MEET MY BOSS
It is one thing to interview garment workers and tell their stories of poverty and long hours. It is another thing to live their life, even for a few days
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Dhaka, Bangladesh
Some days are good for Meem, others she likes to forget as quickly as possible.
The first time I saw Meem, which was also my first day at work in a sweatshop, she was having a good day despite the wretched heat. She sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, a tiny, frail figure among piles of collars, cuffs and other parts of unstitched shirts.
She had a pair of cutters in her hands, much like eyebrow tweezers, and she was trimming threads from a navy collar. She cleared one collar after another of threads until the big pile, which had been bigger than her, was no more. It took her all morning and she didn’t look up much, did not join any conversation.
She did that from 9 am to 9 pm, except for an hour-long lunch break.
Later, she said, it had been a good day: the electricity didn’t play hooky (which meant the three ceiling fans worked all day) and so it wasn’t oppressively hot, she had fish curry for lunch, and the floor manager didn’t yell at her for humming too loudly.
It was a very good day, she said again, dancing a little jig.
Meem is 9 years old and works as a sewing helper in a garment factory. For a few days this summer, she was also my boss.
Cheap fashion has fuelled a social revolution in Bangladesh. By all accounts, working women are changing their lives, their families’ lives. There is more food in homes, and cleaner clothes. There is electricity and there are toilets.
But it has come at a price.
Meem liked playing in the rain. She liked sleeping in on Sundays and holidays. She liked playing with her three baby sisters.
The factory has become her life, the life she will likely know for a long time, maybe all her days.
[October 11, 2013]
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III
NUCLEAR FALLOUT
An Indian court is trying to unravel the mystery of the legions of sick and disabled children, baffling miscarriages and fatal cancers around the country’s first uranium mine
* * *
Jadugora, India
Duniya Uram wants to go outside.
The veranda is only 10 metres away, but it is a struggle. Her face is streaked with sweat in the 45 C heat as the 16-year-old crawls across the cement floor, putting one thin forearm in front of the other.
Halfway, she stops to take a deep breath, then continues to the mesh door at the veranda. She uses her head to open it.
What should have taken a few strides takes five minutes.
As always, her brother Alowati, 18, follows.
Neither Alowati nor Duniya can walk, nor can they hold anything; their limbs dangle lifelessly. Their legs are skeletal, their arms slightly stronger. Their knees and elbows are rubbed raw from crawling. They can’t speak in sentences and gesticulate loudly when they want something. They can’t feed themselves. They need help to bathe and use the toilet.
Children with birth deformities like Alowati and Duniya live on almost every street in Jadugora, a leafy town surrounded by hills and rivers in eastern India, as well as in neighbouring villages. There are young women who have had multiple miscarriages, and men and women who have died of cancer.
No one knows why. Now, an Indian court wants to unravel the mystery of what is happening in Jadugora, the hub of India’s uranium mining industry since the late 1960s.
Budhini Uram spends all day, every day, taking care of her younger siblings Alowati and Duniya. (Their mother is gone; Budhini won’t discuss the circumstances.)
She wakes them, helps brush their teeth, bathes them, feeds them three times a day and takes them to the washroom. If they want to watch TV, she turns it on. If they want to sit on the veranda, she brings them out. If they are cranky, as they frequently are, she sits and tells them stories. She has no idea if they understand a word.
“I would like to get married and have my own family but what will happen to these two if that happens?” she says. “There is no one to look after them. I will always be with them.”
[September 13, 2014]
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IV
THE PERFECT STORM
Climate change means higher temperatures, more rain, stronger winds - and Bangladesh is Ground Zero for the looming disaster.
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Chakbara, Bangladesh
It is hard to imagine Shamisur Gazi sprinting up a tree. He is 86, has a hump on his back and, at the best of times, he needs a cane to walk.
But people do extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances.
On May 25, 2009, a few hours before Cyclone Aila hit Bangladesh and India, Gazi remembers the rain - it was relentless, it came down in brown sheets and visibility was barely two metres.
The wind was fierce, but toward mid-afternoon, it suddenly picked up more momentum and began toppling houses and hurling fences. Within minutes, Gazi knew that if he didn’t find refuge, he would be blown away.
Gazi climbed a palm tree. He doesn’t remember how he did it or how long it took. But he did it. He stayed there for six hours as the wind howled and giant waves surged.
When he climbed down, his coastal village in southwest Bangladesh had changed forever: houses were decimated, livestock drowned. The village was submerged.
Four years later, Gazi’s two sons are in Dhaka with their families. Gazi is clinging to village life the way he did the palm tree.
It is the only existence he knows, but he realizes he soon may not have a choice but to leave. “Climate change has wrecked everything,” he says.
In the past, resilient Bangladeshis would have built new huts, bought more livestock, stockpiled food and carried on. But Aila was different. It killed 300 people, inundated dozens of villages with a three-metre storm surge and destroyed 4,000 kilometres of roads and embankments.
A warm, good-natured man with a short beard and a wry smile, Gazi says he would have liked his sons to stay in his village.
“All I wanted was to grow old with my children and their children. But now they are gone and I don’t think they will ever return.”
The palm tree, the one that saved his life, is still there.
[February 9, 2013]
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V
DIGGING FOR HER LOST GIRL
Ishinomaki, Japan
The wind howls and the snow swirls as Naomi Hiratsuka climbs into the cab of the yellow excavator and turns on the engine. Moments later, she directs the machine’s massive arm down through the mud, scrapes and digs. Her eyes are glued to the bucket as it dumps the dirt.
As it has every day for months, the mud yields only rubble, red and blue plastics.
But Hiratsuka doesn’t stop. She hasn’t stopped since her 12-year-old daughter, Koharu, and 73 schoolmates from the Okawa Primary School were swept away by the tsunami that followed the earthquake that devastated Japan last March.
In the beginning, Hiratsuka, with other grieving parents, waded through the knee-high brown water to search for Koharu. Then she dug through the mud by shovel. In June, she got her licence to operate heavy machinery and returned to dig deeper.
Every morning, Hiratsuka tells herself this is the day she will find Koharu. Every evening, she returns home telling herself she will find her daughter tomorrow.
The villagers call her Akiramena, the one who never gives up.
It’s bleak and desolate where Hiratsuka digs. The Okawa Primary School once stood in a wooded valley. A river runs through the area, mountains looming on both sides. There were trees, buildings and homes nearby. Now it is a muddy, grimy wasteland that smells of gasoline and decay.
The school building is roped off and a Buddhist shrine stands at the entrance. Every day, grieving parents and grandparents arrive at the altar with fresh flowers, mugs brimming with steaming milk and little toys - police officers, dogs and dolls.
“I had to, I had to bring her home,” says Hiratsuka, tears flowing down her cheeks.
Strangers also come.
“It’s terrible, what happened here,” says Nido Takenaka, an engineer in Tokyo.
He is speechless with emotion when he sees the altar. “I have a 3-year-old son. I can’t imagine losing him the way they did.”
He has heard about Hiratsuka’s efforts. He wants to talk to her, tell her how sorry he is for her loss.
She cannot hear. She is operating the excavator.
Her daughter is still out there.
[February 18, 2012]
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A number of excellent articles by Raveena have appeared on sikhchic.com through the years. They can be accessed by clicking “Raveena” in the SEARCH box of the sikhchic.com homepage. Or by CLICKING here.
Our deepest condolences, thoughts and prayers are with Raveena’s family.
All of the above are edited extracts from the full stories written and posted by Raveena Kaur Aulakh.
[Courtesy: The Toronto Star. Edited for sikhchic.com]
June 12, 2016