kartar dhillon ain't no old lady

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Kartar Dhillon ain't no old lady

Ranbir Sidhu

Kartar Dhillon is 80 years old. That makes her special in some people's eyes who now come by, she says, and want to know about this "old Indian" living in their midst, but Kartar doesn't want to talk about that. This romance with a round figure of longevity doesn't interest her much. She would much rather talk about politics and what's happening in America today.

When you walk into her small one bedroom Potrero Hill apartment in San Francisco, her interest in the world around her is evident. The first thing I noticed was the ceiling high bookkcase filling one wall, crammed with works of fiction, history, politics. "I had to leave most of my books in Berkeley," she lamented, "when I moved here, but I couldn't bare to sell them. My granddaughter keeps them for me." On the shelf I found books by Camus and Sartre, Engels, Gorky and Edward Said.

The other thing I noticed were the paintings and sketches. Several charcoal portraits were ones she had done herself. "I always wanted to be an artist," she told me, "even when I was young. I don't know where the impulse came from, but perhaps from watching my mother decorate the margins of her letters home to India. She would paint intricate floral patterns within the borders of her letters."

She is a tall, energetic woman who moves quickly not only around the small apartment, but also from subject to subject, discussing one minute her anger at Newt Gingrich and his "mean-spirited vision of America" (and also at the way, she says, that so many professional South Asians have bought into his demagoguery) and the next about the various projects she is currently involved in. In one, with her grand-daughter who is a filmmaker, she is putting on the screen the story of her own early life in California and Oregon.

Kartar was born in California's Simi Valley in 1915. Her parents were among the first Indians to come to this country and she was one of the first Indian children born here. Her father emigrated from India sometime in 1890s, while her mother, who came here in 1910, was one of the first Indian women to live in the United States. Kartar herself was only among a handful of Indian women on the west coast until the 1940s. U.S. immigration laws made it almost impossible for men to bring wives over from India, or for women to come to the U.S. alone. She remembers only two other Sikh families from those early decades of this century.

The year after she was born the family moved to Astoria in Oregon. Here they lived close to the banks of the Columbia River where it empties into the Pacific. Kartar showed me some photographs she had taken on a trip back over the summer. The site of their house looked idyllic, even with modern-day Astoria in the background.

Her father worked in the local lumber mills while the rest of the family farmed. "The freedom movement was the mainstay of our lives," she said of the ways that Indian living in America had attempted to oust the British Raj from India. Her father was one of the founding members of the Gadar Party, a political party dedicated to an independent India. "We, his children, lived and breathed Gadar every day. We had one goal in mind: to help free India and to go there to live as soon as we could."

Her father died in the 1920s, after they moved back to California, and in 1932, when Kartar was 17, her mother died. But by that age she had created for herself a set of core values, values which she admits were quite openly in opposition to those of her parents and her family. She abhorred the idea of marriage, had no plans whatsoever of having children ("Political activism and babies don't go together," she explained) and already decided that Sikhism, the religion of her parents, was not for her. She would have no religion, explaining only that "it stops a people thinking for themselves."

She married nonetheless, though it was to escape a marriage her older brother was already planning for her. Her husband was a political activist in the Gadar Party, and the two married secretly, a secret that survived until she discovered she was pregnant. She lived with her husband and her two youngest siblings, working at whatever job she could find. Sometimes as a typist, other times as a farm laborer.

Initially, when she married, her husband promised to support her wish to attend college, though on the day she was planning to sign up for classes he prevented her, accusing her of wanting only to look at the other men.

In 1943 she divorced him, telling him not that he had prevented her from getting an education or that he stopped her from doing political work, but simply that he wouldn't even give her a dime to buy some sewing thread. In her fictionalized and powerful story, "The Parrot's Beak," she describes her response to her husband's incredulous look. "That's it exactly," she said. "It cost only five cents, but I didn't have even that much money of my own. I had to ask you for it."

She is still angry, she says, even after all these years. "He cheated me out of an education." But it is an anger she has put to some fabulous uses. All three of her children have advanced degrees, as do most of her various grand-children and friends she has helped through hard times.

In the 1940s and 50s she avoided meeting most Indians. "They couldn't put up with me and I couldn't put up with them. So many were racist and so many still are." Her removal from the Indian community was so stark, she says, that in the 60s when she met some Punjabis and said that, of course, she could speak that language, she was horrified to discover that she had almost completely forgotten it. "I learned it back from them. They were bhangra singers who came here and the first Indians I could get along with for a long while. It's different now. Much of the younger generation is much more open. They accept blacks and latinos and gay men and women, but back then they were all so conservative."

Only in the last few years has she had the time and economic stability to return to her true loves: writing and art. Several of her stories and articles have been published, and one, "The Parrot's Beak," has been printed in two national anthologies. The story tells about her life in stark, unvarnished detail. She has heard from many young women that it has had a great effect on their lives, showing them the many possible paths that are open to them.

So if you come across Kartar Dhillon at a demonstration against cuts in welfare, the continued U.S. support of regimes that torture their own citizens, or ballot measures seeking to curb rights for gays and lesbians in this state, don't say how wonderful it must be to be so old and still active, or what it was like in those pioneer days for Indians in California, ask her what she thinks about today. She is far more interested in that than in the past