And so it was. Hailey sent for my father (by now my father had become his most reliable contractor) and told him that he was to remove the foundation stone from Kingsway to its new site at Malcha. Not a word of this was to be breathed to anyone. He drove in his own car to the tomb of Safdar Jang and then took us on foot to a spot near Malcha where the stone was to be replanted. There was a barbed wire fence round the spot with a couple of armed policemen on guard.

Taking out the foundation stone and planting it in its new site was the first job my father entrusted to me to do all on my own. I was thrilled. First, I had a pit dug for the stone. Then I hired a bullock cart and selected half-a-dozen labourers for the job. We were given four policemen as our escort. Finally, one evening in May I rode my bicycle alongside the bullock cart loaded with labourers and policemen and reached Kingsway Camp an hour after sunset. I had the stone dug out and placed on a bed of straw spread in the cart. I covered it up with tarpaulin. We then proceeded on our journey led by a man carrying a petromax lamp. I walked with the rest of the party behind the car. We looked like a funeral procession. It was a long distance to traverse as we had to skirt round the city. We reached Malcha after midnight. It took us another hour to fix the stone in the pit with mortar. I gave the labourers a rupee each as a reward. By the time I reached home it was daylight. My father interrupted his morning prayer to ask me how it had gone I gave him the details. When I told hm I had given the labourers an extra rupee each, he called me a bharooah.

We were now making enough money to live in better quarters. (However, as we were used to going out in the open to relieve ourselves we found going to a dirty, smelly lavatory very constipating).

We did not get any contracts for the building of the temporary Secretariat which was almost entirely taken over by the CPWD and decided to move out to the site where the new city was destined to come up. With the labourers and the building materials available to us, it didn’t take us a month to put up a couple of rooms, kitchen and courtyard. This was close to an old flour mill. Following our example other Sikh contractors also built shacks alongside ours on what later came to be known as the Old Mill Road. Although we came from different parts of the Punjab and belonged to different castes, we soon became like members of one family.