He conducted this research on the request of the authors during October 2002 by visiting Bara Pind Lohtian and interviewing a number ofold people who have lived in that village since pre-partition times and haveknown Shiv and his family. The whole section ‘The Village’ and first two paragraphs of the next section ‘The Childhood’ are solely based on a detailed research report prepared byAziz-ul-Haque Rammah. His youngest sister, Saroj and her husband Baldev Mehta are settled in Toronto, Canada. His younger sister Surinder, whose husband Varinder passed away in 2002, lives in Chandigarh. His younger brother, Subhash Batalvi lives in Panchkula (a town in the suburbs of Chandigarh) and Suresh Batalvi in Delhi. Davarka lives in the family house in Prem Nagar, Batala. His elder brother Davarka had passed away. Shiv also had two youngerbrothers and two younger sisters. He had two sons from his second wife, Krishan Gupal, Shiv’s father,and Ram Lal. Mehnga Lal’s first wife died early and he married again. The eldest son was Buwa Dita who was from his first wife and became a schoolteacher. Shiv’s grandfather’s namewas Mehnga Lal (Mehnga means precious). Shiv’s father, himself a governmentemployee in the Revenue Department, was probably well aware of the advantage of advancing Shiv’s birth date in the school records.
It was a common practice by some parents in India to intentionally advancethe birth date of their children in the school records to later provide them extra time to apply for government services that had age-limits for hiring in different cadres. The earlier date is generally accepted to be more accurate. Shiv’s date of birth as recorded on his horoscope is July 23, 1936, while a latter birth date, Octois recorded on his matriculation certificate that was the only official birth record at that time.
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