Rishta in Nankana Sahib

Reading a Nankana Sahib profile properly

Jatt is not the answer. The got is, and so is the rule

Across this district a very large share of profiles will put Jatt in the biradari field, and a family reading from outside Punjab takes that as the information. It is not. Inside the district nobody thinks of Jatt as the unit of a rishta; the got does that work — Sandhu, Virk, Randhawa, Bhatti, Cheema, Sial, Kharal, Gill, Dhillon, Waraich — and a proposal is judged on which got, which village, and which families that got already marries into. So write the got, not only the biradari, and when you read a profile that gives only the biradari, ask for the got before anything else. It is the first question asked here and no one is offended by it.

Then ask the second question, which is the one that quietly ends proposals at the third meeting. Does the family marry inside its own got or outside it. Both rules exist in this district under the same word. Some families keep a strict exogamy — the got of the boy and the got of the girl must differ, and so sometimes must the got of the mother, which rules out matches a family from elsewhere would think obvious. Other families in the same chak prefer the opposite, keeping marriages close inside the biradari and often inside first cousins, to keep land and dealings within the family. Neither is unusual and neither is wrong, but they are opposite instructions, and a family that discovers the difference after the elders have met has wasted everyone’s time and some goodwill. Put your own rule in your written partner preferences in plain words, and ask for theirs in the first conversation.

Where cousin marriage is the family practice, there is one piece of care worth taking that has nothing to do with biradari politics. Marriage between first cousins raises the chance that both parents carry the same recessive condition, thalassaemia above all, and a simple blood test for both the boy and the girl settles it before the nikah rather than after a child is born. It costs very little, it is available in Sheikhupura, Faisalabad and Lahore, and asking for it is not an insult to anybody.

Potato, the cold store, and the year the price collapsed

The Sangla Hill, Safdarabad and Shahkot belt grows a great deal of potato as well as rice, and potato is not a steady crop. It is a crop you can store. A grower who holds his sacks in cold storage and sells three or six months later can double his money or lose the lot, and that is why a family in this district can be visibly comfortable one year and quietly straitened the next without anything having changed about its land or its character.

So when a profile or an elder says the family has a cold store, find out which of four things is meant. He may own a cold-storage unit, which is a capital business with electricity bills, a generator and borrowed money behind it. He may rent chambers in somebody else’s unit to hold his own crop. He may be a trader who books space, buys at harvest and sells on the rise, which is the highest-risk version of all. Or he may work at a unit as a manager or munshi on a salary, which is a steady and respectable job and an entirely different proposition. The same four-way split applies to the words rice business: grower, commission agent in the grain market, sheller owner, broker, or a salaried man at the sheller.

The honest question to ask, gently, is about the bad year rather than the good one. Was there a season when the price broke or the crop failed, how did the family get through it, and is there anything still owed from it — to a commission agent, to a cold store, to a bank, to a relative. No family should be judged for having had a bad season; almost every farming family here has. What matters is whether they will tell you about it, because a debt that surfaces after the engagement is the single most common cause of a broken rishta in a farming district.

Canal land or hithar land

Acres in this district are not all the same acres, and the number on its own is close to meaningless. Land on the canal with a working watercourse and a tubewell is one thing. Land out in the hithar — the riverain belt along the Ravi on the southern edge towards Okara — is cheaper, often very fertile, and exposed: a high flood year can take a standing crop and sometimes the soil with it. Land that depends on a tubewell alone carries the diesel or the electricity bill and the falling water table with it.

So ask three things rather than one. How many acres, where — canal, hithar or tubewell — and in whose name. The third is the one families forget. In a joint household the land very often still stands in a grandfather’s name with the inheritance undivided among several sons and daughters, which means the figure quoted to you is the whole family’s and the boy’s actual share is a fraction of it, to be settled one day among brothers. That is completely normal here and not a sign of anything wrong. It is simply a different fact from the one most people hear, and it is better established now, kindly, than argued about in five years.

The Gulf question is the visa, not the salary

A large number of men from these chaks work in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar and Oman, and the Gulf is not the same proposition as Europe. The money is usually real and it arrives every month. What varies is everything about how the marriage would actually be lived, and three documents settle it.

First, what does the iqama or residence permit say his profession is, and is that what he actually does. The two differ more often than people admit, and it matters, because the permit is what governs the rest. Second, does that visa allow family status at all — many categories and many salary levels simply do not, so the honest answer is that the bride would live at home in the joint family and he would visit. Say so if it is so. Third, what is the leave cycle: how many days, how often, paid or unpaid, and who pays the ticket. A man on a two-year contract with thirty days leave is a different husband, practically speaking, from a man who comes every nine months for a month, and a family is entitled to know which it is choosing.

Then ask the question nobody asks: how long does he intend to stay out, and what is the plan after. Most Gulf work in this district is a ten or fifteen year chapter, not a life, and the plan for the end of it — land, a shop, a cold store, a tractor and trolley, a house in Shahkot or Sangla Hill — is as much a part of the proposal as the salary. A family that has thought about it will answer easily.

The district town, its calendar, and which district your papers say

Two practical matters particular to here. The first is the calendar. Nankana Sahib town holds the birthplace of Guru Nanak, and for the birth anniversary in November, and again around Baisakhi, many thousands of Sikh pilgrims arrive from India and elsewhere. For those weeks the town is full, the hotels and guest houses are taken, the roads around the complex are managed and movement through the centre is slow. None of that is a problem; it is simply something to know before you fix a wedding date or a first meeting in the town itself, and local families plan around it without thinking. It is also part of the town’s economy: the hospitality, transport, shop and catering trade here has a season, so if a profile says hotel, transport or shop work, it is fair to ask what the rest of the year looks like.

The second is the district on your documents. Nankana Sahib became a district in 2005, having been part of Sheikhupura before that, so one household can easily hold a father’s CNIC and older matric certificates saying Sheikhupura and a newer card saying Nankana Sahib. Write the address the way your papers write it and add the other in the same line — Shahkot, Nankana Sahib, formerly Sheikhupura district — so a family searching either way finds you. And when you search, run both: a good number of members from these tehsils are filed under Sheikhupura, and others under Faisalabad or Jaranwala because that is where the work or the college is. Read the area line rather than trusting the city field, and keep Hafizabad, Chiniot and Jhang open as well, since the chaks on those boundaries have always married across them.