POMPANOOSUC — In February 1968, Harjit Singh Rakhra moved with his wife and three daughters from England to the Upper Valley, after responding to a Valley News advertisement seeking a linotype operator for the paper’s pressroom.
How Rakhra spotted the ad, whether in the Valley News or a trade publication, is unknown. But as an experienced typesetter seeking opportunity in the United States, the 30-year-old uprooted his family from the UK, a global center of the South Asian diaspora, to Pompanoosuc, a tiny village in Norwich whose Sikh population was zero.
Rakhra and his wife, Amarjit Kaur Sappall, set to work quickly to turn their bare-bones Revolutionary War-era house into a home, and to plant themselves and their children in the community. In so doing, they observed the three major tenets of their Sikh faith.
Remember God. Earn an honest living. Share with others.
Naam Japo. Kirat Karo. Vand Chhako.
Those tenets were the principles by which Rakhra lived a long and purposeful life, one that ended on March 25, as a result of heart failure and cancer. He was a month shy of his 88th birthday.
Rakhra was philosophical about dying. “My time has come,” he told his family: “It is the will of God.”
“He marched into this process with his eyes open. He was very resolute; he accepted what his fate was,” said his daughter Teji Rakhra-Burris, interviewed with her mother and sister Mina Rakhra in the family home. (A third daughter, Bindi Rakhra, lives with her husband in Randolph.)
Over the years, Rakhra amassed a number of honors and titles. He was a life member of both the Thetford and Norwich Lions, where he served as president, and he headed the Norwich Fair. He was a life member of the Norwich Grange, and worked as a volunteer at the Upper Valley Haven in White River Junction, both delivering Indian meals cooked by Amarjit and working at the community food shelf.
The Rakhras hosted large religious services at their home, which drew Sikhs from throughout New England and were followed by communal meals; and, in summer, swimming at the Union Village Dam. Completing the circle, they also traveled for services to the homes of Sikh friends and to Sikh temples, which were mostly in the Boston area.
As secretary of the Norwich Lions Club, Rakhra “never looked for recognition. ‘We serve’ is the Lion’s Club motto — he did that to his utmost,” said his friend, and fellow Lion, Donna Wheeler.
Born in 1937 under British colonial rule in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in East Africa, Rakhra was the second of 10 children from his father’s two marriages. A meteorologist for the British Civil Service, Rakhra’s father, whose ancestral home was in the Indian state of the Punjab, worked in Kenya and Uganda, both of which had significant South Asian populations.
Rakhra had a facility for languages from childhood on, rapidly picking up Punjabi, Swahili, Urdu, English, Gujarati, Hindi and Bengali. Although Rakhra spent his formative years in Kenya and Entebbe, Uganda, his father sent him back to India for high school and to learn a trade — in his case, typesetting. Harjit then returned to Uganda, where he found work with the Ugandan Government Press.
In December 1958, Harjit married 19-year-old Amarjit, in her hometown of Nyeri, Kenya. They lived in Entebbe until 1966. But once they sensed a tide of political agitation turning against the minority South Asian population, because of longstanding class and racial divisions, they moved to London — well before President Idi Amin ordered the mass expulsion in 1972 of all Asians living in Uganda.
Once in the U.S., Rakhra spent a few years at the Valley News, which had sponsored his work visa. In a story about him that ran in the paper in August 1969, he took care to mention that he had made friends not only with fellow workers in the paper’s composing room but also with parishioners at the Lebanon Methodist Church, where he sat in on services.
Rakhra noted in the interview that he had run into some snobbery and prejudice from people in the Upper Valley but other than that, most people left him alone.
“If somebody wanted to start trouble, he would not engage with those people. It’s pointless to engage,” said Mina Rakhra. If somebody asked him where he was from, she added, his habitual answer was, “Pompanoosuc.”
Harjit left the Valley News for Equity Publishing, owned by former New Hampshire Gov. Meldrim Thomson, and then worked at Dartmouth Printing for many years. He then went to work as a real estate agent with McLaughry Real Estate in Hanover, from which he retired in the mid-to-late 2000s.
“He would come into the office and I’d hear the bell ring and hear him speaking, and I knew it would be something interesting. Every time I ran into him I found out something different about his background,” said attorney Dan Grossman, who knew Rakhra both as a fellow member of the Thetford Lions Club and from real estate transactions where Grossman was the attorney and Rakhra was the real estate broker.
Their father was naturally curious and gregarious, his daughters said. If he happened to hear someone speaking Punjabi or Swahili, or see someone wearing the Sikh turban, he would make a beeline for that person and strike up a conversation. If an Indian performer played at the Hopkins Center, such as Ravi Shankar, Rakhra not only attended but persuaded the performer to come back to the house for a meal. (A photo of Shankar in their home is part of a collage of photos on the living room wall.)
During his volunteer work at the Haven, said Lori Wick, a former manager of its food shelf, Rakhra “would take people through without any judgment at all. He made people feel very comfortable doing something that isn’t necessarily comfortable for them to do.”
At home, Harjit was a confirmed, even stubborn, do-it-yourselfer, with a woodshop out back. He and Amarjit, who became naturalized citizens in 1973, refurbished the old house, and installed large vegetable gardens, a Concord grape arbor, and tangles of blackberry bushes. Even toward the end of his life, Rakhra would still make repairs or tell his daughters that this or that needed doing.
In 2006, Rakhra returned to the places he’d once called home in India and Africa. For a month, he visited the places he’d lived as a young man, or where he knew people, studiously recording his travels through photos and a journal.
Although he and Amarjit would later go back to Punjab, and he would also travel there with their daughters, 2006 was the last time Harjit made such a long journey solo. Later, he read any travel writing and history he could get his hands on, and corresponded with other South Asians who were part of the East African diaspora through an online chat group, Namaskar Africana, his family said.
A particular favorite was a YouTube channel devoted to the peripatetic exploits of Cycle Baba, aka Dr. Raj Phanden, who has ridden his bicycle through hundreds of countries to publicize environmental action. It excited him, Teji Rakhra said, to be able to see all the places Cycle Baba had traveled to, and to listen in on the conversations.
As Harjit aged, he missed Uganda, his family said. He had grown up near the Entebbe Botanical Gardens, with their luxuriant plants and animals, and he also missed the bananas, mangos, papaya and jackfruit that had grown in the family’s backyard. But that was in his past and, like the past, that was another country.