The Yellowed Booklet

I visited home recently and decided to help my parents go through some of the old belongings and clear out things we no longer needed. One day, my father opened a box tucked inside a long-forgotten bag. As he sifted through its contents – old passports, letters, papers, and receipts – he pulled one out and handed it to me.

“This is your great grandfather’s passport”, he said.

I looked at it the way anyone might look at an old document at first – casually, almost absentmindedly. The cover was worn, its edges softened by time. The paper had yellowed, and the ink had faded just enough to remind you that it belonged to another era.

But the longer I held it, the less it felt like just another document.

I realised that it might be one of the most fascinating pieces of family history. It was his British Indian Passport – Indian Empire. This was from a time when India was under the British colonial rule, governed by the British Raj from 1858 to 1947. He was a British subject by birth.

I didn’t know much about my great grandfather. Going through his passport now, I began filling in small pieces of the story. His name was Fateh Singh. He was born in 1890 in a small village called Kot Ranjha in the Jallandhar district of Punjab. The passport described him as being 5.5 feet tall - he was a rather smallish man, and the son of Hamir Singh. I suppose that might explain why I stand at just five feet myself.

The photograph showed a solemn, strong-looking man, someone who might have weathered many storms. His piercing gaze met the camera directly, framed by a long, crooked nose, a salt-and-pepper beard and a large neatly tied turban; he looked every bit a villager he has, grounded and resilient in every line of his face.

The passport was issued to him in Lahore – now in Pakistan, but then part of Punjab in British India – on 29th April 1930. It was there that Fateh Singh received this small but powerful booklet – an official document that could have taken him far beyond the borders of the British Empire. As I turned to the next page, I realised that, in fact, he was only allowed to travel to the Kenya Colony. He would have been forty years old at that time. By profession, he was a carpenter – a man whose hands likely carried both skill and stories of hard work, building more than furniture, but perhaps a life for his family as well.

Turning the pages, I noticed that the passport was valid for five years. Yet somehow, he never travelled. There were no visas, no entry or exit stamps, no record of journeys made. I found myself wondering what might have been – what journeys he might have taken, what stories he might have gathered along the way. Why hadn’t he gone? Was it circumstance, duty, or perhaps a quiet contentment with the life he had built at home? The answers are lost to time, but holding the passport in my hands made me feel the weight of those untravelled roads, a life of possibilities, quietly tucked away, in a small, yellowed booklet.

Nearly a century later, holding it again, I felt a strange mix of connection and curiosity. The passport was both a key to the wider world and a reminder of the roads not taken. I began to imagine the life he might have lived had he journeyed to Kenya Colony, the experiences he could have had, the stories he might have collected along the way. And yet, there was a quiet beauty in the life he did lead—a life rooted in his hometown, in his craft, and in his family.

Holding that small, yellowed booklet, I realised it was more than a record of travel – it was a window into possibility, ambition, and the choices that quietly shape a life. Even lives that seem ordinary carry untold stories, waiting for someone to notice, and sometimes history whispers them through the smallest of objects.

Harpreet Lota

12 March 2026