Destiny

The Purewal family tree dates back hundreds of years, and the majority of the people in the village Shankar near the city of Jullundur in the state of Punjab, in India, bear the same last name. In Destiny, author Sukhjit S. Purewal shares his unique family saga beginning with his grandfather, Waryam Singh Purewal.

Born in 1891, Waryam was a subsistence farmer who traveled to the United States searching for a better life. He arrived in 1925 and stayed in California for twenty-eight years while his family remained in India. He initially worked as a farmhand and later owned a vineyard. At his sons’ urging, Waryam sold the vineyard in 1953 and returned to India, hoping to live a happy and prosperous retirement. But fate had other plans, and he died a poor and sad man at age eighty—in the same old house in the village he had left almost fifty years earlier.

Waryam’s son, Gulzar, traveled extensively for business. His life story includes wining and dining with the rich and powerful in India, philandering, an illegitimate son in England, and escape from India to a self-imposed exile in Pakistan to avoid lawsuits and death threats.

Predictions made by a holy man in India more than 2,000 years earlier—and found written in Sanskrit on four-hundred-year-old crumbling paper—forecast Gulzar’s life. He died a lonely death in a foreign land and was buried in a grave far away from his family and friends.