ਚੌਥੀ ਕੂਟਚੌਥੀ ਕੂਟ

About the book

Chauthi Koot, in English The Fourth Direction, is a Punjabi short story collection by Waryam Singh Sandhu, first published in 1998 by Chetna Prakashan of Ludhiana. It is the book that carried Sandhu, already one of the most respected Punjabi story writers of his generation, to the Sahitya Akademi Award, which he received for Punjabi in 2000. The collection belongs to the Punjab of the 1980s and early 1990s, the years of the militancy, when ordinary families lived between armed militants on one side and the security forces on the other, and when a knock on the door after dark was enough to stop a household's breath.

Sandhu did not write those years from a distance. He was a school teacher and later a college lecturer in the same Punjab he describes, and his stories stay at ground level: a clerk trying to get home, a farmer trying to protect his family, neighbours learning to suspect each other. That ground level view is what has kept the book in print in the minds of readers long after the events it describes, and what later carried two of its stories to the Cannes Film Festival.

The title story

The title story follows Rajkumar, a clerk in a school in a border village of Amritsar district, and his friend Jugal Kishor. Travelling back from Chandigarh, the two men reach Jalandhar too late for the last passenger train to Amritsar and persuade a guard to let them onto a train that is not meant to carry passengers. Two young turbaned Sikh men are already on board, and in the fear of those years Rajkumar cannot stop suspecting them: the guard, he notices, took money from the Hindus but refused it from the Sikhs.

The suspicion turns inside out. The Sikh men ask if they can walk with the two friends when the train reaches Amritsar. One of them has just lost his mother, and they are afraid that, seen alone in the dark, they will be killed in a false encounter by the police or the CRPF. Walking beside clean shaven Hindus is their protection. Rajkumar, who had feared them all the way, ends up leading them through the city by the fourth direction, the forbidden route of his grandmother's tale, in which a prince who was told never to go that way went, survived, and came home with treasure. The story's title is that route: the way nobody is supposed to take, which turns out to be the way people save each other.

The story of Joginder and his dog

The collection's other best known story, Hun Main Theek-Thaak Haan (I Am Feeling Fine Now), is set in a village farmhouse where the farmer Joginder lives with his wife, children, mother and a dog called Tommy. Militants who move through the area at night order Joginder to kill the dog, because its barking at strangers draws attention to their visits. Twice he takes Tommy away and leaves him; twice the dog finds his way home. Then the security forces arrive, search the house, turn it upside down and beat Joginder, who is caught between two armed powers and guilty in the eyes of both. It is one of the sharpest short portraits in Punjabi of what those years did to people who wanted only to be left alone.

ਵਿਸ਼ੇ

Across the collection the subject is fear and what fear does to trust. Sandhu's Punjab is a place where a turban, a shaven face, a barking dog or a missed train can decide whether a man gets home alive, and where neighbour begins to read neighbour as a threat. Against that, the stories set small acts of decency: a guard who quietly helps, a stranger who walks beside another stranger so that both survive the night. Sandhu writes in the socialist realist tradition he grew up in, but the politics never lectures. The argument is carried by the situations themselves, which is why the title story is still taught, translated and argued over.

ਲੇਖਕ

Waryam Singh Sandhu was born on 10 September 1945 in the village of Nanke in Amritsar district. The oldest of six children, he trained as a teacher, took a doctorate, and retired as a lecturer from Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar. His first story appeared in the magazine Preetlari, and Chauthi Koot was his fourth collection, after Lohe De Hath (1971), Ang Sang (1981) and Bhajian Bahin (1987). His stories have been translated into Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and English. After retirement he turned to non-fiction and wrote several volumes on the Ghadar Party, the early twentieth century movement of Punjabi revolutionaries abroad. In 2019 he returned his Sahitya Akademi Award in protest against the policies of the government of the day.

From page to screen: the film Chauthi Koot

In 2015 the director Gurvinder Singh wove the title story together with Hun Main Theek-Thaak Haan into the Punjabi film Chauthi Koot, released in English as The Fourth Direction, with Suvinder Vicky as Joginder and Kanwaljit Singh as Jugal. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2015, where it was reported to have received a long standing ovation, and it went on to win Best Asian Feature Film at the Singapore International Film Festival, the top film award at the Mumbai Film Festival, and the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Punjabi in 2016. The film is the second part of Gurvinder Singh's Punjab trilogy, and it carried Sandhu's stories to an audience far beyond Punjabi readers.

Why does Chauthi Koot still matter?

Because it records, from inside ordinary homes, a decade that Punjab is still coming to terms with, and it does so without taking the side of any gun. The title story's English translations, including the one by C. Christine Fair published in the journal Orientalia Suecana in 2025 and an earlier appearance in the anthology Tell Me a Long, Long Story, have taken it into classrooms outside Punjab. For readers who know the period only from headlines, Chauthi Koot shows what the headlines cost the people who lived between them.