by Gulzar
After some enquiries, they found a way in. A muhajir family lived there now. They were cultured people. Many rooms within rooms had been constructed. They were invited in and served tea and homemade gajar ka halwa.
Paul grew tearful. ‘In those days, this house seemed so big.’
The master of the house responded sensitively, ‘I’m sure it was, janab. The tall buildings around it make it look smaller. Also, you are taller now, the doors must look small to you. You must have been very young when you lived here.’
‘Ji.’
Paul could not stay any longer. He was ready to leave.
As he was getting up, Ali Raza sahib said, ‘We have something for you in our safekeeping. I hoped someone, someday, would return for it.’
He fetched something wrapped in old crinkled paper. It was a marble plate. He said, ‘This must have been part of the front gate. There’s none now. But…’
Paul unwrapped it. On top of it, in English, was the address:
Rai Bahadur Des Raj
kothi No. 8
Civil Lines
Campbellpur
Paul broke down. He sat down, hugging the plate to his chest, and sobbed.
‘This is my father.’ His father’s face rose in front of him. A golden kulla wrapped in a Pathani turban. How royal he looked. Even in the truck, he had asked for the keys to the kothi. He must have hoped to return someday.
George was right. The divisions wrought by religion never lasted. The ’60s had just wound down when Pakistan broke up. A part of it became a new nation. Bangladesh.
Another strong gust of wind started blowing dry leaves all over. Another decade passed. The ’70s.
Some leaves from Fauji’s truck had just found their soil and had started to grow in a new land, when another storm arose…
It was a ball of fire that started from Delhi and spread with such speed that it engulfed large parts of India within hours.
Mobs moved around in all directions with sticks, swords and axes. They would identify Sikhs by their turbans and beards and pick them out like insects in wheat. Hunt for them in markets, shops, houses and colonies. They stopped trains and dragged them out. Then, they shaved their heads. Like Muslims had forcefully circumcised Hindu men during the partition.
The prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, had been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguard in Delhi.
Kartar Singh had come to Kanpur. His son had cut his hair despite being a Gur Sikh. He was unhappy about it. After disowning his son, he had spent the night in a gurudwara. In the morning, he was about to leave for Delhi when he heard the news of the assassination. He also heard that anti-Sikh riots had erupted in Delhi.
He had left his wife and mother behind and was worried about their safety. Outside the railway station, he saw a mob. They were pulling some Sikhs by their hair and dragging them out of the station, raising slogans.
‘Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge!’
Baffled, he turned around. A Miyan slapped his turban away and said in a suppressed voice: ‘O Sikkha, marega!’
The stranger pushed him into his truck and raised the plank at the back. Kartar’s head was spinning. Before he could gather his senses, Miyan-ji quickly started the truck and drove off. Kartar kept rolling from side to side in the empty truck as they moved on.
On the highway, Jafar Miyan stopped the truck at a lonely spot and rebuked him. ‘You’re lucky! Don’t you know what’s going on out there?’
He asked Kartar to come out of the back and sit in the front, next to him. They started again. He briefed Kartar about what was happening.
‘Don’t take the train under any circumstances. Trains are being stopped and Sikhs massacred. They are burning shops owned by Sikhs.’ He paused, before continuing, ‘Where were you headed?’
‘Delhi.’
‘What do you do in Delhi?’
Kartar responded, voice quivering, ‘I have a shop selling auto parts.’
‘Hope there’s no khanda on your signboard?’
‘No! But it says … Singh Auto Parts.’
A long silence and then suddenly Miyan-ji asked, ‘Shall I cut your hair? It will grow back.’
Kartar’s hand went straight to his head.
‘Don’t worry, it was only a suggestion for your safety. I respect sardars. I have sardar friends. I am going in the same direction. Karnal. I will drop you off somewhere.’
Jafar Miyan was a patient man, experienced in the ways of the world. He had seen the country through its many ups and downs. He narrated an experience. ‘If a Sikh had not given us refuge, we’d have gone to Pakistan. When riots broke out in Delhi in 1947, Sardar Patel made arrangements for Muslims who wanted to go to Pakistan. Camps were put up in Purana Qila. From there they would be escorted by the military across the border. Our family also took refuge in the qila. My father’s bosom school friend, Sardul Singh, came to know of that. He searched for us and found us in the camp. He beseeched my father and took us home under military security. He was a very influential man. Our Abba too was a Congressi. We stayed back in India.
‘Till such time as Nehru was alive, our Abba had no fear. But after his death … well, it was a different matter. My father used to say, “One can never tell when the pot might boil over in this country. Politics here is like the hookah of the village chaupal. Whoever has the pipe becomes a zamindar.”’
Jafar Miyan knew more than he let on.
He paused for a bit and said, ‘The country will keep breaking and uniting. It’s a centuries-old habit of our rulers. Some outsider may come and unite us, but we will never do it on our own. For that, you need to learn about democracy.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Abba used to tell us. I told you, he was with the Congress.’ He sighed and continued, ‘Amma-Abba are no more. But I do have an elder brother. He went away to America. He is doing well. I could have gone too, but I never felt like leaving Hindustan.’ He paused again. ‘There’s something about its air – we remain attached to it and yet distant.’
‘Why? Don’t you ever get fed up of the riots?’
Jafar Miyan took a long breath and said, ‘It’s like this, Kartar. Those who didn’t want to migrate to Pakistan, but were forced to, looked to the West. It was the same for those who didn’t want to come here from Pakistan, but had to. They too seized the first opportunity and left. That’s why, when they meet each other abroad, they meet with great love … like long-lost lovers. They have enough sorrows to share.’
Kartar Singh said, ‘I feel the same sometimes, but … I cannot leave my mother and go. If it weren’t for her … I would have perished in some refugee camp.’
Jafar Miyan asked, ‘You too have come from the other side?’
‘Yes, we crossed over in a truck like yours.’
A deep silence descended upon them. Only the sound of truck wheels on the tar road could be heard.
Jafar Miyan said, ‘I have a suggestion – tie your hair at the back and wear your turban around your neck like fakirs do. Then, as long as you’re with me, people will not take you for a Sikh. Tomorrow morning I will drop you near Dhaula Kuan and leave for Karnal. I don’t have a permit for Delhi. Inshallah, this fire too will die down in a day or two.’
Jafar Miyan stopped at a dhaba or two he knew on the way. But the same news was aflame everywhere. Some abandoned trucks could be seen. Must have belonged to Sikhs. They drove all night without a wink of sleep.
When they reached Delhi, the sun had risen. But what they saw as they entered was enough to shock them. As soon as they turned towards Munirka, they saw a mob dragging a Sikh towards an electric pole to which another Sikh was already tied. A burning tyre hung around his neck. Dense smoke rose all around. The second one was screaming with all his might, ‘Don’t kill me. Don’t kill … Indira was my mother. Don’t kill me.’
Jafar Miyan turned the truck in another
direction. There was no sign of the police anywhere. Kartar’s voice trembled as he said, ‘This
has been happening since yesterday. By now, the military should have intervened, but even the police aren’t here.’
‘They won’t come,’ Jafar Miyan said coolly. Then, in a gentle voice he added, ‘Come with me, Kartar. We will go to Karnal.’
‘No, no, Miyan-ji. My mother will die of worry and grief. Leave me at the next turning from Dhaula Kuan. My shop is not far from there. I’ll make a phone call home.’
‘Even the shop will not be safe, Kartar!’
‘I … I will lock the door from the inside. I will take the signboard off.’
Jafar Miyan kept driving.
Kartar never got a chance to take off the signboard. The mob had arrived. He had fastened the iron shutter. Holding the iron rod of the roshandan, Kartar trembled uncontrollably. Thank God he had fixed cardboard on the roshandan whose glass was broken. A crowd had gathered outside his shop. They were screaming, ‘Come out, oye Sikkha! Come out!’
They were unable to break open the shutter. When they pushed hard, it rattled, offering Kartar a glimpse of the scene outside.
The tyres heaped outside were being looted. Kartar knew how they planned to use them. He had seen it only this morning. Two Sikhs had been dragged by their turbans and tied to electric poles. The tyres were hurled around their necks and petrol sprinkled on them. Then they were set on fire. Their screams would have been heard all the way to Defence Colony. And then died down in the smoke. There were a number of people in khadi egging on the mob.
Some ‘patriot’ shouted, ‘Oye, break the rear wall!’
Kartar jumped out through the roshandan and dashed across a back lane. His turban came off. His hair fell loose. He thought of stopping somewhere and cutting it off.
Then he remembered. How he had disowned his son for the same act.
Somewhere in his heart, he felt relief. Poor fellow, my son at least will be safe now. He clung to the walls and tried to find a place to hide. As he turned into another lane, he saw some people trying to set fire to a house. They were hurling petrol-soaked fireballs through its windows. The slogans were the same: ‘Come out, Sikkha. Come out!’
People were armed with sticks. They held axes and some brought tyres, rolling them along. He slipped into another lane.
There was yet another mob up ahead. Where had all these people come from? There were villagers among them. Young people and old. Bodies still burned against some lamp-posts. Black tresses of smoke rose into the sky.
Delhi had gone mad.
Yes, he did know that some Sikh had killed the prime minister.
But Gandhi had been killed by a Hindu. So?
Where was the police? The military?
Suddenly, some people saw him and screamed. ‘There … a Sikh!’
He ran as he had never run before. He sprinted through the lanes as if he were jumping across canals. He started to pant. Screaming voices followed him. He came to a dead end. A garbage van stood in the corner. He plunged headlong into the garbage. The angry voices grew louder, closer. Then, gradually, they faded away.
Twenty-four hours had passed since he had jumped into the pile of garbage. He had spent a day and night in the same way in a haystack once, when his father and mother were killed in front of him. He was very young and Baba, his grandfather, had carried him to the cowshed. He had hidden him in a haystack and warned him against even breathing too loud. He was yet to overcome the fear that took root in him that day. The haystack could have been set on fire any time. The next day, when his Baba had taken him out of the stack, a truck driver had offered them a ride. He was coming to Hindustan.
Baba had urinated in the truck, he suddenly remembered. Scared, he felt his pyjamas and found they were wet. He could smell nothing because he was covered in filth. How long had he been here? A day … two days … four days? His hands and legs had become numb. His head was spinning, or had the garbage van begun to move? Where was it headed? Would it leave him in the same wilderness he had left his Baba? Would he find his Maiyya there again?
Maiyya … Panna Maiyya … she will manage to find me in this wilderness. He was becoming delirious.
Panna had been sitting at the threshold for three days.
‘Kartara has not come!’
Kartar’s wife, Jaswant Kaur, reassured her, ‘He’ll come, Maiyya. Good that he went off to Kanpur. It saved him.’
‘The Musalmans must have burned down the shop.’
‘Not Musalmans, Maiyya … these are Hindus.’
Jassi coaxed and persuaded Maiyya indoors. There was only one way to keep her occupied: start off with some old memory. Maiyya would be distracted narrating it.
‘Maiyya, you came right up to Dilli with the refugees. Why didn’t you settle down?’
‘I did, beti. One doesn’t always settle down with a husband. Mothers can settle down with their sons too. And why a son? Kartara was like my grandson … he was that young. You were not even born then!’
Jassi laughed. ‘And that … Fauji … if only he had come with you.’
Panna sighed and fell silent for a while. ‘That night in the ruins was very lonely, Jassi. He had even suggested going back … But as soon as it was morning, Kartara made the decision for me. If his grandfather hadn’t died … I don’t know…’ She shrugged.
Jassi said, ‘Maiyya, do you feel Fauji thinks of you?’
A faint smile spread across Panna’s face. ‘Hmm … I think of him, he must also be thinking of me. When I was descending the mountain, I turned to look once. He was going down the other side.’
Jassi asked, ‘He was older than you, na?’ She paused. ‘Could he still be alive?’
That faint smile remained as Panna answered, ‘I am alive, he must be too.’
He is over ninety years old. He has lost all the hair on his head, apart from two strands on the sides. When these stray into his mouth, he wets his fingers with his spit and pulls them back into place. His eyes still shine the way they did. Flaming torches. Even today, he roams the Valley of Kashmir like a fakir.
Fauji is still alive.
In 1947, coming down the mountain, he had joined a caravan. Had gone some way with it. He thought of Lakhbeera and the dhaba. It dawned on him that there would be nothing there. No one. Why go back then? He stopped and looked back. In the direction Panna had gone.
Suddenly, he thought of his mother. She must be in Jaunpur. Should he go? See her? Would she have started for Rawalpindi again? Could she be in this very caravan? Uff!
He moved away from the caravan.
What sort of a fall is this? People were still falling like autumn leaves … Drifting around like dry leaves.
That’s where he left the caravan and started on a pagdandi alone. Wherever it went. Wherever it took him.
Fauji kept walking. Endless days. Infinite nights.
He spent fifty long years walking the pagdandis of Kashmir. The Valley too had been divided. Uff! These partitions never end. He did not know which side he was on.
He lives in a graveyard with a gravedigger. Now he knows where he has to go. The last address is not far from his room.
History marched on to complete another century. It was 1999. It was Kargil. The night kept resounding with explosions and gunfire.
Lying in his room in the graveyard, Fauji turned over and muttered, ‘There they go again, the rascals! They didn’t let me sleep all night.’
These wars were not new for him. Nor were the soldiers. They were like schoolboys, scaring each other, wearing borrowed masks. One throws a brick, the other hurls a stone. They keep sharpening their nails to lunge at each other.
‘Fifty years … in fact, more. God knows when they will grow up,’ he muttered.
In the morning, he picked up his potli and stuffed his chillum. Then he took to the pagdandi towards the basti:
Painde lambe ne lakiran de
Umr de hisaab muk gaye
Totey labbe taqdiran de
Kisse lambe ne lakiran de
Long are the passages of borders
One has lost count of age
Gathering the pieces of fate
Long are the stories of the partition…
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More…
A NOTE ON TWO
Of late, in the context of the seventieth year of our independence, it has been a revelation to hear people mention the Partition in the same breath as Independence. In fact, if anything, the reference to the Partition, separation, has been more pronounced than to Independence. Unlike, say, the horrors of the Holocaust or the Second World War, which have now become history, the Partition continues to be part of our social-political discourse. This may be because the War has found an outlet in the arts, in the books that have been written on it, in the films that have addressed its horrors. We, on the other hand, have had very little discussion around the Partition. Like a family secret which everyone knows of but is uncomfortable to talk about, we have pulled a curtain over it. It continues to fester.
Two addresses this work-in-progress nature of the cataclysmic events of 1947. A group of refugees starts out from Campbellpur/Attock in the winter of 1946. They make their way to the border. But what next? The passage to the border is not an end. It is what follows that lends their journey the nature of an odyssey, one that has not stopped. Uprooted from the only place they knew as their home, these refugees, and millions like them, have kept travelling, physically and metaphorically, in search of roots, in search of a place called home.
This is a work of fiction, but the characters who inhabit it and the experiences they go through are not. They are the result of my imagination working on the people I have known, the stories they have shared. The boy who runs away from home, boards a truck and works at a dhaba and as a cleaner. The Englishman after whom Alpha Nagar is named. The Rai Bahadur who, making his way to the border as a refugee, asks his wife, ‘Hope you didn’t leave the keys of the kothi at the chowk.’ The owner of the canned food business in the UK. And, of course, the riots of 1984, the war in Kargil. These are people and events I have known, have lived through. I have used their stories and given them an imaginative spin as a storyteller. No work of fiction exists in a vacuum. Mine too is rooted in the world I have seen and experienced.
