Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  When we came to Delhi I was doing social work. We had just reached Delhi. We learnt that Hindus had migrated, and some of the Indian doctors had been sent to Pakistan to render medical aid to the Hindus in the camps. Pakistan did not have too many doctors, and even if they did ... so the Indian government had sent Indian doctors. And when they were winding up camp, a stage came when there were eight or ten abandoned children left in the camp. So these Indian doctors brought those children back to India because they could not possibly leave them there. Even if it was a Muslim child — though they knew these were Hindu children ... At the time Rameshwari Nehru and Raksha Saran were running a kind of home ... so they put them there. And from the school one of our teachers, who was guiding our social work, she went on All India Radio to make an announcement that we have these eight or ten children — would somebody volunteer to adopt them. It was a small number ... eight or ten children is not that many. I was still in the School of Social Work and we started receiving postcards. And everybody first wanted a boy, then they wanted a good looking and healthy boy. Nobody wanted girls. Anyway, one man came along, he took a girl and within two or three days he brought her back, saying she was too naughty. Now what do you expect a child to be if not naughty? After that ... I don’t know what finally happened to those children, but this is an incident where the Hindu parents abandoned their children. You know people’s mental makeup changed, the important thing was to save themselves, so they left the children behind.

  Four decades after Partition, I met Trilok Singh. Trilok Singh was nine years old when his father and two uncles decided that they would have to kill the women and children of their family in order to escape to India. Their village, it had been confirmed, would go to Pakistan. The Sikhs were already under attack, and with every passing day the violence was drawing closer. Mangal Singh (Trilok’s uncle) and his two brothers knew that while they could manage to escape — or die in the attempt to do so — the women and children of their family had little chance. They took a decision to do what had by now become common in Hindu and Sikh families: kill those who were seen to be vulnerable — women, children, the old and infirm. It wasn’t only that these people would make escape difficult and cumbersome, it was also that they — women particularly — were vulnerable to rape, and being ‘weak’ could be forced to convert: both things which would be an insult to their religion (and their manhood). Children too could be converted, or simply taken away — this happened among both communities, so it wasn’t an imaginary fear.

  Trilok heard the male elders of his family discussing the impending family deaths. They called it martyrdom. But somehow, at nine, he knew he did not wish to die. So he pleaded with his uncles and his father. He said he was willing to take the risk of escaping and being killed en route. But he wanted them to give him the chance to at least try. They did. Others in the family did not have this choice. Seventeen of them died at the hands of their men, while young Trilok escaped.

  When I met him Trilok lived in a village a bare thirty kilometres from Amritsar where he ran a cloth shop. Despite himself, he remembered the time. I don’t want to,’ he said, ‘I want to put it behind me, but it keeps coming back.’ After the death of his father and one of his surviving uncles, he and Mangal Singh were the only two who remained of their ‘original’ family. Now both of them had ‘new’ families and, understandably, neither of these families had any interest in the traumas that assailed these two men. In a curious kind of sharing, Trilok and his uncle kept in touch, but they seldom, if at all, talked about ‘that time’. It was as if both understood the ‘betrayal’ that underlay their relationship — but for his pleading Trilok would also have been killed with the other members of his family. He knew, when he faced Mangal Singh, that he could have met death at the hands of this man. But, by the same token, both were tied to each other in a sort of ‘conspiracy’ of silence: the deaths hung around them like a constant presence. But they were never referred to. Occasionally, when Mangal Singh went to the Golden Temple for his annual remembrance ritual, a forty-eight-hour prayer in the name of all those who had died, Trilok would accompany him. They would pray, and silently remember those who had died, and return to their homes. No other family member accompanied them on this private pilgrimage.

  Trilok’s story was not unusual. Many of the people whose stories I heard, in their fifties now, had been children then. They told these stories as adults, describing an experience they had had as children. Unlike older people, as children, often they did not even have the language to describe the experience, to make sense of it for themselves, to tell it to others. It took Trilok several years to be able to speak about what he had been through. Many children grew up in orphanages or homes for the destitute; others made their way through life on the streets, and some had the privilege of being adopted into homes. In most of their lives, there probably was no one to whom they could recount these experiences, nor, perhaps would they have been able to. Adults going through experiences of trauma and pain have, to hand, a history of different experiences, their own or those of others, to draw upon, to refer back to. But children have little of this: the vocabulary of rupture, of the enormous tearing apart of their lives — where will they find this? Many children, Partition survivors, developed severe psychological problems, and found they could not live in families. Kulwant Singh was one such child.

  When I met him Kulwant Singh was close to sixty, a gentle, tall and thin man with a flowing white beard, and one arm cut off at the elbow — a legacy of Partition. ‘I work in a hospital as a technician,’ he told us, ‘and spend the rest of the day in prayer and social service.’ As part of his daily routine — by way of giving thanks to Guru Nanak for saving his life and making it possible to survive — Kulwant Singh gave two or three hours of his time to social service in the Sisganj gurudwara in Delhi. He would go there every day, clean and swab the floors, man the counter where people left their shoes, and do anything else that was required of him. Partition had been for him, as for many others, a traumatic experience. He lost virtually all his family. He remembers lying by the side of his dead father, with the heat of the flames rising up all around him. In an attempt to ward off the attackers, people from his village had laid a sort of barrier of thorns. This proved no obstacle at all and Kulwant has a vivid sense of thorns on one side and flames on the other.

  I was small; my mother, when she saw my father being killed — they cut him up into a hundred pieces, the first blow they struck on his neck, and then they cut him into a hundred pieces — at that time I was trembling, at my feet there were many bodies, there were fires all around, I was dying of thirst, they heard my voice — my mother lifted my head and my chachi took my feet ... the six-month-old daughter, first of all they did ardas and threw her into the fire, and then they said, bibis, our izzat is in danger, will we save our honour or our children. And then turn by turn they threw their children into the fire ... my mother, she took me and put me down by my father’s body, where there was fire all around and I felt so thirsty and because of the heat, my legs got burnt.

  [Later] I got up, my hands were cut, blood was flowing from my body, my body was burnt, I fell down, then they picked me up and when they brought me, I was walking on thorns, huge thorns, but at that time I could not feel them.

  Kulwant spent more than a year — till March 1948, well into Partition — in Rawalpindi, in hospital. When he was well, he came to his relatives in Delhi. But he found it difficult to settle down in the family. His relatives then applied to an ashram and Kulwant Singh was admitted there.

  Then after that, I came and stayed with some of my relatives for two or three years, but things were not too good, and my chacha’s son Tarlok Singh applied saying that I should be admitted into a hostel as I was full of grief, unhappy. At that time I was admitted to a hostel here in Ashram where earlier there was a subzi mandi and then Kasturba Niketan came here. I lived in the hostel nearly sixteen years, I did my matric. And then I got my claim, Rs 5,000 or so. After
that I got a quarter, a place to live and then, thanks to the maharaj, I got a job in JP hospital, Maulana Azad Medical college. Then till now I am doing service. This is my life.

  Once he managed to make his way to Delhi, Kulwant became one of the many subjects of the State’s rehabilitation plan. He was placed in an orphanage, where he stayed till he was old enough to go out looking for a job. In this too, he was helped by the State: displaced persons and refugees were given a kind of priority in job placement, and Kulwant was one of the lucky ones. His permanent government job allows him to live a reasonably comfortable life.

  If Kulwant was lucky enough to be at the receiving end of State welfare policies, there were others who were not, and for whom the experience of ‘that time’ is marked by a sense of bewilderment and incomprehension. I remembered hearing the story of Murad, who did not know how old he was when Partition took place, though he knew he was a child. At the time that Satti Khanna and Peter Chappell interviewed Murad, he was in his forties, a tonga driver in Lahore.

  He cared for me. A schoolmaster accepted me and I started living with him. He was more sympathetic to me than my own relatives and looked after my needs. I would take his cattle to the grazing ground. Then the controversy over Pakistan and Hindustan came up ... nobody was ready to keep me. Unwillingly, an older uncle took me in.

  I would always be out playing. A few Sikhs lived around our village on the main road. People said he plays outside all the time. There are bullets flying around, he will get killed. But I was always out playing. My maternal uncles took me to their homes. They thought I would be killed while I was playing out on the streets. One day we were inside the house, my uncles came in and sat down. Sikhs came! Daughter fuckers!

  First they knocked my uncle down ... I thought I would also be killed and tried to get out. Sugarcane chaff was piled at the back. I jumped into it and wrapped myself with the stuff ...

  Murad was found lying in the chaff by another of his ‘uncles’. Together, they made their way to a nearby camp — the only place where they could be relatively safe. ‘It was miserable,’ he said, ‘if they saw a Muslim, they would kill him ... Near the camp was a sugarcane field, but there was no food to be had: we just lay on the ground and passed the time.’

  Murad’s story mirrored that of hundreds and thousands of children whose lives were torn apart as a result of Partition. Once in the camp, he boarded a lorry bound for Pakistan. Over the border, he remembers being put down by the driver and told to find his way. ‘Nowhere to go, I thought. I did not know the way.’ He followed someone who seemed to know where they were going. A child, he was still careful enough to know that money was important: ‘I would not spend the few coins I had. They would be needed if things got worse.’ Stumbling and making his way through the widespread death and destruction he saw around him, Murad remembers coming across an old woman at Attari, near the border. He said to her: ‘Mother, I want to stay here.’ ‘Where have you come from?’ she asked him. ‘From a well to an abyss,’ said Murad. She gave him food, offered him a roof over his head, but Murad moved on: ‘I have no family,’ he said, and left.

  For many years Murad lived the life of a destitute, with the occasional bit of work, sometimes in the vegetable mandi, at others helping with odd jobs. At some point, he made his way to Lahore, where he began to help cart and tonga drivers by looking after their horses. He earned two annas per horse. ‘The time passed,’ he said. One day he asked the chaudhry of the tonga drivers if he could be allowed to drive a tonga. He was told he did not know the roads. But luck was with him: a cart driver had left his job, there was no one to take his place, and Murad was told he could have a go. He did, hesitantly finding his way around the city by asking passengers and people on the street. And gradually, he had a job, a bit of money, and a sort of life.

  ‘There is not much to think about Partition,’ Murad said. His key memory of that time is his fear that he had nothing to fall back upon — no money, no family. Where can you go, he said, if you have nowhere to go? He would spend disturbed nights, especially at festival times. He remembers the discussions about Partition and the talk of having to leave. ‘Where,’ he says, ‘Where the hell can we go? ... They would say, to your Pakistan. Where will Pakistan be? I would ask. “Somewhere near Lahore”. But I haven’t seen Lahore. People would ask, is Lahore a city? I didn’t know. I had never been there. No, they would insist you too will go to Lahore. But how? Where I have been born is Lahore for me, but anyhow we were dragged to Lahore.’

  Partition children. Listening to these stories, or simply reading about them, I had to constantly remind myself that it was children we were talking about — these stories, told by adults, were stories about what had happened to them as children. Six, eight, nine, eleven, ten ... these were the sorts of ages they had been then. I have often wondered at the role memory plays in such cases. How far back can people be said to remember, and how much of this recall is ‘accurate’? Did any of these people even wish to remember that time? Indeed, did they actually have a choice in the matter? If they were children, how reliable were their memories? Ought they to be discounted as mere childhood fabrications? These are difficult questions to answer. When Kulwant Singh spoke to me about the women of his family killing first the children and then themselves, I could not help feeling that these were the words, and indeed the interpretation, of an adult. Could he have noticed all that he had spoken about as a child? How else would memory have reconstructed the details? Or was it that his adult mind was now building on stories he had heard of that time?

  Yet his wife told us that he still had nightmares, that he woke in the middle of the night feeling an intense heat rising up around him, the flames which surrounded him as he lay by his father’s body in 1947. Another Sikh living in Bhogal in Delhi who had actually been part of a killing spree as a child, would often wake in the night screaming. His wife said he could not forget the screams of the Muslims he had helped to kill. Could Trilok Singh actually have remembered the details of his pleading with his uncles and father and then his escape as clearly as he did? At age nine? Or were these reconstructed from the accounts of others around him? If so, ought they to have been taken seriously or not? All I have is questions, and more questions.

  In November of 1948 Anis Kidwai visited Irwin Hospital in Delhi — she was looking for abandoned, deserted children — Partition children. A group of people from Jamia, including Kidwai’s friend Jamila Begum, had got together to provide shelter to these children. Kidwai found a number of children of all ages in the hospital — someone had a head wound, another a broken leg, a third a broken arm. One little girl — she couldn’t have been more than five years old, according to Kidwai — sat around happily, singing and playing. ‘You seem to be fine,’ Kidwai said to her. ‘Yes, I came here with my aunt [actually her ayah],’ replied the girl, ‘but she’s dead now.’ And with that, she began to introduce the children. ‘This is Rashid,’ she said, ‘everyone in his family is dead, and that is Zainab, her family is also dead, and over there is Nabu — they slit his mother’s throat ...’ and she continued to laugh as she said this.

  Kidwai’s attempt to find a home for these children was probably part of a private enterprise — social work taken on by concerned citizens. There were many such initiatives, but, since they kept virtually no records, it is difficult to know if the government had any role in them (although the government had also set up a number of homes and orphanages). Someone donated a house, others gave their time, and Kidwai went round to hospitals locating children. One little boy said his home was in Lucknow, although he knew no more than that. Firoze Gandhi offered to take him there and help locate his family. On the way, the child got off at a station to drink water and came rushing back. Gandhi asked if he would go again to fetch water for him, but the child refused saying there were too many Sikhs at the station and he was frightened of Sikhs as they would kill him. Another young girl had a different story to tell: asked what her name was, she said, Sita-Hasina. Wh
at is your father’s name? Again, a Muslim name and a Hindu one. To whom did this child belong? A Hindu family or a Muslim one? Or one that was ‘mixed’? Now that the lines had been drawn between Hindus and Muslims, where was the child to go? If she was Muslim, her home was in Pakistan, if Hindu, in India. Sita-Hasina defeated all attempts at being slotted, to allow boundaries to be fixed for her. But eventually, on Gandhi’s advice, was sent off into the care of the Kasturba Trust in Delhi.

  But all cases were not so simply solved. Often, the children were not that easy to locate. When Kidwai set off to look for them in Delhi’s hospitals, she was struck by how few there were. Everywhere there was talk of hospitals being full of children, indeed every hospital was said to have a children’s ward for abandoned children but when Kidwai got there, there were no children to be found. ‘What happened to these children, I have still not been able to figure out. Where did they disappear to? Perhaps they got well and went away. Or could it be that the missionaries took them away?’1