A Place Within (26 page)

It is of course particularly satisfying for someone such as I—to whom the concept of the Partition comes as an offence on the self, because it asks me to choose, and it invites others to put a label on me—that this conference takes place on Indian soil, with visitors also from Pakistan (albeit via the United States). But most of these Manto fans are Hindus, if one wants to put a label on them; and they delight in Manto tales, just as they delight in stories about Faiz, another great secular writer who wound up on the other side, ultimately to be exiled. At this conference translations of Manto stories are read and debated over; themes therein are discussed; a three-volume collection of Partition stories is launched, compiled by the scholar Alok Bhalla, who travelled to Pakistan to collect
some of them. And finally the film of Bhishm Sahni’s Partition novel
Tamas
is shown.

But this seems too much dwelling on the tragic as the academic and the aesthetic. Tragedy becomes career. I decline to see the film on this occasion, after which the audience will undoubtedly meet for tea and cookies. The subject is still too raw for me; only three years before, there was the massive communal violence in Bombay and Gujarat that shocked me to the core. Still, this is intellectual life at the Institute, the former Viceregal Lodge, at its best. At another time, however, a professor of astrology comes to explain his theory of how the entire world received its civilization from India. The new nationalism is not far beneath the surface of this exposition. But the director, with all his philosophic composure, treats the astrologer with due respect, with a pointed and polite question at the end.

After the food, when everyone is sitting around, she says to him, “Come on, sing.” And she announces, “Bhishm-ji will sing.”

This is at the Sahnis’ farewell party at the director’s house.

“No,” he says, in that gentle tone. “I don’t remember the words. Next time,” he promises, “we’ll come having practised.”

But finally, after exhortations, the two of them sing a song from a film in which his brother Balraj had acted. Bhishm-ji’s voice is low, hers high; there are some false starts, words sometimes forgotten. The voices crack, but the melody is there.

And once again I marvel at the presence of song in Indian life, the spontaneity, the love with which people in a circle will begin to sing. For now there are others among us who take their turn. London for some reason reminds someone of a ghazal of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. It is the one he wrote before his death in Burma, in which he says there’s not even six feet of his
beloved Indian homeland to be buried in. Does anyone know it? someone asks. Bhishm-ji and Sheila-ji sing: and the wonder for me is that there is help from everyone present, especially the Punjabis, who suffered some of the worst traumas of the Partition, some of whom were born on the other side. It is, after all, a ghazal by a Mughal emperor that they are reciting with such devotion.

“I’ll sing an IPTA song,” Bhishm-ji then says. By this time a round or two of Scotch has been poured. “The words are not so great,” he smiles, “there’s hardly a tune, but I’ll sing it anyway, because it is an IPTA song.”

And gently, unwaveringly, he sings.

Excursion to the Plains: The Old House in Amritsar

The year I do not remember, but there was great revolutionary fervour in Amritsar….

I would spend the entire day at Jallianwala Bagh. Sitting under a tree, I would watch the windows of the houses bordering the park and dream about the girls who lived behind them. I was sure one of these days, one of them would fall in love with me.

SAADAT HASAN MANTO,
“The Price of Freedom”

M
Y WIFE
N
URJEHAN’S FATHER
is a Punjabi from Amritsar. In Dar es Salaam, where we were both brought up, she was a minority among Gujarati and Kutchi Indians. And so even she, speaking Kutchi and Hindustani (the pre-Partition cosmopolitan form of Hindi and Urdu), did not quite know how much of a Partition child she was. Those of our generation hadn’t even heard the word. Her father and mother moved to Tanganyika in 1946, just before the Partition. At Partition, the rest of the family made their escape in the night, leaving almost everything behind them, and headed for Bombay by train, whence they dispersed to Africa, England, Pakistan, Canada, and the United States. My father-in-law has returned to India many times, never to Amritsar. But he did send us to look at the place of his birth. I wonder at the knot of feelings he must carry inside him, which he has never revealed.

Bhishm Sahni has a poignant story called “Amritsar Has Arrived,” which he read to us around the viceroys’ long oak table
in the seminar room at Shimla one afternoon. In the story, during the tumult of Partition, a train leaves Lahore, bound south. Into a compartment get a tall Pathan of typical arrogant bearing and a mild-mannered, small Bania, from the trader caste, considered cowardly but cunning. The Bania withers before the Pathan’s belligerent boorishness, constantly deferring to him. Suddenly, however, the train stops, and the familiar clamour of a railway station is heard. Coolies get in. Amritsar has arrived! goes the cry. This city is now Hindu and Sikh, cleansed of its Muslims. (As Lahore, correspondingly, has been cleansed of its Hindus and Sikhs; one must always balance the narrative on this prickly subject.) The little Bania discovers a sudden ferociousness awakening in him, and it is the Pathan who begins to cower, and is ultimately murdered.

We leave Shimla by taxi, go down to Kalka, and from there westwards on the Grand Trunk Road, which was not only the main setting but also a character in Kipling’s
Kim
. We pass Ambala—where Kim gave his coded message to the Colonel in his bungalow about an uprising in the north—Ludhiana, and Jalandhar, pass two of the great rivers of Punjab, the Sutlej and the Beas. On both sides are the fertile fields of the green revolution, growing wheat this season. The GT Road, built by the emperor Sher Shah Suri in the sixteenth century, begins at Peshawar in the northwest of Pakistan, passes through India, and ends beyond Calcutta in Bangladesh, spanning a distance of one thousand five hundred miles. We don’t see the throbbing pedestrian life that Kipling described on the road, but there are trucks and buses, and roadside dhabas with bare string cots spread out for travellers to rest and have their samosas, teas, paranthas, and the oiliest vegetable curries that go burning down your throat like acid.

This trip is going to be short; there is a three-year-old to cater to, who is particular about where he pees. If he doesn’t approve of where you take him, he simply says, “Doesn’t want to,” and holds it in. The adults have had malaria in Africa and know their mos
quitoes, they think; it is the two kids they need to worry about. The GT Road enters Amritsar in a street that is bizarrely lined with numerous bicycle shops. We find our accommodation, a guest house at the Guru Nanak Dev University, a splendidly spread-out green campus, and then, leaving a message for one Balwinder Singh, who is to show us the old family house, we head for the Golden Temple, where in 1984, in an operation called Blue Star, Indira Gandhi sent in troops against extremists fighting for a Sikh homeland, thus giving cause to her assassination.

The Golden Temple is usually known as Harmandir Sahib (God’s Temple) and Darbar Sahib. It was built in the time of Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth of the Sikh Gurus, on a sacred pool called Amritsar (“pool of immortality”), which had been dug by the fourth Guru. It was this pool that gave the name to the city that grew around it. The foundation stone of the temple was laid in 1588 by a great Sufi from nearby Lahore, Hazrat Mian Mir. It was completed in 1601 and incorporates both Hindu and Muslim elements in its design. Situated on a platform in the pool, with a walkway bridging it to the gateway on the land, it houses the original Adi Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs, which contains the sayings of the Gurus and also some of the compositions of Muslim and Hindu saints. In a reverse tribute, in one of the ginans—songs—recited in the prayer house of my childhood, Nanak, the first Guru and founder of Sikhism, is listed among the great souls along with other mystics.

The Sikh religion is a blend of Islam and Hinduism. Khushwant Singh, in his book on his people, calls it “a Hindu renaissance produced by Islam,” and “an edifice built as it were with Hindu bricks and Muslim mortar.” Belief in the one God and the paramountcy of the Book are reminiscent of Islam; the devotion of this God in the form of songs is akin to the devotions to Krishna and Rama of Hindu bhaktiism, devotional mysticism. Guru Nanak (1469–1539), the founder of Sikhism, is believed to have been influenced both
by Kabir (died 1398), a disciple of the great south Indian mystic Ramanand, and the Sufi Baba Farid of Lahore, who was also the master of Shaikh Nizamuddin of Delhi. This network of mystical influences spreading out across northern India is reflected in the common language of the songs, commonly called bhajans, of the mystical devotees, which are appreciated by masses of Indians to this day and celebrated even by Bollywood. It is said that when a young Guru Nanak reappeared after a mystical experience which lasted three days, during which he saw God, the first words he uttered were, “There is no Hindu and there is no Muslim.” Sikhism also did away completely with caste. It is even believed by some devotees of Guru Nanak that he made a visit to Mecca, where he performed some wondrous feats. All this was forgotten in the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh butchery and mutual cleansing of the Partition.

Sikhs from across the world come to pay homage to the Darbar Sahib; yet it is a peaceful, orderly place and remarkably clean. Sikh bhajans are sung at the entrance, and as you leave you are given a prasad, which is sooji halwa—much to our excitement, identical to the prasad received at our khano, where it is called sukhreet, from the Sanskrit
sukrita
, meaning “well made.”

Important for us, now that we are in Amritsar, is the family story: Nurjehan’s family had lived in the metal market area, Loha Mandi, behind the Golden Temple, two silver doors of which bear the handiwork of her grandfather or his father.

In 1984, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, sent the Indian army into the temple to capture (“flush out”) Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, one of the leaders of the extremist movement, and other armed militants who were operating from within its confines. The military operation, called Blue Star, has since become infamous in Sikh and Golden Temple history. In the confrontation, Bhindranwale was shot dead among hundreds of others, many of them simply caught in the crossfire. The Akal Takht, the sacred seat of the Sikhs, a beautiful white building with a golden dome,
was damaged. Directly as a result of this sacrilege of the holy place, the prime minister was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards, and the head of the army was also killed. There followed in retaliation a massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, conducted by mobs, in which a few thousand people were killed, sometimes in the most gruesome manner. Seen among the mobs carrying out the violence were members of the ruling Congress party in their whites and police officers in their khakis.

Operation Blue Star of independent India is an ironic reminder of another Amritsar bloodbath, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, which took place under British rule in 1919. To most Indians, there couldn’t be a greater difference between the two confrontations, though in the minds of many Sikhs, Operation Blue Star looms even larger. It is to Jallianwala Bagh, a short walk away, that we go directly from the temple.

The scene is as it has been shown in the movies: a narrow corridor leads into an enclosed park. The corridor was blocked as General Dyer (who had been a student at the Bishop Cotton School in Shimla) brought his troops at a run into the Bagh. At the general’s orders, they took aim with their rifles, and on his command they fired on more than a thousand unarmed men, women, and children who had gathered for a protest.

There is the well near the centre, into which people jumped to escape the bullets. On the boundary walls of the Bagh are the bullet holes. Plaques describe details of the incident. Our eleven-year-old is much taken with this story. Unprompted, he will describe it for his school project; and he will buy a book on the Indian Mutiny. This grandson of Partition refugees will return with a Sikh friend some years later and spend a night at the guest house of the Darbar Sahib.

Upon receiving news of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in protest handed in his knighthood to the British government. And after Operation Blue Star,
the celebrated writer Khushwant Singh, hardly a separatist, handed in his Indian decoration, the Padma Bhushan.

In the middle of the night, in our room at the university guest house, the air-conditioning—the surest way to keep mosquitoes at bay—goes off; in the morning our three-year-old is covered in red spots. Fortunately he will not catch malaria; the recommended quinine tablets, which have been administered hidden deep inside laddoos, must have done their work.

And at breakfast, who should come and greet us but Professor Balwinder Singh. We had just about given up hope. He is of medium height and reserved manner, wears a red turban. He has been in communication with Nurjehan’s father, having met him once in Vancouver, and knows exactly where the family lived. And so off we go to Loha Mandi, in the walled city.

Parking the car near the Golden Temple, we walk into the warren of streets of the old city and finally arrive at a street devoted to copper and silverware. At one such store, which has a wide entrance, an elderly man acknowledges our guide. Tall and close shaved, a mild smile on his face and reserved in his nature, he is introduced to us as Mr. Chaddha. This is not an everyday event for him; we are reminders of the past, we are memory emerged from the sidewalk. Ghosts. Yes, he says, and points, that one is the old shop. We turn to look across the narrow street at a dilapidated two-storey structure, padlocked. The building next to it, the Sindhi Club, has been demolished.

The story is that the reluctant family had been convinced to leave after a day during which the rioters had prowled around; the family asked Mr. Chaddha’s father to lock them inside their shop and keep the keys, so that when the thugs came around he could tell them, “They are gone, the Muslims.” It was April 1947; Amritsar was under curfew, the British were nominally in charge, trying to control the violence. The family finally decided to leave on one of
the crowded trains departing for Bombay, with a bag in the older boy’s hand and perhaps a few smaller belongings. There were the two parents, the three sons, and three daughters. On the way, someone took the bag from the boy. It was never seen again. The family arrived in Bombay with almost nothing.

We are shown the Chaddhas’ home, see the courtyard, the upper floor with a balcony overlooking the courtyard, the stone carvings decorating the walls…surely the abandoned home across the street would have been similar. We climb up to the roof terrace, observe the street. There is some nervousness about taking photos from here; some of the properties must still be under dispute, I understand later. It is hard not to imagine the happy life of a child in such a neighbourhood. My father-in-law has some sweet and delightful tales about his boyhood here.

Back in the shop Mr. Chaddha, now warmed to us, tells Nurjehan, Why don’t you call my sister Madhu? She was a friend of your aunt Sheru. A phone call is made from the shop. Past the greeting and How are you, I am so-and-so’s daughter, the conversation gets emotional, Nurjehan weeps and we can tell that on the other side Madhu is doing the same. Madhu and Sheru had known each other since they were toddlers, had been inseparable friends. Madhu had never heard again from her friend, didn’t quite know where she had gone. If it was India, they would have communicated, so she must have been in Pakistan, whose border was some ten miles away. Lahore, once the great city of all Punjab, is less than thirty miles away. Pakistan TV can be received and is watched here, as we saw people doing at our guest house. Now it is the niece who brings the two childhood friends together.

On our way back we take a detour to pass by a small warehouse from where sacks are being carried out. This, says Balwinder Singh, was the old khano, the prayer house, where Nurjehan’s grandfather was mukhi, the presiding headman.

In the afternoon we visit Madhu and her husband at their apartment in a suburb. We have tea with them. The city cricket ground is next door, and from their balcony you can watch the matches being played. The previous week one of the World Cup games was played here. Madhu and her husband have two children, a boy and girl, both in the United States. She giggles when told that her friend produced twelve children. Finally we exchange addresses and depart.

What happened to the family exiled from a city where they had lived for centuries? To support the family the older son traded between Hyderabad, a Muslim princely state still, but not for long, and Bombay, prone to communal violence. Finally they caught the last ship to Karachi, Pakistan. The three sons and the parents did not last long there, they turned up in East Africa, from where the young men dispersed. Ultimately two of Nurjehan’s uncles ended up in London, one to become a business tycoon, his daughter to marry the son of a Scottish baron. The third uncle, Sherali, ended up a hotelier in Nairobi and is now in Vancouver and runs a hotel in Seattle. Two aunts married in Pakistan, one in Muscat, one in Africa; their numerous children are in Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States, more or less successful. Thus, one Partition family’s fate. Successful, but scattered across the globe.