I grew up listening to tales about Partition from my mother. In May 1946, when just 20, my mother and her 22-member joint family fled to India from Lyallpur (now Faizalabad). She had just graduated in maths, having come second in the then Panjab University. What could have been a happy life was suddenly torn asunder.
My mother’s family had lived in Lyallpur for three generations, and there could be no other place they could call home. But then the Muslim-Hindu riots and clashes began to grow more frequent and bloody.
Giving up
One day, her eldest brother, the head of the family as they lost their father at a young age, told them they should leave. “Mother, if something happens to these girls, we will be left nowhere,” he sad. She instantly agreed. There were three young women about my mother’s age. The family was told to pack just two pairs of clothes each and leave the following day.
“Everyone understood the seriousness of the situation. Our old Muslim servants disappeared one night. We feared our homes would be set on fire, and marauding crowds would slaughter us. It was a predominantly Hindu-Sikh lane, and the menfolk would keep vigil at night, but a day came when everyone knew nothing would work,” my mother would say.
“And we left. We packed in two small trunks, untied our cows and buffaloes so they wouldn’t starve, unfettered our horse, and walked out of the house leaving the door wide open. We left with a stone in our hearts.”
The family boarded a train for India. No one was talking, not even the children. Every passenger in the coach was staring out of the window as they passed trees and canals, knowing full well that they were seeing their beloved land for the last time.
The train chugged on and began to cross Lahore. Everyone’s heart was in their mouth. “The skies were red. No one spoke.”
After two days and 166 km, the train crossed into India. The refugees reached Amritsar. “It was then that the tears began to flow. It had dawned on us what we’d gone through.”
Torn ties
My mother, a Sikh, and Khalida, a Muslim, were like sisters, inseparable. They had to meet every day. When my mother had typhoid, Khalida sat by her daily. Khalida returned from Lahore University two months before the final exams, and asked my mother to coach her in maths.
“I’d finished studying all the topics which Khalida didn’t know. In teaching her those, I couldn’t complete my revision. Maths is such a subject, you can’t depend on past study. I lost the first rank. But it’s all right. If I hadn’t coached Khalida, she’d have failed. We were so happy she’d passed,” my mother would recollect.
She described the last day of their lives together. They only held hands and wept.
Both knew it was their last meeting. Khalida and she exchanged letters for some years.
Then the letters suddenly stopped. Khalida died in 1980. My mother died in 2013. She always talked of her, invariably ending with, “Pakistan should never have been created.”
ceogiit@gmail.com