Difficult Daughters (28 page)

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1946 saw unrest all over the country. The postal, telegraph, general and municipal strikes couldn’t be controlled.

The Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were agitated. Many Muslims don’t want Pakistan. Dr Khan Sahib says, ‘I have no desire to understand Pakistan.’ Abdul Ghaffar Khan says, ‘How can we divide ouselves and live?’ Dr Syed Hossain, Chairman of the National Committee for Indian Freedom at Washington, states that unity has been a historical fact from the time of Akbar. Sir Khizar Hyat Khan accuses the British of being the father and mother of Pakistan. Still, the idea of Pakistan seems more of a reality day by day.

‘You cannot equate us. This is ridiculous. We are the majority,’ the Congress points out.

The Muslim League: ‘We are equal. We demand equal representation.’

The Cabinet Misssion to India, Cripps, Alexander and Pethick Lawrence, is sent to resolve the issue. What will be the exact composition of loyalties in the future government of India? After four months of meetings, hearings and deputations, they are unable to satisfy anyone. They return to England amid accusations and counter-accusations.

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In mid-August the killings in Calcutta start. They go on and on. The drops of blood in the distance come nearer and nearer. Only now it is not drops, but floods. The sewers of Calcutta are clotted with corpses, they float down the Hoogly, they lie scattered in the streets.

People die – roasted, quartered, chopped, mutilated, turning, turning, meat on a spit – are raped and converted in rampages gone mad, and leave a legacy of thousands of tales of sorrow, thousands more episodes shrouded in silence.

Meanwhile, the Interim Government struggles through endless rounds of meetings between representatives of every major party in the country.

*

Virmati felt afraid. She was good at ignoring things not actually under her nose, but she was deeply affected by the Calcutta ravages. Bengal and Punjab, the two states that the Hindus and the Muslims were going to fight over. If this had happened in Bengal, could Punjab be far behind?

In Amritsar, too, there were disturbances. A squabble here, a murder there. Patrols of like religions were formed. There was talk of sending Ganga and the children home to Kanpur.

There was also talk of Ganga refusing. For her husband’s sake. Who would stand by his side?

Kishori Devi felt she was living in a place where the law had no sanctity any more. Two men had died in what had begun as a simple argument over the price of some vegetables. This was in the old city, but Harish’s college was in the gullies of the old city too.

Ordinary events assumed an ugly communal hue.

One day, two Muslim youths started quarrelling in the crowded bazaar. A Hindu tried to separate them. The Muslims turned on the Hindu and started beating him up. Passers-by joined in the fray. Brickbats and soda-water bottles were flung about. The police were called, and they fired in the air. The crowd melted away. It was only 8 October, 1946, with another ten months to go before Independence.

‘Beta, it is time for us to leave this place‚’ Kishori Devi told her son. ‘Your kind of job you will find in any university of the United Provinces.’

‘My work is here,’ replied Harish with a vague look.

‘After independence, there will be work everywhere. You can never want for a job,’ persisted his mother. ‘Bring Virmati and come. It is time everybody at home saw her.’

The idea of travelling with his two wives to his home town sent shivers down Harish’s spine. He could not imagine Virmati coming willingly, though it was not a point he had to consider very carefully. She might protest, but ultimately she had to do as he said. Still, right now, he did not want to make things any worse than they already were between them. He looked at Ganga, engaged in housework as always. She was so convenient, he wished she attracted him more.

One afternoon Guddiya came from school terrified. A strange man had followed her all the way home, whistling and calling. Guddiya could say nothing else about him, but that he was young and Muslim. Guddiya was well-developed, and her mother’s fears instantly increased tenfold.

She spoke to her daughter-in-law.

Then she had a long talk with her son. It was agreed that they would leave first. Harish and Virmati could follow once the house was wound up.

*

Virmati heard of their departure with mixed feelings. Harish was there, in an empty house, waiting. She knew, though he might never admit it, that he had chosen to stay behind for her. On the other hand, they had been married for three years, and somewhere along the way, the prize had tarnished.

For the moment, however, with the unrest in both cities, the most practical solution was to go home to Amritsar and her husband. She left Lahore next morning to start her life as a housewife. She had not been as happy studying the second time. The city had changed, she herself had changed. Perhaps things will be different later, she thought as she left. I will come back next March, do my exams, and see about a job.

10 p.m., 2 March, 1947. Defeated by the year-long attack on him by the Muslim League, the Punjab Premier, Malik Sir Khizar Hayat Khan Tiwana, head of a Muslim, Hindu and Sikh coalition ministry, resigns without consulting his colleagues.

3 March. The MLAs, belonging to the Muslim League, are delighted. They start to dance with glee on the Assembly floor.

they clamour, while unfurling their flag in the Assembly. Master Tara Singh leaps upon it, tears it to pieces, and on the steps of the main entrance to the Punjab Assembly pulls out his sword, brandishes it and shouts:

The Hindu and Sikh crowds respond:

By 5 March it is clear that no coalition or single-party rule is possible in the Punjab. The Punjab Assembly is prorogued.

Governor’s rule under Section 93 of the Government of India Act is proclaimed.

Massive killings start on a province-wide scale.

 

Reading old newspapers, I live through each day as though it were the present. Reports of massacres increase steadily as Independence approaches. My heart breaks. The paper I am reading is a Hindu one, and the disbelief about the breakup of our country that they credit to Hindu and Muslim alike seems incredibly pathetic and naïve. No, no, I want to shout down all those years, what you thought was so impossible was possible. It became true. I want to wail and sob. The loss is mine as well as theirs.

I must be calm. I must be able to scan newspaper headlines with hands that do not tremble. The past has happened. Hundreds and thousands of screams have been uttered. But those deaths I am so scared of created seeds that scattered through the wind, and settled in all parts of the country, waiting restlessly under the earth. Dormant, but not extinct. And if I stare these facts in the face, I cannot cope, because I feel threatened by lawlessness and bloodshed. History makes me insecure. I am glad I am not an historian.

 

Kailashnath: In those days, Amritsar had a population of 300,000. Fifty-one per cent of it Muslim.

You don’t have to be a genius to predict what happens to a city in these circumstances.

I remember when it started. It was 5 March. Those Muslims were well prepared. They knew how to make bombs, explosives. We had to discover ways to protect ourselves, fast.

They looted and burnt, drank our blood, destroyed our peace, and put the fire of revenge in our guts. They had always hated us, tried to poison the well once. We learnt to make bombs with rags soaked in kerosene, and gunpowder in bottles. We closed our shop and took all our jewellery home. Some of it belonged to Muslims, who never claimed it. We were lucky, there was nothing in the shop when they burned it. My wife’s family had a cloth shop; they locked it and prayed to God, but in those days God wasn’t listening. When they found it reduced to dust and rubble, they left and came to Delhi.

*

Gopinath: A few days after the Assembly was dissolved, I had to go to the station. I will never forget the sight of that train. I threw up on the platform. It was taken straight to the shed to be washed. There was blood everywhere, dried and crusted, still oozing from the doorways, arms and legs hanging out, windows smashed.

We all travelled on those trains. It could have been me, anybody I knew. After that we lived with fear. We were afraid to go out, even when the curfew was lifted. We were prisoners in our own homes.

It does no good to remember, no good to think of those things, we had to get on with our lives. If we thought too much we would go mad, as our uncle did after he fled Sultanpur. He couldn’t forget what he had lost, could never find anything to do that he considered an adequate substitute for his old life, and he slowly sank into senility and uselessness.

People living outside the Punjab can have no idea. The British left us with a final stab in the back. We didn’t want freedom, if this is what it meant. But we were forced to accept Partition and suffering along with Independence, as a package deal. They were always Muslim-lovers, those British. The River Ravi was the natural boundary. Lahore was the seat of Raja Ranjit Singh and we all expected the Sikh holy place to come to us. But no, they had to cleave us with their pencils, their tapes and their measurements.

But ultimately, the fault was ours. If we were stupid, greedy and uncivilized enough to allow religion to be used in this way, why blame them? The same thing is happening on a smaller scale even now, when there are no British around. People blame them for this legacy, but how long can you keep doing that? There is always the past to contend with, in one way or another, hidden or openly, one’s own or one’s country’s. Births and deaths are messy, ragged affairs.

*

Kanhiya Lal: I’m a doctor and I had never seen so much blood. It was horrible. I will never forget it as long as I live.

My parents, brothers, uncles and aunts, most of my cousins, left Amritsar in ’47. After what we had seen, there was no question of staying in that hellish place, where people killed each other like hooligans.

On 5 March, the killings started, and we lay low. The birth is going to be bloody, we thought, but then things will get back to normal.

Burning, burning, Amritsar was burning. Every night, for days and days, the sky was red, we could smell the smoke all the time.

I could see them come with lathis, I could see them come with swords. We were safe, though we were in the old city, because we were a doctor’s family. We treated all the sick and wounded, and no questions asked. Everybody knew that and respected it.

We tried to save as many of them as we could. To tell the truth, we were closer to our Muslim friends than we are to our fellow Hindus at present. These people have no culture.

Around this time the cholera scare was at its height. The authorities knew that in the congested conditions, an outbreak of cholera spelt big trouble. I went to work in the camps, did my duty, and when the last camp was emptied, I left too.

*

Swarna Lata: Partition had been decided upon. We accepted that as a political decision. But Lahore was our city. We were going to stay there, no matter who it went to.

When we heard about Rawalpindi, we all felt sick, but for some strange reason we felt such massacres could never occur in our city, where we saw daily evidence of the Hindus and Muslims living as one. I suppose there are some things one cannot comprehend. When the troubles started, we wouldn’t leave. My husband kept saying, you go because of the baby. Well, I thought, the baby will be safe with my mother in Delhi. So I left her there and came back. She said I was a fool, but I didn’t care. If everybody got scared and started to leave, that meant the tactics of bloodshed and terror worked.

Ours was a Hindu area. All night long, the men kept watch from the rooftops. We managed to get hold of guns. My husband learned to make bombs. I did too, though I was against the whole thing. Every evening we would see the sky red. It was rather beautiful, if you could detach yourself from it all. And those cries:

Those cries became the cries of battle rather than religion. And then, of course, the inevitable. I suppose we were also naïve in those days. We believed in man’s innate integrity. Then a Muslim friend rang us up.

‘They are going to get you tonight. For God’s sake, leave.’

And they did come. We escaped to a friend’s house. We had seen too much plundering all around us to believe that they would leave us alone. Next morning, we saw they had ransacked the whole house. Our hearts were empty, and after that there was nothing to do but depart.

*

Indumati: In Amritsar we went wild. Wild with enthusiastic welcomes for those who made it to safety, wild with grief for the loss of a sister city that was steeped in blood. The Mussulmans chopped our people’s heads off, raped our women, cut off their breasts, all of which they claimed was in retaliation for what the Hindus were doing to them.

Everybody’s house functioned as an ashram, with beddings laid on the floor while the angans were converted into langars. To feed whoever came, whoever was there.

We were all together in those days. The whole city was an open house. There was a great spirit of generosity. They gave with open hearts.

They offered money, food, clothes, transport, shelter, time and care. The sorrow and the calamity was stifled in activity, in our sympathy for those who came, having lost everything, in the gratitude we felt for having survived. We never forgot those days, but never spoke of them either, because what was there to say?

*

Shakuntala: I lost my brother in those times. They say he was killed by some Muslims who had a grudge against him. Somnath was always too kind and generous, and very lavish with his favours. After Partition, I came to Amritsar, where I had my house and a job as principal of a girls’ college all ready waiting for me. I was one of the lucky ones.

*

Parvati’s husband: Thousands and thousands came to Amritsar. Overnight we had become a border city, a destination much longed for and reached with relief. Walking, some in ones and twos, some in small groups, and some in processions fifty-thousand strong. We took them all. There were four refugee camps: Govindgarh Fort, the largest; Sharifpura; Company Bagh; Cantonment.

Most of them left as soon as they found a place to go. Moving further into the new India. Looking for relatives, friends, an opening. A place to settle down, and get on with life.

Some stayed, desperate for news of those who had been left behind or lost in the march. They wanted to go back and look for them. And, if they were unsuccessful, they wanted to kill. Kill anybody who was not their own. The age, the sex, nothing mattered. Those, of course, we did our best to dissuade, as we did our best to suppress the stories of atrocities that insidiously burnt themselves into us.

Money poured in. Amritsar gave and gave. Nobody had a thought to spare for themselves. Not like today.

Food was free. Mridula Sarabhai was in charge.

Later, there were those who went back for their things. Their money and their jewellery. When they saw their houses in other peoples’ hands, their bitterness increased. The houses they had given up were far nicer than the ones they got in exchange.

*

Kailashnath: Those days. The dispossessed kept talking. Talking of what they left behind. After a while it got so I could repeat the pattern of conversations in my head. A description of the house. The locality it was in, usually good. The trees they had, usually fruit-giving. The animals they kept, usually productive beyond compare. The furnishings, usually priceless.

I’m not saying their loss wasn’t real, or the bereavement less than devastating. Of course it was. All I mean is, how much can you go on hearing? Consider it your fate and get on with your life. I’ll help you all I can, but spare me your stories. You are alive, aren’t you? Well, there were 500,000 dead by the end of it all, and you’d better thank your lucky stars that you and yours were not one of them. With those bloodthirsty mobs, it is mother luck that you are alive to tell your tale.

My father-in-law made it from Karachi. He couldn’t take it, being dependent on his daughter. Every morning he would start the day by saying I have nothing, it’s all gone, all gone. Everything. I couldn’t bear the droning on of that tired old voice, suddenly decrepit. Everybody who was involved in the bloodiness of Partition grew old forthwith. Yes, we came of age all right, in 1947.