Other Side Of Silence Read online

  ‘No one forced me to do anything. But in a sense there wasn’t really a choice. The only way I could have stayed on was by converting. And so, well, I did. I married a Muslim girl, changed my religion, and took a Muslim name.’

  But did he really believe? Was the change born out of conviction as much as it was of convenience? It is difficult for me to put down Mamu’s response to this question truthfully. When I asked him if I could write what he had said, he said, ‘Of course, write what you like. My life cannot get any worse.’ But my own feeling is that he wasn’t really aware of the kinds of implications this could have. So I did what I thought I had to: silenced those parts that needed to be kept silent. I make no excuses for this except that I could not bring myself to, in the name of a myth called intellectual honesty, expose or make Ranamama so vulnerable.

  ‘One thing I’ll tell you,’ said Mamu in answer to my question, ‘I have not slept one night in these forty years without regretting my decision, Not one night.’ I was chilled to the bone. How could he say this, what did he mean, how had he lived through these forty years, indeed how would he live through the next forty, if this was what he felt? ‘You see, my child,’ he said, repeating something that was to become a sort of refrain in the days we spent together, ‘somehow a convert is never forgiven. Your past follows you, it hounds you. For me, it’s worse because I’ve continued to live in the same place. Even today, when I walk out to the market I often hear people whispering, “Hindu, Hindu”. No, you don’t know what it is like. They never forgive you for being a convert.’

  I was curious about why Ranamama had never tried to come to India to seek out his family. If he felt, so profoundly, the loss of a family, why did he not, like many others, try to locate his? Admittedly, in the beginning, it was difficult for people to cross the two borders, but there were times when things had eased, if only marginally. But he had an answer to that too: ‘How could I? Where would I have gone? My family, my sisters knew where I was. I had no idea where they were. And then, who in India would have trusted an ex-Hindu turned Muslim who now wanted to seek out his Hindu relatives? And this is the only home I have known.’

  And yet, home for him was defined in many different ways. Ever since television made its appearance, Ranamama made sure he listened to the Indian news every day. When cricket was played between the two countries, he watched and secretly rooted for India. Often, when it was India playing another country, he sided with India. More recently, he sometimes watched Indian soaps on the small screen. And, although he had told me that his home in Lahore was the only home he had ever known, it was to India that he turned for a sense of home. There is a word in Punjabi that is enormously evocative and emotive for most Punjabis: watan. It’s a difficult word to translate: it can mean home, country, land — all and any of them. When a Punjabi speaks of his or her watan, you know they are referring to something inexpressible, some longing for a sense of place, of belonging, of rootedness. For most Punjabis who were displaced as a result of Partition, their watan lay in the home they had left behind. For Ranamama, in a curious travesty of this, while he continued to live on in the family home in Pakistan, his watan became India, a country he had visited only briefly, once.

  His children and family found this bizarre. They could not understand these secret yearnings, these things that went on inside his head. They thought the stories he told were strange, as were the people he spoke about, his family — Hindus — from across the border. The two younger girls told me once, ‘Apa, you are all right, you’re just like us, but we thought you know that they were really awful.’ And who could blame them? The only Hindus they had met were a couple of distant relatives who had once managed to visit, and who had behaved as orthodox Hindus often do, practising the ‘untouchability’ that Hindus customarily use with Muslims. They would insist on cooking their own food, not eating anything prepared by the family, and somehow making their hosts feel ‘inferior’. Bir Bahadur Singh, one of the people I interviewed later in the course of my work on Partition, told me what he thought of the way Hindus and Sikhs treated Muslims:

  Such good relations we had that if there was any function that we had, then we used to call Musalmaans to our homes, they would eat in our houses, but we would not eat in theirs and this is a bad thing, which I realize now. If they would come to our houses we would have two utensils in one corner of the house, and we would tell them, pick these up and eat in them; they would then wash them and keep them aside and this was such a terrible thing. This was the reason Pakistan was created. If we went to their houses and took part in their weddings and ceremonies, they used to really respect and honour us. They would give us uncooked food, ghee, atta, dal, whatever sabzis they had, chicken and even mutton, all raw. And our dealings with them were so low that I am even ashamed to say it. A guest comes to our house and we say to him, bring those utensils and wash them, and if my mother or sister have to give him food, they will more or less throw the roti from such a distance, fearing that they may touch the dish and become polluted ... We don’t have such low dealings with our lower castes as Hindus and Sikhs did with Musalmaans.

  As the years went by, Ranamama began to live an internal life, mostly in his head, that no one quite knew about, but everyone, particularly his family, was suspicous of. His children — especially his daughters and daugters-in-law — cared for him but they all feared what went on inside his head. For all the love his daughters gave him, it seemed to me there was very little that came from his sons. Their real interest was in the property he owned. Perhaps the one person who, in some sense, understood the dilemmas in his head, was my mami, his wife. She decided quite early on, and sensibly I thought, that she would not allow her children to have the same kind of crisis of identity that Mamu had had. They were brought up as good Muslims, the girls remained in purdah, they studied at home from the mullah, they learnt to read the Koran. For the younger ones especially, who had no memory or reference of Partition, Rana with his many stories of his family, his friends, his home, remained their father, and yet a stranger. In some ways, this distanced him further from the family, and served to isolate him even more. In others, in a curious kind of paradox, his patriarchal authority was undermined, making him a much more humane father than one might normally find in a middle class Punjabi household. But for several of his family members, he was only the inconvenient owner of the property, to be despatched as soon as possible.

  I could not understand how he could have lived like this: was there anyone he could have spoken to? He told me no. How could he talk about what was so deep, so tortured? And to whom? There was no one, no one who could even begin to understand. Some things, he told me, are better left unsaid. But why then was he saying them to me? Who was I? One day, as we talked deep into the evening, stopping only for the odd bit of food, or a cup of tea, and he told me about his life since Partition, I began to feel a sense of weight, of oppression. ‘Why,’ I asked him, ‘why are you talking to me like this? You don’t even know me. If you’d met me in the marketplace, I would have just been another stranger. Yes, we speak the same language, we wear similar clothes, but apart from that ...’ He looked at me for a long moment and said, ‘My child, this is the first time I am speaking to my own blood.’

  I was shocked. I protested. ‘What about your family? They are your blood, not me.’

  ‘No’, he said, ‘for them I remain a stranger. You, you understand what it is I’m talking about. That is why you are here on this search. You know. Even if nothing else ever happens, I know that you have been sent here to lighten my load.’

  And, in some ways I suppose this was true. I did understand, and I began to wonder. About how many people had been torn apart like this by this event we call Partition, by what is known as history. How many had had to live with their silences, how many had been able to talk, and why it was that we, who had studied modern Indian history in school, who knew there was something called the Partition of India that came simultaneously with Independence, had ne
ver learnt about this side of it? Why had these stories remained hidden? Was there no place for them in history?

  That first time when I came back to India from Pakistan, I brought back messages and letters and gifts from the entire family to various members on this side of the border. Ranamama sent a long letter, addressed to all his sisters (his one remaining brother was dead by then). Initially, my mother found it difficult to get over her bitterness and resentment, and to face the letter I had brought. Her sisters, all five of them, who had gathered in our house, sat in a row, curious, but also somewhat resentful. Then someone picked up the letter and began reading, and soon it was being passed from hand to hand, with memories being exchanged, tears being shed and peals of laughter ringing out as stories were recounted and shared.

  Tell us, they demanded, tell us what the house looks like, is the guava tree still there, what’s happened to the game of chopar, who lives at the back now ... Hundreds of questions. I tried to answer them all — unsuccessfully. How could I tell them who was in which room or how the house had changed, when I hadn’t seen the original house myself? Mamu’s letter was read and reread, touched, smelt, laughed and wept over. Suddenly my mother and my aunts had acquired a family across the border. We kept in touch after that, occasional letters did manage to arrive. I went several times and met him again. Once he wrote to my mother: ‘I wish I could lock up Urvashi in a cage and keep her here.’ And she told me I had made a real difference to his life. As he had, I think, to mine, for he set me on a path from which it has been difficult to withdraw.

  But old resentments die hard. And there are many things that lie beneath the surface that we cannot even apprehend. Once, when I was going to visit him, my mother said to me: ‘Ask him ... ask him if he buried or cremated my mother.’ I looked at her in shock. Religion has never meant much to her — she isn’t an atheist but she has little patience with the trappings of religion.

  ‘How does it matter to you?’ I said to her.

  ‘Just ask him,’ she said, implacable.

  I asked him.

  ‘How could she have stayed on here and kept her original name? I had to make her a convert. She was called Ayesha Bibi,’ he said, ‘I buried her.’

  I often wonder what kind of silent twilight world my grandmother lived in for those nine years after Partition. Did she not wonder where her children had gone? Did she think they had all abandoned her? Did she even understand what had happened? Dayawanti, the merciful one, had indeed been fortunately named. Blessed with a large family — her surviving children numbered nine, six daughters and three sons — and a husband whose medical practice was enormously successful, she had good reason to be happy. Then, suddenly, tragedy struck and her elder son, Vikram, died in an air crash on a practice flight. As my mother tells it, Dayawanti retreated into some kind of shell from then on, although cooking and caring for the children would occasionally pull her out of this. Then, the second tragedy happened: her husband took ill and died and Dayawanti again sought solace in an inner world. When Partition came, the chances are that Dayawanti did not know what was happening. But the journey in and out of her twilight world must have left her with long moments of what one might call ‘sanity’. What must she have wondered about her family. Who could she have asked? What must she have felt about her new identity? My mother has often described her mother as a ‘kattar Hindu’ — not a rabid, flame spouting type, but a strong believer who derived comfort from her daily routine of prayer and fasting. What must it have cost her to convert overnight to a different faith, a different routine? Did it, I wonder, bring on an even more intense alienation, a further recoil into herself, or did it bring on the reverse, a kind of cold, clear sanity and understanding of the lie she had to live till she died? Who was with her these nine years? Will history be answerable for Dayawanti’s life and death?

  Twelve million people were displaced as a result of Partition. Nearly one million died. Some 75,000 women were raped, kidnapped, abducted, forcibly impregnated by men of the ‘other’ religion, thousands of families were split apart, homes burnt down and destroyed, villages abandoned. Refugee camps became part of the landscape of most major cities in the north, but, a half century later, there is still no memorial, no memory, no recall, except what is guarded, and now rapidly dying, in families and collective memory.

  Some of the tales I heard when I began my research seemed so fantastic, they were difficult to believe. We had heard time and again that in many villages on both sides of the border hundreds of women had jumped — or were forced to jump — into wells because they feared that they would be taken away, raped, abducted, forced to convert to the other religion. This seemed bizarre: could the pull of religion be so strong that people — more specifically women — would actually kill themselves? And then I met Bir Bahadur Singh’s mother, Basant Kaur. Basant Kaur, a tall strapping woman in her mid-sixties had been present in her village, Thoa Khalsa in March 1947 when the decision was taken that women would jump into a well. She watched more than ninety women throw themselves into a well for fear of the Muslims. She too jumped in, but survived because there was not enough water in the well to drown them all. She said: ‘It’s like when you put rotis into a tandoor and if it is too full, the ones near the top, they don’t cook, they have to be taken out. So the well filled up, and we could not drown ... Those who died, died, and those who were alive, they pulled out ...’

  And Bir Bahadur Singh, her son, had watched his father kill his sister. He described the incident with pride in his voice, pride at his sister’s courage and her ‘martyrdom’ for she could now be placed alongside other martyrs of the Sikh religion. The first time I had been alerted to family deaths, that is, men of families killing off their women and children, was when I had met an old man, Mangal Singh, in Amritsar during the course of the film A Division of Hearts. Mangal Singh told me how he and his two brothers had taken the decision to kill — he used the word martyr — seventeen members of their family. ‘We had to do this,’ he told me, ‘because otherwise they would have been converted.’ Having done this ‘duty’ Mangal Singh crossed over into Amritsar where he began a new life. When I met him, he was the only one left of the three. He had a new family, a wife, children, grandchildren, all of whom had heard, and dismissed, his stories. Why do you want to know all this, he kept asking me, what is the use? I told him that I wanted to know how he had coped with the grief, the sense of loss, the guilt. He said: ‘Hunger drives all sorrow and grief away. You understand? When you don’t have anything, then what’s the point of having sorrow and grief?’

  Why do you want to know this? This is a question I have been asked again and again — by the people I have wanted to interview, or those to whom I have tried to present my work. Two or three times, having begun work on Partition, I gathered my courage and read a couple of papers in academic gatherings. I wanted to share some questions that had been bothering me: why, for example, had straight historical accounts not been able to really address this underside of the history of Partition, to gather together the experiences of people, to see what role they had played in shaping the India we know today? Was it that they knew they would have to deal with a story so riven with pain and grief, a story that was so close to many people — for in many ways, several of our families were Partition refugees — that some time had to elapse before this work actually began? I wanted to understand how to read the many stories I was now hearing: I knew, without being a historian, that I could not look at these unproblematically. Could I, for example, rely on the ‘truth’ of the stories I was hearing? How much could one trust memory after all these years? For many of those who chose to tell me their stories, I must have been just another listener, the experience perhaps just another telling. I knew that my being middle class, a woman, a Punjabi, perhaps half a Sikh, would have dictated the way people actually responded. What value then ought I to place on their memory, their recall? Often, what emerged from the interviews was so bitter, so full of rage, resentment, communal feelin
g, that it frightened me. What was I to do with such material? Was it incumbent on me, as a might-have-been historian, to try to be true to this material, or should I, as a secular Indian, actually exercise some care about what I made visible and what I did not? A question that has dogged me constantly has been: is it fair to make these interviews public if they relate (as mine do) to only one side of the story? Doesn’t that sort of material lend itself to misuse by one side or another? To this day, I have not solved this dilemma: I am torn between the desire to be honest and to be careful. And all the time, I was asked: why, why are you doing this? The question became important for another reason: the way borders were drawn between our two countries, it was virtually impossible for me to travel to Pakistan to do research, or even to carry out interviews. With the result that my work remained — and still does — very one sided. I knew that this was not right. I didn’t know — I still don’t — what I should be doing. Ought I to have given up the work? There are no easy answers. But in the end, I decided that if this search meant so much to me, I simply had to go on with it. I could not abandon it.

  For some years the border between Pakistan and India seemed to have become more permeable. As a result I was able to make several visits and to cement my relationship with Ranamama. Once, when his second youngest daughter was getting married, I took my mother and her elder sister with me to visit him. There was a great deal of excitement as we planned the visit, for it was really like a visit to the unknown. They didn’t know what their brother would look like, how he would react to them, what their home would look like, what their beloved city would have to offer them ... At Lahore airport Mamu came to fetch his sisters. The last time my mother and aunt had seen their brother was forty one years ago, when he had been a young twenty year old: slim, tall and smart. The man who met them now was in his sixties, balding and greying. He wore an awami suit, the loose salwar and shirt made popular by Bhutto. I tried to imagine what he must have seen: two white-haired women: my aunt, in her seventies, and my mother, in her mid-sixties. The reunion was a tentative, difficult one, with everyone struggling to hold back tears. I stood aside, an outsider now. My friend, Lala, who came to the airport as well, tells me that she has never forgotten the look on their faces — she has no words to describe it. Everyone made small talk in the car until we reached home. Home — this was the house in which my mother and her brothers and sisters had grown up. They knew every stone, every nook and cranny of this place. But now, much of it was occupied by people they did not know. So they were forced to treat it politely, like any other house. My aunt was welcoming, warm, but also suspicious. What, she must have wondered, were these relatives from the other side doing here at the time of a family wedding? How she must have hoped that they would not embarrass her in front of her guests.