Other Side Of Silence Read online

  For the first two days Mamu and his sisters skirted each other. They talked, but polite, strained, talk. On the third day somehow the floodgates opened, and soon the three of them were locked in a room, crying, laughing, talking, remembering. Mamu took his sisters on a proper tour of the house: they were able to go back into their old rooms, to find their favourite trees, to remember their parents and other siblings. I, who was the catalyst at the airport meeting, was now redundant. Earlier, I had told them that I would stay with Lala, and that’s what I had done. But not without a sense of guilt. Now, I was glad I’d done that — they can talk now, I thought, without having me around.

  But what I didn’t reckon on was that immediately one family bonded, the other grew more distant. For Mamu’s own family, the arrival of the two sisters was, quite naturally, something to be concerned about. A girl was being married. What if the potential in-laws objected to Hindus in the family? What if the Hindus were there to reclaim their land? What if the Hindus did something to embarrass the family at the wedding? And, a further complication. My mother and my aunt are the older sisters. Custom demanded that they be given respect. This meant making space for them in the wedding rituals. Yet how could this be done? So, small silences began to build up between ‘this’ side of the family and ‘that’, and I was struck by how easy it was to recreate the borders we thought we’d just crossed.

  Contact with Rana was maintained for some years. I managed, somehow, to go to Pakistan again and see him. But it wasn’t easy. He began to worry he was being watched by the police, and he gradually stopped writing. For a while my mother continued to send him letters and gifts, but slowly, even that petered out. Several times, I sent him letters and messages with my friends until one brought back a message — try not to keep in touch, it makes things very difficult. This wasn’t just something official, but also within the family, for his sons put pressure on him to break contact with his Indian family. And then, in any case, it became more and more difficult to travel from one country to the other.

  It’s been many years now since I have seen Rana. I no longer know if he is alive or dead. I think he is alive, I want him to be alive, no one has told me he isn’t, so I shall have to go on believing that he is. And I keep telling myself, if something happened to him, surely someone would tell us. But I’m not even sure I believe myself when I say that. Years ago, when Mamu answered my mother’s question about whether he had buried or cremated my grandmother, I asked if he would take me to her grave. I still remember standing with him by his gate in the fading light of the evening, looking out onto the road and saying to him, ‘Mamu, I want to see my grandmother’s grave. Please take me to see it.’ It was the first time he answered me without looking at me: he scuffed the dust under his feet and said: ‘No my child, not yet. I’m not ready yet.’

  On the night of August 14, 1996 about a hundred Indians visited the India-Pakistan border at Wagah in the Punjab. They went there to fulfil a long-cherished objective by groups in the two countries. Indians and Pakistanis would stand, in roughly equal numbers, on each side of the border and sing songs for peace. They imagined that the border would be symbolized by a sentry post and that they would be able to see their counterparts on the other side. But they came back disappointed. The border was more complicated than they thought — there is middle ground — and also grander. The Indian side has an arch lit with neon lights and, in large letters, the inscription MERA BHARAT MAHAAN — India, my country, is Great. The Pakistan side has a similar neon-lit arch with the words PAKISTAN ZINDABAD— Long Live Pakistan. People bring picnics here and eat and drink and enjoy themselves. Every evening, a ritual takes place which repeats, lest anyone forget, the aggression the two countries practise towards each other. As the flags are lowered, border security personnel of India and Pakistan rush towards each other, thrusting their faces at each other, then turn smartly and step away. The whole ritual is carried out with such precision that you wonder at how much they must have had to work together to establish their lines of difference. During the day as people arrive at the border, coolies dressed in different colours — blue and red to differentiate them as ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ — meet at the twelve-inch line that forms the boundary, passing heavy bags and sacks across from one head to another; the boundary is crossed as their heads touch, while their feet stay on either side.

  The suffering and grief of Partition are not memorialized at the border, nor, publicly, anywhere else in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A million may have died but they have no monuments. Stories are all that people have, stories that rarely breach the frontiers of family and religious community: people talking to their own blood.

  Part II

  SUBHADRA BUTALIA

  ‘Children of the same parents, the same blood ...’

  Subhadra Butalia is my mother. She and I began talking, hesitantly, about Ranamama and Partition only after I had been to visit him, and later had taken her with me to her family home. I realized then how often, and with what regularity, we had heard stories of Lahore, the old family home, our grandparents, and how little we had absorbed about them. After Mamu began to write, and particularly after my mother went back to Lahore, I was consumed with curiosity about how she had felt on seeing her brother again, on going back to her old home. If I had felt such a strong emotional pull going to Lahore, what must it have been like for her? Over the years, gradually, I managed to persuade her to describe her experiences, and came up against another paradox. People of my parents’ generation tell stories of Partition all the time: it preoccupies their minds, it fills their lives, it memorializes their pasts. Yet when you sit them down, formally, as if to interview them about these very stories, they are strangely reluctant to talk. I have thought a great deal about this and can only conclude that when retrieving memory becomes a self-conscious, self-reflexive exercise, people are perhaps more reluctant to commit themselves, unless they can be sure that what they are saying is ‘accurate’ or true. But this is not all. I think with my mother, the wounds were so deep, that it was doubly difficult to speak of them, the more so to me. Perhaps an impersonal stranger would have succeeded where I failed. At one point, talking about how she had felt at being forced to leave her mother in Lahore, she said: ‘Who can describe the pain of having to leave a mother?’ I realized, in that moment, how little I had thought about this aspect. The pain of parents having to leave children we understand, but that it can happen the other way round is something that is seldom considered. There is no way of knowing how many parents were lost to their children in the sweep of this history, no way of knowing how many of them were lost by accident and how many by design.

  I have chosen to include this interview because in some ways it gives another side of the picture to Ranamama’s story, but also because, in other ways, it is revealing of the silences within families, and the difficulty of going beyond these. As important as the exercise of probing the silence is the question of how it is probed, who poses the questions and when, and indeed who takes the responsibility for what the silence unleashes. A friend of mine described how, after remaining silent for many years, her mother spoke about her memories of Partition to a persuasive researcher. For weeks after she had done so, she was unable to sleep, remembering the pain and anguish of the time. The researcher who had prompted her to speak was by then elsewhere, perhaps involved in another interview. Thus it is never a simple question of silence and speech, for speech is not always cathartic, not always liberating. In my work, I have tried as far as possible to speak to only those people who were willing to speak, and to take the responsibility for what speech meant. There is no way of knowing if this is the right approach, but for me, it was perhaps the only approach I could take.

  There are other reasons why I felt it was important to include my mother’s interview. In some ways, Mamu spoke to her more frankly than he did to me: he did concede that one of the reasons he had stayed on in Pakistan was the house. It is tragic, and ironical, that the same house whic
h, for Mamu, represented a sort of freedom, an opening up of opportunity, at Partition, became a millstone round his neck later. If he was to be believed, he, Rana, the person, was of little consequence for his sons. It was the house that counted. As he said to my mother: ‘I am like a stranger, a man haunted in my own house by my own children.’

  SUBHADRA BUTALIA

  In 1946 I was working in the State High School in Nabha. The school had a large compound and building. It was surrounded by a slum area. There were prostitutes, and there were some very poor Muslims who lived there. So on all four sides it was a Muslim dominated area. At one stage, people began to talk of Partition and the discussion always was about whether it would happen or not. And I and the headmistress Ranjit, and my mother and my brothers and sisters, we all lived together. We were always fearful, because the stories that were circulated made it sound as if whenever there would be trouble, when the fighting would begin, the girls’ school would be the first to be attacked. And even our chowkidar and ayah were Muslims. So we used to be very scared, we’d wonder what we will do. We had sort of given instructions to everyone: we used to sleep outside, in the open maidan, and there were four walls forming the boundary. So the instructions were that if ever there was noise, and commotion, everyone should run directly inside.

  Just across the road from the school there lived a prostitute. One day she had a fight with someone, a man from the army, and he shot her down ... Two bullets he fired at night and then he ran, he jumped the wall, and then he shot himself and died. We were really scared, we all ran inside. And Munna, my sister, who was the youngest, she went mad and instead of going in she ran outside and hid. We were all frantic with worry: Munna, Munna, where is she? Who knew what was happening outside. Ranjit would not let me go outside. And I said how can I leave the girl alone? It was a real crisis. Then she heard us shouting and we brought her inside. In the morning we found out that it was nothing, it was this other story, he had killed the woman. When he had gone away in the army, he used to send this woman money. On his return he asked if she would marry him and she told him, go away, there are so many like you who come and fall at my feet. Something like that. But her mother, she used to cry out ‘Allah’ at night, and she said it in a really frightening way. It was because we had no male person with us. We were all women, so we used to feel really scared. The tension was extreme. And in this interim, I thought we should leave, go away from here. So the children thought they’d go to Lahore — we didn’t know what would happen in Lahore. And Ranjit said don’t go there, things there are very bad. And it was while we were in the process of discussing and deciding this that my brother came, the one who lived in Lahore. Rana. And he said that there was a lot of talk of Partition, so he thought the house should be sold off.

  Let me tell you a bit about Rana. He is the sixth of my parents’ nine children. When my father died he left us well provided for: there was enough in the form of future security (the house) so that even those relatives who came to our house to condole commented that the family would not want for anything. But something else was in store for us: Bikram, my eldest brother, was a college dropout. He decided to start a business, took money from my mother, but the venture failed. Still, the impact of the loss was not felt so much, and Bikram later joined the Royal Air Force. When he brought home news of his appointment he brought with him a beautiful Muslim girl, Ameena. He said he would marry her the day he got his first salary. But this never happened. The day Bikram went to office to collect his first salary, the office was not yet open so he decided to take his small aircraft out for a brief flight. He crashed into some electric wires and died.

  For some reason Rana’s life was the most affected by Bikram’s death. One of our uncles, a judge at the Lahore High Court, decreed that Rana should be sent to the village. So, at age twelve or thirteen, he was pulled out of school and sent off to Paragpur. He hated it. He wrote a letter home one day saying: ‘Here I have to wash my own bedsheets, I don’t want to stay here, if you don’t call me back I will run away.’ Shortly afterwards we heard that he had disappeared — but we did not know what to do, how to find him. My mother was by this time an epileptic, my elder sisters were married and had left home, I was barely twenty ...

  I don’t remember how we discovered that he was with my aunt, my mother’s sister. We tried to get him back, and he ran away again. Rana could not be traced for two years and we began to think we had lost another brother. I felt the loss more than anyone else ... And then one morning my elder sister walked in with Rana. She had found him, waiting at tables at a railway restaurant. The prodigal had come home. He had become a stranger to the family but he had also learnt the art of survival.

  Later, when all of us moved to Nabha, Rana stayed on in Lahore. I took up a job in Nabha and kept my mother and my younger brother and sister with me. Rana stayed in the family home. How he maintained himself no one knows. Often he would ask me for small loans ...

  When the clouds of Partition began to weigh upon us I started worrying about the house in Lahore. This was our only security. I thought if someone grabbed the house in the confusion of Partition, we’d all be left with nothing. One day, I read an advertisement in the papers about a house in Saharanpur. The owner, a Muslim, wanted to migrate to Pakistan and offered to exchange his house for a similar house in Lahore. It sounded ideal. I began negotiations with him, and wrote to my uncle about this.

  There was no reply from my uncle but a few days later Rana came to visit us. He was pleased that I had tried to arrange this exchange of property and said he wanted to take Mother with him to sort out some details on this. I agreed. I was happy that my efforts had succeeded. When she did not come back after many days, I began to worry. She was not well. So I went to Lahore to see her and find out.

  There I learnt that my uncle had warned Rana against me, saying that I would grab the property. Rana had actually brought my mother back so that he could hold on to the Lahore house. When I asked him about this he said, ‘I am an uneducated man. What will I do in India? How long will you support me? Soon you’ll get married and then your family will be your priority. Here at least this house will give me shelter.’

  I tried to argue with him. How would he continue to live here if Pakistan became a reality? Rana was quite clear. He said, religion is not more important than survival. He told me he had planned everything. ‘You know the girl whose mother lives in the quarter next to Jatinder’s house? I have known her a long time and she is willing to marry me if I convert to Islam.’

  What about Mother? I asked him. He told me she was his mother too. He said he would become a Muslim, he’d marry this girl, Fawzia, and would keep Mother with him.

  Who can judge the pain of having to desert an invalid mother? ... I pleaded with Rana to let me take my mother and my younger brother. I felt I could not trust him any more. I thought, in his lust for property he might even kill my mother or my brother ... There was so much tension. I was frightened. I did not want to stay in the house at night. But finally, I had to leave. I left my poor, ailing mother behind and I have never forgiven him for this cruelty. As I was leaving, I wept. He looked at me and said, ‘You are unhappy because I am converting to Islam.’ I just held his hand and cried. I told him to look after Mother. I told him it was immaterial to me whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim — after all our father was a very secular and forward-looking man. But the woman he was snatching away from me, she was ill and frail and needed care ... I came away with a heavy heart. I hoped that one of my sisters would be able to persuade him to let Mother go. But that did not happen. How she lived, whether she was looked after, was she fed properly or starved ... I never came to know any of this. In my heart I yearned for her. After my father had died, Mother had lived with me ... She was a staunch Hindu, she would pray every evening ... I wondered what her daily routine was like now ...

  Rana became Abdulla, and Fawzia became his wife. The house of our childhood was now the abode of a committed and converted Musli
m family. Was he happy? Did he look after my mother? There was no way of finding out. Once or twice he wrote to my younger sister, Munna, but then, she had to ask him to stop. Her husband was in the defence forces and there would have been too many questions ... As time passed and Rana began to feel more and more isolated, I think he began to miss us. But he never wrote to me. And then, years later, you established contact with him. He sent a letter through you. He wrote that he was the father of four sons and three daughters. He said, ‘I have never forgiven myself for what I did in my youth. I can’t retrace my steps. I have never been accepted here, not even by my own family ...’