Roundabout | The strange saga of war and peace
We just bypassed Lahore, although my mother had moved there after marrying my father and spent some 10 years there before the forced migration
Mum, I don’t like war: This was the title of a painting my one of the cherished artists of the city, Raj Kumar when he witnessed the bombing in the city of Dinanagar near say Gurdaspur in 1971. This was what came to the mind as one heard sirens hummed danger, blackouts spelled darkness in the four-day conflict that we witnessed between us and our neighbouring country, which in spite of a sad and violent Partition of 1947, have yearned for one another and offered great hospitality to visitors from across the borders. Cricket matches have meant crossing the borders to watch the game we inherited from the British. We have yearned for chikan suits from Lahore’s Anarkali Bazar and they for paparh-varhi from Amritsar. They love the Indian film songs and we eagerly awake their television serials. The Kartarpur Corridor became a happy meeting place for families who had lost one another in mayhem of Partition made possible by young youtubers who brought together lost siblings. Peace activists on both sides have been holding conferences from time to time bringing youths of the two countries together, friendships have been formed. In the west both Indians and Pakistanis befriend one another as they come from a similar culture and speak the same language. Yet when eerie sirens hiss through the dark it seems all old ties and camaraderie is gone with the wind. What comes to the mind are lines by late Sohan Singh Misha, our Jalandhar poet who broke out in verse at the surrender of arms by Amir Abdula Khan Niyazi in the liberation of Bangladesh: ‘Ajab hai eh dushmani dastan/ ghair nu dasiye te ho jaaye hairan/ terian phaujan ne jad merian Chauhan de agge si hathiar sutte/ Gile wargi gal si kujh rosh vi si/ Tu taan royea hovenga, rona hi si/ Mere kyoon athru si vagge’? (Strange is this saga of animosity, if we tell a stranger he will be taken aback, When your soldiers surrendered to my soldiers, you were unhappy and a little angry, You wept for a reason but why did I shed tears?’
My mother’s imagined country
The first introduction to a country called Pakistan came to me when I was not yet three. We lived in a house in Sector 19 of Chandigarh, a huge bungalow my father had built as a compensation for his Lahore Garden Town house lost to Partition. In the evening, she would bathe and dress me and then send me with the ‘aya’ to visit a white house down the lane in the white government houses of what was known in the 50s as the Barristers’ Colony. One of them had the green flag of a country she called Pakistan because there was some kind of consulate in it of the Pakistan Embassy for some time. As she saw us off at the gate, she would say: “Go meet your Sushila masi who lives in Pakistan.” I was just three-plus and thought it was some kind of a game because I never found my massi there but all the time I heard of a city called Rawalpindi to which my mother said she belonged. I was not sure if it was true or was she telling me a story. This is because my older siblings seemed a bit unhappy about moving from Shimla to Chandigarh just half-built after our father’s retirement. But I pretended to please her by playing the game every evening.
The girl from Rawalpindi
In 1959, when I was all of four years, the opportunity came to actually visit her lost city of Rawalpindi which was not just imagined but real. It so happened that the governments of the two countries decided that people who had blood relatives in either country could visit one another. My mother got her passport with names of two minor children, my brother Salil, just older to me, and I. There was much excitement to meet my uncle, aunt and their beautiful daughter. Two other relatives joined us from Secundrabad. One was my masi’s brother-in-law and one cousin of my mother, whose parents had stayed back in Sialkot.
We just bypassed Lahore, although my mother had moved there after marrying my father and spent some 10 years there before the forced migration. Rawalpindi was supposedly superior for her as it was at the foothills in the area known as Pothoar, while Lahore is in the mainland of Majha just as Amritsar is. Never mind, Lahore with its Kinnaird College, Punjab University, film studios, theatres, famed Anarkali Bazar and ill-famed Hira Mandi, this our girl from Rawalpindi remained loyal to her dialect of Pothoari and always said, “Just hear these Lahoris speak, it’s like they’re hurling stones at you.” The sari-wearing middle-class women of Lahore put her off. Most of them spent the daytime in just a blouse and petticoat and wrapped around a sari only when it was time for the men to come home from work. She came from parts where it had to be a salwar so wide that it covered an entire cloth line. The Pothoarans were so kitchen-proud, cooking the most delicious dish of saag, yogurt (curd), gram flour with just half a handful of rice thrown in. And who could beat their tandoor-fresh rotis of yeast-risen flour. They’d just melt in the mouth with white home-made butter.
With so superior a background she queened over the lesser creatures of Lahore who made up her husband’s large family of brothers and sisters, their children and relatives. A dig or two at her for the Pothoari being smooth talkers and much too clever would be made, but she retained her status of the faithful wife, ideal aunt, fond mother, caring sister-in-law.
Face to face with Lahore
It was as late as 2003 that I got a chance to visit Lahore for a Punjabi conference and I just loved the city with its beautiful architecture, food streets, museums and remnants, the Lawrence Gardens. It charmed me as much as Delhi did with a shared history of monuments and roots. For a moment, I felt my mother had cheated me out of Lahore. Now why do I write all this now? Well, it is good to think of good times when uncertainty is at hand. Good also to think of love when there is fear of hatred. I borrow the title of painter Raj Kumar’s painting to call out to my mother and say: ‘Mum I don’t like war, whether it is in your Rawalpindi or my Chandigarh.” I confess when asked where do I come from, I say my mother was from Rawalpindi, my father from Lahore and I am from Chandigarh.
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