Podcast on Partition

“This time Amma you select the Podcast topic,” said my son as he handed his cell phone to her and took charge of our twenty-five-minute drive to the Farmers Market to buy weekly quota of fruit and vegetables. Fair minded, she read aloud the topics for all of us to select from: The Untold Tales of India; Echoes of India, India Explained, The Partition… I stopped her at that and suggested if everyone agreed we would play Partition. They agreed. It was by a Pakistani writer, narrator… whose family migrated to the US during partition when she was just eight months old.

The session brought me back to my incomplete, dust-laden, half-baked attempt at writing a fiction novel a decade ago, The Last Passenger.
Back home, I retrieved my Master copy and went through some chapters. I thought I might share just two chapters with you: one of the earlier chapters now, and another, way past the middle, afterwards – if prima facie readers express interest, that is.

* * * * *

The Last Passenger

THE YEAR, 1947. An August morning – not ‘yet another morning’ – in Lahore, now designated to be part of Pakistan.

The British Empire was completing formalities to accord independence to India, but to be split into two: India and Pakistan. The border lines would be drawn based on religious majority in an area. Pakistan would emerge as a new nation on 14 August 1947 and India the next day.

A top official from the British Empire in London was appointed to work on the demarcation of the boundaries that would separate one country from the other. Meticulously he worked out the population in each city, town, and village to decide primarily which religious community enjoyed majority, along with a host of other factors, to draw the dividing line. Tension was mounting in the small villages and towns where the population count of both the communities was near equal or, the margin was slender. So, to gain majority each community engaged itself in subhuman attempts to do away with members of the other community and have the territory included within the border of their choice.

The situation was anything but under control. The Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, had already proclaimed that details of the demarcation would be announced only after the countries officially became two independent nations.

Meanwhile Hindus and Muslims, spread across the Indian subcontinent, were given a one-time option to shift residence to either side of the border. Special trains would ply, for a few days, from each side of the border to transport the migrant population to the other side of the border. The only silver lining was that both communities felt elated at the prospect of liberation from the two centuries old colonial subjugation.

The safe exodus, of approximately fifteen million people belonging to both religions, to either side of the borders, was easier said than done, and could be anything but peaceful.

The ink demarcating the countries had hardly dried when the age-old feeling of brotherhood and amity between the two communities took a U-turn for mutual mistrust and hostility. Suddenly the atmosphere was charged with tension. Fear engulfed the minds of everyone – caste, creed, regardless. None dared to venture out of their houses. Civil unrest, arson, loot, and killings took charge of the subcontinent. It raised the hoods of communal fervor, causing untold misery to both the communities.

The very last special train from Lahore, stacked with evacuees from Pakistan in shapes beyond recognition, came to a grinding halt at Amritsar, the Indian border. In the cascade of humanity that gushed out of the compartment to the platform more by the stampede than on one’s own volition, was a lad of 10, in torn clothes with no belongings to go with. He was CHAMAN LAL.

The previous morning in Lahore, a long-bearded Muslim Mullah, in his eighties, had walked back and forth restlessly in his small living room, stroking his beard. Occasionally he pulled the curtain barely enough to get a first-hand account of the mob frenzy in the main street right in front.
Simultaneously, he switched on the radio, despite poor quality of transmission, to hear more of the situations in the rest of the subcontinent. Yes, total civil unrest, chaos, on the other side of the border as well, with no less intensity on the East Bengal borders. The community in majority in any given area called the shots.

The name of the game was arson, loot, and merciless killing of people. What was planned to be a peaceful migration of the communities to their chosen destinations, turned into a run-for-life situation for both, not to speak of miscreants on both sides all eager to grab such opportunities to occupy the abandoned houses with belongings the original occupants could not carry while fleeing.

A piercing scream of a child arrested the attention of the Mullah, already restless. In the middle of the road he saw a boy crying helplessly sitting by the side of slain bodies. Yes, the bodies of his parents lay three yards from one other. The lady had been stabbed in the stomach and throat slit. Her hands had been cut because, after the killing, the miscreants could not remove her gold bangles. The man had multiple wounds at different places. Apparently, he had put up a brave fight before succumbing; the tattoo in his forearm bore the name, Gridhari Lal. The bundles they hoped to carry to India lay strewn, thoroughly searched for valuables.

The Samaritan, the Mullah, could not contain the boy’s plight any longer. Risk or no risk, save the boy before a similar fate befalls him, he said to himself and charged to the spot, to the best of his poor ability. He carried the boy on the back of his 80-year old frail body and limped home, still gasping from the strain of the gallop to save the boy, before it was too late. He stopped for a while, put his cap on the boy’s head to mislead his fellow religionists, running berserk on the streets, that he was carrying a fellow injured Muslim to safety. Half way he changed his mind, headed instead towards the railway station. As he got close to the railway station, in a flash of presence of mind the Mullah removed the very cap that he had earlier put on the boy’s head to mislead his fellow religionists. He did not now want the Hindus who were a majority at the station heading for India to mistake the child with an embroidered cap for a Muslim. With the towel that hung on his shoulder-back he covered his own bearded face to protect himself. Shifting the boy to each of his shoulders by turn so that his brittle shoulder bones didn’t give way to the weight of the boy, and his worn-out chappals not too cooperative, he barely ran up with the train that was already in motion, and just managed to squeeze the boy, the last passenger, into the last compartment of the last train to India.