On the eve of independence — Pakistan’s and India’s — the Nayar family of Sialkot “sat around the dining table to discuss our course of action”. They did not want to leave the city or its “mild, austere and tolerant” people, but leave they did. Kuldip was 24, and with his father, a doctor, and their family, the Nayars shifted to a vacant bungalow in the cantonment that belonged to a “rich Muslim family, my father’s patients”, and the house was soon “a transit refugee camp” for Hindus fleeing to India from newly formed Pakistan.
One of these, a Hindu army major on transfer to India, asked if he could do anything for the doctor, who pleaded that he take with him his three sons. “The major was obviously embarrassed. He said he wished he could but there was no space in his jeep. However, after talking to his wife, who was sitting in the jeep, he said they could probably accommodate one.” And so “[w]hether it was managed or accidental”, Kuldip was chosen and after a parting that was “short and quick” found himself en route to India.
The journey, “an avalanche of migration” along the Grand Trunk Road was one of unparalleled misery: “I saw dead bodies on both sides, the smouldering remains of burnt vehicles and pieces of luggage strewn all over. More hideous was the sight of children impaled on swords or spears and women and men cut to pieces.” But it was in the safety of Amritsar, waiting to board the Frontier Mail to Delhi, that Kuldip came closest to death.
“My bare arm flashed the crescent and star which I had got tattooed at Sialkot” which heightened the suspicion “that I was Muslim”. Pulled out of the compartment at Ludhiana “[b]urly Sikhs with spears and swords joined a hostile crowd around me at the platform, asking me to prove I was Hindu… Before I could pull my pants down, a halwai (sweetmeat seller) from Sialkot, from our locality itself, came to my rescue. He shouted that I was Doctor Sahib’s son.”
Asif Noorani’s parallel account, of his family fleeing Bombay for Karachi, was less traumatic in comparison. Asif was barely five at the time of independence, and the family stayed on in Bombay till 1950, when they boarded a ship for Pakistan. By then, Asif had already learned fear, his “defining moment” coming when he told his father he would not share a bus seat with a “distinguished looking man” because, as he told his parent, “This man is Hindu, he will kill me.” Asif’s father, “despite my mother’s disagreement”, decided to migrate because the medical business where he worked now belonged to an evacuee.
In Delhi, Kuldip started working first with an Urdu daily, then went on to study journalism in the United States, and after a Fulbright scholarship to New York, he returned home to start his career a second time, this time in the publicity department of the Planning Commission. He visited Sialkot in 1972, a city of “strangers”. “Something had gone from the place, something never to return.”
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Asif’s family settled first in Lahore, and later in Karachi, where his soft spoken mother was mildly rebuked for not wearing a burqa, or reminded not to tread too close to people’s emotions because “you didn’t see your relatives being killed”. He visited Bombay with his parents as early as 1955, and then alone in 1964 as a college student, and in 1965 once again to interview celebrities for a magazine, but war between the two countries broke out. “There were fears that Pakistanis would be interned… I acquired an old suitcase and filled it with some books and my less favourite clothes, so that I could carry it with me when I was imprisoned.”
“Ill-feeling towards India is now almost non-existent, at least in Karachi,” writes Asif Noorani in this, the fourth in a series of titles under Cross Border Talks that aim to generate discussions (as well as “greater contact and better relations”, according to its series editor David Page). Tales of Two Cities may be naïve in some ways, wishful in others, but it adds to the considerable literature on partition. “I do not see the subcontinent being reunited,” ends Kuldip Nayar in his conclusion (in which his report of a meeting with Cyril Radcliffe, who redefined the borders of the subcontinent, is probably the highlight of his memoir and this edition), “but I believe it is in the interest of the people on both sides of the border that the two states should live in peace with each other.”
Amen.
TALES OF TWO CITIES
Authors: KULDIP NAYAR & ASIF NOORANI
Publisher: LOTUS/Roli
Pages: 126
PRICE: Rs 295