A Pakistani writer’s travelogue about his visit to India pieces together the Partition

On the twentieth day of March 2008, I headed home for the first time in my life. I was fifty-six years and a month old. Walking east across the border gates at Wagah, I was on my way to the fulfilment of a family pietas of very long standing. I was going to a home I had never known; a home in a foreign land, a land that state propaganda wanted me to believe was enemy territory. But I knew it as a country where my ancestors had lived and died over countless generations. That was the home where the hearth kept the warmth of a fire first kindled by a matriarch many hundred years, nay, a few thousand years, ago and which all of a sudden had been extinguished in a cataclysm in 1947.

In that great upheaval, in a singular moment in time, that home ceased to be home. One part of the family made it across the border to become a tiny part of a huge data: they were among the nearly two million people uprooted from their homes. Another part of the family also became a statistic—a grim and ghastly one: they were part of the more than one million unfortunate souls who paid with their blood for the division of India and foundation of the new country of Pakistan for Muslims. They who died were not just Muslims who lived east of the new line drawn by Cyril Radcliffe. They were Sikhs, Hindus and even Jains who had homes thousands of years old, west of this line in the land that became Pakistan.

Born four years and six months after the dreadful event, I had grown up in a home where we only knew in an amorphous, indirect sort of way that the family had suffered terribly in what the elders referred to as Partition. Even though the lost ones were referred to from time to time, no one ever spoke explicitly of the loss and how it may have occurred. The inhumanity of man against fellow man, of neighbours slaughtering those with whom they shared a common wall, was never spoken of. Never was it mentioned that some may have survived and, forced to convert to another faith, may still be living in India. This last thought was simply too much to take for these damaged but proud Muslim minds…

As a child in the Lahore of early 1960s, I often heard friends talking of the lands and havelis their families had to abandon in India. In order not to be left wanting in this exchange, I once asked my father what sort of haveli our grandfather owned.

‘Your grandfather owned no haveli. He had a modest house measuring seventeen marlas.’ (The marla, a Punjabi measure of land area, equals roughly 19 square metres.)

I do not remember if I was disappointed, but I do know I told my friends we did not own havelis in Jalandhar. Though some might have pitied me, I do not recall if I was made fun of. Among the children of all those wealthy immigrants from Jalandhar, I was the only one whose family was seemingly badly off in the old country…

I was surprisingly free of any prejudice for those across the border. In fact, if there was a country I wanted to visit, it was India. In the 1980s, less than a decade out of the army, I was told there was no way I could travel east of the border because of my military past. Then in 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Partition, Beena Sarwar, my friend and editor at the News on Sunday, told me to apply for a visa since everyone on either side with any connection to the other was going across to write Partition stories.

Beena spoke with someone at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad and instructed me to see this person with my passport and filled in forms. Filling those horrendous five-page forms asking for tedious details was soul-destroying business—and in quintuplicate (no carbon paper, please)—yet the lure of India made me do it. I got into the waiting hall inside the High Commission all right, but never got to see the gentleman Beena had spoken with.

In the waiting hall, stuffy in the August heat with a few dozen expectant applicants, there were two uniformed men, probably peons—one a mousy type, the other a big-boned muscular bouncer type with a vermilion tilak on his forehead. From time to time, the big man barked rather rudely at people to keep to their seats. Since all seats were taken, I was standing to one side when he completely surprised me. He asked a younger man to vacate his chair and, coming up to me, very civilly addressing me as ‘sahib’, asked me to take it. When everyone else’s papers were collected, but mine surprisingly were not, the Bouncer came to me and said, ‘Sahib, I suggest you leave, you are not getting a bija.’

I asked to see the gentleman I was supposed to meet and the man said it was he who had instructed him to tell me to make myself scarce. I protested about my papers not even being looked at and the man hinted that was for the better. I refused to leave. A little while later the man very firmly told me I was wasting my time. It was beyond comprehension why I should be singled out like this and it took eleven years for me to understand how I had been favoured. In 2008, applying again, I realized that by not entertaining my papers, the High Commission had not put me on record as having been refused, a major hindrance in subsequent attempts for a visa. By official record, I had never applied.

In late February 2008, my wife Shabnam and I were invited to dinner at the home of the Indian High Commissioner. We walked into the living room and as Satyabrata Pal and his wife came forward to greet us, I spoke even before either could utter a word of welcome. I said, ‘Do you know yours is the only country to ever deny me a visa?’

It turned out that the High Commissioner was a regular reader of my weekly history column which appeared, at the time, in the widely-read English daily Daily Times, as well as of my work as a travel writer. Pal did not know of my connection with Jalandhar and very briefly I told him all I knew of the events of August 1947 and my desire to pick up whatever was left of the fast-disappearing spoor of that long ago upheaval. The good man instructed me to send him my papers as soon as I got back to Lahore.

And so, in March that year, sixty-one years after Partition, I got my first ever Indian visa. For readers in any country other than our two neighbouring states it would sound strange, but Pakistanis and Indians only get city-specific visas and are not permitted free run on the other side of the common border. Both countries hamper visitors with requirements of reporting to the police when entering or leaving a city and travellers are known to be hassled or even arrested if found in a city not specified on the visa. Even the choice of port of entry and exit is restricted: one must enter and leave by the same port and the same mode of transport. However, my passport was stamped to enable me to visit Amritsar, Jalandhar, the ancestral village of Ughi, Delhi and Solan without police reporting. The special treat was that I could cross the border between Wagah on our side and Attari on the Indian by foot. I was not required to take either the tediously slow train to Attari or the long needless bus journey from Lahore to Delhi in which I would not be permitted to disembark anywhere en route…

Excerpt taken with permission from Aleph Book Company