diya. The only sound besides papa’s voice came occasionally from one of the Uncles who would raise their hands and simply shout, ‘Wah!’ The word had no literal meaning, mama told me later, but what word would there be for these feelings that papa’s songs awoke in everyone? I did not often stay for these mournful ghazals, preferring to creep off to bed unnoticed whilst my younger cousins slept in milky heaps like an abandoned litter. There was no point in my being there; when I looked at my elders, in these moments, they were all far, far away.
And it was during one such evening when I was awoken by shouting. I jerked awake to the sound of a man’s voice berating someone, something. I checked out of the window, all the cars were still there, parked haphazardly on the sides of the country lane, so I knew the Uncles and Aunties had not left yet. I crept slowly along the darkened landing and down past the bannisters, avoiding the creaks on the third and seventh stairs, and was relieved to see that the door separating the winding staircase from the front room was slightly open. It was my Uncle Bhatnagar shouting, I recognised his gravelly boom even from that distance.
‘But it was a damn massacre!’ he was spluttering, and then he talked in Punjabi of which I recognised a few words, ‘Family…money…death …’ and then, ‘They talk about their world wars…We lost a million people! And who thought up Partition? These “gores”, that’s who!’ Then everyone launched in, the whispers squeezed through the gap in the door and I could make out familiar voices saying such terrible and alien things.
‘My mother and I, the Hindus marched us through the streets…our heads uncovered …’ That must have been my Auntie Mumtaz, one of our few Muslim friends. ‘They wanted to do such things to us…but we had left the house for them and everything in it, and my father…he was a judge, he had been so good to them …’ There was a long pause, I thought I heard someone sniff. ‘All the time we were walking, mama and I, papa was lying dead, his head cut from his body. They found it later lying in the fallen jasmine blooms …’
‘We all have these stories, bhainji,’ Uncle Bhatnagar again, addressing her as his sister. ‘What was happening to you was also happening to us. None of us could stop it. Mad people everywhere.’ There was a murmur of consensus, subdued, fearful maybe because of all the old wounds being reopened. ‘We were on the wrong side of the border also when the news came, none of us knew until that moment if we would be going or staying. My whole family, we walked from Syalcote across the border…We maybe passed your family going the other way. The bodies, piled high…the trains pulling into stations full of dead families…Hai Ram. What we have seen …’
My heart was trying to break out of my chest. I had to hold onto the bannister to steady myself, terrified I would be discovered and they would clam up and deny me more. Were these my Uncles and Aunties speaking? Were these stories truly theirs? How could they have kept all this from me for so long? Then a sob broke into the low chatter, I knew immediately it was my Auntie Shaila. The fattest, noisiest and most fun of all the Aunties, she could only express herself in extremes of emotion, banshee howls of disbelief or ear-splitting yodels of joy. That and a taste for loud bright saris with over-tight blouses underneath always guaranteed she was the centre of attention. But I had never heard her sound so broken as this.
She struggled for words through the sobs. ‘Sister …’ she gulped. ‘Meri bhain…Sumi…We were walking, along the river, trying to find the road to Delhi…We could see the Muslims on the other side…Don’t look, mamaji said, don’t look…Sumi looked and they were crossing the river on horses…mad men, mad eyes, sticks with red tips…They just took her. She was too beautiful. They took her. Where is she? Hai mere dil… where is she now?’
The whole room seemed to be sighing, I could make out mama’s soft weeping, it was muffled. She must have been negotiating the complicated geography of Auntie Shaila’s cleavage. No one said ‘I am sorry,’ like an English person might have done. In the silence that followed, I felt a hundred other memories were being briefly relived and battened down again.
It was papa’s voice which finally broke it. He was deliberately upbeat. It was his host’s voice, he knew it was his job to steer his friends away from the rocks that might shipwreck them all. He spoke in his characteristic blend of Punjabi and English, but enough for me to understand. He said he and his family had all been living in Lahore, which became Pakistan within a split second of the announcement. His parents then had the job of smuggling eight children across the border. They decided to head for Delhi. ‘We just left our house where it was, we took nothing. We split up, all of us. Some in carts with Muslim friends, some of us by train. I went with my father on the train. It stopped suddenly, a tree on the track.’ He described how the whole carriage began panicking as it became clear they were being hijacked, but no one knew if it was by Hindus or Muslims.
‘There was a Muslim in our carriage. He began praying. A Sikh next to us began cutting off his hair quickly. He offered to shave the Musselman’s moustache but he refused. “Allah will save me,” he said. The Hindu goondas entered the carriage …’ Papa paused a moment. ‘They looked at us, my father quoted the Gita at them, the only time I have ever heard him quote any religious script. They tore the trousers off the Musselman, saw he was circumcised, and cut off his head …’
Papa must have realised then that his plan of jollying up the party had gone sadly wrong. He cleared his throat. ‘I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a refugee camp with only what I stood up in. But I thank God, because if I had not gone to Delhi, I would never have met Daljit …’ Then the room broke into cheers and relieved laughter. The Uncles began teasing papa for his admission, the Aunties, I could hear, were tittering away and no doubt poking mama in the ribs.
After this, I remember climbing slowly back to my bed and swathing myself in my heavy Indian rajai. My sleep that night was full of blood red trains screaming through empty stations, scattering severed limbs as it whistled past, of beautiful sisters in churning rivers, and old men’s heads in flowerbeds. I wanted to know so much more, but now I was afraid to ask. I realised that the past was not a mere sentimental journey for my parents, like the song told its English listeners. It was a murky bottomless pool full of monsters and the odd shining coin, with a deceptively still surface and a deadly undercurrent. And me, how could I jump in before I had learned to swim?
So as I sat in papa’s arms, heard that word, ‘Partition’, and I held my breath with delight, not daring to exhale until he began. This was a gift to me, this was his way of saying he had forgiven me for lying and I accepted it gratefully. ‘On this occasion,’ continued papa, ‘my friend and I…Kishan it was, we met some policemen, at least they said they were police. But these were the stupid days, everyone waiting to see if Partition would go ahead, all kinds of ruffians and rogues wandering about …’ He smiled, ‘Like us, I suppose. We wanted to sniff the air, maybe become heroes, freedom fighters, you know? These men, they called us over. Gave us a parcel and some money, just a few annas but a lot to us. They asked if we would go and deliver the parcel to some building, not far away. A merchant’s house, I think …’
Papa swallowed slightly, he held me tighter. ‘We walked through the streets with this package, we stopped to boast to our friends, we were on some kind of mission, we had money. We did not hurry. When we got to the merchant’s place, there was nobody in. A big place, he was a rich man, Muslim, well known. Well respected. So we just left the parcel in the doorway. What did we care? We had our payment. When we reached the end of the street…there was a huge bang. An explosion. We fell to the ground, people began running, screaming for cover. There was smoke everywhere, falling stones. We looked back. The merchant’s house had gone. It was dust.’
Papa exhaled deeply and I sighed with him. ‘A bomb!’ I breathed. My father had planted a real live bomb! I wanted to go round to Anita Rutter’s right now and spit on her father’s crummy tattoos. ‘Of course, we did not know. We could have been killed. Those goondas did not care about us. But they must have been Hindu, like us …’
‘Was anyone in the house?’ I asked, couldn’t help myself this time.
‘I don’t…No. Of course not. No,’ said papa, with a final note that meant the story was over.