‘From where? Which gali or bazaar?’
‘Don’t know. Can’t remember.’
Kaushalya Devi and the young man said irritably, ‘At least give us the name and address of someone to whom we can send information about you.’
‘I don’t have anybody.’
Kaushalya Devi and the young man did not have any time to waste on gathering information about one single woman, so they began collecting details about the others. Kaushalya Devi arranged for each woman be given two handfuls of roasted grain and a lump of gur. Then she left, to arrange transport to take the women in her charge to Amritsar before nightfall.
Banti had attached herself to Tara, constantly pleading with her, ‘Bahina, get me to Amritsar, and find out for me the whereabouts of my family. Only you can help me now. You’re educated and clever. I’m just an illiterate country woman, who doesn’t know how to talk to anyone.’
Tara was sitting on the veranda floor, her back against the wall, her cheek resting on her hand. ‘What am I to do?’ she thought. ‘Don’t know where my parents went, or if my brother is in UP? For them I’m dead, burnt to death, don’t exist anywhere in this world.
‘Asad had said he would come at five or six. Once I asked him to give me shelter, but today it was he who offered to shelter me. No, I can’t trust any man now. Had he agreed then, it would have been different, and all this would not have happened. Who knows? And even if he’d agreed, that wouldn’t have prevented the Hindu–Muslim conflict and kept Pakistan from being created. At least I wouldn’t have fallen into the hands of Somraj, Nabbu, Hafizji and Gafoor.’
‘You won’t be able to live in Lahore if you call yourself a Hindu!’ she remembered Asad’s words. ‘Neither he nor my brother believed in making a distinction between Hindus and Muslims. Narendra, Surendra, Zubeida, Pradyumna, Mahajan, none of them believed in it either. But did their disbelief make any difference?’ The devastation and the heinous results of
the belief of other people in making that distinction were all around her.
‘Asad, whatever he is, good or bad, was born a Muslim, but he isn’t like Gafoor, Nabbu, Hafizji and Amjad. He’s their opposite, if anything. He and Zuber went to rescue Hindu women.
‘But where can I go? I’m dead to my family. I’m someone who died in that fire. If I exist at all, I exist as a runaway from my in-laws’ family! Should I go to Asad? Didn’t I ask him to shelter me once before? But that was love. Love? Like the love between Sheelo and Ratan! Nonsense! I must keep away from the male animal!
‘Who else do I know? And where? What shall I do? What shall I tell Asad when he comes at five?’ Asad’s gentle, sympathetic voice echoed in her ears. ‘He’s the only one I know, he’s the only one who cares for me.’
‘Get up, all of you! Let’s go!’ Tara heard Kaushalya Devi call, and looked to her left. Kaushalya Devi was covering the length of the veranda briskly in her short steps. She held one corner of her dupatta between her fingers, which made it billow behind her like the sail of a boat.
‘Hurry up! Got transport to carry all of you. Otherwise you’ll have to wait here for another three days. Who knows? I wonder how my own daughter’s doing?’
Banti, Satwant, Durga, Amaro, Bisni and Kesaro began pulling their clothes around them. They all looked at Tara.
‘Come on, hurry up!’ Kaushalya Devi urged them once again, and snapped at Tara, who was making no attempt to rise, ‘Get up!’
‘Bahinji, let me stay here,’ Tara said, with some hesitation.
‘What?’ Kaushalya Devi’s brow became furrowed. ‘Why? Who’s here belonging to you?’
‘There’s someone I know.’
‘You told us at first that that you had nobody. Now you say there’s someone you know! What peculiar behaviour! Haven’t you suffered enough so far that you want to play around? Just look at her!’ She scolded Tara in a loud voice, ‘Our responsibility is to get you out of Pakistan and back into Hindustan. After that you can play around as much as you like. Go quietly and get into the bus, or I’ll have you thrown out of the camp. What cheek!’
‘Bahinji, give me some time to think,’ Tara pleaded.
‘Think all you want after we reach Amritsar. Get a move on!’
Kaushalya Devi pulled Tara up by her arm, and herded them all towards the bus.
The military truck first went, with armed soldiers in steel helmets, then a station wagon carrying the women liberated from Shaikhupura. After the station wagon came five buses packed with Hindu families being sent to India for repatriation, then another military truck, and then five more buses, with two more military trucks at the tail end. A helmeted soldier, cradling an automatic weapon, rode alongside the driver of each bus. This convoy transporting the refugees headed towards Amritsar.
Kaushalya Devi had been on this road before, and she had seated Tara just behind the driver, next to the window, and had herself taken a seat on the aisle. The rest of the women sat in the seats behind them. Tara, her eyes closed, was giving her imagination a free rein, ‘Asad would come at five or six. Whatever I hope for will never happen. I’ll always be a cog in someone else’s scheme of things. I’ll always be the debris floating on the current of the river of destiny. Why can’t I make a stand! That’s why I haven’t been able to put an end to my life.’
The bus braked suddenly and Tara woke with a start. She smelled a nauseating stench. On the side of the road lay scattered half-eaten corpses, some desiccated by the sun, others rotted by the rain. Vultures were perched on and near them, scavenging, jostling for space, and picking at the bodies. Broken and plundered trunks and boxes lay about. The charred remains of half-burnt buses were scattered here and there. Two skeletons of buses were still blocking the road. As the convoy of refugees went past these obstacles, the side wheels of the vehicles passed onto the unpaved shoulder of the road. The convoy jolted and rattled along very slowly.
Kaushalya Devi said in exasperation so that the Sikh driver could hear, ‘Will this road ever be cleared? These buses have been here for the past nine days.’
‘Bahinji, you’ve had nine days to see it,’ the driver replied. ‘I’ve had to look at it over and over for the past full month. The stench is sickening. These dead are Hindus, granted, but it’ll be people in Pakistan who’ll die if there’s an outbreak of disease. The Pakistani government isn’t bothered whether their citizens live or die. I heard, bahinji, that not a single Hindu from this caravan of refugees survived. Not less than two hundred persons must have been massacred. The thugs drove off the zenana as if they were a herd of goats, all bleating and crying.’
‘May God give these people some sense,’ Kaushalya Devi said with sorrow. After bypassing the bottleneck, the convoy again picked up speed.
Both sides of the road still bore the evidence of massacre, destruction and pillage. Tara closed her eyes to avoid the spectacle of the carnage.
Kaushalya Devi and the driver were conversing in loud voices, so as to be heard over the roar of the engine. Tara could hear them but paid no attention. Her mind was engrossed with thoughts about her future. She had suffered torture and humiliation that was worse than death. Where and how would she be able to find her parents, and her brothers and sisters? And when she did find them, what after that? Would she live with her family, and her brother after suffering so much because of them? She needed some kind of a roof over her head, but where would she find it?
The bus slowed down, then stopped. Tara was jolted out of her reverie. The driver looked out of the window to see what was ahead. He said in frustration, ‘Oh, hell! How can we go forward now, bahinji? These people were in Atari yesterday. They’ve travelled only six miles in one day. They hardly have any stamina left to walk, anymore. These Muslims, I heard, are refugees from the districts of Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Ambala. At best, the bus can move only at a walking speed through this crowd. We won’t be able to reach Amritsar before midnight.’
Someone barked an order from the military truck at the head of the convoy.
The soldiers jumped out of the trucks and stood guard on both sides of the station wagon and the buses, their weapons at the ready. The frightened passengers peered out with alarm. A huge column of men and women, walking with tottering, unsteady steps, was slowly converging on the convoy.
‘Hai! Hai! They’ve come! They’re here!’ Amaro, Satwant and Bishi cried out in panic and terror.
‘Be quiet! Calm down! Don’t be frightened!’ both Kaushalya Devi and the driver said to the women rather gruffly. ‘They look half-dead themselves! How can they do anyone any harm? Don’t you see how they’re dragging along like dogs with broken backs?’
The phalanx of bedraggled, staggering refugees passed on either side of the station wagon in the convoy. Sweat and tears streaked their dust-covered faces, their backs were bent with exhaustion and with the strain of carrying their belongings, beards unkempt and dishevelled, close-fitting caps, shaven heads peeking from loose, dirty turbans coming unravelled, blue-and black-coloured clothes that were nothing but rags. They came in
waves of small groups of ten or fifteen. An immense cloud of flies hovering over the heads of the refugees alighted on the convoy. The flies swarmed so thickly that one had to use both hands to ward them off, so as to avoid breathing them in. With them came the smell of death, a gagging, retching smell, as if their bodies continued to decay as they walked. The dust raised by their dragging feet made breathing even more difficult.
Every person in the column was carrying something. Frequently, a skinny dirty child was to be seen, weeping and whimpering, as it clung to the hip or was held in the arms of a woman, or was perched on the shoulders of a man. Stuffed gunny sacks, empty kerosene cans fashioned into containers, wrapped bundles and packages tied with ropes, and once in a while someone carrying on his head his sole belonging, a charpoy. Or a man and a woman balancing an upturned charpoy on their heads, piled with their meagre possessions and a dazed and shrivelled child or two.
A large number of the men carried in their hands their one and only symbol of comfort and relief: a clay hookah. Many women carried mud
chulha
s on their heads. Some carried as their only possession, a metal pot or a large tray. One woman laboured under a light stone
chakki
for grinding wheat. A few had a pair of hens or perhaps roosters, their feet tied. Some pulled along a goat or a sheep at the end of a rope. Another carried a newly born kid or lamb. Sometimes a gaunt scraggy dog, its stomach sticking to its ribcage, faithfully walked behind its master. The crowd was getting denser by the minute.
The vehicles of the convoy stood waiting. The driver, Kaushalya Devi, Tara and the women did not know what was more important—to use their hands to cover their noses against the stench or to wave them to drive away the flies.
When the army truck at the head of the convoy started its engine, the driver of the station wagon too switched on his ignition, saying uncertainly, ‘Wonder if we’ll be able to get on. Maybe the captain sahib has asked the soldiers to march ahead and clear the way.’
Flanked by the soldiers, the convoy began to move forward at a crawl. As the blade of a plough slices through the earth, leaving a furrow in its wake, so the convoy divided the caravan of Muslims as it moved ahead. The noise from the engines of the vehicles moving in low gear was deafening. The stench intensified, as did the swarming flies. The driver of the station wagon held the steering wheel with one hand, using the other to fight off
the flies. Distracted from keeping his eyes on the road to avoid the oncoming crowd, he kept mumbling ‘Waheguru, Waheguru’ in exasperation, between bouts of spitting out the flies.
The passengers in the station wagon were also holding their noses with one hand, and waving the flies away with the other. The rescued women were mumbling God’s name, visibly relieved that they were not a part of the caravan, but safe inside the vehicles.
The driver said in a loud voice as before, ‘Here, look as much as you want, at these people going to the Promised Land of Pakistan. How has anyone benefited by uprooting people living in the same place for hundreds of years?’
‘If they’re not willing to live in Hindustan, let them leave and be with their own kind!’ Kaushalya Devi said, from behind the hand covering her mouth.
‘They’re not willing?’ the driver asked in surprise. ‘What are you saying, bahinji! These poor people have been driven out by force, Hindus from one side just like Muslims from the other. But, bahinji, you’ve seen refugee caravans of Hindu refugees. Now see this one of Muslims. The Hindus were killed, they were looted, their women were kidnapped and violated, but those fleeing were mostly on some kind of carriage or pony trap, with villagers and farmers on bullock carts. The caravan of Hindus and Sikhs on horse carriages, camel carts and bullock carts that came across the Balloki barrage on the Sutlej River stretched back over fifty miles.
‘The Hindus and Sikhs came loaded with trunks and cases, cash and gold, jewellery and security bonds. All that these people are carrying are clay hookahs, broken charpoys, chulhas, pots and pans, and maybe a chicken or two. That’s all they had in their household. They can only take away with them what they owned, or what they attach any value to. What people say is quite true: If you’re a “have” you’re a Hindu. If you’re a “have-not”, you’re a Muslim.’
Kaushalya Devi agreed with the driver in a tone of sadness, ‘You’re quite right, bhai. But all these people were once Hindus. This is the outcome of the Hindus’ own bad actions from past lives. Who know what more punishment God has in store for them?
Hari om
!
Hari om
!’
‘It’s true, bahinji, that Muslims looted and plundered the houses of Hindus,’ encouraged by Kaushalya Devi’s reply, the driver went on. ‘But Hindus have been looting and robbing the Muslims for centuries.
Otherwise, why would there be such a vast difference between the rich and poor, among people living in the same place? How come all the land and property of Punjab was taken over by the Hindus? The poor, in their anger and frustration, turned to Islam early on. This is another result of their age-old resentment. Bahinji, they’re getting their revenge not only because their religion is different, but also because of their feelings of being badly treated.’