The women lay down to sleep, but mosquitoes attacking their feet, hands and faces did not let them fall asleep. Tara covered herself with her dupatta. After midnight a slight chill made them all curl up for greater warmth. As they were stirring from sleep in the morning, they heard someone singing bhajan in a loud voice next door.
Tara lay curled up with her eyes closed, thinking, ‘In Bhola Pandhe’s Gali, Khushal Singh used to pray to God every morning by singing assa di bar. His young son was murdered. My father used to mutter “God, you are our protector” all the time No one knows where our family is now. People’s faith in God doesn’t come from what they go through or what they hear other people have gone through. When they need to believe in something or other, their imagination finds them something to cling to.’
She heard Banti chanting a prayer and opened her eyes. Banti was sitting on her chatai. The Brahmin woman was going out, lota in hand. The woman said to Banti, ‘Sister, keep your eyes peeled. Some people here steal anything they can lay their hands on if you’re not looking.’
Seeing Tara stretch her limbs, Banti said, ‘Maharaj-ji has been merciful to get us this far. Now He should reunite me with my Jaggi and my family. That little devil sleeps ever so lightly. When his grandmother used to get up early in the morning, he too got up with her. I would churn the yogurt
and take off a bowl of butter before he woke up. I would stuff some butter into his mouth with my finger, and he’d go back to sleep. Then I fed the buffaloes and milked them.’
Tara heard the note of hope and happiness in Banti’s voice. She always talked of her family, but today her voice reflected less despair and more hope. Tara had no reason to look forward to meeting her own family. She said, ‘You’re used to getting up early, sister. I can stay up until late at night, but hate to get up so early.’
‘You’re city folk; you don’t have to milk and feed your cattle.’
The Brahmin woman came back soon. She said to Tara and Banti, ‘You better go and do your business before there’s a line-up. I even had a bath.’ She called out to the woman from the Sunar caste, ‘Nihaldei, you too get up and have a wash.’
An enclosure of chatais had been built around the faucet for the women to wash themselves. Men washed in the open at another water tap, chanting or intoning bhajans and prayers. By the time it was bright enough to turn off the camp lights, Tara and Banti had had their bath. Banti returned to chanting her prayer, Tara went back to her chatai.
Nihaldei’s daughter Sukhdet, lota in hand, returned to the hut. She said, ‘Hai, just look at those oafs. One says to another as I walked past, “That’s not fair. Girls watch us bathe, but they hide themselves behind the chatais when they have their baths!”’
‘May those bastards go to hell! May they become blind! Teasing girls like that,’ Nihaldei said crossly.
‘Let them talk. Don’t pay any attention to them,’ the Brahmin woman advised.
‘Hai, all the clowns seem to have come to this camp,’ Nihaldei said again. ‘Always peering in as they pass by.’
Tara lifted her eyes to look at Nihaldei combing and arranging her hair carefully before a mirror placed on top of her trunk.
‘Hot chai…biscuits,’ called a man with a brass tea urn as he went by the hut. A few minutes later, another pedlar called out, ‘Hot puris, halwa!’
Nihaldei bought four puris from the man. Sukhdet was now combing her hair before the mirror. The three-year-old girl asked her grandmother for halwa in a plaintive voice.
The old woman cursed the bothersome pedlar, hoping that all his family might perish, and then cursed her granddaughter that she might die.
The Brahmin woman took up the child’s plea, ‘She’s only small, and all children are always hungry in the morning. When my grandson wakes up, he calls for something to eat. I save half a roti for him. I buy a cup of tea for one anna, he dunks the roti in it and eats it. Who can get milk these days? Dear God!’ She closed her eyes and joined her hands in silent prayer.
‘When He meant us to lose all we had, why did He give us children? Now when the child is hungry, where can I dig up food from?’ The old woman said with irritation. Tara gave her a sympathetic look.
Nihaldei spoke with her mouth full, ‘This is all our karma. The wise ones said: Reap what you have sown.’
The grandmother ignored the remark and continued to clean her chatai of the clothes that the child had soiled during the night.
Over the loudspeakers they heard an announcement, ‘This is All India Radio, Delhi. Today…’
The old woman said, ‘Our name and address has been announced three times. So far we haven’t heard anything from Dhammo’s family. Who knows what God has destined for her?’
The radio at the house of Dr Prabhu Dayal across from Tara’s home in Lahore used to broadcast bhajans or qawwalis in the morning. Now all it transmitted was news and the names and addresses of people displaced and separated from their families.
Tara asked the Brahmin woman, ‘Where do you go to have your names broadcast over the radio? At the same place we registered when we came here yesterday evening?’
The woman said ‘Yes’ and Tara advised Banti, ‘Sister, let’s tell the radio people about your reaching here. Your family’s in Delhi. If they find out from the radio that you’re in Amritsar they’ll run to that city to look for you.’
Nihaldei suggested, ‘Use your card and draw your rations.’ She complained, ‘The damned authorities give out these rations for only a month, but give no spices or firewood. Do they want us to use our hands and feet for firewood? You spend four to six paisa every time for firewood. I buy my own salt, chillies and spices, and a bit of ghee from the bazaar. They used to hand out blankets. They even gave clothes to those who had none. We got nothing.’
The old woman could not help but say, ‘They are doing a lot as things are. God is so merciful; He looks after everyone. How long can we depend
on others? I’m waiting to get some news of Dhammo’s family so that we don’t have to rely on anyone else.’
Nihaldei took offence at this reply, ‘Wah, we’ve left so much behind. We got neither a blanket, nor a single piece of clothing. I’ve been using my own money to buy spices and ghee. Who do you take us for? My family owned two houses …’
Several volunteers stood around in the tent, but only one was writing down the information for the radio messages. One of the persons waiting suggested, ‘Give us some paper. We’ll write the details down ourselves.’
The person who was recording the details held out some slips of paper.
Tara took one slip, and said, ‘If I could have a pencil…’
She was handed a pencil.
She wrote neatly and legibly, in good English, starting with, ‘Please broadcast over the radio …’
The man glanced at the paper as he took it from her, and asked, ‘You used to teach at some school?’
‘Yes, and I have a request,’ she said in English.
‘Please tell me what it is.’
‘We were told in Ambala that our family was in Delhi. Can’t remember exactly the name of the mohalla, but it was some “ganj”.’
‘Paharganj?’
‘Ji, we were told that Muslims used to live there, but now Hindus have settled in.’
‘That’s right. It has to be Paharganj.’
‘Could you please tell me how to get there?’
‘You go across the bridge to Naya Bazaar, then take … Tell you what. Go past the railway station. You’ll see tonga drivers hailing fares for Paharganj. They’ll charge you two annas per person.’
Banti did not have enough patience to draw, cook her rations and have a meal before going off in search of her son and husband. A pushcart vendor, waving a date palm branch as fan over a stack of cold puris, was touting his stuff as fresh and hot. Banti took Tara’s hand and said, ‘Remember how long it took us in Amritsar. Who knows how long it might take us to search here? We’re strangers in this city, and it might be evening before we find anything. You have a couple of puris and a drink of water. If Maharaj shows
mercy and gets me together with my Jaggi and his father, that’ll be the end of our worries.’
Banti did not want to eat anything herself. If she stayed hungry and suffering, she thought, God might be more inclined to listen to her prayers. She wanted, with God’s blessing, to have her son in her arms before having anything to eat.
Tara refused to listen to her. She paid for eight puris, forced Banti to eat four of them and had four herself. They had a drink of water from the Brahmin woman’s lota, and with their bundles under their arms, got ready to leave.
Nihaldei asked, ‘Where are you off to? When will you come back?’
Banti took this remark as they were leaving as a bad omen. Ignoring Nihaldei, she muttered an aside, ‘If Maharaj is good to us, why would we return?’
Tara and Banti got down from the tonga at the tonga stand outside Paharganj. Tara asked a middle-aged Sikh the way to Paharganj mohalla.
‘Beti, this is all Paharganj. It’s a very large mohalla; nearly a small town,’ replied the Sikh. ‘Beti, who will be able to help you, everyone is newcomer here. There are so many lanes and alleyways. Ask around and keep at it. Waheguru will help you.’
Tara and Banti walked through a partially destroyed bazaar and turned into a gali on their right. Several houses in a terrace were burnt out and in ruins. The fallen debris had blocked the drains which had turned into puddles of dirty water and filth. Tara and Banti, their noses covered with their dupattas to block out the stench, picked their way gingerly through the litter. Some refugees had taken shelter in the ruined houses.
If Banti caught sight of a woman in a doorway or threshold, she asked, ‘Do two brothers from Chimmoki village in Shaikhupura district and their mother live around here? They are in the bajaji, cloth-selling, business. An old woman and a baby are with them.’ Tara also asked any one she saw, even men, ‘Do you know anything about Manohardas and Gopaldas? Khatris from Chimmoki?’
Most people shook their heads to say no in a preoccupied way. Some would stop and ask, ‘What’s their line of work?’
‘They go around selling cloth.’
‘No, sister, don’t know them. We’re new here. Don’t even know our
own neighbours. There’s nobody here from any time back to know about other people.’
So Tara and Banti would go and repeat their questions in another gali.
Banti was surprised. ‘City folks are weird. In our village we knew about the people living in the villages around us. Here they don’t seem to know even their neighbours.’
Tara said, ‘You could ask any child in our Bhola Pandhe’s Gali in Lahore about any of the people living there. These people are new to this place.’
It was past noon and they both were tired and plagued with a raging thirst. They cupped their hands and drank from a water faucet at the corner of two lanes. They needed to rest for some time. The house next to them was nothing but a burnt-out ruin. They sat on its broad chabutara.
Two women were sitting in the doorstep of the opposite house. A young woman was sewing patches on clothes that she took from a bundle. Tara and Banti had already spoken to them, and told them that they were looking for their families. The second, a middle-aged woman, asked Banti, ‘Hai, a pair of defenceless women on your own, and you’ll stay alone in this huge, burnt-out house? You really have guts!’
The woman spoke in the Derawali dialect of Punjab. For Tara, it was less comprehensible than the Hindi they spoke in Delhi.
Banti guessed at what she was trying to say, ‘Why would just the two us live here alone? We’re from the camp.’
The woman heard Banti speak in a dialect very different from her own. She asked, ‘What district and village of Punjab are you from?’
‘We’re from Shaikhupura. This is my sister, she was a student in Lahore.’
The young woman tried to explain to Tara in her schoolgirl Hindi, ‘This house is not fit to live in. Several others have looked it over and gone away. The shell of the house is barely holding out, and the roofs might cave in anytime. Some refugees from Multan stayed just one night here, then took off. Said that the house was haunted.’
Tara said, ‘This is nothing, compared to the Shahalami bazaar in Lahore that was burnt to ashes.’
The young woman said, ‘They say that eleven Muslim women were burnt to death in this house. The Hindus didn’t even let them come out. The Muslims really put up a fight here. There was one young woman, nineteen or twenty years old. She stood on the roof alone and shot at the attackers. She kept on, even when men on the ground floor had surrendered. The
Hindus got to her only when her ammunition ran out. We were told that all her clothes were ripped off, they dragged her through the bazaar by her hair. They said that they’d let her go if she just said “Jai Hind”. She refused. She was tough. They hacked her to pieces, but all she said was “Ya Ali! Pakistan zindabad!” The rest of the women were burnt alive.’
The second woman said, ‘If they were Muslims, they would have taken the women away and raped them.’
Every hair on Tara’s body stood on end. The burnt ruins of the house seemed to her to be a symbol of women not only suffering torture in the country, but in the whole world. Had fate brought her here only to see this? Not only herself, but countless other women had suffered at the hands of men. How long would women go on suffering in the same way? She heard Banti say, ‘Sister, we saw what the Hindus did to women. I can’t bring myself to speak about it. It was wrong, whoever did it. We women live only to be victims of men who are out to take vengeance in this world! Men might cut other men to pieces, but they don’t humiliate them.’
The young woman said, ‘Yes, it was a bad thing, whoever did it.’
The older woman said angrily, ‘What do you know about what Muslims did to Hindu women? Why shouldn’t Hindus do the same?’
The young woman fell silent, but Banti said sorrowfully, ‘Let Hindus and Muslims give us rope to hang ourselves; then they can settle the score among themselves. God alone can make them answerable.’
‘The Muslims must have caught both of you. You’ve lived among them, so that’s why you are loyal to them. Why did you come here? You should’ve stayed back!’