After every summer vacation when schools would reopen, my friends would tell me frolick stories of holidaying in their gaav (village; synonymous here for hometown) with cousins and spending time with Dadu-Dadi and/or Nana-Nani. An unusually rather a concern emerged in me— what is a hometown? and why would you live anywhere else if not your hometown?
It wasn’t until my early teens that I learned, not everyone makes a livelihood in the land where they are born and more importantly, even if they did, their hometown is not really the place where their family is from.
I am a third generation refugee in Delhi. My parents were born and brought up in this city where my grandparents made a livelihood after leaving their hometown in Punjab, Pakistan. Delhi is my hometown, but hundreds of kilometers away is where my family came from.
So when schools would reopen, I would tell stories of traveling with my Dadu-Dadi to beautiful hill stations in North India, spending days in cottages, playing games and visiting our gaav in stories. There were recurring instances of “Saade Lyallpur ich…” (in our Lyallpur…) or “Partition tun pehle di gal haigi…” (this story is from before the Partition…). Then what follows is the pre-partition life story of my grandparents. These stories have never changed… each time Dadi would say “saada inna vadda ghar c, saadi gayein bhaisaan c, sadi maa lassi kar ich e ridakti c….” (we had a big house, we had cows and buffaloes and my mother used to make lassi for us).
While my friends would visit their hometowns, I would have vivid images of this street in Douglas Pura, Lyallpur (now called Faislabad), that had a big open house — with an open courtyard, with charpais, with rooms and kitchen on the periphery, staircases running on both side of the house going up to the rooftop. In summers this rooftop is where lines of charpais were laid out for the entire family to camp at nights throughout the season; only exception being when it would rain and they would set up the charpais in the room.And then the story would have a short mention of my grandmother’s maternal uncle, who lived next door and was a father to ten daughters.
It was a matter of time, before I understood things in its entirety that my grandparents- both paternal and maternal didn’t move by choice, or rather moved due to lack of one — else who would want to leave home, security, comfort and friends. Life was good for them until 1947. Even though the riots in pre-Partition Punjab began somewhere in March 1947 (the Partition boundary line was announced on 17 August ’47), no body believed that this violence would reach them (or their village/district/town). None of them left in fear of being killed, unless the threat came very close and there wasn’t any other way out.
My story isn’t different from any other refugee family that settled in India — most of my generation has grown up listening to these stories and I am perhaps late in finding out this common sense of belonging. But at the same time, since Partition is not something popularly spoken about, even though I would like to believe Delhi evolved as refugees resettled their lives in the city, not many people in India actually are aware of what happened during Partition. The one devil perception that got planted country-wide was that the other country is the “enemy”(more on that later).
But…
10 Saturdays ago, I signed up as a volunteer at the Partition Museum office in Delhi to collect oral histories of Partition Survivors. The museum is located in Amritsar. I gather first hand account of what living in undivided India was like and what the journey through Partition was like.
Before you wonder “why I am doing this” like everyone else has including my parents, let me confess, I am trying to figure that out as well. Though, I’d be understating when I say that this has been the most gratifying thing for me, yet.
I have interviewed over 10 people, each one is a unique record of where they came from and how they rebuilt lives. The next part of this blog will follow peculiarities of those stories and some aspects of how I have strengthened ties with my roots; where my family actually came from. I have visited it through the eyes of an 80 years old, or a 96 years old or even a 100 years old, who relive their childhood thinking of those blood-ridden bittersweet memories and I get a glimpse of what it was like to be from the time I will otherwise never know.
