To understand what happened in Kargil you have to go back half a century, to the colossal and premature sundering of the Subcontinent known as Partition. The men who killed each other over Tiger Hill and Drass and Batalik were dealing with the unfinished business of Partition. I have no personal experience of Partition; my family is Gujarati, from Calcutta and Kenya, and I have no relatives in Pakistan or Bangladesh. My own partition was at the age of 14, when I immigrated with my family to New York. I am a novelist. What I try to do is to get to the struggling human being underneath the massive foot of history. The greatest scholar of Partition was a fiction writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, a man who died in Lahore mourning his separation from a whore named Bombay. "Uper di gur gur di mung dal…", chants the madman in "Toba Tek Singh". Fiction writers and lunatics have their own truth. Our enemies are the writers of school textbooks. As the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert said: "for anybody else, not to tell the truth can be a tactical manoeuvre. But a writer who is not telling the truth — is lying".
My family borders are not subcontinental; they are inter-national. But Partition, like the Big Bang, has echoes that will forever permeate the universe of people I write about. In my work, in my fiction as well as in my non-fiction, I have been looking at riots, at communal conflict, in Banaras, Punjab, and especially Bombay. Most of this conflict has its roots in Partition "batwara", which in different circumstances could also have meant "sharing". It is a family quarrel, as when three brothers live side by side in the same house, walling up the rooms, always conscious of the others in the rooms beyond. Kargil is only the latest battle in that endless property dispute; the brothers have come to blows in the street. There will be more to come, before the children grow up and say to their fathers and uncles: Enough.
There are millions of Partition stories throughout the subcontinent, a body of lore that is infrequently recorded in print or on tape, and rarely passed on to the next generation. All over the map of Southasia, there is an entire generation of people who have been made poets, philosophers, and storytellers by their experiences during Partition. Any person over 55 or 60 in Delhi or Amritsar or Lahore has stories to tell of that period, even if they were not themselves dislocated then. And for those who have been displaced from their birth-places against their will and at an early age, the impression of home is all the more vivid and sharp; it haunts their dream-lives, and their minds are the battleground between the desire to forget and the need to remember.
In the summer of '97, I travelled to the Wagah border, and then on to Lahore. It was through Wagah and the nearby town of Atari that most of the Punjabi refugees came through, crossing east to India or west to Pakistan. It was here, in a dingy tourist hotel room on the border, that two 70 year-old Sikh men, Santokh Singh and Harjeet Singh, told me what they did one afternoon 50 years ago, when their minds went mad.