Some time before Partition, my father, an employee of the railways in Bombay, had opted to go to Pakistan when the time came. Many years later, as a young man struggling to come to terms with the abiding sorrows of Southasia, I asked him why he had made that choice. Well, he had thought that if he were to be posted to Lahore, the distance to our hometown in North India would be shorter, making the annual trip less of a hassle. But realities that had initially not tainted his dreams began to assert themselves as the moment of freedom drew closer. I was a child of about nine when we left Bombay, exactly on 15 August 1947, surrounded by street celebrations.
We were headed, by train, to our hometown, a qasba that is actually significantly less than a town. My father left the family there, and ventured alone into the unknown, his destination being Lahore. He had just boarded his train at the Delhi station when a friend persuaded him to accompany him on the next trip. The train that he did not take was attacked, and its passengers slaughtered before it reached Lahore.
He was posted in Karachi, and came back to take us there, via Bombay and by sea. During the course of the fifty years that he lived after that arrival in early 1948, he visited his hometown just three times. My mother had only one sister, who stayed back in India with her family. The two sisters could only meet in person on those three occasions. A telephone call, before the recent revolution in telecommunications, would leave my mother in tears, and she would stay sad for days thereafter. I have been to India a number of times, but always in order to attend conferences, to talk about the imperatives of peace and a rational visa regime to allow people-to-people contact. It was only in June 2006 that I was in Bombay – now Mumbai – with a delegation. I was there as a foreigner, as a Pakistani citizen.
What made this visit emotionally overwhelming was that I was able, with the help of a local journalist, to find the chawl in Mahim where we had lived. Across the chasm of nearly 60 years, I struggled to recover an entire treasure of lost memories. I also realised that this experience, which only poets and novelists can really explore, was not so unique. Millions of such encounters and linkages constitute the ragged human backdrop to the modern history of Southasia. I wrote a column about this visit, which was reproduced in a major Indian newspaper, and I subsequently received e-mails from some old residents of Mumbai, who had spent their childhoods in Karachi.