By Priyam Moonka
For those of us who read extensively about the Partition of India and Pakistan, the pain that it comes with becomes a part of us. This pain, which is usually considered a thing of the past, has an overwhelming presence in all our days, and rightly so. It reflects in our choice of movies, books, conversations, and thoughts. This is how we attract more pain, knowingly and unknowingly, and before we know it, the pain that belonged to someone else becomes ours. But do we stop? We don’t. We cannot; letting go of what’s our own has never been easy. So everything that comes with this ownership continues to linger. As writers, we often romanticise pain, but let’s just say it is because we feel too much.
The series of events that led to, followed, and continue to follow the vivisection of the Indian Subcontinent evoke a sense of pain that feels very personal. It is this personal nature of my pain that has led me on a journey of documenting the stories of the survivors of the Partition in 1947 and their families. Violence in the name of religion has been common to all the Partition narratives that I have documented to date. Throughout this ongoing documentation process, I have seen myself transforming- new opinions, emotions, and perceptions of everything around me. It took an awfully ugly dream for me to realise the impact that the horrifying memories I was now privy to were having on me. In this dream, I find myself in the shoes of a victim of the terrors of communal violence. All of us have so many dreams, but we forget about most of them as soon as we wake up. But there are a few that stay with us forever. Allow me to take you through all that I saw, heard, and felt.
In that nasty, imaginary space in my head, I find myself in a room full of people. I know two of them. They are my friends from college. We are in my hometown. A discussion is on one between my friends and me and the other between everyone else. The three of us are like that. We’re always talking, giggling, and sometimes we forget about everything around us. This is one such case. We are in our own world. Suddenly, I feel a strange tension in the air. A split second later, I hear an unfamiliar voice. ‘RUN!’ Someone pushes me towards one of the two exits of the building in which we are stuck. My friends are nowhere to be seen. I do not think I’ll be able to make my way out alive. But somehow, I do. My house is around a hundred metres away on the same street. But I can not take this straight route; it is all but safe. There is no time to think. I take another route- longer but safer, and I run for my life. While I’m still running breathlessly, I realise that I’ve lost my way. I have come far from home. I am panting; I can’t do this anymore, but I want to live and so I keep going. I take a rickshaw. I am petrified; I want to be invisible. I ask the rickshaw-wala to hurry, to take me away from my horrifying surroundings. I pass by a street where fruit-sellers have their stalls lined up on both sides. I see a few ruffians approaching. They have knives in their hands; some of them have guns. One of them goes up to a fruit-seller, lifts his brawny arm to slit the poor man’s throat. The man dies with his eyes wide open. My heart hurts; I stretch my hand towards them as if trying to stop this, but in vain. I pull it back immediately. I do not want to be noticed. There were no questions asked, nothing was said. The soorma in his eyes had spoken for itself. The other goons follow suit, and in a heartbeat, they’re all gone-those innocent men who will never know what their fault was. As far as the human eye can see, I cannot spot a single man with a soorma and a skullcap. Not one of them was excused. I cry with my hands covering my mouth; I don’t want to be heard. This is unfair. They did not deserve to die. By now, I have understood that this is about religion.
On reflection, I recall an episode similar to this one. My grandfather had once told me about the communal riots that had happened in our hometown many years back. Hindus had been subjected to violence in Pakistan, and that had infuriated the Hindus in India. Hindu fundamentalists had burned down the houses and stores belonging to Indian Muslims, who were innocent and had nothing to do with what had happened in Pakistan. But the feeling of vengeance had taken over, erasing the line between right and wrong, good and bad. My grandfather had also mentioned going to a refugee camp that was set up for a community of Muslim fruit-sellers who had lost their homes. The contents of the dream were now making sense.
The rickshaw keeps moving. My eyes witnessed a sight, ghastly and barbaric beyond measure. A middle-aged Sikh is being forced to cut his hair. His eyes are full of tears, his heart is full of misery; he seems lifeless. In losing his Kesh-symbolic of his devotion to God, he is losing himself. The world stops making sense. Is this what religion is for? Does religion decide who lives and who does not? This world, devoid of humanity, should cease to exist. All these men with hearts of stone should cease to exist.
It took little thinking to comprehend why something like this was a part of the nightmare. In 1984, reason had lost its way when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her bodyguards, both Sardars. The Sikh community in the rest of the country had nothing to do with it, and yet thousands of them were mercilessly burnt alive, killed, raped, murdered. The world calls it the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots. Riot is not the right word, massacre and genocide are. A few of my interviewee’s families had lived through both- the Partition and the 1984 Sikh Massacre. Their stories, and so many others that I have heard, read and watched, have stayed with me and continue to make my heartache and my blood boil.
What happens to me, a Hindu, in the dream? I am still alive. I feel like all of a sudden, ‘A Hindu’ has become my new identity, and it has started to seem like my only identity. Should I thank my stars because being a Hindu would probably save my life, or curse myself for being a mere spectator while there is so much suffering around? Before I can decide, I hear a loud thud. A few of those wicked, bloodthirsty men stopped my rickshaw. They get in. I tremble in fear. I try to explain that I am a Hindu. How do I prove it? I show them my Durga locket. They pay no heed. These inhuman creatures do not wait to ask one’s religion, only destruction quenches their thirst. This cannot be the end. I am so young. My entire life is ahead of me. I want to go home. I cry; I scream. But in the end, violence and hatred spare no one. Not a Muslim;not a Sikh; not a Hindu. Where there is hatred, extremism and the motive of destruction, no one is safe, whichever religion they may belong to.
As I think about the relevance of the dream, and how accurately it connects various events from the past and the present and gives them an order that makes sense, I am not surprised. It is a perfect example of how what we consume, in any form, constantly shapes our subconscious mind. Every time I listened to someone share their story with me, I remember being in two different time zones at the same time-the 1920s/30s/40s and the present. Selective memory plays a significant role here. My interviewees would not remember what they’d had for breakfast that morning, but would still go on for hours about an incident that took place seventy years back. Tears would roll down their cheeks for the nth time, because of the same poignant memory of an event, decades old. Similarly, out of everything that I have heard, read, and seen over the years, my subconscious mind has chosen to become the permanent home to a few elements that I now believe will stay with me forever, and that is evident in the experience that I have shared. Memory is fascinating; I am constantly learning and unlearning, remembering and forgetting, forming new ideas and discarding old ones.I find myself destroying the borders that once existed in my mind, and that is the most I may do. If only destroying ‘actual’ borders was this easy. But these borders are temporary, unlike memories, which are borderless and become permanent once passed down.
Each time someone shares with me their story, which has stayed in the depths of their heart forever, my heart becomes fuller. It becomes heavier with gratitude for the gift of memory, the most prized possession of all. And what do I have to offer in return? The promise of safekeeping.
Author bio:
Priyam is an independent researcher and an aspiring writer. She documents narratives of the Partition diaspora. Through her writing, she condemns violence in the name of religion. She is a history buff who loves to read and study South Asian history and culture. She believes that there are umpteen stories around each of us, waiting to be found and told. Her work is an attempt to find these stories that were always around, yet unheard or forgotten.
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