The following is a news story that appeared in India Today in august 1997
These are true-life tales of families separated during Partition, building their separate lives across the India-Pakistan border, and then finding each other through determination and luck. Principal Correspondent Ramesh Vinayak and Senior Photographer Saibal Das tracked down a few such families in India, and Associate Editor Harinder Baweja and Chief Photographer Dilip Banerjee followed up in Pakistan. India Today also got a brother and sister who had not met for 50 years to finally catch up one day in June, at the Wagah border.
Pic: Saibal Das
THE frail, stooping frame stood inches short of the white line on the road. It’s called Zero Line, a no man’s land that divides India and Pakistan at Wagah border, near Amritsar. That divide, as much as a chasm caused by unfortunate history, had prevented Shamli Bai, 75, from meeting her brother Veer Bhan – now Sheikh Imam Buksh of Mouza Kot Khalifa, district Bahawalpur, Pakistan – a sibling separated in a panicked crowd. Her eyes fixed ahead, Shamli, who lives in Rajpura, near Patiala, scanned the crowds. She was looking for only one person, her Punnu.
Suddenly, one of her nephews spotted an old, diminutive man staring towards the Indian side. A cheer went up: “O aa gaye hain (They have come).” Minutes later, when Pakistani Rangers – along with the Border Security Force, instrumental in this effort – escorted him to the Zero Line where Shamli stood, recognition flickered in their eyes before tears blurred their vision. Shamli, clasping Punnu, let out a faint sob, “Where have you been?”
It’s a question that many splintered families have asked since 1947. Not sure if their family members or a close relative was alive – could they possibly be alive? – after the subcontinent’s worst holocaust in divided Punjab. Parents who left their children for dead. A brother who stayed behind to protect his assets. A sister separated in mob violence. Some have found each other, through searches spanning three to four decades, through laborious word-of-mouth missions helped by Sikh pilgrims visiting shrines in Pakistan, through Pakistanis visiting shrines and family in India. Eventually, letters, photographs and cassettes have criss-crossed the border. Many who stayed back, or were left behind in Pakistan, converted to Islam. They grew up believing in Allah while their families across the border believed in Wahe Guru or Ram. Where generations have caught up with each other to nurture bonds that have no religious or political barriers.
Before the Pakistani Rangers gently pulled Imam Buksh away after 10 minutes, with both families vowing to keep in touch, he muttered: “Sister, destiny separated us, but the Almighty has united us.” Shamli stood looking at the border till she couldn’t see her brother any longer. “He is the same Punnu I had left behind 50 years ago,” was her refrain as she was led away from the border. “So what if he is a Muslim now? It has not changed his blood.”
“I have come from Pakistan where a lady misses
her mother very much.”
THAT night, before the caravan could move further towards Amritsar, running away from village Lubanwala, set ablaze by a mob, violence caught up with them again. And Dharam Kaur survived – again. It was only the next morning when she returned, wearing a veil, that she stumbled upon the bodies of her relatives. But there was one ‘body’ she didn’t find, of her four-year-old daughter, Mohinder Kaur.
Mohinder was in an orphanage by then, a fortunate survivor of unfortunate times, saved by a nurse called Grace who adopted her and renamed her Anwar Sadeeqa. She never knew she was once Mohinder Kaur. Until she got married, when Grace wrote to her, telling her about her real past. Then coincidence stepped in. One day, while travelling in a bus with her youngest daughter, Azmat, Sadeeqa found herself seated next to a Sikh gentleman. Azmat simply reached out, touched him, and called him mamu (maternal uncle). Sadeeqa broke down. The gentleman, Niranjan Singh, himself a part of a divided family – recently reunited with his sister – promised to help find her mother when he returned. On being told that Lubanwala refugees had settled in Kurukshetra, near his home, Niranjan would board a bus every morning and make an announcement: "I have come from Pakistan where a lady misses her mother very much. If any of you is a Lubanwala Sikh, please stand up.‘’ It worked. Through a word-of-mouth network that lies at the core of many post-Partition reunions, Niranjan learnt that Sadeeqa’s parents had survived the Partition violence and settled in Dera Dhupsadi, a tiny hamlet in Kurukshetra.
Niranjan was determined to follow through. Dharam Kaur – now a grandmother with a new family – would spend most nights gazing at the stars, and wondering aloud which one was her lost daughter. One such night, a stranger arrived at her door to deliver a crumpled piece of paper with an incredible, handwritten message: "I, Mohinder Kaur, daughter of Javind Singh, am alive.‘’ Nobody believed it till Niranjan, the messenger, related his chance encounter with Sadeeqa.
Then, in March 1996, Sadeeqa reached Dhupsadi. All she managed to say to Dharam was “Ma”. It was enough. Mother and daughter just clung to each other, before the tears, and then words, flowed. “Fifty years is a long time,” says Dharam Kaur of that reunion. There has been some catching up since; she is just back from Pakistan, having attended the wedding of her granddaughter. And she doesn’t gaze at the night sky any more.
“With Allah’s grace I have learnt about you.
Please don’t part with me now.”
FOR 45 years, all that Niranjan Singh remembered of his sister Surjeet Kaur was the red dress she wore the last time they saw each other, an image that haunted him, a regular replay in his nightmares. But while his parents fought guilt for having given up their ‘Jeeto’ for dead after she was held back by a mob in Shamsa village, Niranjan, now a mason in Panipat, refused to believe she was dead. “A feeling that Jeeto was suffering like me somewhere in Pakistan never left me,” he says.
He even thought of cutting his hair and disguising himself as a Muslim to get across to Pakistan, but decided against it. All he had to work on was the name of the village in Sheikhupura which he had left at the age of 12; Jeeto was 16.
Then, in 1992, while doing marble work on the tomb of a local Muslim saint, Roshan Ali, Niranjan met Ataullah Qureshi, the aged caretaker. On hearing that Qureshi was going to Pakistan, Niranjan, somewhat reluctantly, asked him for help. Qureshi agreed instantly.
One Friday evening, the women of Shamsa directed Qureshi to Padder village, 12 km away, to see Fatima Begum. “When I asked the old woman if her parents were Sikhs, she instantly wept like a child,” he recalls.
It was Jeeto, wife of Abdullah, a farmer, and mother of three daughters and three sons. For Jeeto, now Fatima, who had been visiting Sikh shrines in Pakistan in search of clues about her family, questioning pilgrims from India about her brother’s whereabouts, Qureshi was “like an angel”. Letters followed, but all in Punjabi, and she could not find anyone to read them for four months till she was directed to a Sikh gentleman who had converted and stayed back in Pakistan. Niranjan had an easier time with the letters in Urdu that Jeeto sent – Qureshi helped.
And he still does, as brother and sister correspond in languages that the other doesn’t understand but both have managed to transcend. Niranjan’s most valuable possession is the first letter he got from his sister where she said, “With Allah’s grace I have learnt about you. Please don’t part with me now. So far I have been like a living dead … Meeting you all would be like a new birth for me.”
Finally, in May 1993, Fatima got a visa to visit India. And in her excitement, forgot to inform her family in India of her visit. She just walked in one evening. “Her eyes told me that this old woman in a Pakistani dress is my Jeeto,” says Niranjan of the meeting, and these days he speaks of Fatima as if she were in the next town. Their blind mother would repeatedly touch the face of a daughter lost and found, the 50 years back in a flash. “We wept at our destiny till the tears dried up.”
Then they offered a prayer of gratitude. Fatima to Allah, and Niranjan to Wahe Guru.
“We have an extended family across the Indo-Pak border.”
IT’S a Sunday afternoon. At his residence in an affluent Ludhiana colony, Santokh Singh dials a Pakistan number. As the call to Gujranwala gets through, he starts speaking in chaste Punjabi. No introductions. The conversation skips from an update on the well-being of the family members to the unseasonably hot weather and cricket on both sides. After 15 minutes or so, the burly Sikh, dressed in a typical Pakistani salwar kameez, hangs up the phone declaring, “She was Abida, the daughter-in-law of my cousin brother, Nazeer.”
For Santokh, a bank official, and his Muslim family in Pakistan, the telephone is the main means of nurturing the bond the two families discovered after a 40-year-long separation. “Now, it’s like having an extended family across the India-Pakistan border,” he says.
When the subcontinent split, Shingara Singh, son of an affluent landlord, never imagined – like many others – that it would divide people forever. When communal riots spread, he stayed with his Muslim friends in the hope that his family would return. While his parents and elder brother, Gian Singh, fell to mob violence, his other brother, Barkat Singh, survived to reach India with his family. Shingara embraced Islam to become Chaudhary Sardar Khan – it also saved his property. But he could never reconcile to the separation. Every time the Sikh jathas would visit the gurdwaras in Pakistan, Khan and his son would make inquiries from the pilgrims. Eventually, they were able to discover where the Indian half of their family lived.
Finally, in 1986, Khan’s grandson, Mohammad Alam, came to India to visit Ajmer Sharif – he admits it was the perfect pretext – and though he didn’t have a permit to visit Punjab, went there anyway, and surprised the family when he came and knocked at Barkat Singh’s house in Patiala. “Suddenly, 1947 came alive in our home. There were sobs and smiles at the most unexpected reunion,” recalls Santokh, Barkat’s son.
There is sorrow and sunshine in Pakistan too. "We can’t afford to make telephone calls, but we think about them a lot,‘’ says Chaudhary Nazeer Ahmed, a modestly successful trader, Santokh’s cousin and Khan’s son, who keeps the family ties alive since their fathers died. "What pains me is that the families too are partitioned. But we don’t consider ourselves complete without our family in India.‘’ Nazeer says he will keep trying for a visa to visit India to reciprocate the three trips Santokh and his family have made. And he, like Santokh, hopes their children will keep the link alive.
“I saw my chacha and recognised him immediately. For a moment I thought it was abbu standing at the border.”
THAT day in August, when the mob came to Kanjrur village in Shakargarh subdivision, the Radcliff Line held the fate of the village – divided between India and Pakistan – in the balance. It finally went to India, but by then it had separated the two brothers, Narain Singh and Hazara Singh, and their families.
Scared that his family would be harmed, Narain, then 30, threw his wife and two minor daughters into a well and jumped in after them. Only he survived. Narain was pulled out, dazed, incoherent, and the mob let him be. He roamed the streets, insane with grief. When the clouds cleared, he found himself as Hakim Ali, married to Surjeet Kaur, a Sikh widow who was then called Noor Sufiya – two people who had lost everything, brought together by the sympathetic.
They had three sons who all grew up on stories about their uncle Hazara. “Abbu never forgot his brother,” says Ali’s son, Maqsood Farooqi. "He would spend hours sitting in the courtyard and crying, even on joyous occasions like Id.‘’ The sons took up the task of locating their uncle and finally succeeded in 1988. And Hazara’s daughter came to Pakistan to visit them.
Forty-one years later, Ali, then a respectable Faisalabad contractor and a haji, held his niece, Rajinder Kaur, in his arms and wept like a child. “It was much more satisfying than even meeting General Zia-ul-Haq,” says Gurdeep Singh, her husband, a journalist who interviewed the military dictator during the trip. A generation later, and four years after Ali’s death, the bonds are still being nurtured. Farooqi breaks down each time he talks of his family in India.
Until June, he had seen them only in photographs. Then, in a meeting arranged by india today, he finally met his uncle Hazara, now 80 – along with the two families – at the Wagah border. “I saw my chacha (paternal uncle) and recognised him immediately,” says Farooqi. "For a moment I thought it was abbu standing at the border.‘’
Hazara Singh was too moved to talk. There were more sobs than words as he hugged his nieces and nephews. As dusk fell and the gates were closing on the border and the families, Hazara could only look skywards at a flock of birds crossing over and, voice quivering, say, “Hum se to yeh parindey achhe hein, koi border nahin in ke liye (These birds are better off than us, there are no borders for them).”
“I will surely go to Pakistan to meet my sister… she will cook for me and we will sit together and sing…”
A feeble voice breaks the hushed silence in the room. “Veerji, sat sri akal, ki haal hey tuhadda? (Brother, how are you?).” The brother, instinctively, folds his hands, bows his head, and murmurs a "Sat sri akal’’ in return.
It’s an ordinary audio cassette. But ever since it arrived from Pakistan about a year ago, life has changed for a family living in a narrow bylane of Katra Munshian in Amritsar. They prefer not to listen. It makes Kartar Singh cry.
But he wants it played over and over again. At 96, that’s the only desire he has left. The cassette is the only contact with his sister, Shivan Wanti, whom he hasn’t seen since Partition; her husband chose to stay back and convert to Islam to save his lands and his life. Kartar sits glued to the tape recorder, surrounded by his family – his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren – as his sister continues: “I can’t bear the separation … sisters have no life without brothers … please come and meet me once … I don’t want to die without seeing you …” Then her daughter’s voice, before dissolving into sobs: “We are helpless. We can’t come to Amritsar because of visa restrictions … I don’t know what it means to have an uncle …” Everyone in the room is weeping.
Across the border, in Duska, some 100 km from Lahore, there is another cassette that makes Shivan’s daughter, Rukia, sob inconsolably. She has never met her mamu jaan and the cassette he has sent her is unintelligible. The old man can barely talk. Nine years ago, her brother went to Amritsar and since, the exchange of a few letters, gifts and the tapes have held the family together.
In Amritsar, the cassette plays out. Kartar Singh, a film of tears on his wrinkled face, replies in a shaky voice: “I will surely go to Pakistan to meet my sister … and then she will cook for me and we will sit together and sing …” Turning to his son, Amrik, he asks: “Is my passport ready?” Red-eyed, Amrik nods. “Before, he was too impoverished to go,” he tells a visitor. “Now, he’s too old.”
It’s also too late. Shivan died eight months ago, four months after she sent the cassette to her brother. “Whenever Ammi fell ill,” says Rukia, "she had only one prayer, that Allah give her a few more days so she could meet her brother once.‘’ The cassette still keeps that hope alive for Kartar Singh, unaware that his sister’s voice in a scratchy recording is the closest he will ever get to her.
“I have blood relations across the border.
Who will nurture these links after my death?”
AGE has dimmed his vision but not his memories. A simple query, of whether he has any relatives in Pakistan, stirs Atma Singh deeply. "Half of me is still there,‘’ he sighs. When his brother Ismail Khan was still alive, seven years ago, going to Pakistan was more than a pilgrimage. “It sustained my soul.”
It still does. He clutches at a frayed black bag, its contents as precious as memories of his brother Tarlok Singh – or Ismail Khan. Smudged photographs, letters in Urdu, the expired passport, his nephew Riaz’s letters. And like many people, suspicious of visitors who ask too much. "I am not a smuggler or a spy, I have blood relations across the border,‘’ he grumbles, gathering up the pieces that are his life.
Life then, in pre-Partition days, when Tarlok and he lived a rural life in Lyallpur. Life now, when Atma is still as obsessive about his trips to Pakistan as he was when Ismail was alive. In the 20 times that he has crossed the border, Atma has come to be respected as the grand old man among three generations of kin in Pakistan, the patriarch, and the brother of Ismail who chose to stay back in Pakistan, embrace Islam and marry a local girl. “Whenever I visit my relations in Pakistan, the locals treat me like a vip,” says Atma. Among those who warmly greet him during his visits to Pakistan are the old Muslims who had migrated from Ram Diwali, a remote village in Amritsar district. “They even enquire about the trees in their pre-Partition village.”
Recently, when Atma learnt about the death of one of his grand-nephews in Pakistan, he quickly packed up his bags after getting a visa, but deteriorating health held him back. “I regret not being with them in their hour of grief,” he rues. He was missed in Pakistan too, his nephew Riaz writing to him, “Please come once to console your grieving daughter. Your blessings may lessen her grief.”
Atma is a worried man today. His sons and grandsons are not keen on their blood relations in Pakistan. “Who will nurture these links after my death?” asks the old man, clutching at the letters and a loose shirt that Tarlok had sent him, one he has never worn. At 90, he has two wishes: that his family’s ties with Pakistan don’t end with his death. And that he wears that shirt on his last journey.