Looking for Razia
by Uma Krishnaswami http://www.chowk.com/bin/showa.cgi?ukrishnaswami_jun0200
A Partition story turns out not to have an ending – yet. Some months ago, a group of writers invited me to do a short story for a middle-grade children’s collection, on girls coming of age in different cultures. Now those of us South Asians who have wandered physically away from the subcontinent often find it annoying to be placed in the
position of honorary cultural ambassadors. So being in the middle of other projects, I placed this one on the bottom of my mental pile, thinking if I ignored the request it might go away. But it didn’t. Even as I tried to tell my writer friends that I didn’t really have a story for this theme, one worked itself into my brain cells and tugged at my consciousness until I finally gave in and wrote it.
The story turned out to be a multigenerational one – grandmother, mother and daughter, in 47 Delhi, 68 Poona and 99 Baltimore respectively. The grandmother’s story is set against the backdrop of (what else?) Partition. She loses a friend whose family leaves suddenly. It was all loosely based on anecdotes from my mother. Through the years I had tripped my childhood way across a very different Delhi, this subtext appeared to have written itself into me, emerging now as a piece that got titled “The Gift.”
I sent it off, then moved on to other things. This March, when my parents came to visit us in the U.S., I showed my mother the story, thinking perhaps she could help me fix factual errors I might have overlooked. That would be useful, if the story ever actually found print.
I was unprepared for her very emotional reaction. I hadn’t realized what I was writing was as close to reality as it turned out to be. Well, stories have a funny way of interacting with what’s “real,” so as my mother settled into my kitchen, organized my spices, and tactfully refrained from commenting on my lack of housekeeping skills, we began to talk.
The young woman my mother lost touch with, was Razia Zafar. One week they were the best of friends, in the way that young women can bond with each other across boundaries, nurturing a friendship begun at the age of thirteen, recognizing common feelings, laughing at the same silliness. Then suddenly it was all over. A book my mother gave her friend was returned by a brother with no explanation. The Radcliffe Commission had done its job. Razia’s family left for Pakistan, and that was that.
Over the years my mother made a few efforts to find her friend again, because how could politics and governments possibly do this to perfectly ordinary, perfectly nice people? At eighteen, the world seems a simple place, governed by personal conviction. Letters from Razia did come across the border for awhile. Then they stopped. Occasionally someone would come and speak in Delhi about trying to trace friends and relatives in Pakistan, but every time my mother tried, Indo-Pak relations would sour and the whole thing would stall.
All right, so there were probably thousands of these stories, many much more traumatic than this one. Novels have been written on the subject, movies made – how could this little anecdote possibly compare? But here’s the point I’m wandering towards. Now we have the Internet, and I’ve written a story only to find it’s not as fictional as I’d thought. And my mother, at seventy-one, is beginning to wonder again if she might possibly find her friend after all. Now there’s Chowk, RIGHT?
So here’s who we’re looking for, and I will let my Amma say this her way: “My name is Vasantha Krishnaswami. The maiden name of my friend was Razia Zafar. Razia’s father’s name was S.M. Zafar. He was an official (possibly a Deputy Secretary, I don’t exactly remember) in the then Government of India. We were together in St. Thomas School in Delhi – the principal at the time was Miss. Helen H. D. Jerwood. Razia had a sister named Qudsia, and two brothers, Shamim and Nasim. I have a photograph taken on the Ridge in Delhi – a painting class we were in with Iris Khan, sometime in 1945 or 46. For some years after the family settled down in Karachi, they lived in Clifton, Bunder Road, Karachi. I remember clearly she got married to a navy officer by name Bashir Ahmad Chaudhury. He was a captain at the time they married in Karachi, and there was a wedding photo in the Illustrated Weekly of India – her way of notifying old friends. Our last correspondence was in February or March 1948, soon after Gandhi’s assassination. After that I lost touch with her. I wrote, and got no replies. I would be so pleased if I could find some way to get in touch with this old friend again. She would be around 70 years old now.”
So there it is. The Partition story I never knew I knew.
Razia (Zafar) Chaudhury, are you out there? Mother or grandmother or neighbor or friend to someone skimming through this piece, looking for the point? Send me an e-mail, will you, at [email protected]? Forward this to folks you know. My mother’s not about to give up yet.
Uma Krishnaswami lives and writes for children in northwestern New Mexico, U.S.A.