Saturday, 5 November 2016
Mighty Thoughts: Unreal Real...
Mighty Thoughts: Unreal Real...: Unreal Reality The story of independence is a well known phenomenon of history that leads us to ...
Unreal Reality
The story of independence is a well known phenomenon of
history that leads us to the present. Accounts of miseries, struggles and
sacrifices can be made available by the living people of that era or the countless
books quoting the struggle for freedom and inception of nations.
Apart from political missions, conferences, leader’s decisions
and platform arrangements; there were numerous other responsible for this act
of freedom, which were not only badly affected physically but also
psychologically for their later lives. The mass exodus, resulting due to
partition, gave us real moving stories based on the people’s lives.
Intercommunal killings in Punjab and other provinces/states,
the flight of refugees, the train massacres, the rape and abduction of women
from all the communities are dreadful nightmares; still sending us shivers down
the spine.
Here’s a recount based primarily on particular experiences selected
from those recounted by over four hundred refugees from both sides (India and
Pakistan) interviewed in the course of the research of the book being used by
me for reference (mentioned in references section later).
------------------------------------------------
The Punjab, October 1947
Boota Singh, a fifty-five-year-old Sikh veteran of
Mountbatten’s Burma campaign, was working his fields one September afternoon
when he heard a terrified scream behind him. He turned to see a young girl
pursued by a fellow Sikh, rushing toward him. The girl threw herself at Boota
Singh, begging “Save me! Save me!”
He stepped between the girl and her captor. He understood
instantly what had happened. The girl was a Muslim whom the Sikh had seized from
a passing refugee column. This wholly unexpected intrusion of the province’s
miseries upon his plot of land offered Boota Singh a providential opportunity
to resolve the problem most oppressing him, his own solitude. He was a shy man who
had never married – first, because of his family’s inability to purchase him a
wife; then, because of his natural timidity.
“How much?” he asked the girl’s captor.
“Fifteen hundred rupees”, was the answer.
Boots Singh did not even bargain. He went into his hut and
returned with a soiled pile of rupee notes. The girl who those banknotes
purchased was seventeen years old, thirty-eight years his junior. Her name was
Zenib; she was the daughter of sharecroppers in Rajasthan. To the lonely old
Sikh she became a kind adorable plaything, half daughter, half mistress, a wondrous
presence who completely disrupted his life. The affection he had never been
able to bestow burst over Zenib in a flood tide. Every other day Boota Singh
was off to the nearest bazaar to buy her some bauble: a sari, a bar of soap, a
pair of embroidered slippers.
To Zenib, who had been beaten and raped before her flight,
the compassion and tenderness poured out to her by the lonely old Sikh who had
purchased her for 1,500 rupees was as overwhelming as it was unexpected.
Inevitably her response was a grateful affection to the man who had saved her,
and she quickly became the pole around which Boota Singh’s life turned. She was
with him in his fields during the day, milked his water buffalos at sunup and
sundown, lay with him at night. Sixteen miles from their hut, the wretched
tides of the refugees flowed up and down the Grand Trunk Highway.
One day that fall, well before the dawn, as Sikh tradition
dictated, a strange melody of flutes advanced down the road to Boota Singh’s house.
Surrounded by singers and neighbors carrying sputtering torches, astride a
horse harnessed in velvet and bangles, Boota Singh rode up to the doorsteps of
his own home to claim the little Moslem girl as his bride.
A guru bearing the Granath Sahib, the Sikh holy book,
followed him into the house, where Zenab waited; trembling in the new sari he
had bought her. Radiant with happiness, his head covered in a new scarlet
turban, Boota Singh squatted beside Zenab on the floor of his house. The priest
explained to them the obligations of married life. Then, with the gathering
intoning his praises after him, he read from the sacred texts.
When he had finished, Boota Singh stood up and clutched one
end of an embroidered sash; Zenab clutched the other. Four times, Zenab
followed him in lawans, four mystic circumambulations of the holy book. At
the instant the fourth circle was joined, they were married. Outside, the sun
of another day rose over their fields.
A few weeks later the season that had brought so much horror
and hardship to his fellow Punjabis bestowed a last gift on Boota Singh. His wife
announced that she was bearing the heir he had despaired of ever having. It was
as though some special providence had singled out the elderly Sikh and the
Moslem girl for its blessings. That was not the case. For that unlikely couple,
a long and cruel ordeal, which would one day become for millions the symbols of
the evils of partition, was soon to begin.
-------------------------------------------------
The
Punjab, August 1948
Eleven months after their marriage, a daughter was born to
Boota Singh and Zenib, the wife he had purchased for 1,500 rupees. Following
Sikh custom, Boota Singh opened the Sikh holy book, the Granth Sahib, at random
and gave his daughter a name beginning with the first letter of the word he
found at the top of the page. The letter was a “T” and he chose Tanveer (“Miracle
of the Sky”).
Several years later, a pair of Boota Singh’s nephew, furious
at the thought of losing a chance to inherit his property, reported Zenib’s
presence to the authorities trying to locate women abducted during the exodus. Zenib was wrenched from Boota Sing and placed
in a camp, while efforts were made to locate her family in Pakistan.
Desperate, Boota Singh rushed to New Delhi and accomplished
at the Grand Mosque the most difficult act a Sikh could perform. He cut his
hair and became a Moslem. Renamed Jamil Ahmed, Boota Singh presented himself at
the office of Pakistan’s High Commissioner and demanded the return of his wife.
It was a useless gesture.
The two nations had agreed that an inflexible set of rules
would govern the exchange of abducted women: married or not, they would be
returned to the families from which they had been forcibly separated.
For six months Boota Singh visited his wife daily in the
detention camp. He would sit beside her in silence, weeping for their lost
dream of happiness. Finally, he learned that her family had been located. The
couple embraced in a tearful farewell, Zenib vowing never to forget him and to
return to him and their daughter as soon as she could.
-------------------------------------------------
India,
February 1949
The desperate Boota Singh applied for the right as a Moslem
to immigrate to Pakistan. His application was refused. He applied for a visa.
That, too, was refused. Finally, taking his daughter, renamed Sultana, with
him, he crossed the frontier illegally. Leaving the girl in Lahore, he made his
way to the village where Zenib’s family had settled. There he received a cruel
shock. His wife had been remarried, to a cousin, within hours after the truck
bringing her back from India had deposited her in the village. The poor man,
weeping and begging the authorities to “give me back my wife”, was brutally
beaten by Zenib’s brothers and cousins, then handed over to the police as an
illegal border crosser.
---------------------------------------------------
Pakistan, 1950- 1956
Brought to trial, Boota Singh pleaded that he was a Moslem
and begged the judge to return his wife to him. If only, he said, he could be
granted the right to see his wife, to ask her if she would return to India with
him and their daughter, he would be satisfied.
Moved by his plea, the judge agreed. The confrontation took
place a week later, in a courtroom overflowing with spectators alerted by newspaper
reports of the case. A terrified Zenib, escorted by an angry and possessive
horde of her relatives, was brought into the chamber. The judge indicated Boota
Singh.
“Do you know this man?” he asked.
“Yes”, replied the trembling girl, “he’s Boota Singh, my
first husband.” Then Zenib identified her daughter standing by the elderly
Sikh.
“Do you wish to return with them to India?” the judge asked.
Boota Singh turned his pleading eyes on the young girl who had brought so much happiness
to his life. Behind Zenib, other eyes were fixed on her quivering figure, a
battery of them glaring at her from the audience, the male members of her clan
warning her against trying to renounce the call of her blood. An atrocious
tension gripped the courtroom. His lined face alive with a desperate hope,
Boota Singh watched Zenib’s lips, waiting for the favorable reply he was sure
would come. For an unbearably long moment the room was silent.
Zenib shook her head. “No”, she whispered.
A gasp of anguish escaped Boota Singh. He staggered back
against the railing behind him. When he had regained his poise, he took his
daughter by the hand and crossed the room.
“I cannot deprive you of your daughter, Zenib,” he said.
“I leave her to you.” He took a clump of bills from his
pocket and offered them to his wife along with their daughter. “My life is
finished now,” he said simply.
The judge asked Zenib if she wished to accept his offer of
the custody of their daughter. Again, an agonizing silence filled the
courtroom. From their seats Zenib’s male relatives furiously shook their heads.
They wanted no Sikh blood defiling their community.
Zenib looked at her daughter with eyes of despair. To accept
her would be to condemn her to a life of misery. An awful sob shook her frame.
“No”,
she gasped.
Boota Singh, his eyes overflowing with tears, stood for a
long moment looking at his weeping wife, trying perhaps to fix forever in his
mind the blurred image of her face. Then he tenderly picked up his daughter
and, without turning back, left the courtroom.
The despairing man spent the night weeping and praying in
the mausoleum of the Moslem saint Data Ganj Baksh, while his daughter slept
against a nearby pillar. With the dawn, he took the girl to a nearby bazaar.
There, using the rupees he had offered to his wife the afternoon before, He
bought her a new robe and a pair of sandals embroidered in gold brocade. Then,
hand in hand, the old Sikh and his daughter walked to the nearby railroad
station of Shahdarah. Waiting in the platform for the train to arrive, the
weeping Boota Singh explained to his daughter that she would not see her mother
again.
In the distance, a locomotive’s whistle shrieked. Boota
Singh tenderly picked up his daughter and kissed her. He walked to the edge of
the platform. As the locomotive burst into the station, the little girl felt
her father’s arms tighten around her. Then suddenly, she was plunging forward.
Boota Singh had leaped into the path of the onrushing locomotive. The girl
heard again the roar of the whistle mingled this time with her own screams.
Then she was in the blackness beneath the engine.
Boota Singh was killed instantly, but by a remarkable
miracle his daughter survived unscathed. On the old Sikh’s mutilated corpse,
the police found a blood-soaked farewell note to the young wife who had rejected
him.
“My dear Zenib”, it said, “You listened to the voice of the
multitude, but that voice is never sincere. Still my last wish is to be with
you. Please bury me in your village and come from time to time to put a flower
on my grave”.
Boota Singh’s suicide stirred a wave of emotion in Pakistan,
and his funeral became an event of national importance. Even in death, however,
the elderly Sikh remained a symbol of those terrible days when the Punjab was
in flames and he had thought he was blessed among the suffering because he had
bought happiness for 1,500 rupees. Zenib’s family and the inhabitants of their
village refused to permit Boota Singh’s burial in the village cemetery. The
village males, led by Zenib’s second husband, on February 22, 1957, barred its
entrance to his coffin.
Rather than provoke a riot, the authorities ordered the
coffin and the thousands of Pakistanis touched by Boota Singh’s drama who had
followed it, to return to Lahore. There, under a mountain of flowers, Boota
Singh’s remains were interred.
Zenib’s family, however, enraged by the honor extended to
Boota Singh, sent a commando to Lahore to uproot and profane his tomb. Their
savage action provoked a remarkable outburst from the citites population. Boota
Singh was reinterred under another mountain of flowers. This time hundreds of
Moslems volunteered to guard the graved of the Sikh convert, illustrating with
their generous gesture the hope that time might eventually efface in the Punjab
the bitter heritage of 1947.
----------------------------------------------------
Boota Singh's daughter, Sultana, was adopted and raised by foster parents in Lahore. Today (1975) the mother of three children, she lives in Libya with her engineer husband.
-------------------------------------------------------
The tragedies of partition would not have been completed had
they not been accompanied, as every conflict since the dawn of history, by an
outpouring of sexual savagery. Nearly all of the atrocities cursing the unhappy
province were embellished by their orgy of rape. Tens of thousands of girls and
women were seized from refugee columns, from crowded trains, from isolated
villages, in the most wide-scale kidnapping of modern times.
-----------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES:
Freedom At Midnight a book by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins
Story is taken from a chapter THE GREATEST MIGRATION IN HISTORY and the EPILOGUE section as mentioned by the writers.
Author Yumna Razzaq takes the responsibility of dates and years as are self calculated along with the layout of story, title and certain details.
DISCLAIMER:
This story is for no hate purpose or offence, it's a mere message of realization of the sacrifices laid down by the people of that time.
Indirectly, it is to reflect the psychological aspected and terrific conditions being brought by certain mass change and attitude of general people towards women.
(c) ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED
Thank you
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)