Lahore, love and loss: Why a Partition-theme film sparked memories of my parents’ difficult romance

When I watched Main Vaapas Aaunga with school friends recently, it felt almost as if my ancestors were asking me to come back home to Lahore.

A young couple sitting next to me were asking one another whether the story was based on fact or fiction. My answer to them: regardless of the details, the movie did capture the texture of some lives affected by Partition, such as those of my father and mother.

In many ways my parents’ story is quite different from that of Keenu and Afsan in the film. Unlike Keenu and Afsan, they were able to find a life together after Partition. They were both Hindu. And neither of them expressed a wish to return to the Lahore they had grown up in.

For my mother it was fear; for my father it would be like visiting a ghost.

But there were other resonances. Like Keenu, my mother developed severe dementia late in life, and in that phase, she became lost in Lahore. One day she looked really busy. I asked her what she was doing. She said, “I have a lot of work to do. Everything is all over the place. Taji’s clothes have to be put back in the cupboard”. (The family always referred to her father as Taji, short for Pitaji.)

A few days later she said, “Are you coming with me to Lahore?” I tried to explain that she needed a visa. She got really upset. “You are always so negative,” she said. “I am driving with William [her driver] to Lahore. I will go alone if you don’t want to come.”

Some months later, I told her I was going shopping for a sofa. “Don’t buy one. I have one at home,” she said. “You can take it.” The sofa she had in mind had been left behind in Rattigan Road more than 60 years ago.

Alok Sarin, our wonderful psychiatrist, told us that we should not contradict her. She died in June 2019 with memories of Lahore firmly etched in her mind.

My mother was a grandchild of the well-known public figure, Professor Ruchi Ram Sahni and grew up in a large compound on 22 Rattigan Road, adjoining Bradlaugh Hall. By June 1947, her uncles had persuaded Ruchi Ram Sahni to leave for Bombay. As a result only her family was left in the large compound.

Every day vehicles full of young people shouting “Pakistan leke rahenge” and “Allah o Akbar” passed on the streets. We will take Pakistan. God is Great.

This would be followed by saffron-clothed mobs shouting “Har Har Mahadev”, hail Lord Shiva.

She used to tell us how frightening it was to be living in Lahore those days, watching the city burn from their roof-top, not knowing who had left, who was still around and who had died.

At night, she and her older brother would keep vigil on the roof. The lights would be switched off and they could hear armed people moving around the compound.

My mother’s father was a small-time journalist and editor, not a very successful one at that – he had to keep selling family jewelry to run his printing press. When my Nani pressed him to leave Lahore like her other relatives, he refused.

“Where will we go?” he retorted. “I have a printing press. We can’t carry it with us to India. In any case, Hindus have lived under Mughal rule for centuries. We can also continue to live in Lahore under Muslim rule. The Sikhs have been living in Afghanistan for generations and they seem to be fine.”

One day my mother was warned in college by her Muslim classmates that her father was on a “hit list” and should leave Lahore immediately. She never forgave herself for not passing on this message to him. He was apparently a target because of his efforts to persuade his Hindu friends to stay on.

On August 14, 1947, as he was returning home for lunch, he was stabbed by a mob just outside his house. He cried out, “Marra gaya, marra gaya.” I have been hit.

My mother and her older brother rushed to the gate, where they saw him die before their eyes. They could not reach him because they were pushed back by the crowd that had gathered on the busy road. Later they were told that some workers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had picked up the body and had performed his last rites.

The family jumped over the broken wall into the compound of Bradlaugh Hall where they were rescued by some army personnel.

The family was lucky to escape to Ferozepur, and then to Lucknow, where they stayed in the house of her uncle, the scientist Birbal Sahni. My mother was almost 20.

My father had seen my mother at a wedding in Lahore and decided that he was going to marry her. But they belonged to different castes. His father, a senior government official, wanted his son to marry a woman from a wealthy family, since he himself was a self-made man. When he learnt about this budding romance, he got my father a job in Simla, hoping that he would forget my mother.

The day before my father was to leave for Simla, he took the bold step of visiting my mother at her home and gifting her a book of love poems by Omar Khayyam. Mum was too scared to accept a gift from a man, largely because her own father would have been very upset at this. But they promised to stay in touch.

But then came Partition and my father could not go back to Lahore. His father, meanwhile, was comfortably placed in Delhi in a huge property, which is now the Iranian Cultural Centre.

In Simla, my father learnt about the killing of my mother’s father from The Times of India, but had no news about the others. He left immediately for Delhi, hoping to find my mother.

Every evening after work, he would make the rounds of Connaught Place, hoping to meet someone who could give him news. Then one day by chance he bumped into Mum’s older brother and learnt the story of their escape from Lahore to Ferozepur. (Mum used to tell us that it was the worst monsoon she had ever experienced; the rivulets they could see were red with the blood of dead refugees.)

Dad was desperate to meet my mum. Knowing that his father would not give him money for the train ticket, he sold his watch and landed up in Lucknow, where they had moved from Ferozepur. It was winter and bitterly cold, and she had no warm clothes.

She later explained to him that while leaving Lahore; she had hastily packed only a few vessels and the clothes that were easily accessible. She was able to load only a few trunks in the truck on which they escaped to Ferozepur. She had assumed they contained warm clothes; instead, they contained phulkaris that her paternal grandmother had embroidered in Chakwal in the late 1880s under candle light).

My father bought her a coat, and later escorted her to Amritsar so that she could sit for her final MA exam – because of sporadic rioting, it was not safe for her to travel alone.

My mother had a difficult time trying to support her family with teaching jobs; she was young and beautiful and faced harassment from male colleagues. PG accommodation was not safe for her. She moved from job to job – Sitapur to the Patna Women’s College and finally, back to Lucknow because it was not safe for her to live alone.

There was more to the story of their romance and the problems they faced, as I realised when I found in the packet of letters they exchanged in the late 1940s.

But marry they did in June 1950, in the face of great resistance from my father’s family.

Mum insisted on a civil marriage because she didn’t want her brother to be indebted by a traditional wedding. No dowry, she told my father: she was only going to come with her own clothes and bedding.

We grew up in Delhi, where my parents lived and died, with stories of Lahore, love, and loss. And that is why Main Vaapas Aaunga hit so close to home.

Neera Burra is a sociologist, an amateur historian and a writer of this and that. Her latest book, an edited volume, is titled A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab: Ruchi Ram Sahni 1863-1948 (2017), Oxford University Press, Delhi. Her other book is Born to Work. Child Labour in India (1997), Oxford University Press, Delhi. Her blog can be accessed here. Her email address is neeraburra@gmail.com.