What happened to the Partition people afterwards? These short stories imagine their future

In the acknowledgements to her collection of stories, An Unrestored Woman, Rao writes about Partition: that other side of the independence story of 1947, when India was divided into two nations and overnight, families and homes, were torn asunder.

Partition’s storytellers

Partition’s stories, or rather its many tragedies, which saw many deaths and refugees – some of whom would remain forever unaccounted for – were resurrected in a way from the late 1980s onward. Eloquent oral histories of that time of sudden journeys and desperate separations were documented by Urvashi Butalia and also by Ritu Menon, Jasodhara Bagchi and others. But the lasting permanence of Partition and its horrors was guaranteed when the works of Saadat Hasan Manto began to be widely translated around this time, from Urdu to English and other languages.

Manto, more than any other writer of his time or even later, wrote in a surreal and grim way of Partition’s victims; how Partition, in an ironic, even tragicomic way, affected the lives of the truly marginal, and how lives once torn could never really be re-created or rebuilt the same way.

Rao’s stories are linked in an interesting way; every two stories are conjoined to each other. But in seeking to set these stories within the thematic overview of Partition, Rao takes on an ambitious task – one that does invite a comparison to Manto.

In his memorable stories (and Manto gave this period and its stories a fictional reality), Toba Tek Singh, Thanda Gosht or Titwal Ka Kutta, for example, Manto depicts the strange, grotesque horrors that came with Partition. An unexpected turn in history, which Partition was, made everyone who was witness and participant to it, “not-human” in some way. Writers often use the word “cathexis” to depict the hard-to-describe tension that permeates stories; Manto’s stories have this and then much more.

Rao begins her story with Neela, the “Unrestored Woman” of her title. A word Rao chooses deliberately, one in preference to the word used then, “recovered” – for all the women, and also children, rescued from the other side and “returned” to their families, as per the Abducted Persons Act of 1949. And while some of Rao’s stories do concern themselves with Partition’s tragic victims – for instance, the women and children in the lead story and in Kavita and Mustafa (a story that also made it to the Best American Stories for 2015) – the others only touch fleetingly on this theme, often only nominally.

Stories that move places

Take the two stories featuring the police constable Jenkins, for instance. In The Imperial Police, Jenkins has been transferred in some disgrace to Rawalpindi. This is for an aberration that is only hinted at, but as the reader understands it, Jenkins has nursed his guilty secret since childhood, a secret he was punished for. Yet, in a turbulent period when riots between communities have broken out in Rawalpindi, Jenkins finds an inexplicable tormenting attraction towards a subordinate officer, Abheet Singh.

It is a story that demands a second reading, replete as it is with Singh’s own “secret” aberrant behaviour, one that his widow only hints at when she meets Jenkins. The next story, Unleashed, travels farther away in time and place to New York and Jenkins this time figures as a kindly doorman who time and again comes to the rescue of the unhappy narrator, a tenant in an apartment who has just discovered that her husband and her sister are having a affair.

Almost a similar conceit appears in the linked stories, Kavita and Mustafa and Curfew. With the help of his pebbles, Mustafa, the alert young boy, alerts Kavita, the young wife, to the periodic movement of the robber guards who have forced their refugee train to a halt somewhere before the border to India. Having lost their families to the carnage that both know will ensue, once they have escaped the train, Kavita and Mustafa travel toward East Pakistan, knowing “what happened to us, it’s ours…” And that they must never allude to it.

And so Mustafa never does, though in the very next story, Curfew, he (albeit unnamed) appears in London, several decades later, as Safia’s grandfather. He never tells Safia the story behind his sudden sadness as the pebble he has always treasured disappears into a river through Safia’s inadvertent moves.

In Rao’s other stories, there are those seeking to make a new life for themselves, like Renu who escapes from her two lovers – the diamond merchant and his wife – to Durban in South Africa; and Zubaida in Blindfold, who escapes from the brothel in Peshawar, in a way almost similar to Renu’s.

There are also refugees like Arya and her husband, the narrator in the story The Road to Mirpur Khas who will offer “anything” just to stave away the ugly, gnawing hunger they feel inside themselves.

Partition’s villains who also turn out to be victims – cartographers who drew the border lines – appear in the two conjoined stories, The Opposite of Sex and Such A Mighty River. In the first, Mohan’s attraction to a woman leads him to manipulate the border lines in the east. Something he is censured for by his superior, Alok Debnath, the one with the strangely mesmerising sixth finger. Debnath himself appears almost thirty years later in the next story, a man afflicted with Alzheimer’s, wandering the streets of Benares while believing himself to be in Calcutta and looking for his long dead wife.

Of moments and their evanescence

Sometimes Rao might appear to be trying too hard to bring in the Partition motif. Yet she brings alive, in a poignant and haunting way, those unexpected moments of happiness, the bursts of light in lives otherwise dark, the memories that linger and stand out – all of which individuals hold onto like “pebbles” or “thin ribbons” when all else is lost.

Thus Renu, travelling alone out of the refugee camp, disguised as a man, remembers those moments of happiness in her young married life with her husband, Gopichand.

She’d gazed like that, with his arms around her, and imagined that they would stand that way forever. Not literally of course, but that the Shivaliks would stand like they always stood, whipped and creamy like clotted ghee, and that the dandelions would bend like baby’s heads in the northeasterly wind, and that she would be a farmer’s wife, with its days of toil and earth and anguish, measuring the rain as one measures sugar into a teacup, with care and constancy, and by the spoonful.

There is the old woman in the government women’s hostel on Khalsa Road in Thin Ribbon, who remembers those precious moments of joy with her infant daughter; the tragically forgetful Debnath, with memories of his youthful married days that appear fleetingly through the fog of his disappearing memories; and how Neela remembers those stolen moments of happiness with Renu in the refugee camp.

Partitions within

Partition – as Manto has reminded us and Rao does too – was a gruesome event that left no one unaffected; it created separations and divisions, and then it also divided people within. But perhaps Partition is also a metaphor, standing in for the many ways human beings remain divided from each other, making it an inexorable fact of life. As Rao writes in Curfew, the very last story of all, Safia wonders to herself if she really did the right thing in defying her family to marry Ethan.

Maybe people of different races weren’t meant to marry. Maybe their babies died. The thought made sense, in a way. We’d roamed away from each other all those thousands of years ago; there must’ve been a reason. There must’ve been an explanation.

It is a story that ends in hope, however. As Safia runs with Ethan toward a monastery whose doors are rapidly closing, its light dimming – light and its fleeting appearances having appeared as a motif in several stories – she realises that it offers a beginning of sorts. People left the places where they were born; they ventured out, defenceless and vulnerable, to make their own journeys’ and there always had to be, as a matter of necessity, new beginnings.

An Unrestored Woman, Shobha Rao, Hachette.