A Pakistani travel writer’s visit to his family’s hometown in India became a memoir of Partition

Alighting from the bus, I was setting foot for the first time in my life on the soil of my hometown. If my destiny had willed any differently I would have been a Jalandhari instead of a Lahori. In Delhi and Solan everyone spoke Urdu (or Hindi, if you please), now at home it was Punjabi all the way – even with the rickshaw-pullers who were mostly from Bihar or UP. They were mostly Muslims and every single one I quizzed came from an oversized family. They all spoke of upward of a dozen siblings, alcoholic fathers, utter poverty and therefore no education in their families.

A week previously, in Amristar, Dr Parminder Singh had instructed me to call him from Solan to ask about my lodgings at Jalandhar. On the phone he said I was to head for Desh Bhagat Yadgar and ask for a Gurmeet Singh, who would have accommodation ready for me. A large property set in sprawling grounds shaded by beautiful spreading trees, the Yadgar comprises a couple of auditoriums, a hostel of some dozen rooms and a busy kitchen.

The hall commemorates martyrs of the 1857 upheaval – Mutiny for the British and War of Independence for the people of the subcontinent. Black and white framed images, some of poor resolution, others better, of those heroes and heroines adorn the walls of a ground floor auditorium. There were also a few paintings, presumably of those whose camera image was not available. If I am not wrong, there would be upward of two hundred images in all.

And unlike us in Pakistan where we sing only of Islam, the commemoration at Desh Bhagat rests on loyalty to the land. It has nothing to do with one’s creed.

Desh Bhagat Yadgar is a non-governmental organization run on donations and is home to jogis (renunciants) of the twentieth century. Like old-time jogis, these men and women have given up everything worldly to keep alive the memory of the martyrs. Gurmeet was one such who administered the organisation. So was a clean-shaven Amolak Singh who, having completed his engineering in 1975, did not care to follow the humdrum life of a good job, ease and worldly wealth. Instead, living a rather spartan life off the meagre earnings of his agricultural lands, he travels around with a drama group enacting patriotic Punjabi plays. Amolak hinted that some of his work was not appreciated by the authorities and there had been times when he had to go underground.

After I was settled in a room in a detached wing of the then deserted premises, I returned to the front office where Gurmeet was conferring with three other Sikh gentlemen. He informed the company of the purpose of my journey and the three responded very warmly. Tea was called for and we talked of Partition: only two of the three older men remembered the time; the third, being too young then, knew only what he had heard. Gurmeet and I were of the post-Partition generation.

Someone asked if I knew where my grandparents’ home was and I pulled out the photocopy of the only photograph of the exterior of the house that my family had kept.

Taken in 1985 by our mamu Abdul Haq, it shows a two-storey house with shops on the ground floor and stylish windows above a cantilevered overhang on the first. Opposite and across the road from it stands a building with a curving façade and a sign reading “Lyallpur Sweets” – which, I believed, would make a specific landmark. Other than that, I knew the house was on Railway Road.

“This was Bhagat Singh Chowk,” Gurmeet said, “and Lyallpur Sweets is no more.” He was not sure if the house I sought would still be there because of the way people were pulling down old properties to raise new multi-storey buildings. Earlier, in Delhi, I had shown the same picture to my friend Ramneek and had mentioned the confectionary shop as a landmark. The hope was that Ramneek, having spent fifteen years of his youth in Jalandhar, would know the place or have friends there who could tell me something about it. Somehow he misunderstood me and instead of the house I sought, he focussed on Lyallpur Sweets thinking my family had something to do with it. Since it had gone out of business many years ago, Ramneek grieved that I had lost what I had come looking for.

Asking the rickshaw-puller to inform me when we turned into Railway Road, I sat in the topless back with the photo in my hand. Back in Lahore, my mother had no idea how far the house was from the railway station, but she had guessed it would be about a “couple of kilometres”. As we trundled along the road, every passing house seemed to be my grandfather’s until we got to Bhagat Singh Chowk.

There it stood across from the chowk, still recognisable from the 1985 photo despite the large signs covering half of the first floor facade. It was still unchanged from that dreadful moment in August 1947 when its owner, Dr Badaruddin, violently passed away from this life. I got off the rickshaw and stood looking at the facade, taking in the detail of the cantilever of the overhang and the fine woodwork of the windows. The mock pilasters separating the windows were worked with flutes and sprang from fountain-shaped devices to rise to capitals that I am at a loss to liken with any style. There were floral and rhomboid shapes on bases and capitals.

The windows had multi-cusped arches in which the spandrels were worked with curvilinear vines. My grandfather must have spent a pretty penny on this woodwork. Above the windows were glass and timber fanlights to permit light into the room even with the windows closed; at the bottom were wrought iron grills. The top floor terrace was hidden behind a cement screen embellished with bracket shapes and stylised esses.

In the centre of this was a whitewashed panel under a pediment shape that once bore the words “Habib Manzil” after my uncle. The name my grandfather had given his home was obliterated by whitewash.

If history had not taken the course it took in August 1947, if the Muslims had not resorted to Direct Action in Bombay and Kolkata in 1946, if Master Tara Singh had not carried out his dreadful promise of a massacre of Muslims in the event of division, if the Muslims of Rawalpindi district had not begun unprovoked attacks on Sikh and Hindu families in March 1947 and if the trains carrying Hindu and Sikh refugees from what was to be Pakistan had not been attacked, Habib Manzil could have been the home where I would have spent part of my life. Standing across the road from Habib Manzil, I almost saw myself looking down from the ornate windows watching the world go by in the street below.

From as far back as I can remember, my father used to say, “Fools build houses; wise men live in them”. All his life he resisted building a house for himself and his family, preferring, instead, to live in large rented premises. But things turned bad in the late 1960s when he was swindled of a substantial sum of money and went bankrupt. Even in adversity, he repeated that same phrase even as we drifted from smaller to smaller homes. Now, standing across the road from my grandfather’s home I knew how Partition had destroyed my father: his father had raised this beautiful edifice in the 1930s and he could only live in it for a decade and a half.

Excerpted with permission from A Time of Madness: A Memoir of Partition, Salman Rashid, Aleph Book Company.