Along the India-Pak Border, Aug 14

As he lay dying in the no-man's land, caught in the cusp of madness and memories, Bishan Singh dreamt of a village called Toba Tek Singh. Decades after the greatest chronicler of Partition, Saadat Hasan Manto, wrote Toba Tek Singh, the story recurs in the lives of people in the villages along the India-Pakistan border.

``Fifty years of Independence means I cannot till my land, grow the crop of my choice or move freely in my village at night,'' says Jaswinder Singh of Jaitpur village. As we tread along the border, we hear different voices, but telling the same story.

At Bamial village in Gurdaspur district, we are at a shouting distance from the Pakistani farmers. To reach Bamial, cut off from the rest of Punjab, we have to cross the Ravi and the journey involves a long detour up to Lakhanpur in Jammu. ``What is azadi if you have to pay toll tax to enter our village from Punjab? Are we not a part of Punjab?'' asks village sarpanch Surinder Singla. ``It took 50 years for journalists to enter our village,'' he says.

The border village still has scars of the 1971 war an Army bunker surrounds an old village temple. North of Bamial, across a rivulet, is Sibal Sakor, a village cut midway by the international border. ``There were houses which had one door opening in Pakistan and another in India,'' Singla remembers.

Walking along the border, drawn by eight-feet wide electrified fence, we reach the twin villages Khudaipur and Jaitpur, five km away. ``As fencing has been done inside Indian territory, a substantial part of our land falls in between the fence and the border,'' says a farmer.

There are even restrictions on farming. The farmers are allowed to till their lands for a few hours a day and a person who goes to work one day cannot go the following day. Only 10 villagers from each village are allowed to cross the fence to work.

Unhappiness and a wound that hasn't healed even after 50 years are visible across the border. In Narot Mehra in Pathankot, 12 km from the border, Ishar Chand is not enthused by Independence even today. ``Our village Kilberbadman was divided half-way with half of the mango groves falling in our territory. After that my family never attained the prosperity we enjoyed earlier.''

Another villager whispers something in his ear and Ishar stops talking. An outsider is still looked at with suspicion.

In the Gurdaspur village of Pull Kanjri, there are only six families left. In 1947, there were 700. The village still shares a pond with village Thatti in Pakistan, and the BSF sentry always accompanies them whenever they cross the fence to till their land.

Both in Gurdaspur and Amritsar districts, terrorism and fencing have drastically altered the cropping pattern in the border villages. Sugarcane, cotton and a host of other tall crop varieties are ``forbidden'', while wheat and rice are the acceptable varieties.

The scars of partition are evident at the Hussainiwala border. The village is still referred to as Ghulam Hussainiwala. To visit the mazaar of Ghulam Hussain, after whom the village is named, one has to cross the fence. And the Hussainiwala railway station which was once a gateway to Lahore has been shut down.

Fifty years after the Partition, the border is still a wound. Divided by a line which came out of nowhere, the villagers look beyond to the memories on the other side. The wound still bleeds, and Toba Tek Singh persists as a state of mind.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.