One of the oozing sores Partition left behind were divided Muslim families. As far as Hindus and Sikhs are concerned the transfer of populations was bloody but total.

The tragedy of Muslims has been of a different order, particularly the Muslims from UP, Bihar and Hyderabad. These families did not migrate en masse. Most were torn apart: parents in India; children in Pakistan. Brothers in India; sisters, married to men with a future on the other side, in Pakistan. An uncle of mine, a captain in the British Indian army actually placed a measuring tape on a map of undivided India to see if Bombay (where he was posted) and Karachi were the same distance from our village of Mustafabad, near Rae Bareli. They were. He moved to Karachi where generals and brigadiers of his acquaintance promised him the moon in the new Islamic state.

Mohajirs (or immigrants) were trapped in all sorts of ironies because this rather ambitious uncle of mine retired and died with no higher rank than that of a major! I am not for a moment suggesting that he would have made it as the army chief had he stayed on in India. The point I am making is that the destination as El Dorado soured as a dream for many Muslims who crossed over. Muslims from the most effete enclaves of India had to make the near impossible adjustment in the hegemonic hold of the energetic Punjabi.

It is largely these Muslims, poor souls, who populated the Samjhauta Express both ways. In a sense it is not a ‘samjhauta’ but a sort of ‘majboori’ or a ‘compulsory’ express. The Monabao-Khokrapar route in Rajasthan-Sindh and the Attari-Wagah train in Punjab have been in operation since soon after Partition, subject to the usual stoppages conditioned by fluctuations in political temperatures between the countries.

... contd.