For those who had nothing to do with Partition, Karachi is just another city. For those whose patriotism begins and ends with the geographical boundaries of the state they were born in — and they are many — Karachi is the name of an enemy city, just like Lahore. But ask a Sindhi what Karachi means to her or to him.

Sindhis have always complained that they got the rawest deal among all those affected by Partition. They had to leave their homeland where Hindu-Muslim conflict was barely known, and take refuge wherever they could in India. Here, they had no state they could call their own, unlike the Punjabis and Bengalis who came over. But they managed not just to survive and indeed prosper, but also to contribute.

In Mumbai, within seven years of Partition, at least three prominent colleges were started by Sindhis, which were open to all. But even as they became part of what was then Bombay’s bhelpuri, Sindhis never forgot their homeland. Indeed, it would have been unnatural for them to do so. In fact, many of them had left Sindh only a year after Partition, when Muslims from UP landed in Karachi, bringing tales of horror. Even then, some Sindhis thought it would be a temporary exile.

Many of them couldn’t reconcile to the bitter realisation that they’d left Sindh forever. They pined for the streets of Hyderabad and Karachi, Sukkur and Larkana. They longed to go back at least once; the temporary Pakistani visa-issuing office that used to be set up in Mumbai in the 80s, would be teeming with old Sindhi women, still wearing their distinctive long loose kurtas, looser pyjamas and white chunis, weeping in front of the impassive visa officer, begging him for their last chance to visit the families left behind. Sindhi writers grabbed every opportunity to meet their counterparts from Sindh visiting India, to listen to news about their lost homeland. What they heard only made them more protective about what they had lost.

... contd.