Step across those lines

A Muslim death, if one can trace down one’s ancestry a few generations, is a rather more territorial affair. An Indian Muslim, if he can help it, likes to be buried in his ‘native’ place. Since Justice Sachar has confirmed Indian Muslims as being a financially embarrassed lot, transporting the deceased from the location of his or her expiry is a huge inconvenience to relatives who are committed to fulfilling the wishes of the dead and of abiding by traditions. This reverie on ashes and graves has been triggered by the terrorist attack on the Samjhauta Express, which transports passengers from Delhi to Lahore and the other way round.

The terminals for this train being Delhi and Lahore creates the impression that it represents some durable system of sustaining people-to-people contact between the two countries. People-to-people, in the Indo-Pak context, would conjure up images of a burgeoning Hindu-Muslim jamboree. This is a huge misunderstanding about the Samjhauta Express, attacked by the terrorists on Sunday night killing almost 70.

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.

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