Our idyllic life in Lahore was short-lived. In the late afternoon of 20 August 1946, there were urgent steps outside. My mother was sitting at the dressing table. She held a bottle of coconut oil in her hand and she was combing her hair. I was watching her in the mirror when my father burst in and announced that Lord Louis Mountbatten had been appointed Viceroy and he had declared that the British would finally leave India. My mother dropped the bottle.
‘Look what you did!’ she exclaimed accusingly.
Eight months later, Mountbatten announced that Punjab would have to be partitioned to make room for the Muslim state of Pakistan. Our happiness over our country’s approaching independence turned to fear and uncertainty, and a pall of gloom settled over the Hindus of Lahore. We wondered if Lahore would go to India or to Pakistan. In those months before the boundary line was drawn, everyone was in a panic. We no longer felt safe. Large-scale violence broke out in early August 1947. While the Muslims were in a majority in Lahore, the Hindus owned eighty percent of the property. When our neighbour's house was burned in early August, we realised that we might be trapped on the wrong side of the new border. The next day a Muslim mob came and threatened to burn us alive if we did not leave. We escaped that night to the home of a Muslim friend of my father's who hid us in his storeroom. On August 8 we fled. My younger aunt's husband, a major in the army, brought us to safety in a military truck, and deposited us at the Guru’s ashram at Beas. On August 9, 1947 occurred the ‘Great Killing of Lahore’ in which 10,000 Hindus were slaughtered.
At midnight on August 14th the British Raj came to an end. On the same day Pakistan was born, carved out of Punjab and Bengal. Sir Cyril Radcliffe did the actual carving in five weeks and the demarcation on the map came to be known as the Radcliffe Boundary Award. The Guru gave asylum to thousands of refugees like us. He set up tents and make-shift kitchens. To our good fortune, according to the boundary line drawn by Mr. Radcliffe, the ashram found itself forty miles inside the Indian border. My mother cried continuously for she had heard no news from Lyallpur and she was afraid that her family was trapped. In his last letter, my grandfather was reported to be stubbornly insisting on staying on even if Lyallpur went to Pakistan. My father had been to Jullunder, the nearest town, to enquire after their whereabouts, but he had not succeeded. On the historic night of the 14th, dozens of people were huddled in our ill-lit tent glued to the radio. Despite the suffering and the uncertainty about the future, the refugees were filled with emotion as Nehru began his historic speech at midnight. For the first time we heard the new nation’s anthem but few recognised it. Someone stood up. Then, one by one the others also got up until everyone in the dark tent was standing up, and many had tears in their eyes. When the reference came to ‘Punjab’ in the anthem, the refugees looked at each other, helplessness in their eyes.
In the end, my grandfather had no choice. On August 9, a train filled with half-dead Muslim refugees arrived in Lyallpur. They told a harrowing tale of murder, arson and rape on the other side of the border. The Muslims of Lyallpur vowed revenge. On the morning of the 10th, the Muslim clergy called a meeting in Lyallpur’s main mosque and called upon God fearing Muslims to kill non-Muslims. Sikhs were singled out to pay for the crimes in Amritsar, Jullunder and Ludhiana. On hearing this, Sikhs began to cut off their hair and shave their beards. The barbers of Lyallpur were unusually busy that day. But it did not help. Two thousand Hindus and the Sikhs were killed on the 10th. Grandfather’s family escaped miraculously. My uncle, the major, showed up at their door without warning on the same afternoon with a military van. He gave them an hour to pack. As they piled in, my grandmother said, ‘O wait! I forgot to lock the front door’. My grandfather shook his head, ‘she’s locking the Muslims out’.
A week later, my father learned that he had been transferred to Simla, which had now become the temporary capital of the new, truncated state of Punjab after the loss of Lahore to Pakistan. We left the ashram the following day but found only chaos at Jullunder’s railway station. No one knew to what schedule the trains were running. On both sides of the railway platform, crowds of refugees were huddled together, believing that they would be safer in groups. As soon as a train approached, the refugees would get up. Pushing and shouting, they would rush for the train. But the last four trains had not stopped.
We did finally manage to get onto a train which was going east. But it did not move, and seemed to stand still for hours. My father went to check with the station master. From the window of our compartment, I watched him go past and I saw a tall Muslim police officer standing erect on the platform. Suddenly, there was movement. A train was coming from the opposite direction—from Delhi going to Lahore. Activity increased on the platform, but the policeman seemed unaffected, and continued to stare straight ahead. Then two very young Sikh boys emerged from nowhere. They could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen. They came from behind and thrust a dagger into the policeman. He did not cry. He just fell and died. My mother pulled me back and tried to shut the window, but it would not close.
We heard screams as the incoming train slowed down. There were sounds of bullets. My mother pushed me down. We lay on the floor of the carriage. They were shooting at the incoming train. There were more shots followed by more shouts. The train full of half-dead bodies did not stop. Minutes later an old Sikh forced his way into our compartment. Full of fear my mother screamed. ‘We are Hindus, don’t kill us!’ Then she saw her husband come in after the stranger. My father had found him at the ticket window when the shooting began and the old man grabbed hold of my father’s shirt. Both had hidden in the toilet of the First Class Retiring Room. Eventually we began to move. We reached Ambala, where we changed for Kalka, and from there got on the hill train for Simla.
*******
The view from the tiny window of the miniature hill train was enough to refresh the most exhausted emotions. On each bend of the winding route, we saw green slopes with tiers of neatly cultivated terraces, which looked like gardens hanging in the air. Belts of pine, fir and deodar punctuated the terraces. Masses of rhododendrons clothed the slopes. Towards the south, we could see the receding Ambala plains far below. Sabathu and the Kasauli hills were in the foreground. Northwards rose the confused Himalayan chains, range after snowy range of the world’s highest mountains. The stench of death was left behind at Jullunder station.
The train stopped at Barog where a white car on rails went speeding by. ‘The rail car’, the Anglo-Indian ticket collector explained, ‘carries the rich and the busy who don't have luggage and who want to reach Simla in a hurry. Until a week ago it was the only white sahibs rode in it, but now it seems everyone is doing it. Amazing, how quickly the brown sahibs have slid into the shoes of their departing masters!’
At Shogi, we glimpsed the first wondrous vision of Simla. From afar, it looked like a mythical green garden dotted with red-roofed houses. Our excitement mounted. We passed Jutogh, crossed Summer Hill, turned into tunnel number 103, and finally reached Simla's Victorian railway station. The town of Simla occupied a spur of the lower Himalaya and ran in an east-west direction for six miles. We settled in a little cottage which was situated in an unfashionable part of town known as Chhota Simla, at the southeast end, sloping directly south towards Jakhoo hill. The government provided us a house that was tiny and icy cold at night. But we loved our little house. It was situated in a handsome grove of deodars and from our veranda we had a spectacular view of the next ridge and many ridges beyond. From the narrow veranda, we stepped onto a little lawn; from the lawn, there was nothing to step onto except fresh air for the ground suddenly dropped beneath our feet.
My earliest memory of Simla is of waking up suddenly on a frosty morning. It was just after dawn and I was only half awake. It had been raining and along with the wet there was a rawness in the air. I could hear the wind blow. I ran to my mother’s bed. She stretched her arm and I nestled by her side. With her warm hands she felt my body and pressed me closer to her.
‘Did you have a bad dream?’ she asked.
I did not answer. I was content to feel her warmth. In her big bed with her soft arms around me, I felt protected. I cuddled against her and in a moment I was blissfully asleep.
I was put into St Edward’s school soon after we arrived. I cried on the first day when I was taken by the headmaster to the first grade. I stood shyly behind the door, not daring to go in. I was shorter than the other boys and my hair was cut square and parted in the middle like a peasant’s. I was ill at ease in a new shirt which pinched me under my arms. My new shorts braced up tightly. I sat down at a desk at the back, not daring to cross my legs. When the bell rang in the afternoon I did not get up. I would have kept sitting there had the teacher not returned to the class to pick up her bag. The daily two mile walk to school along Cart Road framed my new life. In the mornings I would be rushed and nervous, my hair wet, as I hurried to school, In the afternoons I would dawdle back home, usually with other boys. I would linger, eat wild berries along the way, and arrive kicking a pine cone with my new Bata shoes.
In the evenings, everyone in Simla went to the Mall no matter what the season. Between five and seven o'clock the thing to do was to get dressed and take a stroll from the Ridge to the end of the lower Mall in order 'to eat the air’. It was a wide, winding stretch of about a mile along a gentle slope with glamorous shops and smart cafes. One went there to be seen and to see others, and every evening you found a veritable fashion parade where men, women and children vied with each other in the elegance of their clothes.
We had never seen anything quite like Simla: the Tudor belfry of Christ Church cathedral with its massive brass bells; the elegant Victorian villas with their gardens bursting with dahlias and pansies; the imposing architecture of Viceregal Lodge. Simla had been, after all, a grand bouquet to the Englishmen's fondest imperial dream. For five months of the year, from mid-April to mid-September, it used to be the imperial capital from where the British Viceroy ruled the Indian Empire (extending, administratively speaking, from Burma to the Red Sea). Every English man and woman in India used to yearn to be in Simla for 'the season', when it was one of the gayest places on the earth. The refugees from West Punjab were so happy to be alive that they embraced Simla with reckless abandon and tried to make a new life; this helped them to forget the one they had lost in Pakistan.
My father earned a modest salary, and my mother ran the house on a tight budget. Her biggest expenses were on school fees, uniforms, and milk for her growing children. She worked hard to get us into an English-medium school although it cost more than she could afford. It had a long waiting list because of the recent influx of refugees and she had to apply “influence” to get us in. She made sure that we worked hard at studies, got good marks, especially in English and Mathematics. At the end of the month there was little money left for anything else.
A shy mid-level government official, my father was a man content with his own company. But my mother had a great and unrequited desire to be a part of Simla’s fashionable society. She wanted ‘to see and to be seen’; she wanted to mix with the elite; she wanted to be a ‘somebody’--and she lived in fear that her own world was insignificant compared to the grand world beyond us. The natural solution was to join ‘the club’, the ADC. Although it had begun as an Amateur Dramatics Club, a sort of extension to the Gaiety Theatre during the British days, it was now mainly a social club and, more importantly, the meeting place of the fashionable in Simla. Unfortunately, we could not afford it.
She must have transmitted her anxieties to me for I grew up with an acute concern for status. I compared myself to those who had things that I did not possess; to boys who were more attractive to girls than I was; and especially to those who made it to the school cricket team. I must have been twelve when a bachelor friend of our family’s saw me hovering outside the ADC one day. He put an arm around me. ‘Come, my boy, let’s go into the Green Room for a cup of tea,’ he said.
We were greeted by the hall porter and we walked past smoke-filled card rooms to another room full of young people and laughter. I looked around me with awe. Bearers in starched white uniforms with green cummerbunds and sashes and tassels were gliding between the tables. ‘So, this is where the smart people of Simla meet’, I thought. As my host hailed a group of young people to join us, I was intoxicated by my first encounter with an inaccessible and forbidden world--the glamour, the clothes, the sophistication of language and manners. I imagined these people dwelling in big houses, with tall hedges and high gates, leading a life quite unlike my own.
Among them I recognized a girl who was a few years older. She looked utterly beautiful. I kept looking at her, hoping she would recognize me. But she looked through me. Even when I smiled at her she ignored me. My head was spinning when I returned home. I was excited by my first encounter with a forbidden world. I tried to recall her thin face. I could visualize her shining brown eyes, her long dark hair, and the unusual way she tilted her head. The more I thought about her, the more inaccessible she seemed to become. I would lie awake for weeks thinking of her.
‘Look what you did!’ she exclaimed accusingly.
Eight months later, Mountbatten announced that Punjab would have to be partitioned to make room for the Muslim state of Pakistan. Our happiness over our country’s approaching independence turned to fear and uncertainty, and a pall of gloom settled over the Hindus of Lahore. We wondered if Lahore would go to India or to Pakistan. In those months before the boundary line was drawn, everyone was in a panic. We no longer felt safe. Large-scale violence broke out in early August 1947. While the Muslims were in a majority in Lahore, the Hindus owned eighty percent of the property. When our neighbour's house was burned in early August, we realised that we might be trapped on the wrong side of the new border. The next day a Muslim mob came and threatened to burn us alive if we did not leave. We escaped that night to the home of a Muslim friend of my father's who hid us in his storeroom. On August 8 we fled. My younger aunt's husband, a major in the army, brought us to safety in a military truck, and deposited us at the Guru’s ashram at Beas. On August 9, 1947 occurred the ‘Great Killing of Lahore’ in which 10,000 Hindus were slaughtered.
At midnight on August 14th the British Raj came to an end. On the same day Pakistan was born, carved out of Punjab and Bengal. Sir Cyril Radcliffe did the actual carving in five weeks and the demarcation on the map came to be known as the Radcliffe Boundary Award. The Guru gave asylum to thousands of refugees like us. He set up tents and make-shift kitchens. To our good fortune, according to the boundary line drawn by Mr. Radcliffe, the ashram found itself forty miles inside the Indian border. My mother cried continuously for she had heard no news from Lyallpur and she was afraid that her family was trapped. In his last letter, my grandfather was reported to be stubbornly insisting on staying on even if Lyallpur went to Pakistan. My father had been to Jullunder, the nearest town, to enquire after their whereabouts, but he had not succeeded. On the historic night of the 14th, dozens of people were huddled in our ill-lit tent glued to the radio. Despite the suffering and the uncertainty about the future, the refugees were filled with emotion as Nehru began his historic speech at midnight. For the first time we heard the new nation’s anthem but few recognised it. Someone stood up. Then, one by one the others also got up until everyone in the dark tent was standing up, and many had tears in their eyes. When the reference came to ‘Punjab’ in the anthem, the refugees looked at each other, helplessness in their eyes.
In the end, my grandfather had no choice. On August 9, a train filled with half-dead Muslim refugees arrived in Lyallpur. They told a harrowing tale of murder, arson and rape on the other side of the border. The Muslims of Lyallpur vowed revenge. On the morning of the 10th, the Muslim clergy called a meeting in Lyallpur’s main mosque and called upon God fearing Muslims to kill non-Muslims. Sikhs were singled out to pay for the crimes in Amritsar, Jullunder and Ludhiana. On hearing this, Sikhs began to cut off their hair and shave their beards. The barbers of Lyallpur were unusually busy that day. But it did not help. Two thousand Hindus and the Sikhs were killed on the 10th. Grandfather’s family escaped miraculously. My uncle, the major, showed up at their door without warning on the same afternoon with a military van. He gave them an hour to pack. As they piled in, my grandmother said, ‘O wait! I forgot to lock the front door’. My grandfather shook his head, ‘she’s locking the Muslims out’.
A week later, my father learned that he had been transferred to Simla, which had now become the temporary capital of the new, truncated state of Punjab after the loss of Lahore to Pakistan. We left the ashram the following day but found only chaos at Jullunder’s railway station. No one knew to what schedule the trains were running. On both sides of the railway platform, crowds of refugees were huddled together, believing that they would be safer in groups. As soon as a train approached, the refugees would get up. Pushing and shouting, they would rush for the train. But the last four trains had not stopped.
We did finally manage to get onto a train which was going east. But it did not move, and seemed to stand still for hours. My father went to check with the station master. From the window of our compartment, I watched him go past and I saw a tall Muslim police officer standing erect on the platform. Suddenly, there was movement. A train was coming from the opposite direction—from Delhi going to Lahore. Activity increased on the platform, but the policeman seemed unaffected, and continued to stare straight ahead. Then two very young Sikh boys emerged from nowhere. They could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen. They came from behind and thrust a dagger into the policeman. He did not cry. He just fell and died. My mother pulled me back and tried to shut the window, but it would not close.
We heard screams as the incoming train slowed down. There were sounds of bullets. My mother pushed me down. We lay on the floor of the carriage. They were shooting at the incoming train. There were more shots followed by more shouts. The train full of half-dead bodies did not stop. Minutes later an old Sikh forced his way into our compartment. Full of fear my mother screamed. ‘We are Hindus, don’t kill us!’ Then she saw her husband come in after the stranger. My father had found him at the ticket window when the shooting began and the old man grabbed hold of my father’s shirt. Both had hidden in the toilet of the First Class Retiring Room. Eventually we began to move. We reached Ambala, where we changed for Kalka, and from there got on the hill train for Simla.
*******
The view from the tiny window of the miniature hill train was enough to refresh the most exhausted emotions. On each bend of the winding route, we saw green slopes with tiers of neatly cultivated terraces, which looked like gardens hanging in the air. Belts of pine, fir and deodar punctuated the terraces. Masses of rhododendrons clothed the slopes. Towards the south, we could see the receding Ambala plains far below. Sabathu and the Kasauli hills were in the foreground. Northwards rose the confused Himalayan chains, range after snowy range of the world’s highest mountains. The stench of death was left behind at Jullunder station.
The train stopped at Barog where a white car on rails went speeding by. ‘The rail car’, the Anglo-Indian ticket collector explained, ‘carries the rich and the busy who don't have luggage and who want to reach Simla in a hurry. Until a week ago it was the only white sahibs rode in it, but now it seems everyone is doing it. Amazing, how quickly the brown sahibs have slid into the shoes of their departing masters!’
At Shogi, we glimpsed the first wondrous vision of Simla. From afar, it looked like a mythical green garden dotted with red-roofed houses. Our excitement mounted. We passed Jutogh, crossed Summer Hill, turned into tunnel number 103, and finally reached Simla's Victorian railway station. The town of Simla occupied a spur of the lower Himalaya and ran in an east-west direction for six miles. We settled in a little cottage which was situated in an unfashionable part of town known as Chhota Simla, at the southeast end, sloping directly south towards Jakhoo hill. The government provided us a house that was tiny and icy cold at night. But we loved our little house. It was situated in a handsome grove of deodars and from our veranda we had a spectacular view of the next ridge and many ridges beyond. From the narrow veranda, we stepped onto a little lawn; from the lawn, there was nothing to step onto except fresh air for the ground suddenly dropped beneath our feet.
My earliest memory of Simla is of waking up suddenly on a frosty morning. It was just after dawn and I was only half awake. It had been raining and along with the wet there was a rawness in the air. I could hear the wind blow. I ran to my mother’s bed. She stretched her arm and I nestled by her side. With her warm hands she felt my body and pressed me closer to her.
‘Did you have a bad dream?’ she asked.
I did not answer. I was content to feel her warmth. In her big bed with her soft arms around me, I felt protected. I cuddled against her and in a moment I was blissfully asleep.
I was put into St Edward’s school soon after we arrived. I cried on the first day when I was taken by the headmaster to the first grade. I stood shyly behind the door, not daring to go in. I was shorter than the other boys and my hair was cut square and parted in the middle like a peasant’s. I was ill at ease in a new shirt which pinched me under my arms. My new shorts braced up tightly. I sat down at a desk at the back, not daring to cross my legs. When the bell rang in the afternoon I did not get up. I would have kept sitting there had the teacher not returned to the class to pick up her bag. The daily two mile walk to school along Cart Road framed my new life. In the mornings I would be rushed and nervous, my hair wet, as I hurried to school, In the afternoons I would dawdle back home, usually with other boys. I would linger, eat wild berries along the way, and arrive kicking a pine cone with my new Bata shoes.
In the evenings, everyone in Simla went to the Mall no matter what the season. Between five and seven o'clock the thing to do was to get dressed and take a stroll from the Ridge to the end of the lower Mall in order 'to eat the air’. It was a wide, winding stretch of about a mile along a gentle slope with glamorous shops and smart cafes. One went there to be seen and to see others, and every evening you found a veritable fashion parade where men, women and children vied with each other in the elegance of their clothes.
We had never seen anything quite like Simla: the Tudor belfry of Christ Church cathedral with its massive brass bells; the elegant Victorian villas with their gardens bursting with dahlias and pansies; the imposing architecture of Viceregal Lodge. Simla had been, after all, a grand bouquet to the Englishmen's fondest imperial dream. For five months of the year, from mid-April to mid-September, it used to be the imperial capital from where the British Viceroy ruled the Indian Empire (extending, administratively speaking, from Burma to the Red Sea). Every English man and woman in India used to yearn to be in Simla for 'the season', when it was one of the gayest places on the earth. The refugees from West Punjab were so happy to be alive that they embraced Simla with reckless abandon and tried to make a new life; this helped them to forget the one they had lost in Pakistan.
My father earned a modest salary, and my mother ran the house on a tight budget. Her biggest expenses were on school fees, uniforms, and milk for her growing children. She worked hard to get us into an English-medium school although it cost more than she could afford. It had a long waiting list because of the recent influx of refugees and she had to apply “influence” to get us in. She made sure that we worked hard at studies, got good marks, especially in English and Mathematics. At the end of the month there was little money left for anything else.
A shy mid-level government official, my father was a man content with his own company. But my mother had a great and unrequited desire to be a part of Simla’s fashionable society. She wanted ‘to see and to be seen’; she wanted to mix with the elite; she wanted to be a ‘somebody’--and she lived in fear that her own world was insignificant compared to the grand world beyond us. The natural solution was to join ‘the club’, the ADC. Although it had begun as an Amateur Dramatics Club, a sort of extension to the Gaiety Theatre during the British days, it was now mainly a social club and, more importantly, the meeting place of the fashionable in Simla. Unfortunately, we could not afford it.
She must have transmitted her anxieties to me for I grew up with an acute concern for status. I compared myself to those who had things that I did not possess; to boys who were more attractive to girls than I was; and especially to those who made it to the school cricket team. I must have been twelve when a bachelor friend of our family’s saw me hovering outside the ADC one day. He put an arm around me. ‘Come, my boy, let’s go into the Green Room for a cup of tea,’ he said.
We were greeted by the hall porter and we walked past smoke-filled card rooms to another room full of young people and laughter. I looked around me with awe. Bearers in starched white uniforms with green cummerbunds and sashes and tassels were gliding between the tables. ‘So, this is where the smart people of Simla meet’, I thought. As my host hailed a group of young people to join us, I was intoxicated by my first encounter with an inaccessible and forbidden world--the glamour, the clothes, the sophistication of language and manners. I imagined these people dwelling in big houses, with tall hedges and high gates, leading a life quite unlike my own.
Among them I recognized a girl who was a few years older. She looked utterly beautiful. I kept looking at her, hoping she would recognize me. But she looked through me. Even when I smiled at her she ignored me. My head was spinning when I returned home. I was excited by my first encounter with a forbidden world. I tried to recall her thin face. I could visualize her shining brown eyes, her long dark hair, and the unusual way she tilted her head. The more I thought about her, the more inaccessible she seemed to become. I would lie awake for weeks thinking of her.
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