by Sudhir Kakar
My aunt Darshana tried to console me when she saw how downcast I was after I realized the enormity of what I had done. ‘You can never get lost now,’ she said.
My uncle Sohan Lal said, ‘Look at it as a blessing. If in a riot, you are cornered by a Hindu mob and they ask you to prove that you are a Hindu, you just have to bare your arm and show them the “Om”.’
‘What if the mob is Muslim?’
‘Then just drop your underwear and show them your penis—it’s circumcised like theirs,’ he said, referring to my surgeon-grandfather’s removal of the foreskin when I was a child because he considered foreskins unhygienic. ‘And then recite the kalma,’ he added.
In the next few days, I memorized the kalma, the Muslim declaration of faith, which every Muslim boy, no matter how modern his upbringing and how irreligious his family, would be expected to know. I can still declaim La llaha illa Allah, Muhammad Rasul Allah (There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Messenger), my boyhood mantra of safety in situations I encountered only in my childhood fantasies.
If memory is an archaeological site, with many layers of bygone eras, one on top of the other, then the partition riots, as mediated by the conversations and stories of the refugees, form the second layer of my stance towards Muslims. The later layers, accrued over decades of adult life, are more conscious and more conventional. They constitute a liberal outlook and secular convictions that disdain a division of fellow human beings in religious categories, but lack the emotional charge—a complex blend of attraction and aversion, love and fear—of the earlier, buried habitations. If my negative feelings are from the time of the partition, the positive ones of attraction and warmth stem from my childhood in Sargodha where I had known Muslims as my father’s colleagues and friends, and especially as indulgent servants. These comprise the earliest layer.
In Sargodha, I was particularly fond of Fateh Khan, the Muslim orderly, who lived with his family in one of the servants’ quarters. His daughter Fatima, a teenage girl, looked after me from the ages of four to eight. She was second only to my mother as the object of my budding desires and inchoate longings. Fatima was a patient and a willing participant in the games I invented for both of us. She was an intrepid liar on my behalf whenever one of my more adventurous undertakings ended in disaster. Half girl, half woman, Fatima delightfully forgot to be consistently one or the other when she was with me. Hitching up her shalwar trousers, she would scamper up a guava tree to pluck the best fruit from the top branches. Her maternal persona taking over once she was back on the ground, she would wash the guava for me and hold the salt in the open palm of her hand while I took salted bites from the flesh of the fruit. Fatima was an indispensable companion on our fishing expeditions to the small pond that lay on the grounds of the bungalow. She helped me make the fishing rod from a twig, a piece of string and a bent pin. She kneaded the dough I ‘borrowed’ from the kitchen and shaped it into small pellets that I used as bait. In spite of my never catching any fish she encouraged me and kept alive my illusion that there were indeed some lurking below the scummy green film that covered the pond. With little effort, I can still summon the memory of the hot afternoons when, after our exertions, I slept with my head in her lap while she sat under the shade of a tree and kept the flies away from my face. My love for Fateh Khan and Fatima, the two people in Sargodha who were second only to my parents as the objects of the mighty love of a child’s heart, is part of the first layer of memory.
The other Muslims I came in occasional contact with in Sargodha were my father’s friends, the ‘uncles’, who were no different from their Hindu or Sikh counterparts: modern, liberal, indifferent to religion and dismissive of the religious specialist, be it the Hindu priest, derisively called ‘baman’ instead of brahmin, or the Muslim mullah. Not that they or my father were unaware of their own religious affiliations. Indeed, there was a gentle ribbing of the foibles of each other’s communities, a joking relationship that testified to the comfort they felt about the matter of religious identities. I remember my father telling a joke, considered risqué in mixed company, at a dinner party where my parents had invited some of their Sikh and Muslim friends. Since the joke, with its double entendres, is tied to Punjabi, it is difficult to translate. A Sikh is on his morning walk when on an impulse he decides to drop in on his Muslim friend. He finds the friend closeted in a room practising on the sitar. ‘Mian,’ says the Sikh, ‘apne aap vaja rahe ho—You are playing by yourself,’ which in Punjabi also implies that the friend is masturbating. The Muslim ponders for a while and then retorts, ‘Sardarji, vajana painda hai, sikhni jo hoi—Sardarji, one has to play to learn.’ The last three words, sikhni jo hoi, could also be translated as ‘because she is a Sikh woman’ implying that he is fucking a woman of his friend’s community. A joking relationship between members of different ethnic communities and the uninhibited sharing of ethnic jokes that disregard notions of political correctness, I discovered later, are signs of a healthy, peaceful relationship between the communities. The jokes disappear during times of rising ethnic tension—such as between Hindus and Sikhs in the late 1980s or the recurring bouts of violence between Hindus and Muslims—while their reappearance signal a return to normality.
As the winter of 1947 approached, the extended family began to scatter. Family networks kicked in to arrange jobs and lobby with the new government of Indian Punjab for allotment of evacuee property—houses and shops left by Muslims who had fled in the opposite direction to Pakistan. One of my father’s brothers got a job as lecturer in mathematics in a college in Moga. Another became an insurance agent in Amritsar. Sohan Lal went to Calcutta to work as a purchase officer in Usha Sewing Machines, a job arranged for him by my surgeon-grandfather who was a close friend of the owner, Sir Sri Ram, an industrial magnate in Delhi. My grandfather himself first found shelter in his friend’s palatial house on Curzon Road, now Kasturba Gandhi Marg. He then went to Dibrugarh in Assam to head a newly established medical college, but returned to Delhi after a couple of years where he lived in an apartment at the back of Sri Ram’s house till he passed away in 1970.
I stayed with Sohan Lal for eight months when I worked in Usha Sewing Machines as an apprentice after finishing my engineering studies in 1958. He was still a genial and affectionate man, possessed of a sunny optimism that comes from being the favourite of his mother as her youngest son. He had a family now and doted on his two children. He had added flab to his once lean and hard frame. Once, when I reminded him of his heroics as a ‘killer’ during the partition violence, he just said, ‘Chad de yaar, bachpana siga—Let it go, friend, it was childishness.’
The family members who found it difficult to begin new lives were those who had possessed and thus lost the most. One of my father’s brothers-in-law, who had to leave a thriving business in Lahore’s upmarket Anarkali Bazaar, could never reconcile to his new status as a minor office clerk in a small provincial town and became an alcoholic. There were others, men and women, who never really recovered from an insidious depression that also scarred the emotional lives of their children. These hidden consequences of partition, a fate that befell thousands of families, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim, have never been acknowledged in the effusive, and rightful, praise of the resilience of Punjabi refugees in picking up pieces of their lives and beginning anew in different parts of India. Some of them, though, even when they prospered economically, could never again succeed in planting new gardens of love around them.
I do not remember Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January, 1948. The radio and the conversations at our home and in the bazaar must have been full of this momentous event. This dark hole in my memory is even more surprising since I well remember a Sunday evening, almost eighteen months earlier when I was in school in Delhi and was taken by my grand-aunt to Gandhi’s prayer meeting in the Harijan colony where he was staying at the time. After the meeting ended with the singing of bhajans, Gandhi walked back to his hut, his hands resting on the shoulders of two women in hi
s retinue for support. A narrow passage had been cleared amidst the crowd. People were standing up on both sides, their palms joined together in front of them in a mark of respect. We were just behind the densely packed front row. I remember my grand-aunt pushing me forward so that I could bend down and touch the Mahatma’s feet in veneration as he walked past us. Either Gandhi was already past the point where we stood or I was unable to wriggle through the crowd to reach him for I don’t remember succeeding in the venture.
The partition riots and Mahatma Gandhi’s murder were the two ill-omened beginnings to India’s journey as a free country. I find it surprising that whereas the partition violence occupies a crucial space in my memory, its culmination, Gandhi’s death, evokes neither images nor emotions. Perhaps, as some sociologists claim, it is only the intersection of personal and national history that provides the most vital and remembered connection to the times we have lived through.4 Without a connection to a memorable event in the record of our own lives, a historical moment is as ephemeral as the fiery trail of a meteor streaking across the night sky. Mahatma Gandhi’s death may have been a momentous event in the country’s history but was merely a blip on the radar of my inner screen, unlike the matter of partition violence. It did not disturb my psyche like the partition and thus did not require an emotional adaptation that is crucial to the formation of memories.
A Welcome to the World
1946–55
Delhi – Shimla – Jaipur
In July 1946, at the beginning of the new school year, I too became a reluctant refugee when my parents decided that I needed to go to a good school for my education. Since Rohtak did not have any schools that met my father’s high standards, he decided that I be sent to Modern School, one of Delhi’s leading schools, as a boarder. I was eight years old.
My mother came with me to Delhi to drop me off at the school. My black steel trunk, containing the exact number of blue school uniforms, shoes, socks, toothbrush, towels and other linen that the school had asked for in a list sent to the parents of all prospective boarders, was unloaded from the tonga. One of the teachers, the master of the residence hall where I would stay, was smiling down at us as my mother bent forward to embrace me in farewell. She climbed up to the back of the tonga. The coachman waved his whip and clicked his tongue to goad the horse forward, and the tonga was away. As it turned right from the school’s driveway into Barakhamba Road, the dam broke. Caught in the tentacles of a full-blown panic attack, I pushed away the restraining hand of the teacher and ran out on the road behind the tonga, crying to be taken back home, till the pursuing teacher caught me. Through tear-filled eyes, I helplessly watched the tonga become smaller and smaller in the distance till it finally disappeared in the morning traffic.
My mother was weeping as the tonga drove away, she later told me. When she saw me running after her, she was on the verge of asking the driver to turn around and take me back with her. But what would my father have said! She had to harden her heart, the normal state of being an adult. For me, as a child, I believe this was the moment when plaque began to be deposited in the emotional arteries of my own heart. My mother is a siren and has but seduced and abandoned me. Her earlier goddess-like image began to retreat to the further corners of my imagination, becoming a part of my deeply buried mythology. She would lose lustre, become a woman who steadily ages, no longer the enchanted being who had laid out the riches of an ‘unreal estate’ before the child. She would now enter my history.
I have filed away this memory as marking the point of my separation from my mother although such a separation is never a single instant but a long process of which this memory is but the culmination. My mother was doing only what all mothers must do: first seduce the child into the world through the offer of illusion, and then push him into the world’s reality where he becomes acquainted with an essential condition of living his future life, the ‘solitude of subjectivity’, in which he must learn to tolerate her absence and bear the pain of his yearning for a restoration of their intimacy.
In my father’s papers after his death, I found six letters that I wrote home from boarding school. All through his life, my father kept each scrap of paper that had to do with me: letters, school certificates, newspaper clippings of my exploits in the sporting arena during school, college, or even later when I first went to Germany. He never praised me in my presence. I could always do better. I should make more of an effort to fight against my besetting sin of laziness. But the look of pride on his face whenever his friends complimented him on his son belied his words. Later, when I was in my late twenties, John Ross, my friend and co-author of our book Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, visited our Jaipur home while I was away. It was a cold winter morning and John recollects, with both amusement and not a little astonishment, that my parents called him to their bedroom for a hot cup of morning tea. They made room for him under the quilt on the double bed. My father then proceeded to show him the scrapbook and the album of my photographs from childhood and youth.
Written in pencil on Sundays—Sunday was the letter-writing day—the first three letters are in Urdu, the language in which I was most comfortable. The other three, written some months later at the beginning of 1947, are in English. The first two letters are addressed to my mother. The letters to my father are newsy, about what I was doing at school, my studies and my friends, and enquiring about his work and my baby sister. In one early letter, there is also a plea for more communication from him: ‘Why don’t you write? If not every day, then at least sometimes. Do you at least read my letters to my mother?’
The letters to my mother contain a litany of complaints against her for the abandonment of her darling eight-year-old. Translated from Urdu, a passage from the first one, dated 1 August 1946, a month after I started school, reads: ‘You don’t think of me. You promised to write. You must have heard the saying “Kehna asaan, karna mushkil”—It is easy to say but difficult to do.’ As a clinician, I am glad to note that a child’s feeling of loneliness and abandonment is marked by protest and not by emptiness.
My last letter to her from school—which I left in April or May 1947, never to return because of the Hindu–Muslim violence that enveloped Delhi and other major cities such as Calcutta and Lahore at the approach of India’s freedom and the country’s partition—is in English. My smile ends in a grimace as I read the boy’s effort to relieve his mother’s distress while unwittingly conveying his own.
My dear mother,
I am quite well over here. We are doing a Drama and I doing a part of Mother cat. And did you get mine last letter. And this Sunday I think we will go to a picture. Why did you not write me a letter and now come to see me. And when you are going to write me a letter. And I am studying well and when you come to Delhi bring me the Biscuits and Chocolates. And now I am quite happy. Now quickly come to see me. And now what shall I write. How are you and father. Now I am quite well over here.
Your loving son
Sudhir
Our connection was not broken but took on a different quality. Henceforth, her image would become coated with the patina of a bittersweet nostalgia. This is the image that pervades my later childhood memories, such as those of bringing freshly plucked flowers for her morning puja on Janmashtami or Diwali. In these memories, all of them coalescing into one, I am sitting next to her, legs crossed, palms folded, eyes closed, imitating her devotion as she prays to the small white marble idol of Lord Krishna. A thin ribbon of smoke is curling up from a burning gob of sweet-smelling resinous dhoop placed in the middle of the flowers heaped at the feet of the idol. I do not need to make much of an effort to recall the sultry-sweet fragrance of the dhoop.
Oddly enough, the process of separation began to be reversed when I crossed middle age and once again opened my heart to her maternal spirit and my ears to the song of the ‘eternal feminine’. She was dead by then, an absent witness to my striving for what the French philosopher Paul Ricouer, in a different context, calls a ‘second naiveté’. A
s I aged, I consciously sought to reclaim the child’s innocence. Or at least an innocence that is still possible for an adult, a willed re-illusioning of ways of looking at the world. I will return to this at its proper place in the story.