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Searching for faces in
the mob
"THOSE who forget history are condemned to repeat it" — the warning that flashed on an ominously darkened T.V. screen, hunts oblivion from T.V. and the front pages of newspapers. The darkness that enveloped our country over half a century ago, is suddenly not history any longer, buried somewhere in the dark recesses of the mind. It intrudes into our present, and not through a T.V. serial. It is easy to not dwell too deeply and lose one’s appetite about what has happened in some stranger’s home and eat one’s meals and drink one’s coffee while trying to digest violence in all its stark, naked brutality when it is shown on T.V. One dwells on it if one replaces the victims with one’s own kith and kin. One dwells on it, if one puts faces on the victims. I remember listening in
open-mouthed disbelief when mother would tell us when we were old enough
to understand, the tales of horror from "those" days. With due
consideration for our tender years, the gory details of the violence and
bloodshed were avoided where possible and abstracted where unavoidable.
Although, because the abstractions were not boiled down to the ultimate
"cold statistics" — it did have its due impact. |
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My grandfather (a doctor), along with my grandmother and family of nine children had shifted from Lahore to Khudian in Kasur district when it became apparent that Lahore would come under Pakistan. My mother and her elder sister had their tenth standard examinations to appear for, for which they had to go to Ferozepore. But when Partition was formally declared, Ferozepore became a part of India and Khudian fell in Pakistan. Leaving the sisters in Ferozepore in safety, my grandfather rushed back to Khudian to find the house empty of its occupants. He ran to the neighbouring house of his compounder Abdul Ghani to ask about the whereabouts of his family. Abdul Ghani, surprise writ large on his face, quickly pulled him in and asked him what he was doing in Khudian when his entire family had been escorted by the Gorkha military to safety. Grandfather was given shelter in a room at the back while the situation outside turned increasingly ugly with a few hundred armed people demanding that the kafir be brought outside. Abdul Ghani went out — alone and unarmed — and faced the mob with the simple words. "Doctor Sahib is in my panaah. You will take him over my dead body." He did not repeat himself, just stood there like a sentinel till the mob retreated. Before the break of dawn, he escorted my grandfather to the railway station, waiting till the train for Ferozepore had departed. In the Kumbh Mela at Triveni, Allahabad, many years ago, when a terrible stampede ensued and God knows how many people were crushed underfoot a panicking crowd, my falling mother was saved from certain death by a brother who had only half minute’s acquaintance with her. He lost his own balance — and his life — in the process of saving her. When I think back about all these true "children of God", I find it easy to understand the goodness every religion preaches. I could just bind these incidents together and believe that secularism, as it has come to be understood, is not just a grossly misinterpreted word taken from the dictionary of a politician, it does live in the kind hearts of some rare human beings. But then, a Gujarat happens, or is made
to happen, and a four years old child’s wide innocent eyes leap out of
a burnt face and scream the truth about the violent death of
humanitarianism itself. About the reality of the final death — in the
year 2002 — of "the human being" in the mob. One hunts in
vain for faces in the mobs. |
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