Memories of the cruel divide

Pritam Bhullar

SIR Cyril Radcliffe’s pencil divided India and sealed the fate of millions like me. I lost my home for ever and became rootless. Nearly 68 years have rolled by, yet I get filled with nostalgia when I think of my childhood home.  

My home is (yes, is) in Lyallpur (now known as Faisalabad in Pakistan), a town 80 miles south-west of Lahore. My village, Sardar Sunder Singhwala, was named after my grandfather and being on the periphery of municipal limits, it enjoyed benefits of both rural as well as urban life.

A landlord was virtually a “monarch” of his estate. His mansion with a sprawling garden in front and open space on the other three sides looked really majestic. On the outer perimeter of his estate usually stood a hundred or so tenements in which lived his farm workers, artisans and other helpers. 

In the beginning of the 20th century when all others in his family at Bhullar village in Batala tehsil of Gurdaspur district refused to go to Lyallpur, where land was cheap and had to be developed from scratch, my grandfather accepted the challenge and began his new life with 125 acres of arid land. Being a land lover, he kept on adding to his land with the sweat of his brow so much so that he owned 878 acres of land in Punjab and Sind at the time of Partition. But he was poorly compensated in East Punjab as after applying various cuts, including the crippling "Punjab cut", the government slashed his entitlement to 140 acres. 

The day of parting is indelibly imprinted on my memory. Our workers, mostly Muslim, gave us a tearful send-off. They brought 'chhannas' (shallow utensils) filled with milk and made a fervent appeal to us to drink it. The milk still tastes fresh in my mouth.

I loved our race horses so much that I could not think of leaving them behind. While all other family members left for India in the first week of September 1947, my grandfather and I decided to stay back and travel along with a ‘kafla’ (caravan). I was 21at that time. 

Because of the slow movement of the kafla, my grandfather after the first night's halt advised me to take the horses separately. He himself continued to travel on our bullock-carts with the kafla. So the next morning I and three of our servants and my grandfather's confidants trotted our horses towards India. We rode nonstop during the day, but halted with one of the kaflas at night for security reasons.

On the second morning, when the kafla that we had halted with at night started crossing the Ravi bridge, a battalion of the Bloch regiment opened fire and killed about 30 people. On the third night, about 15 people from another kafla that we were halting with died of cholera. Finally, our tortuous journey came to an end when we crossed the Sutlej to enter Ferozepur. 

Though the “cruel divide” separated me from my home, I had left my heart behind. Now even in the twilight years of my life, a question that keeps crossing my mind is:  Would I ever return to my lost home? Alas! That day may not come in this life.