Decades not enough to heal wounds

Sukhmeet Bhasin

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, August 14

The saying ‘Time is a great healer’ seems to be have lost much of its appeal for the two brothers — Harminder Singh Mokha (83) and Gurcharan Singh Mokha (78) — who still live with a heavy heart and bitter memories of Partition.

While recalling their partition experiences, Harminder Singh and Gurcharan Singh Mokha said they were leading a royal life in Lal Kurti Bazaar at Rawalpindi.

Their grandfather, Atar Singh Mokha, was a landlord. They Life turned owned many horses and had employed many servants over there.

They said in March 1947, tension started building up in the Rawalpindi area. Their grandfather was the president of the peace committee.

Along with their paternal uncle Locha Singh, he had called a meeting at Tanch village, which was dominated by Sikhs at that time.

“The meeting was organised at a Muslim resident’s house at the village. It lasted for six hours after which, all of a sudden, the Muslims told the Sikhs present there to vacate the house immediately. When they started moving, Muslims surrounded the house and they started firing on the Sikhs. In this incident, the grandfather and paternal uncle were brutally murdered,” they added.

The military didn’t even hand over the body of Atar Singh Mokha to his father Budh Singh Mokha. An acquaintance gave us kara (symbol of faith in Sikhism) of our grandfather, which he found at the site of the killing, and we have kept it till date,” they said.

“Seeing the tension increasing with each passing day, our family decided to shift from Rawalpindi. We stayed at our Muslim friend’s house near the railway station,” the brothers said.

“A few days later, we went to the railway station to board a train to India. We were horrified to learn at the station that the train which had arrived earlier was full of dead bodies of Sikhs who were killed by Muslims,” the two brothers said.

Mokha brothers said with the grace of God, we were able to cross over to Ferozpur.

“Finally, we reached Bathinda but we didn’t know anyone here,” they said.

“We thought there was many Sikhs living at Ambala Cantonment. We decided to go there but the ticket checker at the railway station told us that our relative, whom we were looking for, was transferred to Bathinda. We were told that we didn’t need to leave as he would arrange for an accommodation here,” they added.

It took 23 days for their relative to reach Bathinda from Pakistan due to the tension.

As many as 25 members of their family stayed in two rooms for many days.

Because of running out of money, the two brothers had to sell their grandmothers jewellery to start a business.

They started a tea shop and later swerved into cloth business. It was not before tremendous struggle and putting in a lot of hard work that they started living a prosperous life.

They said they were allotted land at Fazilka but when their father went to see it, the Army was deployed there.

“The thought of living near the border again gave rise to anxiety. We asked for land somewhere else and after some appeals, we got land in Bathinda,” they said.