Our house in Daska

It’s been over seven decades, yet the events of 1947 continue to haunt. The family got separated and when we found my mother and siblings, the young ones were crying along with hundreds of other kids because they had not been fed for days. Things were so grim that my aunt, in sheer desperation, had decided to throw my infant sister into the Ravi as there was no food and she wouldn’t stop crying

Joginder Singh Matharu

I HAD just turned 16 on August 3, 1947, when talk of Partition had begun in hush-hush tones. Until that August, life in Daska city of Sialkot district was perfect. I was born and brought up there. We lived a comfortable life in a two-storey house that my grandfather had built. My father, Mistri Lachhman Singh, had followed in his footsteps and taken up the profession of builder-supervisor. He would make me read out English labels on maps; that’s how my training in the profession began when I was in Class VI.

Till the fifth standard, I studied in a government school and it was in Class VI, when I joined Scotch Mission High School (established by Scottish missionaries), that I began learning English. The three years or so that I studied in the school is the only time I learnt the language and it has helped me thus far.

A boy who was into poetry, whose parents dreamt of seeing him become a doctor or an engineer, who played hockey every evening after school, ended up as a draftsman and later became an architect because of Partition. Life was very simple on that side of Punjab. Until August of that fateful year, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians lived in harmony. We were one community and our region was our identity, not our religion.

Suddenly, when the conversation began of a different flag being hoisted because India had been divided into two indepenent nations, everything turned upside down. Sikhs were in danger in Pakistan, some said, but we didn’t believe it till it really became a matter of life and death.

It was in the second week of August that the entire city of Daska began living in a camp on the outskirts, because that felt safe. In our minds, it was a temporary arrangement and once the flag-hoisting ceremony was over, we would go back to living in our homes. One day, because there was shortage of food in the camp, my father and I went home. He asked me to wait while he took a sack of wheat to a mill in the market nearby. When he was waiting to collect flour, there was noise of gunfire. Someone got shot because he was a Sikh; a while later, my father found out it was his cousin. The threat was real. He rushed home, we didn’t shut the rooms, just locked the main door. That was our last time in that house. My father broke down because he realised we would never meet my mother and siblings again. A week earlier, my mother with my four siblings and a cousin was sent to her village on a tonga. That move was a safety measure as she took with her gold jewellery, some documents and fine clothes in four trunks.

After around two weeks in the camp, the entire city was restless, unaware of its fate. One day, an announcement was made that trains were going to Dera Baba Nanak and all Hindus and Sikhs were to vacate the land. There were thousands of us, and together we started walking towards the railway station, 16 km away. That day, four trains were loaded; there were people sitting on the roof just so they could leave Pakistan. My father, uncle and I had boarded the last train of the day when someone suggested that we should wait for my maternal uncle, his kids and my paternal aunt’s family, to travel in one large group. We got off the train. The next morning, we reached Dera Baba Nanak to see the station covered in blood, bodies strewn across it. All the people on the night train were massacred. Even today, it makes me shudder.

The ordeal wasn’t over. The next step was to reach Amritsar on buses. When we got there, someone told us that villages had been evacuated and people were being sent to Dera Baba Nanak.

In the hope of meeting my mother and siblings, my father and I went back to Dera Baba Nanak while my uncle arranged for a place to stay in Amritsar. It was monsoon then and it rained non-stop. Two days of incessant search later, on a roadside, we found my mother and my siblings, who were crying along with hundreds of other kids because they had not been fed for days. Things were so grim that my aunt, in sheer desperation, had decided to throw my infant sister into the Ravi as there was no food and she wouldn’t stop crying.

We all returned to Amritsar and stayed in a janj ghar for more than four months. There, my father, uncle, cousin and I did odd jobs to earn a living. We had nothing left and it was a big family of 28 persons to be looked after. My father had contacts in Delhi because he had made houses for barrister Shivdev Singh. He went there looking for work. Days later, we all joined him. Some months of living in New Delhi and my father, with the help of my maternal uncle, found work in Dehradun. We moved there and built a house in the area allotted to refugees. We were all working together in the construction and supervision business, but that wasn’t enough.

I got married in 1949 and had two sons and a daughter by 1953, so I decided to move to Chandigarh and look for work. Luckily for me, the Punjab and Haryana High Court building work had just started and with a senior supervisor’s recommendation, Agya Ram, a PWD engineer, who was also the first Executive Engineer of PU, appointed me in his team. I worked with him as a supervisor on the High Court project and later on Panjab University construction. Two years later, I joined PC Loomba as an assistant architect and in 1958, I set up my own office in Sector 18. I found a new lease of life in this city and life has been kind, but I still want to see my birthplace, the city where I spent my childhood, and meet all my friends who never cared about religion or caste, something so prevalent today. I am willing to exchange this life and all I have to go back and live in that house in Daska.

— The writer is an architect

(As told to Gurnaaz Kaur)