Shimla, Alam, Bedi, & the namesake

IN Shimla of the 1980s, one daily woke up to a view of what seemed like a castle in deep woods. It was, and is, a power house built by the British in the magnificent isolation in thick forest, though only a short walk away from the nearest human habitation, Kaithu. It is in this building that Intikhab Alam, former Pakistan captain and coach, found shelter from rioters in those days of rabid madness in 1947, along with his family.

“We were there for two-three days,” says Alam, born in Hoshiarpur in 1942. In a moving account of the uprooting of Alam’s family from Shimla, Anam Zakaria writes that in the context of Partition, she had come across the notion of “big bad Sikhs… in my school textbooks” and “news bulletins and in general discussions among people while growing up in Pakistan”. This notion would have been reinforced, she writes, “had Intikhab not narrated the story of his father’s Sikh neighbour to me”.

In India, we were exposed to a more nuanced and more honest understanding of the Partition violence, through textbooks and popular culture. In 1987, when the two countries were celebrating 40 years of freedom, we could watch Pakistan Television telecasts in Shimla. PTV ran a series on short stories on the Partition trauma suffered by people — invariably, without exception, the sufferers in those ‘dramas’ were non-Sikhs and non-Hindus. Around the same time, Govind Nihalani’s Tamas played on Doordarshan, showing that the frenzy of 1947 created victims and perpetrators from all communities. The TV series was based on a book by Bhisham Sahni, the Rawalpindi-born writer who was among the millions of people who had to leave home and hearth that year.

Alam’s “Sikh neighbour” was his father’s junior in the electricity department in Shimla. “His name was Bedi,” says Alam. “That’s all I remember, that he was ‘Bedi’.”

After rioting started in Shimla, this Bedi hid the family of Alam — which included his parents, two sisters and a brother — in his own house. But the rioters began to suspect that Bedi was hiding the Muslim family in his own house and told him that they would inspect his house. So, late one night, Bedi took his boss and his family to the power station in the woods. Alam recounts: “Bedi Sahab told my father, ‘Khan Sahab, we have to leave now.’ The power station was in the forest, and we walked down to it, in the light of mashaals lit by kerosene oil. It took us nearly two hours to reach the power house. The next day, Bedi Sahab told us that the trouble-makers had come and checked his house, looking for us.”

Braving countless troubles along the way, the family eventually reached Pakistan. Alam became, like his father, a very good cricketer. He too became friends with a Sikh gentleman — a Bedi, to boot! Alam met Bishan Singh Bedi in August 1971, exactly 24 years after the traumatic events of his childhood. The meeting was on a famous cricket ground in London, the Oval; Alam, playing for the county Surrey, hit Bedi for sixers before Bedi dismissed him, and they became friends. “I found that he was a very good human being, a lovely person, with great integrity,” says Alam.

Later that year, Bedi and Alam were teammates in a World XI that played against the Australian team. “That team included Bedi, Sunil Gavaskar and Farokh Engineer from India, and me, Zaheer Abbas and Asif Masood from Pakistan,” says Alam. “We had a great time there, hanging out with each other for months.”

It was also the time of another cataclysmic event in the Indian subcontinent — Bangladesh’s war for Independence. The region — East Pakistan — had been torn by a bloody ethnic strife since the March of that year, when the Pakistani army launched Operation Searchlight; India got involved in the war on December 3, after Pakistan conducted air strikes in north India. During the 13 days of war, the Indian and Pakistani cricketers were teammates for the World XI. In his first book, Sunny Days, Gavaskar recounted that they used to go for meals to a restaurant run by a Pakistan expat, who would give Alam news updates about the war, written down in Urdu on a napkin. Alam would ‘barely glance at it, crumple it up and throw it away’, Gavaskar wrote.

The bitterness of those times — when Pakistan suffered a loss, the map of South Asia was redrawn, and thousands of Pakistani army personnel had to surrender — did not lead to a rift between Alam and Bedi. Their friendship deepened over the years, in fact. Over the course of the last 20 months, after Bedi underwent a heart surgery, followed by a brain surgery to remove a clot, and went through gradual recovery, Alam and his family were a pillar of support to Bedi and his family, through regular phone conversations, pep-talk and prayers.

Using religion to segregate human beings from the same soil, same history and culture is a pre-modern, colonial idea, a terrible mistake. The story of Bedi and Alam confirms this.