The stark irony of it all

In the early 20th century, the government decided to lay a network of canals and distributaries, providing assured irrigation to the barren lands of west Punjab. However, the vast majority of the local Muslim tribesmen preferred rearing of cattle to the hard work of cultivating the land. To attract the hardy Sikh farmers from east Punjab, the government offered this land at very cheap rates. My grandfather, Sawan Singh Gill, was granted some land as a jagir for his services during World War I. He bought some more to acquire 275 acres of land, to be distributed among his four sons.

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My father, Harsharn Singh, got his share in Chakk (village) Number 65/4R, Montgomery district (now Sahiwal). It was not convenient to assign names to thousands of these settlements and hence the numbers and the letter L or R were added, depending upon whether that village was located along the left or right bank of a canal.

I was born in 1939, one among the four sons of my parents. I was enrolled in the local government middle school when I was old enough to be able to walk 3 km to the school. Another boy in the neighbourhood named Abdul was in the same class and soon became my best friend. We would spend most of our time together.

Now fast forward to July 1947. The Tribune, published at Lahore, would reach us a day late. We got to know about sporadic incidents of stabbing in the cities, which slowly turned into communal riots. It was a portent of the events to follow. My father and his two brothers planned to defend their homes with their licensed shotguns and some ammunition they had collected. Like most others, they considered this to be a passing phase, after which life would soon return to normal. On August 14, the lines were drawn dividing India into two separate dominions.

My father’s youngest brother was a police officer posted at Amritsar. He had a wider perspective of the overall situation. He reached our village with two police trucks to rescue the families of his three brothers. My father went to his two friends in the village to come along, with their families. They only taunted him for abandoning the plan of forming a common defence. We learnt that a few days later, all the village folk decided to move eastward with their bullock carts, an odd camel or a horse. They had hardly travelled about 7 km when a large armed mob fell upon them, and indulged in murder, loot and rape. A handful among the young men managed to run and swim after jumping into the large Lower Bari Doab Canal. We learnt about this a few days later from one among these survivors.

Our own family, after about a week of wandering, occupied a house in Moga, which had been abandoned by a well-to-do Muslim family. The house had been stripped bare of everything. Not satisfied with the loot, the wild lot had set fire to one of the rooms used for storing toori (dried hay). The roof had come down, burying the contents, that kept smouldering for a long time to come. We, the young lot, found it useful for burying fresh corn cobs, to be pulled out after a while to enjoy the nicely roasted ones.

One morning, I was playing in an open ground near the house when I saw a small crowd gathering nearby. I pushed my way in and saw a man squatting on the ground in a small opening in the middle. A Nihang Singh was holding a spear over him in a menacing way. The intended victim was muttering parts of Hindu-Sikh scriptures and also names of some prominent persons whom he knew. Among these were also the names of my father and uncles. I went running to describe this to my father. He rushed there, but could not recognise the poor chap. After listening to his story, he understood that he was married to a girl from our village and managed a shop in the adjoining village — Khan Kamal. That village was inhabited by a Muslim tribe. Being the only Hindu there, he had completely adopted their ways. Attired in their fashion, his hair parted in the middle and dyed in henna colour, he made a perfect picture for the Nihang to consider him legitimate prey. We managed to save him, brought him home, fed him and lodged him in the refugee camp established in the local high school.

Even at that tender age, I saw the irony of that situation. After losing his family and all that he owned, he had managed to escape to the region where he thought he would be safe, to be almost killed by his own.

For another bit of irony, I have to go back to my childhood friend Abdul. His elder brother, Yaqub, had enlisted in the army as per tradition; he and Abdul too would surely have joined the Pakistan army. I grew up to join the Indian Air Force, to be trained as a bomber pilot. During the Indo-Pak War of 1971, I was considered very proficient in dispatching a large number of the opposing forces with my bombs, and was awarded the Vir Chakra. Among my unfortunate victims could have been my dear friend Abdul. On the other hand, Abdul could have been manning an anti-aircraft gun, trying to shoot me down.

— The writer is based in Chandigarh