A world with virtual borders

BEING the youngest sibling, I had the luxury of being regaled with bedtime stories with a happy ending by my parents. Often, the cosy comfort of a quilt while listening to my father — fondly called Baoji —on wintry nights contrasted with the traumatic tales of the Partition. Sparing my impressionable mind the gory details would somewhat reduce the contrast. A stream of emotions would cross his face while recalling the communal frenzy, in the helter-skelter of which he got separated from his family.

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It would make me shudder to think of how, while finding his way to Amritsar, trudging gingerly along the railway track, he had to feed himself on raw vegetables from wayside fields, while avoiding lurking danger at every step. And how he would catch chapattis flung at him by generous souls and help out the injured lying along the track. Facing overwhelming odds and avoiding risky routes via detours, he somehow reached the Attari railway station. Fortunately, the family reunion took place, but it felt like an eternity, he would say. Normalcy took time to return. He set up house and found a job with a bank in 1951.

His survival instinct and his ordeal inculcated in him traits that did him a world of good later in life — an unflinching streak of fearlessness being one of them. I never found him nursing any insecurity while dealing with day-to-day problems. He repaid the debt of succour he received from kind souls during the treacherous journey with a free hand to those in distress around him.

Everything in life went his way until he got afflicted with a heart condition, later worsened by acute dementia. He would forget things and sometimes had trouble recognising his children and remembering even the name of my mother. But the memories of his native place, Jhang Maghiana, a district in Pakistan where he was born, were so entrenched in the deep recesses of his mind that whenever I whispered its name in his ears, saying, ‘Baoji, let’s go to Jhang Maghiana’, there would be a glint in his eyes and a broad smile betrayed his ardent desire to visit his birthplace. Alas! His wish remained just that due to the geopolitical fault lines and the borders separating people.

The edifying lines of a film song, ‘Panchhi, nadiya, pawan ke jhonke/Koi sarhad na inhe roke’, make me ponder over my father’s wish for a world sans borders. A question posed by my tech-savvy son left me nonplussed: ‘In this digital age, if through AI, we can have so many things in the virtual mode, why can’t we have a world with virtual borders?’