Dip and I are eating hot dogs for supper. She woke the previous night with a craving, she said. Our usual fare these days is breaded cod with peas and cumin-sautéed potatoes. Since this is a radical departure, it makes it a good moment, I decide, to throw out a radical proposal.
‘I am thinking of going to Kashmir.’
‘Don’t be silly. You are not going to Kashmir. That would be asking for trouble.’
She has a point. Kashmir is in lockdown. Local politicians are in jail, communications are cut and the state has been flooded with Indian troops.
Since 1947, relations between India and Pakistan have been marred by the dispute over this place. But before my recent travels to India and Pakistan, I had not grasped the extent of the hostility: in the UK, the communities appear to co-exist peacefully enough.
The first time I pitched up at the National Archives in Delhi, I didn’t get very far. Without a letter of ‘authorisation’ from the Embassy, no one would let me near the collection. On my way out, at the foot of a stone staircase, I came upon an exhibition being dismantled (much like my plans for the day). Heroic Indian troops repeatedly outwitted the enemy. The enemy were Pakistani troops who weeks before had been comrades in the British Indian Army. The battleground was Kashmir in 1948 and the first of three wars fought over the territory.
Since Partition, numerous grievances have intersected. Dividing the Punjab also divided its rivers. From the outset this proved a problem. After Partition, irrigation headworks in India fed canals in Pakistan. In April 1948, the Government of East Punjab (in India) turned off the supply. It took a month to turn it back on and then only for a fee. Pakistan saw this as bad faith and bullying by its larger neighbour.
Charles was reporting from the region when the World Bank finally brokered a deal. The Indus Water Treaty of 1960 allocated waters of the eastern rivers – the Beas, Satluj and Ravi – to India and the western rivers – the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – to Pakistan. The fact that the western rivers flow into Pakistan via Jammu and Kashmir intensifies Pakistan’s claims to the territory.
In 1947 a number of Indian leaders, including Nehru, didn’t expect the division of the country to last; indeed they hoped Pakistan wouldn’t survive. In 1971 their hopes were almost fulfilled. The Bengalis of East Pakistan did not take well to being ruled by Punjab-dominated West Pakistan. Indian troops helped ‘liberate’ East Pakistan and after a fourteen-day war it became Bangladesh, a desperately poor, water-logged nation just east of Calcutta.
In the coming years Pakistan avenged the loss of Bangladesh by supporting terror and secessionist urges within the Indian Republic. It did this in Kashmir and in the Indian state of Punjab, where the seeds of separatism, sown at Partition, continued to grow.
Partition of the Punjab fractured the Sikh community and created a huge refugee population. Many, like Dip’s family, relocated and settled in Delhi. Ujjal Singh and Baldev Singh, once Punjabi politicians, became Delhi-based All-India politicians. Fiery Akali leader Tara Singh stayed in the Punjab, crossing the border into Amritsar.
In the early 1960s, when Charles reported from the region, Tara Singh was still agitating for a Sikh state and in the Golden Temple he launched a fast ‘unto death’ in order to win one. Judging by his reports, Charles wasn’t a fan of the man. The weapon of fasting, he said, survived Gandhi, but his motives did not. ‘Gandhi brought his people together. Fasts since have been devoted to creating new divisions.’
The Sikh leaders, Charles said, were obsessed by the thought of the community losing its separate identity. Their assertiveness frightened the ‘more easy-going’ Hindus, who disowned the Punjabi language as a symbol of Sikh communalism. The Sikh leaders then called for the Hindi-speaking parts of the Punjab to be cut away. ‘What the Sikhs are really doing,’ said Charles, is ‘asking a secular government to take executive action to help them protect their religion from decline’.
In the end (after Dip and Charles left India) the Punjab was divided. Kasauli became part of Himachal Pradesh and Haryana came into being alongside the Punjabi-speaking state of Punjab. But this didn’t silence the demand for a Sikh homeland or crush the dream of Khalistan, mooted to little effect at the time of Partition. In the 1980s separatist embers were stoked into violence by the radical charismatic Sikh preacher, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.
I remember seeing photographs at the time. Bhindranwale and his coterie of fundamentalists, army deserters, criminals and thugs terrorised the Punjab, charging through the countryside on motorbikes or in open cars, brandishing rifles and spears. It was so far from the welcoming inclusive faith that Dip had spoken about. For months these extremists murdered and whipped up anti-Hindu hatred. They openly stockpiled weapons and turned the Golden Temple into a fortress.
The BBC’s Mark Tully co-authored a gripping book about these events, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle, which we discussed in Kasauli over tea. Finally, and according to Mark much too late, Mrs Gandhi ordered Operation Blue Star to flush out Bhindranwale and his band. On the day the army stormed the site – 5 June 1984 – thousands of pilgrims were celebrating the martyrdom of Guru Arjun, builder of the Golden Temple, and bathing in the sacred tank.
The generals had pledged to use minimum force and spare the two shrines, the Golden Temple and the Akal Takht. But they were unprepared for the fierce resistance they encountered. That it was organised by a Sikh general and hero of the Bangladesh war was an irony Pakistan reportedly relished. Waves of the Indian Army were felled, shot from ventilators and other hidden spots. Then, with approval from Delhi, the tanks went in and the Akal Takht was virtually reduced to rubble. When it was over, Bhindranwale’s corpse was brought out.
The storming of the Temple, Ramchandra Guha writes, ‘left a collective wound in the psyche of the Sikhs’. Khushwant had always condemned Bhindranwale, but in protest at the desecration he returned an honour he had been given by Mrs Gandhi’s government. Further repercussions took place in Delhi. On 31 October 1984 Mrs Gandhi was shot and killed by her Sikh bodyguards in the garden of her home. The next evening, rioting broke out. Gangs roamed the streets, mainly in Delhi, killing, burning and looting. Sikhs alone were the target.
One evening in Kasauli, Pami told me about those terrifying days and I learnt how my mild-mannered (though argumentative) cousin became a manufacturer of Molotov cocktails.
Mrs Gandhi was killed on the Saturday. The next day, Pami said, it was clear there was going to be retaliation. He was in the garden of their flat in Sujan Singh Park, discussing Kalamkari fabric with a supplier, when they heard a loud banging. ‘A Muslim friend reported crowds were breaking into Sikh garages and he advised us to get out.
‘Relations were ringing to ask what we should do. There were twenty flats occupied by our family. I decided to consult Khushwant, as he was the eldest. Initially, he was for staying, but while we were debating it, the Swedish Ambassador came and took him off to the Embassy. He was a well-known Sikh and we feared he’d be a target. This was ironic because his criticism of Bhindranwale meant that for a time he had needed bodyguards to protect him from Sikh extremists.’
Pami took his then wife and young children, Amba and Kabir, to stay with friends. ‘After sitting with friends for an hour I felt like a coward, so they dropped me home. I went to one of my cousins to see if he had a gun. I had never fired one, but he showed me how to do it. I went back to our flat alone. The night was quiet.
‘The next morning there were rumours that the rioters were going to attack three locations in Sujan Singh Park, including my flat. Our fabric supplier had heard that the Congress Party was organising a group from the sweeper colony behind Sujan Singh Park. The plan was to whip them up and supply them with liquor and iron rods before the attack. This was to happen when Mrs Gandhi’s funeral pyre was lit the following day.
‘Residents of the servants’ quarters – Sikhs and Hindus – started to make petrol bombs, like Molotov cocktails. They filled about thirty bottles. I went to my brother-in-law, a guy in the army, and asked if our defences were adequate.
‘He asked what the petrol bombs were made of. When I told him, he said, “Are you crazy? You’ll blow yourselves up!” He told me a formula, which included diesel to delay the explosion. For the rest of the day we were very publicly refilling the bottles. We increased our supply to sixty. We were going to chuck them down from the roof of the servants’ quarters. We spent a long time up there. I had the gun and we were standing taking aim, practising. My brother-in-law advised that at dusk we should stretch out nylon wire so that when the mob came they’d trip and then we could pelt them.
‘On the day of the cremation our preparations were complete. Dusk came. There were about ten of us on the roof, including Hindu and Sikh shopkeepers. We waited, but there was no attack. I am almost sure they were deterred by our show of resistance.’ He explained that there were other places in the city where people put up defences and escaped attack. The Imperial Hotel, he said, was owned by a Sikh. ‘That evening the Sikh taxi drivers cordoned off the hotel with their taxis and stood on guard. No one attacked.’
Thanks to their brave and loyal workers, Pami said, their factory at Noida south of Delhi was saved. ‘On the third day of rioting when they realised factories were being destroyed, ten of our printers – Hindus and Muslims – raced to Noida and persuaded the mob not to burn it.’ At the time of the riots, he says eighty-five of the three hundred properties in Noida belonged to Sikhs. Eighty-three were destroyed.
Pami’s daughter Amba says it was traumatic as a child to feel hunted and hear mobs baying for blood. In their hiding place, she says, her mother sharpened her kirpan ready to kill anyone who might try to harm her children.
Nearly three thousand were killed in the violence, mostly in Delhi. In the absence of an official investigation, groups of eminent citizens conducted inquiries. The Citizens’ Commission highlighted the role of ‘dubious political elements’ in starting the riots, the ‘abysmal failure’ of the police, and the ‘inertia, apathy and indifference of the official machinery’. The first criminal convictions came in 2018 and are under appeal. This impunity still riles.
Pami told me that the anti-Sikh riots played an important role in their lives.
‘Before Operation Blue Star, when a wave of terrorism hit the Punjab all we Sikhs were seen as extremists. Wherever we went we were singled out and harassed. I remember being pulled out of airport queues. It was very demeaning. I found my bonds of nationality started to loosen; 1984 made me feel I did not care about this country. We opened a shop, Handblock, in New York at about that time. I didn’t want my children to study in India.’
This conversation opened my eyes and made me think about what being Sikh means nowadays. When I asked, Pami declared that our family doesn’t feel Sikh any more. ‘Of the outward symbols of Sikhism, the five “ks”, only the kara (bracelet) is worn. And that’s just because it’s useful for opening bottles of beer.’ Pami is provocative. That’s a fact. And his manner is so deadpan it’s hard to tell when he’s joking. Which I work out later he was.
Pondering the five ks, I think first about turbans and uncut hair. Dip was alone among her siblings in cutting her hair. A generation later, commitment to the kesh stayed strong. Five of my six male cousins (Pami included) wear a turban. Sati (one of Amarjit’s sons), who died in 2016, cut his hair in the 1970s while attending a catering college in Portsmouth. Pami says the pressure of being different got to him. Pami also studied in Britain and felt pressure to conform. But, he says, ‘I didn’t want to feel the British had forced me into doing something like that.’ So he kept his turban.
During Partition and the 1984 riots, a turban could mark you for slaughter. Nearly twenty years later, on 11 September 2001, when Al-Qaeda murdered nearly three thousand people in New York and Washington DC, my nephew Karam was studying economics at the University of Chicago. A couple of days after 9/11 he was with his mother Rano and an uncle in up-state New York. A woman approached Rano and spat: ‘You damn bitch Pakistani, are you carrying arms?’ In a Radio Shack store, a stranger pleaded, ‘Please go to your hotel or someone will kill you.’ The atmosphere was ugly and tense. Karam refused to miss class, but he decided to cut his hair and no longer wears a turban. On a recent tally, I realise all my nephews have cut their hair. None wears a turban.
But it is not over yet. There is an outlier in the youngest generation: Sujan, my nephew Jaisal’s seven-year-old son. His mother Anjali explains: ‘We used to cut Sujan’s hair until he was about four. Then he said he didn’t want us to. Jugnu (Sujan’s grandfather) wears a turban, but I am sure he never encouraged Sujan to do the same. Jaisal just wears one for special events, like weddings. Maybe Sujan imbibed somehow that Jaisal regretted his hair was cut.’
Anjali’s mother is from an old Sikh family and her father is the eldest son of a Punjabi Hindu family, who, in keeping with tradition, followed Sikhism almost all of his life. I think of her as more attached to Sikh practice than many other family members, so I ask what she feels about her son’s hair. ‘Hair is less important nowadays. It’s the hassle factor and the reaction you get from other people. They are so ignorant. But something has made Sujan feel the way he does, so let’s see.’
Ateesh, Geeta’s younger son, grew up mostly in Hong Kong (where his father Nayan, a Bengali born to Hindu parents, edited the Far Eastern Economic Review) and in the US, where both parents worked. Ateesh wasn’t raised as a Hindu or Sikh.
‘My parents didn’t teach us much about religion,’ he says. ‘In fact, I’d assumed I was a Christian until I was about six because we got Christmas presents. I also thought I was Chinese when I was in kindergarten, since I was born in Hong Kong. Clearly, not the brightest child!’
Aged ten, after living in Delhi for a year before moving back to Hong Kong, he chose to become a practising Sikh. He says he was drawn to Sikhism by his grandmother (Amarjit). He was impressed by the strength she drew from it and he liked the rituals. ‘When we visited India, I enjoyed going to Gurdwara Bangla Sahib. It was beautiful and I loved the sweet, hot parshad followed by a refreshing drink of amrit (holy water). I started wearing a turban at ten. I’d become an atheist by about sixteen or seventeen, but I hesitated a few years before I cut my hair.’
I asked if he hesitated because he feared family disapproval. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the family is quite easy-going about religion. It was because the turban and beard had become such a significant part of my appearance and of an identity that felt comfortable. Your standard Christian can quietly change his mind about religious belief, but it’s more of a public statement when a Sikh makes a change.’
While in law school in the US, Ateesh met Shideh, a medical student of Iranian origin (now a doctor), whom he married. They have four-year-old twins and live in Providence, Rhode Island. One summer, Cassia, Theo and I enjoyed a few days with them there. Sitting by the bay, Ateesh told me food was one way the twins were learning about their cultures. They have some Farsi vocabulary thanks to Shideh’s mother and celebrate Nowruz (Persian New Year) along with Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. ‘At some point,’ he said, ‘I’ll teach them about Sikhism and take them to a gurdwara, because I think there’s beauty and wisdom in the religion and I want them to have an understanding of their family.’
I was already doubting Pami’s beer-bottle pronouncement when I learnt about the langar. In 2019, to mark the 500th anniversary of the founding of Sikhism, Kabir and Aishwarya (who is Hindu, by the way) decided to hold a langar in Sujan Singh Park. In the morning they started the cooking, making vats of mixed dal with rajma (kidney beans), rice pilaf with peas, sabzi (mixed vegetables) and tandoori rotis. Huge tablecloths from The Shop were spread out on the lawns.
With my nieces Laila and Amira, they began the event in the gurdwara, singing kirtans from the Guru Granth Sahib, and then went for the langar. The children rushed about serving food. Instead of the expected one hundred and fifty, three hundred people turned up, so to ensure no one went hungry, extra food was brought in from restaurants nearby.
Kabir wonders if his father Pami’s ‘joke’ about beer bottles is an expression of regret that Sikh traditions are fading. We talk about the prayer room at his grandmother Amarjit’s old house, where it was obligatory to gather on certain occasions for kirtans and parshad. Like Ateesh, Kabir saw that his grandmother’s faith brought her solace, especially towards the end of her life. When she began losing her memory, he says, she would sit for hours reading her prayers.
Otherwise religion featured little in his own upbringing, Kabir says. ‘I was actually quite fiercely atheist for a time. I didn’t want to have a Sikh wedding at all and only acquiesced to keep my grandmother happy.’ But now he attends Buddhist classes and is learning more about Sikhism, from a book called Walking with Nanak by a Pakistani Muslim from the Punjab.
Faith and identity are highly personal, but the younger generation of my family show that people can be at ease with multiple identities. We are many things at once. Some feel that’s what India, a country of staggering diversity, is all about, but today it’s under threat. The ideology of Hindutva demands a single identity. That’s not what the secular founders of India had in mind, I’m told, and it condemns many Indians to feel like outsiders in their own country.
Golf Links, Sujan Singh Park and Cuffe Parade. These places house core clusters of the family. But there are outposts too, several in the US and here in the UK. This means a family WhatsApp group chat is essential. ‘Singh is King’ is mostly used to send celebratory wishes on birthdays, anniversaries and festivals like Baisakhi, Eid, Diwali and Onam (a Keralan harvest festival, I’m told). There’s also family news, articles, plenty of jokes and the occasional political spat.
One (mini) spat began with a video clip of a Sikh Member of Parliament in Westminster chastising a politician for comparing Muslim women in burkas to letter boxes.
A cousin commented that the MP should have spoken instead about ‘attacks’ on the Indian High Commission in London (a demonstration against India’s revocation of Kashmir’s special constitutional status in August 2019). He then observed that some of those the MP was speaking up for (meaning Muslims/Pakistanis?) ‘are the very people who are attacking the High Commission and Indian interests’.
This prompted some indignant responses from other family members, not usually active on the chat. My cousin held his ground: ‘He [meaning the Sikh MP] should have spoken up for India.’
Two nephews replied, hitting the nail on the head.
Amit: He’s British innit.
Kabir: He is the Right Honourable Member for Slough, not Patiala.
Periodically, the prospect of improved relations between India and Pakistan has come into view. Sometimes there is talk of softening the Line of Control, the de facto border in Kashmir, pending resolution of the dispute. In 2007, the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, a Partition refugee, spoke of his dream that one day ‘while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want my grandchildren to live.’ Then terror destroyed all discussion of peace.
A few hundred yards from the Cuffe Parade mansion, to the right looking from the veranda, there’s a small fishing village. In November 2008 ten young men approached the shore in small inflatable boats and stepped onto the beach. According to Kamalbir, the locals who saw them arrive thought they were ‘kids on some kind of an outing’. But they had weapons in their kitbags and for the next thirty-six hours they terrorised Mumbai, using guns and grenades.
Kamalbir and Rano were dining with friends at a restaurant called Wong Wong. Rano sat with her back to the window. A bullet entered above her head and made a neat hole in the wall. Outside, people ran frantically as the attackers shot their way into the Oberoi Hotel.
‘At first people said it was gang war,’ Rano recounted. ‘The police told us to go next door where there was a huge TV. Then we realised it was a terrorist attack. We were stuck there, standing the whole night watching what was going on. At the Oberoi those guys made them lie down and told them to say the Muslim prayer. Anyone who couldn’t, they just killed them, just killed them all. We had so many friends stuck in the Oberoi and the Taj. We were in contact with the family on the telephone. Mummy (Anup) was talking to us about every half-hour, panicking, panicking.’
I asked about the reaction once it was over. It was very subdued, they said. ‘There was no anti-Muslim feeling then. Everyone was mad with Pakistan for supporting the terrorists, but not with Muslims living here. The military wanted to carpet-bomb Pakistan, but Manmohan Singh did not want any of that.’
In fact, the two countries came very close to war.
The Partition Museum opened a few years ago in a renovated section of Amritsar’s Old Town Hall.
The narrative of Partition is told in about ten rooms, skilfully curated with photographs, newspapers, memorabilia and text. It starts with the Raj and chronicles some of the lowest points of colonial rule, such as the Rowlatt Acts and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. There is Colonel Dyer’s testimony to a parliamentary committee beneath a banner exhorting the ill-fated Simon Commission to go home. The British, these rooms explain, pursued a policy of divide and rule, deliberately stoking division between communities to keep control and suppress the movement for independence.
Newspaper front pages and editorials chronicle the constitutional and political wrangling: the Congress – Muslim League rivalry, the demand for Pakistan, the fall of Khizr’s Unionist government in the Punjab. There’s a mass of fascinating material, but it’s a lot to digest.
In one room, a huge image of a train is projected onto a wall. People hang from the carriage doors and cram the roof. Many, many people are on the move. Every few minutes the train whistles shrilly, warning of its departure. If you know the fate of these trains – many arrived filled with corpses – the whistle sounds chilling. In the museum, photographs placed high up or behind curtains show there was killing, but not its scale or barbarity.
Two rooms upstairs are dedicated to displaced people – such as my mother and family – who rebuilt their lives. I stop before a grainy black-and-white photo. It’s of a group of refugees who have found shelter. Their clothes are ragged. They have spread bedding on a stone floor and some lie down. Others crouch under arches. Their expressions are impossible to read. Did they feel relief or despair? I glance at the caption. It is Humayun’s Tomb, 1947. About fifteen years before Dip and her gang came here to dance.
Over two years I visited the museum four times. It is imaginative and informative. Unequivocally, it is a good thing. But I feel it overplays ‘divide and rule’ as an explanation for Partition. Historians like Patrick French recognise instances where British officials exploited divisions between communities, including to hold back Independence. But government, they say, was never ‘joined up’ enough to pursue it as a policy. The Raj ruled, but it didn’t deliberately divide. Indeed, it feared disorder and outbreaks of communal violence.
The Muslim League, egged on by the British, are also fingered here as authors of Partition. Of course, the country was divided to create Pakistan, and Muslim League politicians stoked communal hatred. But so did leaders from other communities. Hindu nationalists played their part. Lala Lajpat Rai (the leader who died after being struck by a lathi) advanced the two-nation theory – that Hindus and Muslims belonged in separate states – well before Jinnah.
A museum visitor wants to know why Partition happened, but they also want to know why so many died. Why, people ask, did the authorities not stop the killing? The question in part contains the answer. The absence of a single functioning authority allowed the violence to escalate. The Raj was being dismantled while the two (mutually antagonistic) successor states were just emerging. As Yasmin Khan writes: ‘during these fraught days, the state was trying to do two contradictory things at once: split the army in half and prevent civil war’.
In Delhi, the politicians agreed to use firm force to keep the peace. If necessary, they said, military aircraft would be deployed to shoot down militias. But it didn’t happen. Some historians suggest the ghost of past failures played a role. Penderal Moon, Deputy Commissioner in Amritsar, wrote that Rees (Commander of the Punjab Boundary Force) and others would have been ‘familiar with the Dyer case’ and while they understood the need to take tough action against jathas, ‘it is reasonable to assume they were conscious of the need to avoid another Jallianwala Bagh’. That’s not to excuse the failure to protect the civilian population: it’s an attempt to understand it. Since those days, peacekeeping has developed as a distinct form of soldiering.
Outside the museum it was hot. I joined Theo and Chloe. We swigged water, agreed our next stop and checked how long it was until lunch.
I walked in front. Determined vendors offered me Indian sweets, ornamental daggers, scarves and bright-coloured bangles, but they were wasting their breath. I was not in the mood. I was thinking about murder. I still couldn’t understand why the communities were so intent on butchering each other. Why did they systematically wipe out people they had previously lived with in peace? Dip had spoken of the violence as a temporary ‘madness’, but it didn’t feel like a real explanation.
We surrendered our shoes to a communal locker and covered our heads. Then we waded through a pool of tepid ‘disinfected’ water onto a plastic mat and emerged after a few steps into the courtyard of the Golden Temple. It was a glorious sight. Literally dazzling. The white marble, gilded tips of the buildings and expanse of sacred water in the middle reflected a sunlight so bright we were forced to shield our eyes even in sunglasses. The Akal Takht had been restored to its earlier glory. I was struck by the opulence and the tranquillity.
It was lunchtime and in our hour of need we found ourselves outside the langar. We each grabbed a tin plate. There was no queue, so we joined the throng, gently jostling our way in to take up a place on the floor of a vast hall. Volunteers walked along lines of expectant pilgrims slopping watery dal from a bucket and handing out rotis. We were grateful for what we received, but the langar isn’t a place to linger, especially if you’re not used to sitting cross-legged and feel guilty about not really being in need.
On the way out we passed a hillock of garlic, and another of onion, next to a mini army of peelers. I thought of Bei-ji preparing food for the langar in Sargodha.
To aid digestion we did a few rotations around the sacred tank looking, I guess, conspicuously foreign. Members of the global diaspora of Sikhs came up for a chat. One guy was from Birmingham and there was a couple from Leicester. A friendly family we met came every year from Toronto. We wrapped up the pleasantries before climbing the steps of the Central Sikh Museum.
Four adjoining rooms housed the museum’s exhibits, mainly paintings and photographs. The dominant theme was defence of the faith. Mughal Emperors ordered the Gurus and their disciples to renounce it and devised creative ways to torture those who refused. It was all chronicled here. Someone with flayed skin hung upside down from a branch, another was boiled in a pot. One was sawn down the middle, a second was thrown onto a bonfire. Taj Bahadur, the ninth Guru, was beheaded, while another was crushed in a mangle.
I confess I am a little squeamish. Under certain conditions I faint. It happened at Bar School looking at pictures of corpses in a forensic medicine lecture. Another time I was queuing for a visa in the sun reading a newspaper account of Bosnian war crimes. For a moment I worried it might happen here. The scenes of torture were terrible. But then I noticed the Gurus’ expressions. They were supremely unbothered by their horrifying fate. They were calm. In fact, many grinned as they faced death.
Guru Gobind Singh toughened up the Sikh faith. Here were the two young sons Dip told me about. Wearing matching saffron turbans and blue sashes, they stood side by side. Wazir Khan watched on while four masons built up the walls to brick them in alive. Underneath the painting a small plaque explained: ‘They preferred self-sacrifice to forcible conversion and emerged in history as immortals.’
Dip told me about this bricking up. ‘Muslim–Sikh relationships were complicated,’ she had explained in the kitchen in Sussex. ‘We were taught about all this to show the bravery and resolve of the Sikhs – that they didn’t forsake their faith even under torture. But, of course, it can be used to vilify Muslims.’
Two large paintings hang high up, close to the exit. One is the Temple complex after the 1984 military attack. The tank is drained, the towers are blackened. The other is a portrait of a well-armed, full-bearded man in white robes. He wears a blue turban, with two swords tucked into a sash. He is an ‘Immortal Martyr Sant Jarnail Singh Si Kalsa Bindranwale’. We are a hundred yards from the langar in a gallery of martyrs.
Papa-ji had two nephews who also lived in Sargodha: Madan and Mehtab Singh. Mehtab’s daughter Guddi used to play outside with my mother and Priti. Guddi and my mother haven’t met since 1947 and Dip’s memory of her is hazy. After Partition the families fractured and lost contact. Then, some years ago, Anup recognised Guddi in Delhi’s Habitat Centre and approached her.
Subhag and I were invited to meet Guddi for lunch at her daughter Tutu’s flat in Gurgaon. Gurgaon is a new satellite town of pristine high-rise blocks. Outside the residential colony, security guards circled our car inspecting its underbelly. We found the building and took the lift up. The flat was spacious and light. On the balcony, nine floors up, we looked down on a series of swimming pools, lawns and golf courses. I imagined Singapore being something like this.
I had come to talk to Guddi about what happened to her side of the family on Partition. She held my hand and asked after my mother. It was thanks to Papa-ji, she said, that she went to Kinnaird College. Her father was reluctant, but Papa-ji said his daughters could only go if Guddi was also allowed.
Guddi told me that in the summer of 1947, her parents were still in Sargodha. Guddi had travelled to Dehra Dun, a town two hundred miles to the east, to be with her sister who lived there and was expecting a baby. On 14 August 1947 Mehtab wrote a letter to his daughters from Sargodha, which Guddi has kept. Tutu got up to fetch it. The script was hard to decipher, so Tutu read it aloud. After some preliminaries, Mehtab reported:
This place is quiet but people from eastern Punjab want to foment trouble in these parts as a retaliation for what is alleged to be done in Amritsar and Hoshiarpur Districts. But God’s mercy will save the crisis. There have been many troubles in Amritsar and Lahore during the last 3 days, and Military also is said to have shot down many people in the act of mischief. This may have a salutatory effect. An express train was also said to have been stopped near Badami Bagh and many people including ladies are said to have been killed.
Men have run mad and the only place for such is hell or a mad house. Please do not have any worry and let us hope that peace will prevail after 15th August.
Tutu paused to explain that the family used to buy and sell horses at auction, then she continued to read.
‘Auction was not very successful as people could not come due to the disturbances; it will now take place after a fortnight when there is a lull.’
After giving news about various friends and acquaintances, Mehtab wrote: ‘May God restore calmness, and you all may meet us here in happiness. May the whole world get peace through Guru Nanak Saheb’s mercy.’ Then he signed off.
Guddi told me that by the time the letter arrived in Dehra Dun, news had reached them about the carnage in the Punjab. They were sure their parents had perished. About two weeks later, out of the blue, her parents appeared, walking across the lawn.
In the late 1990s, Guddi and Tutu went together to a Kinnaird College reunion in Lahore. They spent an afternoon in Sargodha. They looked for our houses, but they were gone. The land was sold and in the early 1990s the buildings came down. Of course, I had feared this might be the case, but my heart sank when I heard it first-hand. Tutu was still speaking as I processed the implications of what I had learnt. Had I fantasised about a moment of discovery, walking through the house, over a cracked marble floor, to find my grandfather’s turbans still untouched after seventy years? If so, that wasn’t going to happen. More importantly, how would I break it to Dip? Had I raised her hopes of finding her home, only to have to reveal it no longer existed?
I worried Dip would try to dissuade me, but I was still determined to get to Sargodha. I wanted to see for myself. Guddi and Tutu understood this and drew me a map. From Sargodha railway station they sketched how I could find the place where the Lost Homestead used to be.
I folded the map and slid it into my bag.