Footprints on Zero Line Read online

Her lips tremble

  When he says...

  ‘The flowers have dried in the pages of books

  My friend Faraz too is gone, will meet him in my dreams perhaps!’*

  Eyes closed, I often cross the border.

  Eyes don’t need a visa

  Dreams have no borders.

  vk¡[kksa dks oht+k ugha yxrk

  vk¡[kksa dks oht+k ugha yxrk

  liuksa dh ljgn gksrh ugha

  cUn vk¡[kksa ls jkst+ eSa ljgn ikj pyk tkrk gw¡

  feyus] ^esgnh glu* ls!

  lqurk gw¡ mudh vkokt+ dks pksV yxh gS

  vkSj x+t+y [+kkeks'k gS lkeus cSBh gqbZ gS

  dkai jgs gSa gksaV x+t+y ds!

  tc dgrs gSa---

  lw[k x;s gSa Qwy fdrkcksa esa

  ;kj ^Q+jkt+* Hkh fcNM+ x;s]

  vc 'kk;n feyss oks [+okcksa esa!

  cUn vk¡[kksa ls vdlj ljgn ikj pyk tkrk gw¡ eSa!

  vk¡[kksa dks oht+k ugha yxrk

  liuksa dh ljgn] dksbZ ugha!

  Ramzan

  Listen, this time too it was during Ramzan

  That I had come to Pakistan

  My visa would not allow me to wait till Iftari

  I came back to Bombay.

  I have left a paper boat on the sea at Karachi

  If the breeze changes direction some day

  It might float this way

  Or else,

  On the day the Eid moon is sighted

  Blow hard and push it towards me

  I will be at the shore

  I will meet you at the shore.

  lquks] bl ckj Hkh jet+ku ds fnu Fks!

  lquks] bl ckj Hkh jet+ku ds fnu Fks]

  eSa ikfdLrku vk;k Fkk---

  esjs ^oht+k* esa ^vQ+rkjh* ryd #dus dh xqatkbZ'k u Fkh

  eSa ckWEcs ykSV vk;kA

  djkph ds leUnj is eSa bd dkx+t+ dh d'rh j[kds vk;k gw¡

  gok dk #[+k dHkh cnyk rks 'kk;n cg ds vktk;s

  oxzuk pk¡n fudyk bZn dk ftl fnu]

  mlh dks Qwad ls rqe esjh tkfuc Bsy nsuk

  eSa lkfgy ij [kM+k gw¡

  eSa lkfgy ij feywaxk!

  Ghazal

  Some shadows are visible in the distance still

  But neither time returns, nor they.

  The autumn leaves that had fallen off the tree

  Where have they gone swirling in the waters?

  Let’s spread durries and beat the dhol again

  Adorned with mehendi let someone sing lyrical tappas.

  Let’s fly kites from every rooftop

  Try out our skills across a common sky.

  Let’s play kabaddi on the border

  And hold on to those who cross the Zero Line.

  x+t+y

  fn[kkbZ nsrs gSa] nwj rd vc Hkh lk;s dksbZ

  exj cqykus ls oD+r ykSVs u vk;s dksbZ

  oks t+nZ iRrs tks isM+ ls VwV dj fxjs Fks

  dgkWa x;s cgrs ikfu;ksa esa] cqyk;s dksbZ

  pyks u fQj ls fcNk;sa nfj;ka] ctk;sa
  yxk ds eganh] lqjhys VIis lquk;s dksbZ

  irax mM+k;sa] Nrksa is p<+ ds] eksgYys okys

  Q+yd rks lka>k gS] ml esa isps yM+k;s dksbZ

  mBks dcM~Mh dcM~Mh [ksysaxs] lgZnksa ij

  tks vk;s vcds] rks ykSV dj fQj u tk;s dksbZ

  TALES

  Crossing the Raavi

  IT IS a wonder that Darshan Singh did not go mad. His father died, his mother was lost somewhere in what remained of the gurudwara and his wife gave birth to two babies at the same time. Twins … both boys! Darshan Singh did not know if he should laugh or cry. Fate had dealt him a strange hand … taken away with one hand what She had given with the other.

  It was being said that freedom had come or was coming, though it was hard to tell when it would reach Lyallpur. Hindus and Sikhs were surreptitiously making their way to the safety of the gurudwara. Shahni had been moaning in pain for the past few days and nights. Those were the last days of her pregnancy and it would be her first labour.

  Every day, Darshan Singh would bring a new story about the riots. Every day, his father would comfort him.

  ‘Nothing will happen, son; nothing at all. Has any Hindu or Sikh home been attacked so far?’

  ‘But the gurudwara was attacked, Bhapa-ji. It has been set on fire twice.’

  ‘And yet you want to go and assemble there?’

  Darshan Singh fell silent. But all around him, people were leaving their homes and gathering in the gurudwara.

  ‘It is comforting to be in one place, Bhapa-ji. There is not a single Hindu or Sikh left in our alley. We are the only ones here.’

  One night, ten or fifteen days ago, the sound of Bhapa-ji falling down in the courtyard rang out; everyone woke up. Cries of ‘Jo Bole So Nihaal’ could be heard in the distance, coming from the gurudwara. Bhapa-ji had, in fact, heard the shouts and woken up, and gone up to the terrace. On his way down, he had slipped on the stairs, and the axe lying in the courtyard had smashed his head.

  Somehow or the other, Bhapa-ji’s last rites were performed, and whatever little they possessed was stuffed in a pillowcase and the three of them had made their way to seek refuge in the gurudwara. There was no dearth of frightened souls inside the gurudwara. No wonder, he felt buoyed with courage. Darshan Singh would say, ‘After all, we are not alone; if nothing else we are close to Waheguru.’

  Groups of young volunteers would work all day long. People had collected flour, pulses and ghee from their homes. All day and all night the community kitchen churned out meals. But how long could their provisions last … the question haunted every heart. They were hopeful, the government would send some help.

  ‘But which government?’ someone would ask. ‘The English have left.’

  ‘Pakistan has been created but there is no Pakistani government in place yet.’

  ‘I have heard that the military is all around; they are taking caravans of sharanarthis till the border under their care.’

  ‘Sharanarthis? Who are they?’ Darshan’s wife asked.

  ‘Refugees.’

  ‘We have never heard these words before.’

  A group comprising two or three families, who could no longer bear the burden of anxiety, decided to set off.

  ‘We are leaving. We have heard that there are trains leaving from the railway station. How long can we sit about waiting here?’

  ‘After all, brother, one has to find the courage. Waheguru will not carry us on His shoulders.’

  Another quoted from the Granth Sahib to bolster his argument, ‘Nanak Naam is the ship; he who boards the ship will sail across.’

  No sooner had some people left than a bubble of emptiness would form in their absence. But as soon as a fresh set of people came with news from the world outside, the bubble would burst.

  ‘Do you know … a huge camp has been set up at the railway station!’

  ‘People are dying of hunger and eating stale food. Diseases are spreading.’

  ‘Five days ago, a train had passed by this way. There wasn’t space to keep a seed of sesame; people were packed even on the roof.’

  The next morning was Sankrant. Verses from the Granth Sahib were being recited day and night. Shahni gave birth to her twins at a very auspicious moment. Of the two, one baby was extremely weak; it had little chance of survival but Shahni kept it alive through the sheer force of her umbilical cord.

  That very night someone said, ‘A special train has come to get the refugees; let us go.’

  A large mass of people set out from the gurudwara. It included Darshan Singh and Shahni too who, though extremely weak, was willing to leave for the sake of her sons. The mother refused to budge.

  ‘I will come, son; I will come with the next lot. You leave with my daughter-in-law and my grandsons.’

  Darshan Singh tried to dissuade her but the granthi intervened. The volunteers in the gurudwara too tried to bolster his courage.

  ‘Leave now, sardar-ji. One by one, we shall all go across the border. We will bring your mother with us.’

 
; And so Darshan Singh set out. He put his two babies in a basket as though he were a street hawker who had set out with his family atop his head.

  The train was at the railway station but there was no space inside it. People seemed to grow like grass on its roof.

  People saw the weak and sickly mother and her newly born babies, pulled her onto the roof, and made some space for her.

  After about ten hours there was a small rumble in the train. The evening was red, as though bloodied, its face livid and ablaze.

  Shahni’s breasts were sucked dry. She would lift one baby away, then put the other to suckle. The bundle of two infants, wrapped in rags, looked like something that had been picked up from a garbage heap.

  After some time, as the train slowly pushed its way into the night, Darshan Singh noticed that while one baby moved its arms and legs and even let out an occasional cry, the other was absolutely still. He thrust his hand inside the bundle and found it was stone cold.

  When Darshan Singh burst into tears, the people sitting around him understood. They tried to take the baby away from Shahni but she seemed to have turned to stone too. She sat there with the basket clasped to her chest.

  ‘No, one doesn’t take milk without his brother.’

  Despite everyone’s efforts, Shahni refused to let go of the basket.

  The train stopped ten times, and moved ten times.

  People made conjectures in the dark.

  ‘I am sure we have just crossed Khairabad.’

  ‘Surely this is Gujranwala.’

  ‘Just an hour more … as soon as we reach Lahore, it is as good as reaching Hindustan.’

  And in their fervour, they began to raise slogans.

  ‘Har Har Mahadev!’

  ‘Jo Bole So Nihaal!’

  A wave seemed to ripple through the crowd as the train climbed a bridge.

  ‘It is the Raavi.’

  ‘It is the Raavi! That means we have reached Lahore!’

  In that clamour of noises, someone whispered something in Darshan Singh’s ear.

  ‘Sardar-ji, throw your baby here; it will find its mukti in the Raavi. What good will it do taking it across the border?’

  Softly, Darshan Singh nudged the basket away from his wife. And, in one swift move, plucked the bundle out and flung it into the Raavi with a loud cry of ‘Waheguru’.

  The faint cry of a baby was heard in the darkness. Terrified, Darshan Singh turned to look at Shahni. The dead baby was clinging to Shahni’s breast. A bubble of noise erupted all around him…

  ‘Wagah! Wagah!’

  ‘Hindustan Zindabad!’

  Two Sisters*

  ‘MONI WOULDN’T let Loki’s hair be cut till he was about a year-and-a-half or two.’

  Soni was telling Salaam sahab this for the third time. ‘And once when I pointed this out to her, she said, “How can I cut his hair? He is a Sikh.”’

  Salaam sahab could repeat the rest on his own.

  And then one day, armed with a comb and a pair of scissors, Moni had herself sat down to cut his hair. And all the while she had kept looking at him from every angle.

  Suddenly, when Soni had entered the room, she had said, ‘Look, Soni, doesn’t he look exactly like the man who used to rape us every day.’

  There had been a strange sort of madness in her eyes. It had scared Soni.

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ Soni had picked up Loki and taken him out of the room. Soni had not been able to forget the look in Moni’s eyes. A fear had crept into her heart.

  Salaam sahab was driving the jeep. Soni was sitting quietly beside him. The driver was at the back. They were going from Kota to Alpha Nagar to find out if Loki was lying in some morgue, or whether he had been buried somewhere by the policemen. Salaam sahab knew all about Soni’s life as though he had experienced everything himself.

  When Moni and Soni had crossed the border and reached Amritsar, an entire city of camps had come up. Apart from the government-run camps, people would set up eight or ten tents in a row beside any empty stretch of wall. Forget about figuring out the borders between countries, you couldn’t tell the boundaries of a city. Who had reached where? Clutching their young and old, sons and daughters, people were moving from one camp to another like dry leaves tossed about in a gust of wind. Many had managed to reach India holding on to their families and goods but, once here, somehow their fingers had slipped loose and they had been separated from their loved ones. No one knew how or where they had been carried away – such was the chaos all around them. Most of those who had managed to cross over with their valuables were now either looking for lost relatives or shunning those who had come with them. People who had lived for generations in only one city now came face-to-face with maps of all the cities of India. They were trying to reach cities they had read about or heard of, or at best had written letters to someone from those cities. If they met a kind stranger, or a stranger showed sympathy, or someone held their hand on the way, they went along with that person.

  The real names of Soni and Moni were Surjeet and Manjeet. Perhaps they were twins. Both wore kadas. Soni and Moni were travelling alone. They had got separated from the caravan with whom they had come till Amritsar. They had heard of Gurudwara Darbar Sahab. So, the first thing they did was to go there and bow their heads. They touched the shrine with their forehead, took a dip in the holy tank and sat down to eat in the langar. They tucked a roti each in their kurti; who knew if they would get something to eat in the evening or not. Close by, volunteers were distributing clothes as well as sheets, shawls and blankets to the needy. The sisters got dupattas to cover their heads and also something to sleep on and use as a covering.

  It was not easy for two young girls, especially who had no family whatsoever, to live in the camps. Pretending to help them in the name of Waheguru, a volunteer took them to a burnt house of a Muslim in a deserted alley. He even tempted them, offering to give them the house.

  The volunteer said, ‘People are flooding in. I have saved this house. You can keep the two rooms on the first floor and my family will come and live on the ground floor.’

  The girls ran away in terror. The burnt haveli was like the one on the other side where the rioters had held them captive. If that truck driver had not reached there, would they have been alive today? Who knows where they would have been? Or, what they would have been?

  Both became a bit careful after that incident. But what could they do? A torrent of people was pouring in. And with every new surge, the people already there were being pushed backwards. There was no time to pause or stop.

  The trains were all headed in the same direction till this point. There was only one destination: Amritsar. After Amritsar, there was the border – for those who wished to go back. Trains were heading out from Amritsar in all directions. There were buses too. And trucks as well. But these were only for those who had money in their pocket. There were no tickets in the trains. Many people simply got onto a train that was the first to leave. The idea was to somehow get out of this city of camps.

  After weeks of being jostled and pushed about, Soni and Moni also got onto one such train. God knows what was the station on which the train stopped and everyone spilled out. The people who had travelled with them, said: ‘Don’t stop here; change the train. You should travel further.’

  They got onto another train and travelled on. They got off at another station where they stayed on the platform for a few days, and then moved on. The two sisters kept moving from city to city, changing courses like a train changing tracks.

  Days slipped into months. They had reached India but they had still not found their destination.

  Moni was often sick. Her face became pale. Soon, she began to vomit. That’s when she realized the rape had stayed in her womb. There was no place where they could go for an abortion. Nor did they have the occasion to look for such a place. They were still travelling.

  Moni would beat her belly and cry, ‘I am rearing my enemy in my womb! What shall I do? It will
die only if I die!’

  It was hard to tell who was genuinely a sympathizer and who an exploiter. People had begun to stick together in groups. After spending a few days together, they would form a tight little cluster. And these groups preferred to travel together.

  There was another kind of group travelling about; they were looting the sharanarthis and taking advantage of their helplessness.

  Some volunteers were helping people get into buses on the pretext of taking them from stations and depots to refugee camps. Halfway through, they would extort money from the sharanarthis. Those who did not pay were threatened and told to get off the bus. Naturally, no one wanted to get off in some deserted place and fend for themselves. Someone would pull out the money they had stashed away in their waistband; others would offer their bangles and ornaments. Often, a fellow traveller would help out those who didn’t have anything to give. The homeless are a compassionate lot. They had reached their country but they were still either muhajir or sharanarthi.

  The refugees made a place for themselves inside Bundi Fort. Workers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were offering help and assistance to all of them. The saffron flag was flying on the fort after nine hundred years.

  Several refugee families were living in the fort. An elderly lady from one of the Punjabi families, Bebe, recognized Moni’s condition. By now Moni’s belly had begun to bulge. There was no man with the girls. When Bebe asked point-blank, Soni lied; she said her family and Moni’s husband were killed on that side. Moni was pregnant when the two sisters managed to escape in a truck full of refugees. Only the bit about the truck was true.

  Bebe had nine sons; all of them had managed to escape with their entire families intact. And as luck would have it, they had managed to bring across quite a bit of their wealth too, although their house, land, livestock and immovable properties were all left behind. They were fortunate that no one from their family had been killed. Only their grandfather was left behind, who, virtually till the last minute, kept saying: ‘All of you are going to come back. You wait and see; if Allah wills, this calamity too shall pass.’