BY S’HA SIDDIQI
Ajaz Khan ran, his little sister cradled in his arms as he raced through the high grass in the smoke-clogged night. His heart pounded as he barreled towards the tree line, the sound of gunshots thundering in the distance. His legs burned, calf muscles straining as he snagged his foot on the underbrush. He tripped, crashing them both down to the dirt.
“The men had machetes and rifles,” he’d recalled. They had been armed with an assortment of rusted second-hand weapons. People had been screaming and he’d been afraid that he would be caught.
Ajaz Khan was my grandfather. He passed away in August 2016.
He recalled his flight to Pakistan in a conversation with me in March of that same year, just a few months before his death. Until then, I never had paused to consider the implications of.
At the time we had this discussion, he was an eighty-seven-year-old government retiree living in Islamabad, a city he’d helped design at its inception in the 1960’s. If prodded, he would smile and tell you about his contributions to the capital’s master plan. He had tremendous national pride, but he had been born five-hundred miles away – in a country he had not set foot in since 1947 and hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place.
He had been a young man in university when Pakistan and India gained independence after WWII. His family had lived in a majority Muslim district of Delhi. Their once vibrant neighborhood had become quiet, half the homes abandoned as gangs of vigilantes patrolled at night. Those who stayed were often beaten and those caught trying to leave were killed – the aftermath of the war leaving a vacuum of power that intensified political unrest.
The British Raj had been recently dismantled, and the new replacement governments were ineffective. Without a mediator, centuries-old tensions between the various religious communities had escalated, leading to public executions and internal conflict. Woman were mutilated and charred remains of infants were found rotting on roadsides. Modern estimates put the Partition death toll at 1 million, with an additional 15 million individuals displaced.
Eventually my grandfather’s family had attempted an escape, lured by the promise of a new homeland in Pakistan.
Recently, I asked my mother, Ayesha, if she’d ever heard this story. She told me yes and that he hadn’t actually wanted to leave India.
“My dad had always been a bookworm,” she said. “He argued with his father because he didn’t want to leave his college, he just wanted to be left alone and study […] Partition made it too dangerous.”
This sounded more like the man I was familiar with, perpetually huddled in a blanket with a wool cap – newspapers and cups of tea always within easy reach.
He was the type of person who enjoyed playing solitaire on his computer and faithfully self-monitored his intake of Splenda. It was hard to imagine that same man in the context of his past, forsaking his birthplace to take part in one of the largest mass migrations in human history.
During that conversation, he had told me how his family had left their home in Delhi in the morning. They had taken nothing with them and said goodbye to no one. The seven of them had pretended to go to school, work, or market in order to belie suspicion as they individually made for the station. It had been crowded, filled with other families trying to cram themselves into the train compartments – all carrying tickets for too few seats.
His parents and sisters had managed to squeeze inside but he and his elder brother had to go up on the carriage roof, open to the elements as they made their way out of the city. The two men next to them began to squabble and one pushed the other out of anger. He’d toppled over.
The train didn’t stop for him.
At this point in his retelling, my grandfather had paused again to refresh his tea, pouring himself a second cup – this time without Splenda. His doctor had warned him not to have too much.
The trains had been the hardest part, he’d told me. Groups of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs civilians had roamed the countryside – all angry and seeking unwarranted retribution against each other following British withdrawal from the subcontinent.
His stepmother had made them face away from the windows but he hadn’t had that option as they passed the bodies lining the tracks. “She told my siblings, close your eyes,” he said.
Every now and then he’d see carcasses pulled further away, their clothes peppered with bullet holes and piled together carefully. Other times he’d notice black smoke curling from raided villages as they crossed Punjab province towards the border.
During that time, food was sparse. Occasionally they’d stop, refueling or changing trains – sometimes braving the fields on foot.
Then one night, they came face to face with one of the marauding parties. They’d begun traveling with a small group of other migrants, but the sight of the armed men had them all scattering – screaming as they raced into the crop fields. Some weren’t fast enough and collapsed as they were shot. Others were caught by men holding meat cleavers or harvest sickles.
This was the memory my grandfather had started our conversation with. It had been that night that he’d fallen while running with his younger sibling.
He had scrambled up, ignoring the scrapes on his knees as he tried to hush his little sister in his arms – the echo of footsteps growing closer.
To his shock, it hadn’t been the outlaws. Sikh refugees emerged from the woods ahead, making their way to India in the opposite direction. The subsequent confusion had been enough to buy him time, escaping around them to reach the rest of his family.
When I had asked him what happened next, he’d given a small shrug and told me he’d eventually arrived in Karachi. He hadn’t wanted, apparently, to linger on the subject – preferring to discuss his work as a Pakistani civil servant in his later years.
My mother had more to add to the story
She told me that my grandfather’s extended family lived back on the same block in Delhi as they had. Their home had been raided, and records showed most had died or disappeared in those initial years of Partition after they had fled. No one on the street had survived.
“He didn’t want to go, and it was really hard, but I’m so glad he left,” my mother said.
Despite his initial reluctance to leave Delhi, I think my grandfather was happy with his decision too. Not only did he escape the violence, but he embraced his adopted country and joined the civil service – trading the blood-soaked capital of the Old British Raj of his youth for a new capital in independent Pakistan that he helped design.