Daily Times

Iqbal Singh was waiting. He dialled a number on the phone the minute he saw me cross the street. Five minutes later Mohinder Pratab Sehgal walked into his shop. A little shorter than me, stocky and bespectacled, he talked fast. After the initial introductions I went into a kind of daze. It was as if I was watching a movie in fast-forward mode. I extracted my voice recorder and held it out as he spoke. It was only later that evening in the solitude of my room in Desh Bhagat Yadgar that I came to grasp what he had said.

“Look here, first of all I have to seek forgiveness, for it was my father’s mistake,” Mohinder Pratab began but I simply did not register anything. As he spoke, I thought he was referring not to his father but to someone else in the mob since he referred to him as ‘bewakoof’ (foolish) and ‘tung dil’ (mean). It was his father, said Mohinder Pratab, who, because he ran after Eidu, gave away the family’s hiding place. “Come, let me show you how it all happened.” Grasping my hand he led me out of Iqbal’s store.

I had not mentioned our domestic Eidu at all. That Mohinder Pratab knew him only meant he had seen or heard of him.

Since that day in March 2008, I have often wondered how my family behaved in the face of violent and certain death. Had they felt the lump of fear in their throats? Would my aunts have broken down?

We turned into Krishna Street and there, sitting on the threshold preparing vegetables for the evening meal was the virago I had encountered earlier at Habib Manzil.

“Bhaiji,” I complained, “this woman does not let me enter the house.” “Oye, who do you think you are to not permit this man into his own grandfather’s house?” Mohinder Pratab, arms akimbo, addressed the woman angrily. She looked up at him speechlessly, her hand frozen in mid swipe across a wad of cilantro.

“Get out of the way,” he said as he pushed her away with his foot almost in a manner of kicking. “Go look. You have the right, more than this woman, to be in there,” he said to me.

For the first time I had a free run of the house. I inspected every room and also climbed the terrace. Mohinder Pratab joined me and we spent three quarters of an hour exploring the place. He said that the small, pediment-shaped device overlooking the street retained the Persian lettering for a few years after Partition but was then washed over and replaced with the Hindi, a faded impression of which still remains. That would have said ‘Habib Manzil’, I told him, named after Chan.

Mohinder Pratab did not remember either my father or Chan. He was of the impression that both lived in Karachi. When Mohinder was growing up my father and uncle were studying successively at Government College, Lahore. They would have come home only in short stretches, not long enough for a pre-teenage boy to recognize them well enough. One of them subsequently went to Roorkee and the other got admission in King Edward Medical College (now University), Lahore. But Mohinder did remember my aunts, especially the fact that they used to go to the terrace at the end of each Ramadan to scan the horizon for the new moon heralding Eid.

While exploring the terrace, I asked if this was the place where the child Iqbal had mentioned was pitched to his death. Mohinder said it wasn’t here; it had all happened in the house of the Chopras.

That could not be possible, I countered. “My grandfather and Lala Bheek Chand were friends. The family would either have been in their own house or in the protection of Lalaji.”

“Everyone knew of your grandfather’s friendship with Lalaji. Had the mob not found Doctor Sahib at home, it would surely have raided the house of Lala Bheek Chand,” said Mohinder. My grandfather and his family were hidden away in the Chopra residence where no one would suspect their presence, he said as we went down the stairs and turned left.

“This was Eidu’s room,” he pointed to a green door along the outer wall of Habib Manzil. The memory of seeing Eidu and his children emerge from that door countless times had not dimmed in him in six decades.

With Mohinder’s help, I pieced together the events as they occurred on that fateful day. The baying mob turned from Railway Road into Krishna Street led, among others, by Mohinder’s father. As the noise grew, Eidu panicked. His wife and four older children were already with my grandparents, and he knew they had taken refuge with the Chopras. He gathered his two-year-old son and bolted from the room. As he turned into the street at the end of which Mohinder’s family lived, the senior Sehgal made after him and saw him disappear into the Chopra residence.

Mohinder and I turned right into a gated alley, the same path Eidu had sped along that humid August day six decades ago. The Chopra residence was the fourth or fifth house on the left. While waiting for someone to answer the door, I imagined the mob behind us.

Eidu would have tried the door of the room where my family had hidden and finding it bolted from inside, run up the stairs. Just then the senior Sehgal would have ducked into the courtyard and pursued him to the terrace. There he would have knifed Eidu repeatedly and thrown his son to his death on the courtyard below. Meanwhile, the mob had gathered outside the room where my grandfather Dr Badaruddin, his wife Fatima, their daughters Jamila and Tahira, and my grandmother’s father Qutubuddin, awaited their final moments together with Eidu’s wife Fateh and their four children.

Since that day in March 2008, I have often wondered how my family behaved in the face of violent and certain death. Had they felt the lump of fear in their throats? Would my aunts have broken down? Grandmother Fatima is said to have been a woman of exceptional grit. Family lore has it that, roused by a noise in the middle of night, she found a burglar making off with a trunk. She pursued him into the street, smacked him hard on the back and, as he stumbled, snatched the trunk away. Another blow sent the man scampering and she returned home with her property. She would probably have kept her cool, telling her daughters to rely on God who, obviously, was no longer mindful of their distress. Deeply religious as they were, the family would surely have attempted to find solace through prayers. But it hadn’t helped.

Mohinder revealed that a rifle or shotgun had been fired into the room through a hole in the door. The bullet caught my grandfather in the eye and he died instantaneously. That may have been when unrestrained wailing broke out in the room. The door wasn’t smashed; the mob merely undid a panel at the top to reach in and slide down the bolt. Once the door was open, a few men entered the room and methodically slashed at the nine people inside with daggers and swords.

This article is part of a series on partition. It will include a piece related to partition every day from the August 1 to 15

Published in Daily Times, August 7^th 2018.