India-Pakistan Partition through Grandma's eyes

Grandma talks abouts the life before India-Pakistan Partition

After their marriage on July 10, 1947, my grandparents along with their
families were forced to leave their hometowns & move to India. They
buried most of their money & jewelry to hide it from the looters
& hoping that someday they would come back to retrieve it. Grandma
cannot remember the exact date they left their homes. The neighbors,
mostly Muslim families, had told them that the situation was worsening
& that they should leave as soon as possible.

They took some money with them & they boarded trucks which
carried Hindus to India & brought back Muslims to Pakistan. During
their journey, they got the news of tragic death of a close relative.
That person used to be at a very high post in the civil administration
& was conferred with the title of Raishahib.
My great grandfather was shocked & horrified by the way that person
was killed. That man was killed & his body was tied with a rope and
was dragged for miles behind a horse by the British officers.

My great grandpa couldn’t take it and he fell very ill while they all
were in a refugee camp near the ‘about to be formed’ borders between
the two countries. He subsequently died because of the shock.

As per Hindu religion, the dead body should be cremated but at that
time neither there was any time nor any place to cremate the body. My
great grandma talked to a ‘high-level’ official working in that refugee
camp & pleaded him to allow my grandpa to accompany the body to a
place where all the other dead bodies were taken & were (more or
less respectfully) dumped into a river. The official, after repeated
pleas from grandpa, allowed him to accompany his father’s dead body.

My grandparents didn’t have much problem while crossing over thanks to
those Muslim neighbors who had warned them early enough for them to
leave safely. After coming to India they had nowhere to live so they
had to live with their relatives or anybody whom they knew. They lived
at Ludhiana, Punjab for sometime before moving to New Delhi where the
government had put aside some areas for the refugees to live. After few
years, in 1952, my grandpa bought a big piece of land in an area which
was going to be the most posh area of the capital of India. Today that
area is crowded with big malls & showrooms of multi national
companies.

My grandparents were lucky to get out of that tragedy alive in which
more than a million people died & more than 10 million lost their
homes & assets. And for that matter I’m grateful that they were
lucky otherwise I wouldn’t have been writing this article.