The nightmare of exodus as a
result of the Great Divide of India in Aug. 1947did not efface the bitter
memories even after its subsequent march toward prosperity. On both sides of
the frontier created by Cyril Radcliffe’s pencil a legacy of hatred, deep and
malignant, remained. One unfortunate
man, Boota Singh, the Sikh farmer who had purchased a Moslem girl fleeing her
abductor, came to symbolize for millions of Punjabis the tragic aftermath of
their conflict as well as the hope that ultimate man’s enduring aptitude for
happiness might overcome the hatred separating them.
Eleven months after their
marriage a daughter was born to Boota Singh and Zenab, the wife he’d purchased
for 1500 rupees. Following Sikh custom,
Boota Singh opened the Sikh Holy Book, the Granth Sahib, at random and gave his
daughter a name beginning with the first letter of the word he found at the top
of the page. The letter was a ‘T’ and he
chose ‘Tanveer’ – Miracle of the sky.
Several years later, a pair
of Boota Singh’s nephews, furious at losing a chance to inherit his property,
reported Zenab’s presence to the authorities who were trying to locate women
abducted during the exodus. Zenab was
wrenched from Boota Singh and placed in a camp while efforts were made to
locate her family in Pakistan.
Desperate Boota Singh rushed
to New Delhi and accomplished at the Grand Mosque the most difficult act a Sikh
could perform. He cut his hair and
became a Moslem. Renamed Jamil Ahmed,
Boota Singh presented himself at the office of Pakistan’s High Commissioner and
demanded the return of his wife. It was
a useless gesture. The two nations had
agreed that implacable rules would govern the exchange of abducted women: married
or not, they would be returned to the families from which they had been
forcibly separated.
For six months Boota Singh
visited his wife daily in the detention camp.
He would sit beside her in silence, weeping for their lost dream of
happiness. Finally, he learned her family
had been located. The couple embraced in
a tearful farewell, Zenab vowing never to forget him and to return to him and
their daughter as soon as she could.
The desparate Boota Singh
applied for the right as a Moslem to immigrate to Pakistan. His application was refused. He applied for a visa. That too was refused. Finally, taking with him his daughter,
renamed Sultana, he crossed the frontier illegally. Leaving the girl in Lahore he made his way to
the village where Zenab family had settled.
There he received a cruel shock.
His wife had been remarried with a cousin only hours after the truck
bringing her back from India had deposited her in the village. The poor man, weeping ‘give me back my wife’,
ws brutally beaten by Zenab’s brothers and cousins, then handed over to the
police as an illegal immigrant.
Brought to trial, Boota Singh
pleaded he was a Moslem and begged the judge to return his wife to him. If only, he said, he could be granted the
right to see his wife, to ask her if she would return to India with him and
their daughter, he would be satisfied.
Moved by his plea, the judge
agreed. The confrontation took place a
week later in a courtroom overflowing with spectators alerted by newspaper
reports of the case. A terrified Zenab,
escorted by an angry and possessive horde of her relatives, was brought into
the chamber. The judge indicated Boota
Singh: ‘Do you know this man?’ he asked Zenab. ‘Yes’ replied the trembling
girl, ‘he’s Boota Singh, my first husband.’ Then Zenab identified her daughter
standing by the elderly Sikh. ‘Do you
wish to return with them to India?’ the judge asked Zenab. An atrocious tension gripped the
courtroom. For an unbearably long moment
the room was silent.
Zenab shook her head; ‘No’
she whispered.
A gasp of anguish escaped
Boota Singh. When he regained his poise, he took his daughter by the hand and
crossed the room.
‘I cannot deprive you of your
daughter, Zenab,’ he said. ‘I leave her to you.’ He took a clump of banknotes from his pocket
and offered them to his wife, along with their daughter. ‘My life is finished now,’ he said simply.
The judge asked Zenab if she
wished to accept his offer of the custody of their daughter. Again, an agonizing silence filled the
courtroom. From their seat Zenab’s male
relatives furiously shook their heads in negative. They wanted no Sikh blood defiling their
little community.
Zenab looked at her daughter
with the eyes of despair. To accept her would be to condemn her to a life of
misery, she thought. An awful sob shook her frame. ‘No’ she gasped.
Boota Singh, his eyes
overflowing with tears, stood for a long moment looking at his weeping wife,
trying perhaps to fix for ever in his mind the blurred image of her face. Then he tenderly picked up his daughter and,
without turning back, left the courtroom.
The despairing man spent the
night weeping and praying in the mausoleum of the Moslem Saint Data Ganj Baksh,
while his daughter slept against a nearby pillar. With the dawn, he took the girl to a nearby
bazaar. There, using the rupees he’d
tendered to his wife the afternoon before, he bought her a new robe and a pair
of sandals embroidered in gold brocade.
Then, hand in hand, the old Sikh and his daughter walked to the nearby
railway station of Shahdarah. Waiting on
the platform for the train to arrive, the weeping Boota Singh explained to his
daughter that she would not see her mother again.
In the distance a locomotive’s
whistle shrieked. Boota Singh tenderly
picked up his daughter and kissed her.
He walked to the edge of the platform.
As the locomotive burst into the station the little girl felt her father’s
arms tighten around her. Then suddenly
she was plunging forward. Boota Singh
had leapt into the path of the onrushing locomotive. The girl heard again the roar of the whistle
mingled this time with her own screams.
Then she was in the blackness beneath the engine.
Boota Singh was killed
instantly, but by a miracle his daughter survived unscathed. On the old Sikh’s mutilated corpse, the
police found a blook-soaked farewell note to the young wife who had rejected
him.
‘My dear Zenab,’ it said. ‘you
listened to the voice of the multitude, but that voice is never sincere. Still my last wish is to be with you. Please bury me in your village and come from
time to time to put a flower on my grave.’
Boota Singh’s suicide stirred
a wave of emotion in Pakistan and his funeral became an event of national
importance. Even in death, however, the
elderly Sikh remained a symbol of those terrible days when the Punjab was in
flames. Zenab’s family and the
inhabitants of their village refused to permit Boota Singh’s burial in the
village cemetery. The village males, led
by Zenab’s second husband, barred entrance to his coffin on 12 Feb. 1957.
Rather than provoke a riot, the
authorities ordered the coffin and the thousands of Pakistanis touched by Boota
Singh’s drama who had followed it to return to Lahore. There, under a mountain of flowers, Boota
Singh’s remains were interred.
Zenab’s family, however,
enraged by the honour extended to Boota Singh, sent a commando to Lahore to
uproot and profane his tomb. Their savage action provoked a remarkable outburst from the city’s population. Boota Singh was reinterred under another
mountain of flowers. This time hundreds
of Moslems volunteered to guard the grave of the Sikh convert, illustrating by
their generous gesture the hope that time might eventually efface in the Punjab
the bitter heritage of 1947.
ISRAR HASAN
12 MAY 2014
ihasanfaq@yahoo.com
[1] An
Excerpt taken from “Freedom at Midnight” by Dominique Lapierre and Larry
Collins, New Edition, 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment