The black tin trunk

Bedraggled men and women clutching a child with one hand and giant suitcases and backpacks with the other scream refugee to the global news audience in the present. But suitcases or attachés (pronounced as ‘tachees’) were the treasured possession of the elite in India 75 years ago. The rest packed all their belongings in a tin trunk som painted black, or red with the owner’s name painted in white. I will be talking about trunks that travelled across the border in which the owners packed their essential belongings or valuables when they fled the communal riots that broke out on the Indian subcontinent in the mad months of 1947. A British lawyer, who had never lived in India, was given five weeks to draw a line between a region in which people belonging to all religions that had existed for centuries on communal grounds. Even though the leaders themselves could not figure out how to extricate Muslim majority areas from the Hindu/Sikh, as they were inextricably mixed up, the dispassionate, objective, neutral lawyer performed a surgical operation leading to the bloodiest vivisection in the subcontinent's history. When the British Viceroy announced the Partition on radio on June 3, advancing the date by two months, the line turned out to be the bloodiest in world history. Muslims were driven out of India to seek their promised land and Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan were forced to leave their ancestral lands for a strange land they knew as Hindustan. The British did not discriminate against any religious group who were both victims and perpetrators depending which side of the border they found themselves in. Fifteen million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims boarded wailing ghost trains and lorries or on foot, sometimes with their owners, at others without, surrounded by mutilated bodies. But they all packed cherished memories of an entire lifetime of harmony, happiness and plenty, if not riches, mixed with the putrid stench of death, the deafening sound of screams and paralyzing touch of unknown danger.

Nina had always been fascinated by the rifle, the Sola topi and the Pathan embroidered turban hanging on large hooks on the bracket in her grandmother’s store room. They were strategically hung above a black tin trunk bearing her grandfather’s name, which rested against two giant size tin trunks. But she had not dared ask anyone. When did Grandpa wear a Sola topi? How did he come to possess a rifle that was cleaned regularly? Where was the turban whose top was embroidered with gold thread brought from? Why was the tin trunk kept under lock and key? She had seen her grandfather walking tall wearing the Pathan turban, called kullewali pagri, at family weddings to greet guests. Was he a Pathan? Well, come to think of it, he did have a striking resemblance to the Kabuli Wala character in the film version of Tagore’s Kabuli Wala. He certainly had the fiery temper of a Pathan and was plain-speaking but he couldn’t possibly have been a real Pathan. The grandfather she knew was the old man with two missing front teeth who would switch between strong outbursts of affection and rage. She would cower when he would scowl and shout at his grandchildren when they refused to nap and hide behind her mother when he burst into a fit of rage. Nina had heard a story about his chasing away neighborhood lads chasing his teenage daughter reputed to be as beautiful as a Pathani. But she knew better than inviting his wrath by inquiring about its past uses. But he was long gone and it was impossible to verify the family lore. She would have had to wait decades when the memory had turned hazy and the house sold before the secrets of the tin trunk and the objects on the wall could tumble out in bits and pieces.

The rifle mystery would be repeated years later by one of his daughters, Meshi, as an example of his ferocious temper and old-world code of honour. The incident was sharply etched in four-year-old Meshi’s memory as an aside in the fun and games the children had playing 'Hide and Seek' when adults had gone to sleep in the camp where they were forced to live on arriving in the unknown city. As she hid behind the wall, she spied her father threatening some young lads who were eve teasing his eldest daughter with a rifle and began to shudder in terror. After that incident, no young lad dare cast a glance at his five beautiful prepubertal and pubertal daughters. The code remained in force for two generations when the daughters, and even granddaughters, of his house were strictly forbidden to appear at the iron gate with the heavy brass lock when their brother’s friends rattled the gate even though the rifle was never brought out again. Nina understood the code only when she watched Pakistani telesoaps where fathers and brothers preferred death, of their daughters or their own, to dishonour. But it still did not answer the question of what the rifle was doing on the wall in the first place. Did Grandpa kill anyone with the rifle? His daughters were far too young to be eve teased in 1947 and had been escorted to the safety of their mother’s brother’s home across the border. But thousands of women of all ages were abducted, raped and killed during the gruesome riots on both sides of the newly drawn border. Unsure whether he got to protect any of them, the miraculous occurrence of a crow cawing to herald the arrival of a visitor and his toddler daughter breaking into speech, the children spotting from the rooftop on a cold January morning a tongah stopping in front of the house and Grandpa emerging with a rifle, clad in blood-soaked khaki shorts and burning with high fever was an image that was never erased from the children’s memory. Perhaps the six months of waiting, of not knowing whether he was alive or dead and the relief at seeing him made this an undeletable moment 8n their entire lives. They also recalled their grandmother, who, instead of rejoicing in his return, let out a piercing wail as he was not accompanied by her younger son. Manik Ram, consoling her with, “Don’t cry, Mother, I will bring him back”, turned on his heels to catch the next train and retuned with the young man stuck in another city in tow after a few days.

The children were spared gory details of what transpired in those six months? Why did he carry a rifle? Why were his clothes drenched in blood? Where was he those six months? He was too traumatized to share his agony even with his wife for years. They had to turn to the black trunk narrated the story of the reverse journey. After leaving his wife and children in the care of her brother, Manik Ram decided to return to Quetta, now in Pakistan, when all Hindus and Sikhs left in what was to become Pakistan were running for their lives to jump on the trains to India and Muslims to Pakistan. “If I don’t bring my new positing orders, we would starve to death in any case,” he unconvincingly tried to reason with his sobbing wife and boarded the train to Pakistan on 14^th August, 1947. He was on the train on the midnight when Mohammed Ali Jinnah announced the formation of Pakistan. The Muslims fleeing India shouted “Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Pakistan)” as the news trickled to the train. It was difficult to tell a Hindu from a Muslim in Punjab as they looked similar and wore similar clothes and turbans and Manik Ram, with his tall built and ruddy complexion, could easily pass as a Pathan. He had enthusiastically joined the chorus when he noticed that his Hindu name painted on the black trunk would give away his Hindu identity and flipped it the other way and sat on it to conceal his religious affiliation.

The details of the missing six months were shared much later. As a railway employee, Grandpa continued to perform his duties shuttling between Quetta and Karachi. On two occasions, he providentially escaped being killed as his train left Karachi where the rioters had tormed the platform in the nick of time and Quetta when the riots began on that station. After six months, Quetta had become a city of death. Renting part of a house owned by a Sikh police officer, he and the police officer, armed with rifles, fought their way through the crazy mobs to the platform and boarded a departing train just in time. Grandpa made a feeble attempt to halt in Lyallpur, his permanent posting, to salvage valuables from his home but was warned by his wife’s younger brother not to step into the riot torn Hindu neighborhood in the city. All that mattered were his transfer orders for which he had risked the return journey to claim the exchange posting option provided by both states to government servants. He carefully tucked these away and left the incendiary city. Haunted by nightmares of angry mobs, gory corpses and the burning trains, he would wake up for years in the middle of the night screaming, “The mobs are coming to kill us with swords,” break into tears and hold his wife tight “Shh, don’t think about it,” she would hush him lest the children would hear, “and you are with us to look take care of us.”

He hid behind his tears the traumatic trace of the vision of bloodthirsty mobs , of those wounded and dying, women screaming, children separated but also the bewilderment at his lives turning topsy-turvy with the freedom at midnight. Who was he? The son of Milkha Ram, known as the progressive landowner who believed in providing education to both his sons and daughters. He tried to rehearse in his mind the day he had left his small town to seek admission in the university in the big city like his brothers with his glowing High School results in his pocket, his being accosted by a gora sahib (white man) and offered a job in the railways then reserved only for Anglo-Indians. Like Anglo Indian youth, he had also fallen for the bait and agreed to serve the Indian Railways with all its promised perks. Kicked by the prospect of earning a living, the 15-year-old succumbed to the sahib's logic that, as an Indian, he would not get a better job even after completing his Master’s degree. The glamour of the Railways, which was like working in an airline under the British, the salary and the perks given by the Railways to maintain a middle-class British lifestyle was too tempting for him to decline the offer. He didn’t wait to get the opinion of his elder brothers who might have prevented him from not joining the university and obtain a Master’s degree like them. They were also forced to accept clerical positions despite their Master’s degrees, he had reasoned and joined the Railways by raising his age from 15 to 18. Catapulted into a strange region with unfamiliar ways, his brain was too messed up with decisions he needed to make to be able to take stock of a wrong decision made 20 years ago. 

He recalled his spotting his betrothed at a village fair and marrying her when he they were both still in their teens. Too young to understand the responsibilities of marriage, he would often get provoked by his arrogant, stubborn wife to slap her following the feudal code forcing her with no choice to seek refuge in her parental home. It was when he almost died of cholera that she returned to tend him never to leave him again. Delirious with fever, he had clung to her and vowed never to hurt her. The young couple’s coming close during the near fatal illness bonded them for the rest of their lives. He resolved to educate his wife and took her to the city to start a new life. Within a few years of her training, the village belle turned into a working woman, a rarity in that generation. Instead of basking in the riches of her wealthy fat her, she began to sponsor her younger siblings’ education by offering them a place in the city. Together, the young couple earned enough to give their children a very comfortable life without any support from their landowning families. But their identity was firmly planted in their landowning roots. Their status among friends and neighbours continued to be defined by their family antecedents. He was Milkha Ram’s son and she Lehna Ram’s daughter.

Uprooted to a distant region, it hurt to be treated as a mere employee in a land where the weight of ancestral name and wealth was more than a salaried income, where family trees were traced for generations before giving a daughter away in marriage. Grandpa would have sleepless nights thinking about who would marry his daughters in a land of strangers where no one knew the name of his village or ancestors even though they had not even reached their teens. What if they were abducted like the girls in 1947 and brought shame to him? Paranoid about their beauty bringing him dishonour, he banned them from visiting anyone, even the homes of their female friends, unaccompanied by their mother but insisted on them getting an education. If they had their lands, a single harvest would have sufficed to pay for each one’s dowry. The gold they left behind, would have been used for their jewellery. He rued the day he forced his wife to sell her jewellery to avoid being looted and killed and transferring it into a bank account. He was never able to buy back her beloved heirlooms as he had promised as the deposit was now used for the mandatory jewellery to be gifted to each daughter. He sighed when saw her wearing only the gold earrings she wore on the journey to India. The gold rings in the 12 holes on her ear lobes that made him fall in love with her when he saw her at the village fair were lost forever with the lands and homes they were forced to leave behind. She returned his sigh with a rueful smile. The daughters were married and settled in their new homes. The son had was sent to the top engineering college and was going join his new job in another city. What more could they ask having escaped with their lives?