The Refugee

K. A. Abbas
The tragic storm of August - September, 1947, blew away nearly ten million people, like autumn
leaves, from one end of the country to the other --from Delhi to Karachi, from Karachi to Bombay,
from Lahore to Delhi, from Rawalpindi to Agra, from Noakhali to Calcutta, from Calcutta to Dacca,
from Lyallpur to Panipat, from Panipat to Montgomery! The thousand-year-old joint family system
was shattered beyond repair. Age-old friends and neighbours were ruthlessly separated. Brother was
torn away from brother. Uprooted from their ancestral homes, millions found themselves driven to
strange and alien soil.

In October of that year of sorrowful memories, this very storm blew two weak old women into
Bombay, hundreds of miles away from their respective home towns. One of them was my own
mother and the other was the mother of a Sikh friend and neighbour of mine. One had come from the
East Punjab and the other from the West Punjab, one from Panipat and the other from Rawalpindi.
By a strange chance they reached Bombay on the same day. My mother, along with other women
and children of my family, was evacuated from Panipat in a military truck and brought to Delhi. She
stayed there for three weeks crowded in a small room with two other families, and then came to
Bombay by plane because it was still unsafe to travel by train. My friend's mother, along with her old
husband, came in a refugee caravan from Pindi to Amritsar, from there to a refugee camp in Delhi,
and finally from there to Bombay.

I called my mother Ammaan and my friend called his mother Maanji. When both of them arrived
here, I discovered that, that was about the only difference between these two old women.

Maanji used to live in Rawalpindi in her own house. It was a double-storeyed building, she told me
one day. She occupied the upper floor, while down below on the ground floor were shops, mostly
tenanted by muslim shop-keepers or artisans. Many of her neighbours, too, were Muslims.

There was a close bond of good neighbourliness between all of them Muslim or Hindu or Sikh.
The Muslim women of the neighbourhood called the old Sardarni Behanji while the younger ones
respectfully addressed her Maanji or Chachi. That was the pattern of living not only in that
neighbourhood, not only in Rawalpindi, but all over the Punjab.

The town of Rawalpindi was the whole world for Maanji. She had never been elsewhere. Her son
first worked in Lahore, then in Calcutta, and finally in Bombay. But to Maanji, these cities belonged

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to another, far-off world. If she had her way she would never have allowed her son to go far from
home. She often argued with him, 'What's the use of earning money, my son, when in those cities
you get neither pure milk or ghee, neither apricots nor peaches, neither grapes nor apples. And
baggogoshas? Why, in the city they don't even know what that is! At home they had a buffalo of
their own giving no less than ten seers of milk every day. After churning the curds to take out butter,
she would distribute butter -milk to the whole neighbourhood. Everyone would thank her abd say
, your son live a thousand year's, Maanji but that would remind her of her son, eating hotel
food in a city, and that would make her sad.

Not far from Pindi they had a bit of their own land leased to some famers. Twice a year, at harvest
time, they would get there share of the produce wheat or maize or & Bajra. Milk and butter and
ghee were, of course, available at home. Then there was a small but steady income from the rent of
the shops.And thus they lived contented couple, a peace with themselves, with their neighbours
and their God!

When in June 1947, the newspapers published the news of the impending partition, it did not alarm
or even worry Maanji or the Old Sardarji. Politics, they always thought, was not concern of peaceful
folk like them. Whether the country was called Hindustan or Pakistan, what did it matter? Their
concern was only with their neighbours, and with them their relations had always been friendly, even
cordial.

There had been inter-communal riots in the past- a fever of the mind, son, which seized the
people now and then'---but never had they been involved in any unpleasant incident. This time the
fire of hate and violence raged more fiercely than ever before, but even then Maanji was sure that it
would soon cool off. Her son wrote from Bombay asking them to come there, but Maanji would not
agree to abandon her beloved Rawalpindi. Many of her relations and Sikh and Hindu neighbours
went away to East Punjab, but she stayed on in her house. Whenever any one said that it was dangers
for Sikhs to live in West Punjab, she would say,"-Who will harass us here? After all the Muslims
who live around us are all like my own children- aren't they?; But then came the Muslim refugees
from the East Punjab, with the bitter feeling of revenge and hate. The situation in 'Pindi became
increasingly dangerous for Hindus and Sikhs, and some of Maanji's own Muslim neighbours came to
her and pleaded with her to go away to a place of safety. And yet there were some who reassured her
and promised that they would protect her life, honour and property with their own lives. In particular,
the old lady remembers the loyal devotion of a Muslim tailor, a tenant of theirs, who kept watch

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night and day on their house. 'May he live long,' she always blesses him, 'he truly helped us and
saved us like a real son.'

Some of the refugees from the East Punjab were staying in their neighbourhood. Maanji was so
moved by their pitiable condition that she voluntarily sent them donations of foodstuffs, clothes,
blankets, and bedding --- and it never occurred to her that they were Muslims, supposed to be the
enemies of her people, and so she ought not to help them. Nor did she imagine that soon she, too,
would be in a plight very similar to theirs.

Then something happened that snapped the last thread of her faith. On the road, in front of her house,
tonga-waalah was stabbed to death. This is how Maanji described the frightful incident and her own
feeling to it. 'Son it was bad enough that the tonga-wallah was killed him because he was a Hindu
but they did not spare even the horse. You know a horse has neither religion nor caste. And yet they
went on stabbing the poor animal with their daggers till the poor dumb creature bled to death. Then I
knew the madness had gone too far, and human beings had become something else, something
horrible and evil, that we could no longer feel safe in Rawalpindi.' And so she locked up her house,
leaving everything behind just as it was. She still did not imagine that she was abandoning her hearth
and home for ever. The prevalent madness, she hoped would blow over one day and then she would
return home. 'But by the time we reached Delhi,' she said with a sigh, 'my old eyes saw things
horrible things--both there and here, that told us that we could never again go to 'Pindi. By the time
they reached Bombay, memory of her home in Rawalpindi was only a pain in her aged heart.

In Rawalpindi she used to live in a house with six spacious rooms, wide verandahs and a big
courtyard. In Bombay she and her husband live with their son, in a single room tenement --- with a
dhobie occupying the room on one side, and a coal-shop on the other. There is a small kitchen which
also serves as dining-room, bath-room and store-room. When my friend lived there alone the room
was always in a mess -- books, newspapers, dirty linen and unwashed tea-cups lying about
everywhere. But anyone who visits the same place now finds it completely changed. Within its
narrow limits, everything is spotlessly clean, well-arranged. There are white sheets on the beds, with
embroidered pillow-cases, the floor shines with constant scrubbing, and there is not a particle of dust
or dirt anywhere. In Rawalpindi Maanji had two male-servants and a maid-servant. Here she cooks
with her own hands, washes the dishes, sweeps the floor. But she has a maternal smile and a pleasant
smile for any friend of her son who happens to drop in and of course, she would never let anyone go
away without eating something, or at least taking a cup of tea. Maanji has lost her hearth and home,

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all her life's savings and possessions; from a prosperous landlady in Rawalpindi. She has become a
refugee in Bombay but her hospitality has not lost its North Indian flavour and fervour!

Maanji has a fair complexion, a rather short stature and frail body, her hair which was already grey
has turned almost completely white since after the partition, and her health is not so good. She gets
attacks of asthma and neuralgia. But she never sits idle for a moment, never relaxes or sleeps except
for six hours at night. First to get up in the morning, last to go to sleep, throughout the day she is
constantly working. Whether it is cooking for her son, or darning and mending her husband's old
clothes or making tea or lassi for a guest, she insists on doing everything with her own hands. Seeing
her you would never imagine that she is a refugee who lost and suffered so much. She never
proclaims her tragedy. She never curses or abuses those who made her leave her home. She still
remembers her Muslim neighbours with affection, and brightens up whenever her husband reads out
a letter received from Rawalpindi. Only very occasionally a soft, cold sigh escapes her lips, as she
says: 'Your Bombay may be a great and grand city, son. But we can never forget our Rawalpindi
those pears and apricots and apples, those grapes and melons and baggoogoshas that you never get in
Bombay...

And suddenly she is silent, tears bubbling up in her tired, old eyes. And it seems that in the intensely
human heart of this refugee there is neither anger nor self-pity, but only memories memories that
are soft like ripe apricots and fragrant like baggoogoshas

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 Mispronunciation
Robert Lynd

If you say it over to yourself you will see that it sounds much better that way. It is melancholy to
think that as the child grows up she will inevitably take to the correct pronunciation of the word and
give up her own vastly superior one.

last syllable but one. You will agree, I think, that pronounced in this way the word expresses purpose
much better than if you pronounce it correctly. As I grew up I weakly gave in to authority, and my
vocabulary is the poorer as a result of my cowardice.

Is it one of the evil results of education that we all try to pronounce words in the same way to give

There should be scope for individual preferences in the pronunciation of words. I have heard a young
poet usin
convey a sense of gloom, boringness, and toilsome effort in a way

What a good adjective, again, did the housemaid invent when she described somebody as a
man!

It is a curious fact that most people find mispronunciation of words extraordinarily interesting. A
g in
a pulpit or on a platform. One speaker startled his hearers a few years ago by speaking tenderly of
-wee-
- l way and

- unlearn it. I knew a child who for years thought that

surely the richer for so nobly-pronounced a trade. Yet education comes along and insists that every
little boy and girl shall call an upholsterer an upholsterer, which seems to me exceedingly dull in
comparison.
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I have no quarrel with school teachers for teaching children the correct pronunciation of words, when
the mispronunciation is not eccentric, but follows a convention of its own. There is not virtue, for
this merely because it has heard other people doing
so. The only mispronunciation that give pleasure are those which are individual, and are, as it were,
freshly invented.

I remember as a small boy going up one day an hour before a party was to begin to a sideboard on
which there where jellies as beautiful as rainbows and all manner of other delightful dishes. A

rich a mixture of exquisite foods.

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