Leaving Bannu
Photo: Karan Madhok
Personal Essay: ‘A man dressed in black robes stood by the bed, his stern face staring down at her. Death was a millimetre away, as effortless as peeling away an onion.’
He raised his dagger in the silent night, the sharp steel of the pesh-kabz pressing against her throat. The only light in the silent blackness was a dim lantern in the corner of my grandmother’s chamber. For decades later, she would tell the story of how her mother was awoken by the lantern’s reflection shining off the dagger’s sharp surface.
My maternal grandmother—Nani—was a mere infant then, snuggled, asleep under the folds of her mother’s embrace. Nani couldn’t possibly remember if she awoke to see the sword-wielding man, but she had heard the story often enough. Nearly 85 years after that night, she still speaks of the oil lantern in vivid terms, thankful for that little glimmer of light that saved her life.
Born Raj Bhatia, my Nani has survived a lot more: Partition, migration, separation, an unsuitable marriage, financial struggles, and early widowhood. Her stories are filled with drama and free embellishments, entertaining enough for me to never examine the borders between fact and fiction under the lens of a stronger magnifying glass. She claims to have been separated from her parents during the chaos of Partition as a child and spent several months in an orphanage, before they were reunited again… not before supposedly-meeting prime minister Jawahar Lal Nehru and his young daughter—Indira—who came to survey the orphanage and refugee area. In her late teens, she claimed that her parents had gotten her married to a man she didn’t like, so she simply walked out on him and returned home to her family a few days later (It was the 1950s; no divorce paperwork was required before her eventual marriage to my mother’s father some years later).
She survived; and her survival ensured her children and her grandchildren to thrive, a family tree descending from Partition refugees who’ve now, in turn, returned the favour, helping her twilight years be far more comfortable than the tumult she was once born into.
Every time I meet Nani now, she speaks without the fluff of small talk, as if she’s got too few breaths left to waste on niceties. Each visit begins with unfiltered (and often, unsolicited) advice on a myriad of subjects she’s been recently reading up on: dental health care, couples therapy, population control, vector-borne diseases, whatever. And later, she says each farewell with a sense of pragmatic morbidity. “This could be the last time we meet,” to which I almost always answer, “See you soon.” She has suffered from osteoarthritis for decades, and has a myriad of other health conditions accumulated with the weight of time; but whenever she’s physically able to, she spends her days visiting friends and family, or contributing to charity organizations in her hometown (Faridabad), listening to music, playing the keyboard, or sending all of her progeny WhatsApp forwards with positive suggestions for our health and well-being.
Nani was relatively mobile and in good spirits when she came over for breakfast a few months ago. For some reason, however, I found myself taking her sense of morbidity seriously. What if this is, indeed, the last time we meet? Perhaps, it was an after-effect of the post-COVID world, where we all realized the fragility of the elderly and their immune systems. Or perhaps it was a reaction to my own recent fatherhood, where the start of a new life made me confront the fear of life’s eventual end.
I wanted to know about the beginning of her life, too, a lifetime that had spanned generations, a life over twice as long as mine, a life older than our independent nation.
She survived; and her survival ensured her children and her grandchildren to thrive, a family tree descending from Partition refugees who’ve now, in turn, returned the favour, helping her twilight years be far more comfortable than the tumult she was once born into.
So, after some hearty aloo parathas, we sat together with a few other members of my family. My mother (Nani’s daughter) was there, too; as was my toddler daughter—Nani’s great-granddaughter.
Nani mentioned an upcoming wedding in the family: her brother’s grandson.
“You have a brother?” I asked.
Her brother’s name was Lakshman Das—who was perhaps now in his early 90s. “I haven’t told you his story, have I?” she said.
I shook my head. “Well, he’s my brother, but related to my other mother.”
“You had another mother?”
“Yes, she said. A Badi Mummy (elder mom) and a Chhoti Mummy (younger mom).”
And thus began her unlikely story, a new spring of revelation from my last living grandparent. Nani’s father was a Hindu man who owned a small estate in the Bannu region, now in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) close to the Afghanistan border. The region was largely inhabited by the Pashtun or Pathan people who were majority Sunni Muslim, but could be Shia, Hindu, and Sikh, too. My great-grandfather—let’s call him Great-Nana—owned some land, a kothi (bungalow), meaning that he was likely wealthy in relation to most others in his hometown. He had a wife (Great-Nani), and this wife bore him a daughter, and this daughter was Nani.
One day, a gang of marauding dacoits raided the nearby home of a tribal family, trampling across town on horseback, murdering the adults, and robbing the household. Only the children were spared: a teenage girl and her younger brother.
In what wasn’t exactly an unusual custom at the time, Great-Nana ‘married’ the teenage girl and adopted the younger brother into his family; it was a socially-acceptable way for Great-Nana and Great-Nani (the ‘Badi Mummy’) to provide the orphans a new home. And this is how my newborn Nani came to be mothered by two: the woman who birthed her, and the girl who helped raise her (‘Chhoti Mummy’). The young boy was Lakshman Das, technically my Nani’s step-uncle, but in informal relationship, her brother.
Just as the family multiplied, tragedy struck again. An early death for Great-Nana. Now, the household had lost its male protector, leaving behind the two wives, young Lakshman Das, and my infant Nani. Word spread quickly around town of a home boasting of expensive jewellery without a patriarch.
Fast-forward now to that fateful night, besides the dim lantern. Unbeknownst to the family, a group of robbers (“four or five of them,” Nani said) had somehow snuck into the house earlier that day. They hid the storeroom, waiting for dark.
Chhoti Mummy, asleep with my Nani wrapped around her bosom, was disturbed by a rustle in the otherwise silent night. She awoke to a pesh-kabz to her throat (“or maybe it was a long sword”), and to that light yellow of the lantern fire reflecting against the steel. A man dressed in black robes stood by the bed, his stern face staring down at her. Death was a millimetre away, as effortless as peeling away an onion.
Often, true heroism arises not from a premeditated masterplan, but a spontaneous desperation. Chhoti Mummy chanted “Dhan Baba Nanak!”—an evocation to conjure the strength of the Sikh guru—and raised a hand up between the dagger and herself, until the sharp steel lacerated deep into her palm. Bleeding profusely, she howled out loud; this brazen act, perhaps, unnerved the man out of his game plan.
Then, Chhoti Mummy kicked him as hard as she could (This is my Nani’s favourite part of the story. Jor se laat mari! she said. And although she didn’t specify, I like to imagine that the kick landed into his most-vulnerable man-parts). The racket that followed awoke the rest of the household, and the raiders abandoned their plan and ran out of the kothi.
The following morning (or maybe it was many days later, who really knows?), authorities arrested the group of suspects, individuals who had been linked to similar crimes in the past. They were, indeed, the same gang who had attempted to rob Nani’s household. They were all from the Pashtun Sunni tribe of Wazirs; this specific gang were known to attack and loot unsuspecting homes in the region.
Now, this is where the story takes another twist. As the story of the bungled robbery and imprisonment spread, friends and townspeople advised Great-Nani to plead for the men’s forgiveness, for the fear that they might hold the grudge against the family and return with a more vicious plan of attack in the future.
Chhoti Mummy chanted “Dhan Baba Nanak!” and raised a hand up between the dagger and herself, until the sharp steel lacerated deep into her palm. Bleeding profusely, she howled out loud; this brazen act, perhaps, unnerved the man out of his game plan.
“Badi Mummy,” Nani said, “didn’t want to create trouble with them… She said that there was no need for us to harbour hate in this way, and these young men made a mistake—they shouldn’t pay for it by wasting away their lives.”
This offering of peace worked a charm. The police let the men go.
Moved by Great-Nani’s gesture, promised the women their protection in return. It was a wondrous turn of events: and for the years that followed, Nani’s household was left untroubled, earning the friendship of the Wazirs who had once attempted to rob them. Despite their religious identities, I imagine that there must have been little difference within those of the Bannu community, entwined together by the same Bannuwal language and culture that had been shared by generations.
Nani was eight-years-old when Sir Cyril Radcliffe—a British lawyer who had never travelled to India—was given five weeks to commission the borders that would divide the soon-to-be-independent land into two new nations under mostly-religious lines: India and Pakistan. The former would be a nation for the Hindu majority; the latter—further divided into East and West Pakistan across India’s wide breadth—would be a country for Muslims. Violence erupted on all sides of these manmade lines in the months leading up to Independence and Partition. Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities often turned against their neighbours. Fearing for life and livelihood, Muslims from India left their homes behind to find refuge in the safety of Pakistan, and Hindu and Sikh families in the Pakistan regions did the opposite to head towards India.
They went on trains, bullock-carts, and foot, millions who were told that their homeland was not their home any longer. Among the displaced were also my grandparents from my father’s side. My Dada (father’s father) was born in the Gujranwala—now in Pakistan, too—and migrated to India with his entire clan in 1947, eventually settling near Shimla. My mom’s paternal grandfather—hailing from a different part of Bannu—was shot at during the pre-Partition riots, injured his foot, and was assumed to be dead… until he arrived across the border to arrive just in time for his own Chautha havan, a ritual held in honour of the deceased. He had ridden on the back of someone’s bicycle and wore a muffler over his head, and when found alive, received a severe scolding from his wife.
With tensions rising in Bannu, Nani’s family had to leave home, too. Great-Nani, however, assumed at first that this was all just a temporary hullaballoo, and the communal tensions would likely simmer down after a few months. To escape the rising violence, the women of the household took the train across the new India-Pakistan border. They were eventually resettled into a refugee colony in Faridabad. But they left Lakshman Das—now 16—at home in Bannu to take care of the kothi.
Alas, they would quickly learn that there was to be no going back, that their homeland would be lost to them forever. Bannu was now a foreign land; ‘home’ was an idea that they to reimagine all over again—for themselves, and for generations of their successors to come.
But what to do of Lakshman Das, the teenager left behind in what was suddenly a hostile, foreign land? The family decided to choose life over property, and arrangements had to be made for him to cross the border to be reunited with his sisters/mothers, too.
The journey, however had become even more fraught for refugees post-Independence. It was a cycle of violence and retaliatory violence: a killing in one nation followed by a revenge-killing in its newly amputated twin, followed by more murders in revenge, and revenge begat more revenge.
They would quickly learn that their homeland would be lost to them forever. Bannu was now a foreign land; ‘home’ was an idea that they had to reimagine all over again—for themselves, and for generations of their successors to come.
More than a million people died in the riots and genocide that followed on all sides of the border.
Fortunately, Lakshman Das had help. Years after they attempted to rob his home, the Wazirs in Bannu came to his rescue. It would be too dangerous for a young Hindu man to travel alone to the border at this time, so some of the dacoits (or former dacoits; I have no way of confirming if they gave up on their vocation) accompanied Lakshman Das on the train. Nani told me that they dressed him up “like a Muslim,” wrote quotations from the Quran on his hand, and made him memorize a few āyāt (verses) from the holy book, just in case he needed to prove his identity.
Lakshman Das bid farewell to his protectors and made it across the border; soon, he was safely reunited with the rest of his family—including Nani, my grandmother.
This was over seventy-five years ago.
Partition was a wildfire of violence and sorrow, of lives lost, lives scarred, and homelands snatched away. The inception of our nations—India, Pakistan, and later, Bangladesh—were conceived by the original sins of the late 1940s, and continue to haunt generations of South Asians, most of us who weren’t even born until decades later. Our nations have fought major wars and countless battles and skirmishes against our cousins across the border, and our political ideologies are still defined by the lacerations of the subcontinent.
I’m one of the fortunate ones, the descendent of a generation of refugees that survived. They were uprooted, but they were alive.
I’m glad that my Nani was alive to tell me these tales—tales she had inherited from her own ancestors. Now, Nani could share the story of my great-grandmother’s heroism in the presence of her own great-granddaughter.
Nani has lived a eventful, memorable life, most of it in the land that is now the Republic of India, where she has enjoyed the social privilege of being the majority. I imagine, however, that it hardly relieves her to know that much of the hate she’d witnessed in her childhood continues today. Just this month, her home state of Haryana bulldozed hundreds of shops and homes belonging to Muslims, after a fresh wave of communal riots here. The tragedies suffered in the state have only been the latest of a deluge of violence and suppression executed upon Indian Muslims and other minorities across the nation in recent years.
Stories like Lakshman Das’s escape are a reminder that we are more than the identities imposed upon us by our countries or our faith. We are human: we make mistakes and we forgive, we make promises and we keep them, we help our neighbours in times of need: whether they chant in reverence to Guru Nanak, recite verses from the Hanuman Chalisa, or memorize āyāt from the Quran. Partition narratives are filled with stories of hope and camaraderie like these, even in the most acrimonious of times. As bleak as it may seem, the cycle of violence isn’t inevitable—but breaking it requires a deeper humanity that is starkly absent in the political spheres of our nations today.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, and the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
