Humanity- A road to Redemption.

The element of Serendipity that we encounter often in a travel, sometimes would present a stunning perspective. A remarkable travelogue, one which is well conceived, executed and written, gives interesting and deep insights on very sensitive subjects that is not present in any narrative. It usually lies somewhere in between, interesting story telling and journalistic reportage. It also takes you on a trip to places and times, with an authenticity that we rarely experience in any other type of narrative, however well written it may be. That is why I tend to select travelogues quite regularly.

Rarely you get travelogue which gives an experience that is not just academic or array of simple incidents but would instead, take you on a trip into your inner self and offer a perspective on life that has the power transform you. I did not realize this book was one such when I started reading it.

It all started with me choosing this book to accompany a long flight. I started browsing the book I found it light ( 120+ pages is only one of them), fast and interesting. At the Start, lines in the book had that Tongue-in-the-cheek sort of funny side to it. In fact, Quite few times, I even noticed few faces curiously looking at me while I sat waiting for the flight at the gate and was reading the book, smiling ( possibly laughing) to myself. I felt that my time in flight would be a full of happy and humorous reading. Oh, how wrong I was.

The observations Salman Rashid started with were for me sounded funny, critical Pakistan's historical and social trajectory over the years. Some very convincing and some little bit skewed towards India, I felt. But who am I to judge?

"Here in our own good land, we molest passing women with our eyes all the time. There appears a well-wrapped shrouded creature with only eyes showing through a narrow slit and all available men leave whatever they are doing to scratch their crotches and ogle. Their heads turn like radar antennas with the passing swaddle of clothing until the poor nondescript thing that could possibly be a woman—if he is not a suicide bomber in disguise—is out of sight. These staring Morlocks would very likely go berserk seeing the bare legs and arms in Amritsar."

"From more than 1,200 functioning railway stations inherited from the British at the time of Partition, there were less than 500 working in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Whereas India laid several thousand kilometres of new track (and revamped all outdated ones) to take high speed trains, Pakistan Railway continued to trundle along in an age warped to the 1940s. Not only were no new tracks laid, some two dozen branch lines were closed and simply abandoned in the 1980s. Those who lived by the side of the tracks filched the steel and fittings. Disused railway stations were permitted to be annexed as private residences by anyone who felt so inclined. No action was taken when ordinary folk took over railway land to build upon it. In a word, Pakistan Railway was a microcosm of the rest of the country, which had been turned into a free-for-all by the military dictator of sham piety.

The stated objective of the Author was to cross the border and search for his missing members of his extended family and find out what really happened to them. He had seen so many of his father’s generation, suffering silently without a logical closure for their search. However, as he started his journey to Jalandhar and its adjacent areas where his family lived before Partition, he finds himself and along with him we readers, walking along a graveyard in the past. By the time I landed and was waiting for my shuttle, I was completely broken down and was fighting my tears.

Slowly as he started going back on time to the days of Partition, the author started recounting number of incidents. We realize that the people connected with those gory incidents, - the emotion blurred the line between India / Pakistan or Hindu / Muslim - appear only as perpetrator / Victim.

"Then one day, in a month he does not remember, young Darshan’s world exploded in flames—an event whose cause and meaning his young mind failed to fathom. Though his immediate locality was untroubled, from the roof of their home he and his family could see the eerie glow of fires raging in other areas. Soon after his father Varyam Singh announced that they had to leave Rawalpindi and return to the village. Although he could not name the month, I presume this would have been sometime after March 1947. That was when, encouraged by the events of Direct Action by Muslims in Bombay and Calcutta, the first killings and plunder of Hindu and Sikh families began in and around Rawalpindi. The prelude to the mayhem of Partition had begun."

But then there was also rare oasis moments in the history observed by Salman, which were very far and few in-between, but nevertheless need to be told.

"In that one instant, something went very right. Something inexplicably human took place: the inherent goodness that lives, even if in small measures, in all human beings came to the fore. The gathered crowd armed with guns, clubs, swords and farm implements ready to kill and rape quieted down. Moments slipped by. The only sound to be heard was the pattering of the thickening drizzle on the steel spans and the carriage roofs. At length, the terrified refugees one by one trickled off the train and made their uncertain way in the rain across the bridge to safety on the other side of the Ravi. The men who would have murdered them as compensation for the death of Muslims elsewhere silently watched them leave. "


"I asked him what he thought was that kept the Muslims from turning on them at the bridge. ‘The Parmatma dwells in the soul of all humans. There He kept those people from doing evil.’ ‘But then you saw hundreds of dead on the other side of the Ravi. What of them?’ I asked. ‘It was a crime against humanity and the Parmatma. Those who killed the Muslims tried to kill God who dwells in our souls.’"

"What surprised me was that they were keeping a Muslim tomb complete with its tombstone and Arabic inscriptions. In Pakistan, tomb-worshippers revere only those non-Muslim burials that have posthumously been converted to Islam. And there are many of this kind across the country. All other known Hindu shrines have, at best, been neglected and at worst vandalized. That having been said, it must be granted that the government did begin an effort at restoring some of the more important shrines. Despite the stringent visa regime, temples like Ketas Raj near Chakwal and Sri Mata Hinglaj on the Makran coast of Balochistan, two of the holiest Hindu shrines in Pakistan, are now active pilgrimage sites. For some reason the several Sikh shrines of Punjab have fared rather well. Sites like Panja Sahib of Hasan Abdal, the birthplace of Guru Nanak Dev at Nankana and Gurdwara Kartarpur, the site of his death near Narowal, together with minor shrines have all been well looked after and annual pilgrimage permitted to them."

As you hear such tragical and horrible stories narrated to the Author, often by the descendants of the perpetrators themselves as a repentance for the act that their ancestor / Family member perpetrated during the moment of madness, there is a deeper question that begs attention.

As the terrible act starts on one side by any particular religious group, it is like a forest fire, fuels hatred on the other side. It does not matter who started it. Once started it engulfs every one on either side of the religious identity. Until entire humanity is snuffed out, the fire of hatred keeps running on and on.


"On the way, they crossed the BRB canal and Charan Singh recalls seeing it virtually clogged with dead bodies: men, women, and children alike. These were those luckless Hindus and Sikhs who had only a few days earlier lived peaceably with their Muslim neighbours in nearby villages. ‘My mind was filled not with grief seeing the dead, but with rage and an overpowering desire for revenge,’ he recalled. Deserting his post, young Charan Singh reached home in Buttar and joined the mobs running amok across the country. They killed and looted, their hearts bursting with religious fervour and indignation at the needless and brutal deaths of their co-religionists in Pakistan. There was no remorse, no twinge of guilt upon doing in a fellow human being for no part in the grisly events occurring in the west. It was, he said, as if men had descended to a level below the lowliest beasts.

As more and more trainloads of dead Sikhs and Hindus arrived, the call to exact greater vengeance charged up Charan Singh. To add to this were the tales told by those lucky to have lost only their worldly possessions and made it across the border with their lives. Charan Singh said it was religious fervour that made him join the rampaging mob. It was passion whipped up by religious leaders in the name of God that made him kill the very same people who had amicably shared the village with him. He said his blood had turned white and he lost count of the number of people he killed. Many of these were neighbours to whom his family sent food on the Lohri festival and who in turn sent them vermicelli or meat depending on which Eid it was. "

So is there a redemption possible at all during that insane time? Is there a Redemption possible at all?

The answer to this question is when the author opens up about an almost spiritual moment when he has a private moment with Mohinder Pratap Sehgal who offers a insight to the author about the plight suffered by his family and is also a descendent of the man responsible for that sad state.


"He, Mohinder Pratap Sehgal, son of a man who died with the blood of my family on his hands and whose name I never asked, a Hindu, and I, born into a family of devout Muslims, stood there in the bright late afternoon sunshine looking at each other as we tried to come to grips with what had just been narrated. I felt no emotion; nothing against the teller of my family’s story. If anything, I was overcome by Mohinder Pratap’s use of the phrase ‘our doctor sahib’ for my grandfather. It bore a feeling of intimacy rooted in what he knew of the man even though, as he said, he had never been treated by him. Even if this meeting had spooled at a fast-forward mode for me, my mind must have taken in his opening indictment of his father and apology on his behalf. Though I did not realize it then, I must have known that this good man endured in his heart the guilt of an error of judgement of his father’s. If I had inherited grief from a family that never spoke explicitly of the loss suffered during Partition, Mohinder Pratap had a legacy of remorse from a father who rued his error to the end of his days. For a few moments neither of us spoke. I almost made to hug him, but something restrained me. I might have been afraid of his reaction though as I write now, eight years after that meeting, I know we both needed each other to heal our wounds of Partition. I had not let memory turn grief into hatred for them across the border. Instead, it taught me to forgive and move on. Mohinder Pratap had in the same way kept the guilt of his father, hoping perhaps to someday meet someone to apologize to. Our need for the other was mutual"

While the author concedes that he is not a historian, is very candid about his criticism of the role that the Muslim League and Jinnah in the cataclysm of Partition, his the Indian Leaders is very subtle statement about his feelings which ranges from Warmth to melancholy. While his view on the Indian & Pakistani side ranges from Criticism to sadness, he does not mince words on the British and especially on Lord Mountbatten.

"Mountbatten, who to my mind appears to be incredibly immature and even foolish—a moron who should have been tried for crimes against humanity and hanged—wanted to do the job and get out as quickly as possible. Jinnah wanted it done the soonest in view of his tuberculosis of the lungs that he knew was killing him, a fact which he skilfully kept from public knowledge. Nehru, grieving over the cutting up of Mother India, had come to a stage where he seemed to have stopped caring about the bloodshed that seemed certain to take place. The tragedy that was sure to oversee Partition seemed to be a concern only for Mahatma Gandhi. One man against millions was bound to lose."

How relevant is the Partition and its dreadful outcome for our current situation and issues? For every emotional issue that seem to be kindled by those who seek power and want to retain that forever, where lies the redemption? This is a question that rings in my ears.

Whatever the answer may be, one thing is clear. Till we personalize every act of atrocity, both real and imaginary, using the man made constructs of Race, Religion or any other division that self-serving leaders direct us, and react to it as if it is an act perpetrated our self and want to act in kind, failing to realize that is instead an act of aggression on the whole of human Kind, we keep fueling the beast and keep the cycle going.

With all our forms of Art, Political discourse, general conscience all directed towards manufacturing rage and revenge, by enticing us to fall for one of those artificial constructs, hope is bleak at best.


At that lowest moment, I realize like silver streak on a cloudy horizon, what the half-dressed fakir did at that time is almost a divine act. Yet, we have a long way to go, while history repeats again and again in throwing humanity on the mud. After all, Evil is learned swiftly; goodness takes generations to become part of one’s consciousness.