Meena's Story

Swapna Gupta was born in Shillong, in the hills of Assam, India. After studies in Shillong and Calcutta, she travelled and taught school in Napier, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia. In 1972 she moved to Boston where she obtained her Doctorate from Boston University. In New England, she has taught in the Lesley College Schools and Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. In 1981 she joined the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary, Canada, where she worked for nearly three decades as a Clinical Psychologist.

She is the author of a children’s book, translated from Danish, “Osvald, the Monkey who Disappeared”, and co-author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, “The Irrelevance of Space & Other Stories.”

“Meena’s Story” is her debut novel.

Meena’s Story:

SWAPNA GUPTA

Meena’s Story

TO FREEDOM

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MEENA’S STORY: Flight to Freedom

Based on a true story, ‘Meena’s Story’ covers a span of nearly eighty years from 1939 when her mother, Elizabeth Burdett, stumbled on an escalator in London and fell into the arms of a dark, handsome Indian. Before long, she boarded a P&O liner bound for Bombay, to join him.

The voyage to Bombay was easy. The myriad challenges that faced her from the moment she was led to hide in the servants’ quarters of her Muslim husband’s family house in Hyderabad, that was something else - comic, ironic, and tragic in equal measure.

Set in India, Pakistan, England, and Canada, Meena’s ‘flight to freedom’ is not an escape from captivity, but rather an escape from haunting memories. The physical and geographical dislocations that affect Elizabeth (named Zareena by her mother-in-law) enmesh Meena as well.

Swapna Gupta brings to a story of simple lives tossed about by forces of religion and political violence a sensitivity and understanding that weaves together threads of love, family attachments, fear, loss, and remembrance in a moving narrative.

Author photograph by Ashis Gupta

Jacket design by Lumina Datamatics

MEENA’S STORY

FLIGHT

TO FREEDOM

A True Story by SWAPNA GUPTA

Chapter 1

It’s only ten o’ clock in the morning. The sun is scorching hot already. The air is still, with not even a slight breeze to breathe ripples across the golden wheat fields ready for harvest. Grey smoke rises in the distance as farmers burn down swaths of wheat stubble. There hangs a sense of foreboding in the air. Ali is pensive as he looks out of the latticed verandah of his home. It was only recently that an aunt in Hyderabad had found his family this house in Malir on the outskirts of Karachi.

Ali feels deeply troubled. The last few months have been very difficult for him, his young English wife, two sons and two daughters. They had left their family home in Hyderabad to

begin a new life in Pakistan. Little did Ali know that he, a Muslim, would face such intense hostility in this new country. Only a fortnight ago, in the middle of the night, they had to run for their lives and hide in the fields for hours after the old caretaker of the house had been beaten up and threatened with more. “How dare you let the house to be rented by those Mahajirs?”

If only Ali had understood earlier the intense hatred Pakistanis of Sindhi descent harbored against him, he might have thought twice about moving to Karachi. To the people of Sindh, he was unwanted because he was an immigrant, a Mahajir. But where would he have gone? He had lived in pre-partition India and also England, but he wanted to serve Pakistan and help it grow into a strong nation. The communal tensions he saw upon coming to Karachi shocked him. It seemed the Punjabi Muslims of Sindh detested Muslim Mahajirs like him. Before long, the hatred had boiled over into the 1948 Karachi riots.

As he looked out of his verandah, Ali recalled the parts of Karachi scarred by the riots,

horrific tales of murder and mayhem, that filled his heart with fear. The riots were intended to drive Hindu Sindhis out of Pakistan, but soon engulfed Mahajirs as well.

Ali looked around the verandah, and stopped to stare at the faded calendar hanging on the wall. The sun beat relentlessly on it, discoloring the paper. When the wind blew the calendar swayed from side to side, the metal headband scratching rhythmically against the wall, scratching a permanent semi-circle. Yes, it was the beginning of Ramadan.

Although liked by his peers in the office where he worked for the Karachi Transportation, there were many who were increasingly envious of Ali’s quick promotions. And many who of course resented him being a Mahajir.

The Sindh government had set up a Peace Board made up of Hindu and Muslim members to maintain order in the troubled province. P.V. Tahilramani, a Hindu, was secretary of the Peace Board. Karachi newspapers had carried details of the riots, and how Tahilramani rushed

to the office of the Sindh Chief Minister, Khuhro, to inform the chief minister that the Sikhs in Guru Mandir areas of Karachi were being killed. According to Khuhro, senior bureaucrats and police officials were nowhere to be found and he rushed to the scene at around 12.30 p.m. where he saw “mobs of refugees armed with knives and sticks storming the temples”. Khuhro tried to stem the violence. Mr. Jinnah, the Founder of Pakistan, was pleased with his efforts. But death still took a terrible toll.

Because the house was large and isolated, inhabited by only a young couple and four young children in this remote desert-like landscape, danger lurked in every corner. Their scattered neighbors were nomadic tribals from the neighboring state of Baluchistan. Many of them were known to snatch babies, or so it was believed. They also raised armadillos and intentionally sent them into nearby houses to torment and bite the residents. Another common belief. After the attack on the caretaker who lived at the rear of the house, Ali had started to sleep with a gun.

It is not as if there weren’t other houses nearby. Most notably, a retreat of the Amir of Bahawalpur, Nawab Sadiq Mohammad Khan Abbasi V, a friend of Mr. Jinnah’s. The Nawabs were friends and allies of the British, until the British hurriedly dumped them all like unwanted mistresses when the Empire collapsed with India’s independence and Pakistan’s emergence. Even Ali, with his British wife, couldn’t say they were the Amir’s neighbors.

Eight month’s later, Mr. Jinnah was dead. His dream was that of a secular Pakistan. Religion never mattered in his public or private life. Disagreeing with Gandhi’s mixture of politics with religion, Jinnah left the Indian Congress Party. Gandhi used the Khilafat (rule of the khalifa), a religious issue, to unite the Hindus and Muslims in India. Jinnah opposed it both in the Muslim League and Congress even at the risk of his political career. Kamal Pasha, who had abolished the Khilafat and introduced democracy and modernism in Turkey, became his role model. That’s what Mr. Jinnah was building his vision of Pakistan on.