BORDERS AND ATROCITIES I recall decorating my neighborhood with green pennants, dangling on strings, and hoisting the proud flag of Pakistan every Independence Day. The tradition was followed by visiting my grandmother for evening chai. We celebrated the birth of Pakistan in a gathering blessed with ignorant bliss, until one year when my grandmother shattered this innocence. “I was walking back from school, with books clutched in my hands. It was Friday, and I was looking forward to the weekend, dreading the math assignment that came with it. I was hoping that my father had returned from the mosque after the congregational prayer. However, when I reached my haveli, my world collapsed,” she recalled. “My father was hanging lifelessly from the ceiling of our patio - a Sikh man did it, my neighbors claimed, maybe he killed a Sikh too. I covered my sister’s eyes, gathering whatever I could in my satchel, and left my home, to go home.” In August 1947, a massive struggle of decades resulted in the collapse of the British colonial rule in India. Atrocities spanning for over two centuries were overcome by the emasculated population, leading to the independence of the Indo-Pak subcontinent – but the stains of colonization rooted in the divide and rule policy, culminated in the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs pitting against each other, splitting the once syncretic, motherland in half. Hence the traumatic experience both, politically and emotionally of one of the greatest mass migrations in recorded history commenced – over 15 million people were uprooted and 2 million slaughtered. Trains loaded with immigrants, poured in and out of the newly-founded state, often reaching their destination tainted scarlet - with nothing but bloodied corpses. My grandmother arrived to Pakistan in one of those horrendous trains amidst a landscape of violent victory. She had arrived to her new home – Pakistan.
The Utopian Palimpsest
31
