The Great Indian Railways by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-08-15T21:00:09+00:00

The Muslims on the train breathed again only when they reached Jatto, the first station in Pakistani territory. ‘Murdon mein jaan aa gayi’ [The dead heaved living sighs]. Hundreds of people were waiting here, to greet them with slogans of ‘Pakistan zindabad’ and generous supplies of drinking water and food—roti, dal and achar.²²

When the train reached Lahore, the usual statistics of ‘how many dead’ were demanded. On hearing of these, from the survivors, the crowd at the station vouched to ‘settle scores’ in the presence of the returning refugees. This, it duly accomplished by halting a special refugee train, bound for India, at the Baghbanpura station a few miles away from Lahore, and paying ‘back the killers of eastern Punjab in their own coin— “with interest.”’²³

Pandey also adds the testimony of a Hindu civil servant from Gharuan, who confessed to have slept (figuratively) through several Partition incidents—when he chased, along with other Hindu boys, emaciated Muslim women who had been led astray from their refugee camps due to hunger, or the nonchalant discussions on whether to kill or rape a Muslim refugee girl. Quite literally too, he ‘slept right through’ an episode when the train in which his mother and he were fleeing from west Pakistan was rained with bullets from a train passing by, going in the opposite direction. ‘Sleeping through it all,’ as Pandey writes, ‘is perhaps another comment on the disintegration of given notions of community and the incomprehensibility that supervenes, while the struggle for a new order takes place in the mind.’²⁴

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