Partition Voices by Kavita Puri

Author:Kavita Puri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

15

Horrible Days

The telephone rang at the residence of Ratendone Road, Delhi, at eleven at night. Maneck Dalal picked up the receiver to hear a voice say: ‘We’re coming to kill you.’ Maneck thought it was a friend playing a prank. ‘Look, I’m very tired, please don’t fool around,’ he said. But the man repeated the threat: ‘We’re coming to kill you.’1

Maneck’s English wife Kay was pregnant with their first child, and he was concerned enough to call friends, who invited them over to their house to spend the night. The next morning, back at the residence, their chowkidars, nightwatchmen, said a gang of men had come to the house asking for him. Later that day a large black square with a black cross was found on the front door. It was ‘the practice at that time, particularly for Sikhs, to mark their victim’, Maneck says.

In September 1947, twenty-eight-year-old Maneck Dalal, from the small minority of Parsees – so, technically, above the fray of communal fighting – was a wanted man. As manager of Air India in the capital, Delhi, he was responsible for ensuring that Muslims left the city safely. ‘It infuriated some of the extremist elements [Hindus and Sikhs] who did not realise we were acting on government orders.’ After the threatening phone call, Maneck and his wife moved temporarily to the Imperial hotel, and then to a second-floor flat in Connaught Circus in the centre of town.

The weeks after partition were ‘a time of chaos and mayhem,’ remembers Maneck, ‘it was intense … and extremely frightening. Murder was commonplace. Houses were looted.’ Just weeks earlier, he and Kay had been on the streets of Delhi with thousands of others shouting ‘Pandit Nehru ke jai!’ (Long live Pandit Nehru!). It was a day ‘full of joy’; everyone, regardless of their backgrounds, was jubilant at independence. But soon the bodies of dead Muslims began to appear outside the gates of their compound. In the centre of the city, Maneck saw more and more corpses: ‘They just lay there, because no one dared to pick them up, in case they themselves were fiercely attacked.’

Maneck worked long days at Willingdon airfield – the same airfield that Haroon Ahmed and his family went to when they fled Delhi for Karachi. Each morning Maneck would be given a list, provided by the government, of people who had been prioritised to be transported on the Air India Dakotas from Delhi to Lahore or Karachi. Muslims would come to his office, begging him to take their families, offering huge sums of money. They were desperate to leave quickly, and Maneck remembers they were not all rich people. ‘But it was a question of life and death.’ He was never tempted to take the bags of money. Instead, he would patiently explain the government rules of prioritisation. ‘Often they would get furious and abuse me and swear at me. They would say things like, “Have you ever seen your mother killed? Have you ever seen your sister raped?” This was a very tough period.

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