Bhat Abas
Thanks a lot for tagging me in this beautiful video about reunion of friends separated by partition ...
One gets involved in a tale when one finds his/ her story lurking somewhere in it..or sees the plausibility of such a tale in his lived experiences or future destiny...
Coming from a family wounded by partition, I've grown up hearing anecdotes and tales, narrated and often re-told, by my father, uncles and paternal aunts of a lost ‘pastoral paradise’ that existed in Zafarwal.. in district Sialkot. They often rued the loss of their 'haveli,' land and cattle ...which they had to leave…behind ...as their 'home' had become a part of Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1947.
My nonagenarian tau (paternal uncle), during each meeting, harps on the old communitarian culture they had, and still longs for the "Mehtian di Gali"(street of Mehtas) in Zafarwal named after our clan, and where his clan once flourished..
Life for them, the migrants from across, must have been quite tough ...dad was a child barely gaining consciousness of the harsh, divisive world around...For him, it took a lifetime to overcome the loss of his parents just before partition and the loss of his ‘home’ and ‘hearth.’
My dad's generation of 'victims' of partition..really slogged it out..Grappling almost daily with the wounds of partition and the resulting emotional and psychological scars…Father had a large circle of friends, and that friendship sustained throughout. The ‘victims of partition’ were united by their ‘lacks,’ united by their ‘sense of victimhood and loss.’
When ‘we’ took birth, dad had already carved a place in the social topography of Pathankot; earned the status of a sincere, sagacious soul, from who people could seek advice and help. We grew up to know of his struggle... against recalcitrant conditions, poverty, rejection and hunger... from his friends, and proud relatives.
The topography of the kasba or township of Zafarwal must have been so vividly entrenched in his mind that he often confidently claimed that if he ever goes to his town he would easily trace his steps to home ; ‘the ‘home of his childhood’ that survived in his memory, the home he had left long ago. We, the children, had developed our own ‘mind-pictures’ of the place and had developed ‘place-attachments’ to a place where we never had been and never would physically be. But in our stories, and in imagination Zafarwal had always been a real, thriving place.
Was it curiosity or ‘inquisitiveness’ born out of the daily ritual of communicating with dad?, that made me …search ‘google baba’ to find that Zafarwal the town… where my grandparents build their home and bore six, or seven, children, had grown to become an administrative tehsil of the district Narowal.
The image of the town that I could ‘construct’ was of a place having dusty lanes, cluttered with small houses amidst the large, expansive green fields. Mosques and large farm houses of the feudal lords were perhaps the most pompous and eye-catching buildings of Zafarwal. Though divided by a distance of a few kilometers (aprox 100 maybe), ‘no route’ was shown by google maps between Gurdaspur/ Pathankot and Zafarwal/ Narowal …
We, the children of our father had always known of the routes that led across to the place.. …We had often been there…,and though aware of the physical boundary …we had crossed it many times …in our ‘imaginative worlds’…
and I’m sure about this, Zafarwal- the place of our imagination is much more ‘paradisal ;’ much more vivid than the place of ‘feudal reality’ that I encountered through Google.
Thanks a lot for tagging me in this beautiful video about reunion of friends separated by partition ...
One gets involved in a tale when one finds his/ her story lurking somewhere in it..or sees the plausibility of such a tale in his lived experiences or future destiny...
Coming from a family wounded by partition, I've grown up hearing anecdotes and tales, narrated and often re-told, by my father, uncles and paternal aunts of a lost ‘pastoral paradise’ that existed in Zafarwal.. in district Sialkot. They often rued the loss of their 'haveli,' land and cattle ...which they had to leave…behind ...as their 'home' had become a part of Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1947.
My nonagenarian tau (paternal uncle), during each meeting, harps on the old communitarian culture they had, and still longs for the "Mehtian di Gali"(street of Mehtas) in Zafarwal named after our clan, and where his clan once flourished..
Life for them, the migrants from across, must have been quite tough ...dad was a child barely gaining consciousness of the harsh, divisive world around...For him, it took a lifetime to overcome the loss of his parents just before partition and the loss of his ‘home’ and ‘hearth.’
My dad's generation of 'victims' of partition..really slogged it out..Grappling almost daily with the wounds of partition and the resulting emotional and psychological scars…Father had a large circle of friends, and that friendship sustained throughout. The ‘victims of partition’ were united by their ‘lacks,’ united by their ‘sense of victimhood and loss.’
When ‘we’ took birth, dad had already carved a place in the social topography of Pathankot; earned the status of a sincere, sagacious soul, from who people could seek advice and help. We grew up to know of his struggle... against recalcitrant conditions, poverty, rejection and hunger... from his friends, and proud relatives.
The topography of the kasba or township of Zafarwal must have been so vividly entrenched in his mind that he often confidently claimed that if he ever goes to his town he would easily trace his steps to home ; ‘the ‘home of his childhood’ that survived in his memory, the home he had left long ago. We, the children, had developed our own ‘mind-pictures’ of the place and had developed ‘place-attachments’ to a place where we never had been and never would physically be. But in our stories, and in imagination Zafarwal had always been a real, thriving place.
Was it curiosity or ‘inquisitiveness’ born out of the daily ritual of communicating with dad?, that made me …search ‘google baba’ to find that Zafarwal the town… where my grandparents build their home and bore six, or seven, children, had grown to become an administrative tehsil of the district Narowal.
The image of the town that I could ‘construct’ was of a place having dusty lanes, cluttered with small houses amidst the large, expansive green fields. Mosques and large farm houses of the feudal lords were perhaps the most pompous and eye-catching buildings of Zafarwal. Though divided by a distance of a few kilometers (aprox 100 maybe), ‘no route’ was shown by google maps between Gurdaspur/ Pathankot and Zafarwal/ Narowal …
We, the children of our father had always known of the routes that led across to the place.. …We had often been there…,and though aware of the physical boundary …we had crossed it many times …in our ‘imaginative worlds’…
and I’m sure about this, Zafarwal- the place of our imagination is much more ‘paradisal ;’ much more vivid than the place of ‘feudal reality’ that I encountered through Google.
