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My visit to Panipat in September 1987 was one of
the more distressing events of my journey to India in connection
with an international training programme which took me to many
cities ─ Delhi, Agra, Banglore, Mysore, Hyderabad. I was deeply
moved by my stay in Delhi, the city of my birth. I stayed at India
International Centre and walked every morning around the nearby
Lodhi tombs, trying to etch their austere beauty in my mind forever.
Alone, I went to Humayun’s tomb, pausing at the neglected Arab
Serai, overgrown with weeds, where poor Bahadur Shah Zafar had
sought refuge. At Jama Masjid, also in a state of neglect, I thought
of my grand-uncle, Latif Hasan, who had looked after its repairs.
Night fell as I extricated myself from my fascination with the
mosque. In the back streets there were long queues of cycle
rickshaws but nobody – no rickshaw or taxi driver – was willing to
take me back to New Delhi. I walked in fear in the dark streets
around the mosque, seeking help, until one man took pity on me and
dropped me in a well-lit street in New Delhi. At India Gate, I
remembered running around the monument as a small child, at
Connaught Circus, I seemed to discern vaguely the direction in which
my father had his office. I made a trip to see that jewel on 10
Aurangzeb Road, which had been Jinnah’s residence. In Daryaganj, I
went to Lahore Music House to purchase a scale changer. The Sikh
owners of the shop could not do enough to welcome me. Their music
shop was located in Anarkali in Lahore before Partition and they
told me the story of their flight from Lahore to Delhi. Wherever I
went, I told myself that my forefathers and parents had trodden upon
these paths.
My parents had never called at Sufi shrines but I
felt I must pay homage to Nizamuddin Auliya, the patron saint not
only of Delhi but of all believers in prayer, if only because of
Ameer Khusrau who is buried there and whose verses and lyrics had
sustained me in the sadder moments of my life. The steps leading to
the shrine were absolutely filthy, the shopkeepers on both sides of
the stairs called out to me loudly as I went up. Inside the shrine,
I was quickly surrounded by young men who guessed immediately that I
had come from Pakistan. They knew the names of all the
neighbourhoods of Karachi and tried to place me in one of them. All
they were interested in, however, were personal donations and a
contribution to the association which looked after the dargah.
In 1965, I had visited Panipat with my father
Sanwar Hasan, when he went as a delegate to the unofficial
Commonwealth relations conference in Delhi and took me along with
him. Before we left for Delhi, he said to me, ‘you are my eldest
child, you will understand.’ Towards the end of the conference, the
smoothly arranged trip to Panipat, where his ancestors had lived for
700 years and where he had been the richest, the most educated and
most influential person before Partition, was for him a journey of
pain. In his house, we found a school in a state of disrepair and
his former munshi, Chetan, came to meet him there, clinging to him
and weeping uncontrollably. My father seemed to want to avoid
further distress and took only one look at his beautiful garden
house, without going in, and said, ‘let’s go.’ When we reached home
in Karachi, his first words to my mother were, ‘Sughra biwi,
yesterday we went to Panipat.’
Finding a way to go to Panipat on this occasion
was not easy but I thought I could manage on my own. I was not well
known and had no friends in high places. But before Partition, my
mother and Saleha Abid Husain, also known as Misdaq, had been close
friends in Panipat and one evening I made the journey to Jamia
Millia to see her. She was not well then but embraced me warmly. In
her house, I could have been in Panipat in my childhood ─ the
simplicity of it all was in stark contrast to our more comfortable
surroundings. Time seemed to have stood still. She called the
Governor of Haryana and said her niece had come from Pakistan and
wanted to visit her vatan. (homeland). The irony of her words
pierced my heart. How amazing that he spoke to her almost
immediately and advised that I should call at the city police
station in Panipat and the station house officer would help me.
Next afternoon, a friend of mine and his wife
drove me in their small Maruti car from Delhi to Panipat. Much had
changed and my childhood memories were very hazy but I recognized
the dak bungalow on the highway. At the city police station in
Panipat, the station house officer had been waiting for me with
lunch. ‘Where do you want to go’, he asked me? I did not have a
clue. He was very patient with me and sent a constable to accompany
me. I reckoned that somebody at Bu Ali Shah Qalandar’s tomb would
have heard of my family, so we drove to the shrine through very
narrow streets piled with rubbish on both sides. The shrine was
deserted. I noticed the black pillars which my father had told me
were made of touchstone but there was nobody there, except a lone
woman praying in the courtyard. A naked fakir, who looked ancient
enough, said he had come to the city only a few years ago. It was
obvious that nobody had ever heard of my family. The inner sanctum
was locked and had to be opened for me to enter. It was dark inside.
I picked up a few faded flowers from Bu Ali’s grave. After offering
fateha at Bu Ali’s grave and that of the legendary Altaf Husain Hali
who is buried in the shrine complex, I turned helplessly to the
constable.
‘Where did your family live’, the constable asked
me impatiently? ‘In Mohalla Ansar’, I replied, quite sure that the
name had been changed. ‘Then why didn’t you tell me’, he said, ‘I
will take you to Chowk Ansar.’ And so it was that he stood me at an
intersection which he said was Chowk Ansar. Nothing appeared
familiar to me, as I walked from one street to another, in search of
the devhri of my father’s house. Soon, it became a real spectacle
and scores of people, including the Sikh shopkeepers who had taken
over Panipat after the Muslim population was forced to leave, walked
up and down behind and beside me, inquisitive, raising queries, even
trying to help. Finally, the whole exercise became so embarrassing
that I told my friends we should go back to Delhi. Disappointed, as
we were driving away, I asked them to stop at the entrance to a
street on the right. That is the sweeper’s lane, the constable said.
But some strange instinct pushed me towards a door on the right,
further up the street. It opened upon a staircase which I started
climbing in the semi-darkness and then rushed down, fearing that I
had made a mistake. As I stood outside in the street again, a man
came out of the house, wondering why the police had knocked at his
door. ‘I am looking for a house’, I said, ‘which had a square pond
in the courtyard.’ ‘You have reached the right place’, he replied,
‘come upstairs.’ I had recognized baghcha, my family’s
neighbourhood.
Makhad Lal Vijh, who now lived in Latif Hasan’s
house, in which my mother had been raised, had migrated from
Lyallpur and knew my uncle, Ansar Hasan who had studied in that city
in his youth. The house had been divided into two parts and so had
the pond in the courtyard. They were welcoming and hospitable but my
presence must surely have reminded them of their own loss in
Lyallpur, if any reminding was needed. ‘There were steps leading
down from this house into a much larger residence which belonged to
my father, Sarwar Hasan’, I said, ‘which I had visited with him in
1965.’ ‘Yes’, they said, ‘there is a school in that house.’ ‘Can’t I
see it’, I asked? ‘You can, when the school opens tomorrow morning.’
‘But can’t we send for the keys, can’t the headmaster let me in
today’, I persisted? ‘No, not today, the school is closed’, they
replied.
In the street outside, a bald old man working on a
thela was telling some people, ‘Oh, I knew she had come in search of
her house.’ A younger man appeared who remembered the names of some
of my elders. I took photographs of the beautiful side façade of the
house my grandfather had built, the chauburji and those lovely inset
arches, the colour of the Mughal monuments in Delhi. And since I
could not go inside the house, the constable brought a stool for me
to stand on and look into the courtyard from the devri. ‘When you
had so much property here, why did you leave it and go away’, my
friend’s wife chided me. ‘You will never understand’, I told her,
‘we were simply pushed out.’ There was no time to search for other
assets belonging to my parents or to visit historical landmarks. We
had tea at Skylark motel ─ there was, actually, a motel in Panipat ─
and drove back to Delhi as dusk fell. A strange feeling of disquiet
overcame me. For 40 years, my mother had never shown much emotion
about the loss of what she and my father had left behind in India.
But when I reached home and met her, she said to me, ‘tell me about
my house, have you brought photographs?’
We are glad that Ambssador Dr Masuma Hasan of
Pakistan gracefully agreed that we publish her piece written on the
occasion of her visit to her ancestral homeland. Her evocative story
resonates deeply with the enduring pain of hundreds of thousands and
millions of displaced people and refugees all over the world,
including in our region.
Ambassador Dr. Masuma Hasan
Scholar, diplomat and civil servant, Dr.
Masuma Hasan is Chairperson of The Pakistan Institute of
International Affairs, President of the Board Governors of Aurat
Foundation, Senate member of the Federal Urdu University, and member
Board of Governors of the National School of Public Policy. In her
public service career, she was Cabinet Secretary to the Government
of Pakistan, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN Office
and other international agencies in Vienna, Ambassador to Austria,
Slovenia and Slovakia. Dr. Hasan has a Ph.D. degree in Politics from
the University of Cambridge UK, is the editor of Pakistan in a
Changing World and Editor-in Chief of the quarterly Pakistan
Horizon.
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