How the book starts

A gentle, stoic acceptance

This picture of Devi and Kishinchand Bijlani was 

probably taken in Hyderabad, Sindh, in 1947.
Devi is expecting her seventh child, Hiru.

Image courtesy Meher Bijlani

Every year, as the 15th of August approaches, thoughts about my grandparents crowd into my mind. As our Prime Minister addresses the nation from the Red Fort, children across the country turn out in their school uniforms to salute the flag and honour the memory of the great leaders of our independence struggle, and India celebrates yet another Independence Day holiday, I try to peer back in time to feel and understand what independence for India, and the birth of our sovereign nation, meant to them.
In August 1947, my grandfather, Kishinchand Bijlani, was five months short of his forty-second birthday. My grandmother, Devi, was thirty-nine. They lived in Hyderabad, Sindh. He was a prosperous lawyer with a practice that extended across Sindh and occasionally took him to Bombay. They had six children; a seventh was on the way. Kishno, as his friends called him, was a Gandhian – they were one of the few families in the neighbourhood whose children ran about in the angan, the wide, multi-purpose courtyard of their house, playing happily with the children of the sweepers, Rajasthani women with colourful swinging skirts, mirror-work embroidered bodices, and bone bangles clattering all the way from wrist to elbow.
That first Independence Day was a day of rejoicing for them; the vindication of decades of struggle against imperialism. But as the day approached, unfolding events carried the message that major change, not all of it pleasant, was on the way. How would they adapt? What did the future have in store?
Musing nostalgically thus, my Facebook status on 15 August 2011, read: “thinking of my grandparents and wondering why, when we celebrate Independence Day, we don’t also pay homage to the millions who suffered displacement and tragedy at Partition.”
In addition to a number of supportive comments and ‘likes’, I received the following private message in response: “Saaz, with all due respect, time we forgot those memories. They don’t let us go forward. It’s time we buried hate which is redundant.”
Indignant that my minor homage to my grandparents’ bravery and calm acceptance should be misinterpreted as a message of hate, I tried to think back to any instance of hatred, or even lesser negative emotion, they had ever expressed in connection with Partition. There was none.
I lived in my grandparents’ home for three years, fresh from boarding school in south India, a privileged, cloistered life, and thrown abruptly into the rough-and-tumble of Bombay. It was a difficult time: one of culture shock and rude awakenings. But, studying in a Sindhi college, living in a Sindhi home, I learnt almost nothing about Sindh or the Sindhi community.
We did eat Sindhi food, but the only time I heard the Sindhi language was when my grandparents spoke to each other or occasionally to their five elder children who had spent their childhood in Sindh.  Years later, reading in The Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia about a place where Sindhi was spoken on the streets, I felt startled – and incredibly moved. It was not something I had ever imagined before.
The youngest three of my grandparents’ children grew up in Bombay and could barely speak the language. My uncle Hiru, who was born short weeks after the family arrived in Bombay as refugees, often asked his father about what life was like in Sindh. The only reply he ever got was, “Why should we think about something which is over, which no longer exists?”
Many other families had followed a similar pattern. They had packed their bags and left, leaving material belongings and emotional attachments behind, and never looked back. Some felt regret; some nostalgia. But all expressed a clear understanding that their lives had been impacted by a tide over which no one had control. Life was difficult for everyone, no matter who or where they were. The best any human being could do would be to adapt to new situations and make the best of them. Hate? I encountered no trace of it.
In 1947, as Independence approached, plans were made to partition the country into India and Pakistan. It became clear that Punjab and Bengal would be split in two, with a part going to each country. Sindh, however, would be given intact to the new country, Pakistan. The Sindhi Hindus would remain in Sindh. They had always been a minority community in Sindh; they would continue as before.
Soon, however, it became clear that the creation of a new country on religious lines was mobilising the population along the new borders and creating terror and bloodshed in a way that no one could control. Migrants from the United Provinces and Bihar began appearing in Sindh and gradually refugees too, hunted and embittered, with horror stories of their own. The Sindhi Hindus felt a growing fear and uncertainty. Some began to pack their bags and prepare to depart.
It was only after Independence, when violence and mayhem became established along the borders, that my grandparents decided to leave. Perhaps they imagined that things would calm down; that they would come back to lives they had always known, in the land where their families had lived for generations.
Thinking about the courage and resolve with which they took this decision always makes me feel sad. It reminds me of another sad occasion, at which I was present, many years later.
In September 1985, my eldest uncle Kanna died. He was only 58. He had been estranged from the family for decades, long before I was born. In recent years he had come back to live in Bombay and would occasionally visit his parents. It brought my ageing grandmother comfort – delight, even. My grandfather welcomed him gingerly, with no display of emotion.
Kanna died in Nanavati Hospital. His body was laid out in one corner of the grounds. The family gathered around to bid final goodbyes to someone who had once been adored, cherished, and hero-worshipped – and then, as a wayward lifestyle overcame him, feared and even hated. I remembered my mother telling me that he wrote poetry. When she was a child he had published some, but under her name, so his friends wouldn’t laugh. I remembered my adolescent disdain for her fear that, being similar, I might turn out just as he had.
My grandmother wept with abandon, and my grandfather’s eyes were clouded but calm. He bent to stroke Kanna’s forehead but the doctor standing in attendance intervened abruptly, explaining that it was dangerous to touch a corpse. The memory of my grandfather’s look of gentle, stoic acceptance on being denied a final caress for his firstborn son still moves me to tears.
To me, it is this gentle, stoic acceptance that characterises the community of Sindhi Hindus. Victims of the times, they adapted with grace and fortitude, suppressing their negative thoughts and feelings, and putting their energy into getting on with their lives as best as they could.
This book is not about anyone hating anyone else. It is a tribute to my grandparents, an act of self-indulgence: me, looking with affection and regard at a portrait of them, and smiling at the memories it brings.
The first few pages of Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland