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This is the second part of a series. You can read Part 1 >here .
Good drivers are often good storytellers: they not only make the miles melt faster with anecdotes but also enrich one’s journey by providing what writers call ‘background information’.
My driver in Amritsar, Balbir Singh, turned out be one such, as we set out for Ferozepur, the southernmost of the three Punjab districts to border Pakistan, about 120 km away.
He wasn’t always Balbir Singh. He was called Babu when he came from Bihar to Amritsar in 1978 as an eight-year-old, accompanying his poverty-stricken parents who were desperate to find a living.
The young Babu too did odd jobs to supplement family income until he learned driving and one fine afternoon, while ferrying passengers to a wedding, impressed a Sikh couple sufficiently enough to eventually become their son-in-law. It was at his own wedding that Babu was rechristened Balbir Singh.
And now he had impressed me with the honest rendition of his life-story. We had barely left Amritsar behind and were finally on the road leading to Ferozepur, flanked by paddy fields ripening in the sun, when Babu slowed down near a gurudwara that sat right on the thoroughfare.
“Do you see commuters throwing money inside the gurudwara ?” Babu said. “No one goes past without making a small donation because they want to have a safe journey.”
Almost every passing motorist, I noticed, slowed down when in front of the gurudwara , bowed briefly and flung currency notes with their entire might so that the money landed in the designated enclosure serving as the receptacle for such donations.
Many missed their aim but they moved on, having done their bit. It was left to the volunteers to pick up the fallen money. I myself picked up two hundred-rupee notes that landed at my feet as I walked into the gurudwara after Babu had parked the car under a tree.
Both Babu and I pulled out our handkerchiefs to cover our heads before we entered the shrine and sat down with a sevadar — caretaker — who told us about the history of the gurudwara . He spoke only Punjabi, Babu acted as the interpreter. From what I gathered, the gurudwara was built over the tomb of Baba Naudh Singh, a saint-warrior who was killed on that spot while fighting the Mughals.
An elderly Sikh gentleman, who sat nearby, interrupted the sevadar : “Baba Naudh Singh Ji, in spite of being beheaded, placed his head on his own palm and went all the way to the Golden Temple. By then the Mughal forces had been completely destroyed.”
Later that evening, searching the internet, I found from a website whose information seemed most credible, that Baba Naudh Singh didn’t die fighting the Mughals but the army of the Afghan invader Ahmad Shah Durrani, and that the cause of his death was a bullet wound.
I asked the elderly gentleman — I would call him Hoshiyar Singh — to tell me about himself: his own story wouldn’t need cross-checking. He said he was born in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) in Pakistan, and was five years old when India was partitioned. His family left home and came on a bullock-cart to Amritsar, where his maternal grandfather lived, and along the way were almost butchered by a mob before soldiers came to their rescue. Soon after, the government allotted the family a piece of land in Rajasthan, in lieu of the land they had lost in Pakistan, and, while his brother became farmers, Hoshiyar Singh grew up to join the Rajasthan State Transport Corporation as a mechanic.
“I was hardworking, my rise was rapid. Today I have a house of my own, in Rajasthan; my son is settled in Adelaide; my daughter is happily married and lives in Haryana. My life is set,” he said.
“What about the land?”
“My two brothers look after it. I have nothing to do with them, they are both naalayak (good for nothing). Actually I would blame their wives, they are not from good families,” he said.
The sevadar interrupted us. “Look at me!” he admonished himself, “I haven’t even offered you anything to eat or drink all this while.” He called a volunteer who handed us steel bowls and poured badam milk from a kettle. We drank it up and the bowls, on the insistence of Hoshiyar Singh, were filled again.
Babu looked pleased as he allowed his bowl to be filled yet again. “This is a wholesome drink, gives you strength. Sometimes it can also make you drowsy,” he told me. I wasn’t very pleased to hear that: he had to drive me another 100 km.
*
‘Welcome to the land of martyrs,’ a signboard welcomed us into Ferozepur.
I would probably have never heard of this town had it not been for friends’ fathers (and later on several friends themselves) in the Army who were posted here sometime or the other. Unfortunately no one I knew was stationed here at present, or else I would have not only had local support but also been assured of drinks in the evening followed by dinner: Army officers are gracious hosts and usually have well-stocked bars at home.
Right now I bought drinks — two bottles of Thums Up — from a stall and handed one to Babu, as we finally arrived at our destination: Hussainiwala, a village about 10 km northwest from the main town of Ferozepur.
Hussainiwala sits right on the Radcliffe Line, on the banks of the river Sutlej, and one of the most unforgettable moments during the journey was approaching the bridge across the Sutlej: a few hundred metres to our left lay Pakistan, and the sun, an orange ball by now, had gone over to its skies, lowering itself every passing moment; and to our right India, the furiously-flowing waters of the river washing along the hyacinth.
But as soon as we had got onto the bridge, we found the view of the Pakistani side of the river — and also the sun — blocked by yellow-painted tin sheets. In other words, we knew what the Sutlej looked like on the Indian side, but were only left to guess what it must be looking like on the other side of the bridge as it gurgled its way across the border.
One felt eager to peep into the other side only because of the deliberate visual obstruction: one wouldn’t have thrown a second glance at the river in the year, say, 1931, when the entire territory was just Punjab, a prosperous province in British India, its capital city being Lahore — the most progressive Indian city at the time.
It was in 1931, on the evening of March 23, that three young revolutionaries — Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Raj Guru — were hanged at the Lahore Central Jail, and the prison officials, fearing a revolt, secretly transported their bodies to Hussainiwala, not very far from Lahore, and cremated them in the wee hours on the banks of the Sutlej.
Babu and I now stood at the spot where they were cremated, marked by a memorial: the river has since changed its course and has shifted south, leaving behind a vast tract of fertile land between its banks and the memorial.
The memorial park has several plaques saluting the valour shown by the Indian Army against Pakistan from time to time: in 1956, it thwarted an attack on the Hussainiwala headworks; in 1965, it prevented the enemy from capturing the memorial as well as the headworks; and in 1971, repelled the enemy after it had destroyed the memorial and also the bridge linking Hussainiwala to the rest of India (until the 1971 war, Hussainiwala served as a border crossing between the two countries). The pillars of the bridge still stand, so do the scarred headworks.
The towers of the headworks at Hussainiwala shelled by Pakistan in 1971 ~ Photo: Bishwanath Ghosh Hussainiwala itself is a monument of irony: Bhagat Singh and his comrades died fighting the British, never imagining that India would soon be fighting not against the British but a new nation carved out of it, called Pakistan, and that some of the pitched battles would be fought on the site of their cremation.
Hussainiwala is named after a Muslim peer, Hussaini Baba, whose shrine stands close to the memorial park: you have to walk past it on your way to the galleries where people gather every evening to watch the flag-lowering ceremony conducted jointly by the two countries — an event similar to the ceremony at Wagah.
A signboard outside the shrine said that Hussaini Baba — long dead — is often spotted at nights, clad in white. It also said that people who pray at his shrine on Fridays have their wishes fulfilled and listed four categories of people who must seek the peer’s favour: childless women wanting to be mothers; employees wanting promotion; students wanting good results; and businessmen eyeing profits. Unfortunately, the paint on the digits that indicated the age of the shrine had faded, though from what my eyes could pick up, the dargah was stated to be 150 years old.
My visit took place on a Friday, but I didn’t see anyone — apart from myself — stepping into the shrine. It also happened to be Pakistan’s Independence Day, and the visitors — they were trooping in now — were more eager to watch the “parade”, the flag-lowering ceremony.
As we sat down on the concrete steps in the gallery, I found the stands on the Pakistani side — barely 100 metres away, in my estimate — packed to capacity. The men waved Pakistani flags and cheered in chorus; the women, unlike them, sat wearing dignified expressions; and schoolchildren obediently stuck to their seats.
Loudspeakers on the Indian side played bhangra numbers, while those on the Pakistani side created a carnival-like atmosphere: the songs and their tempo kept changing frequently. At one point, Dama dam mast kalandar , the highly popular Sufi song, burst out from the Pakistani speakers, and my neighbour exclaimed, “Arrey yeh to Mikke ki aawaz hai!” — This is Mika’s voice! Mika Singh is a popular Indian singer.
The next song was in the inimitable voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, accompanied by children’s chorus: “Pakistan Pakistan, mera imaan Pakistan, mera paigham Pakistan…” The tune registered in my head.
*
The foot-stomping began at six — the sun now as gentle as the moon, hanging in the Pakistani sky — as sentries from the Border Security Force and Pakistan Rangers took positions on their side of Radcliffe Line.
Compared to what unfolded at Hussainiwala, the event at Wagah-Attari border seemed liked a crowd-pulling tamasha , aimed at promoting — if I can take the liberty of coining a term — ‘patriotourism’. The event there had looked more like a showdown than a joint exercise in flag-lowering, much like an India-Pakistan cricket match in which both sides pretended to be the winners.
There was high-kicking and foot-stamping at Hussainiwala too, but they seemed part of a drill than a taunt. And when it came to the lowering of the flags, the sentry of each country entrusted with the job untied the rope from the respective posts and, holding on to the rope, marched into the soil of the opposite country and slowly brought down the flag to the sound of the bugle.
In other words, the BSF man lowered the Indian flag while standing in Pakistan, and the Pakistan Ranger man lowered the flag of his country while standing on Indian soil. Heart-warming — this was not how I had felt at the Wagah-Attari border.
*
On the drive back, we once again crossed the Sutlej, the yellow tin sheets blocking the view of the Pakistani side. But homebound birds flew over the metal screen: they don’t recognise manmade borders. Neither does music, come to think of it. Dama dam mast kalander is as much Indian as much it is Pakistani. They did not shy away from playing Mika Singh’s rendition of the famous song, that too at an event held on the border, even though Mika is an Indian. But then Mika is also a Punjabi. Similarly, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani, probably has more fans in India than in Pakistan.
Back in the hotel, as I settled down with a glass of whisky, I opened my laptop and opened You Tube. I had to listen to the song that had been playing in my head all this while: “Pakistan, Pakistan, mera imaan Pakistan.” I found it easily and listened to it, and then listened to it once again. I didn’t feel shy. I was alone anyway.
