People Like Us Across The Border
S.K. Aggarwal

The Tribune:  Saturday, May 31, 2003, Chandigarh, India

It was mid-fifties and I was a growing child in the streets of Amritsar. The area around where we lived was very thinly populated and there were many dilapidated houses and an abandoned mosque near our house. During our evening outings my father would tell me how these houses once belonged to Muslims and how they had to leave for Pakistan. There were no Muslims to be seen in Amritsar as this town was right at the declared border and everybody was able to cross over.

My father and mother would tell me how once they were their neighbours and all those nasty and ugly scenes at the time of partition. We children would perceive Muslims as looters, plunderers, tormenters and war-mongers. There were our text books narrating the horrible stories of Muslim atrocities on Sikh Gurus and all these were very well illustrated in beautiful but piercing and poignant paintings by S. Sobha Singh mounted on the walls of the famous Sikh Museum in the Golden Temple. My own conception of a Muslim was that of a fierce looking monster. I grew up like that and finished my school without seeing any in flesh and blood.

It was my first year at college. During the summer break a friend’s brother who was a customs official took the two of us to see the Wagah border post. There I stood at the no-man’s stretch of land facing a boy of my age who had come to see the border post from Lahore. We were soon talking. We spoke the same language and the same dialect. We longed to cross over and sit together and talk more. Dogs were running from this side to that and back chasing each other in play. There were no barriers for them. But a soldier of the Pakistan Rangers was keeping a vigil on us. As soon as I tried to read the English daily that my newly formed friend was holding in his hand the soldier separated us, “This is not allowed”. We grudgingly moved away from each other. That day I felt very different. So where were those monsters that I had imagined?

After finishing college when I moved out of my shell at Amritsar and saw the vast sea of human faces of my country it became so obvious how it is the same stock, all of us. Only the name will tell you whether you are a Hindu, a Muslim or for that matter a Christian or someone else. Working in a busy maternity and paediatric hospital in the walled city of Delhi with a majority of our patients being poor Muslims from the city and the slums and resettlement colonies for the last 20 years I see the all prevailing mothers and children with anxieties and apprehensions common to all of us during the illness of our near and dear ones. Mothers and grand-mothers and fathers and grand-fathers overjoyed over the birth of their new-borns and wailing over the loss of their children. There is no difference. All humans behave in a similar manner in matters of joy and sorrow.

There is a realisation; we are the same people. When we see the people from across the border whether on their arrival here or on the Pak TV we cannot make out one from the other. Why this animosity? We are living with it for the past 50 years.

But then real brothers also have it for some similar reasons after they start living separately. It may last for many years, but in due course bones of contention crumble and cordiality evolves. Their children relish the kinship and proudly declare in larger gatherings that they are cousins.

Let the people of this sub-continent rediscover this kinship. Are we at such a threshold; alas there are more fears than hopes. But then hope sustains us. This is bound to happen sooner or later.