Tript Kaur
Qasba [i]
It was the Wild, Wild West. It had dust storms and sun and quietude and a stray crow screeching through the sky and a water tank so dry that its metal was cracking. And yet it had pigs—snotty pigs covered in mud—grunting through garbage. The town was known for its pigs—snorting, pot-bellied creatures with balancing crowns of flies on their heads. And because the town had pigs and rotting garbage and no trees to speak of and no sanitation to speak of, it smelled like a sewer. The people of the town went about their lives in zigzags, avoiding the areas with the worst stench and nimbly jumping over the cow dung polka-dotting the streets. They whizzed past random buildings comfortably colonizing streets, and random temples, mosques and gurudwaras springing out of the dusty land like mushrooms. A romantic would say, “If these whizzing people carried lamps in the night, the town would look like a galaxy of whirling stars”. And then the romantic would trip over a pig.
The people would remain in their own quarters, move in fixed directions, keep revolving around lefts, rights and centres—their religions, their sun. Rarely did these planets abandon their orbits or intrude into another’s like a stray Pluto. They moved about like clockwork, as if all the townspeople had wristwatches they kept glancing at, meeting every second with bated breath. In reality, because it was still a village desperately trying to become a town and claiming township without even having a signboard (imagine!), none of them had watches, the town clock didn’t gong, and nobody bothered to grease its gears. It was said that many years ago, Chacha’s [ii] father’s father had seen the white man and his brown sahibs cut the ribbon. It stopped working two months later, but the one in the town next to them still creaks to a dejected clang every afternoon. The stark heat drained Qasba of words, the dust blew into their eyes, but their feet walked them in their perfect orbits which brooked revolution without revolution. As Woman swept the years out of her doorstep, gathering them into neat piles and then dumping them in front of a neighbour’s house, the sun began setting on the mighty British Empire.
With sunset came the call of the jackal, howling with its pack as it fled from the fat man-eating street dogs living on the margins of Qasba. The howls echoed through the fields and rippled into sleeping bodies, making them shiver with uncertainty. From the newspapers and announcements and neighbouring towns and villages came similar echoes, puncturing the silence typical of Qasba with speaking thoughts, uncharacteristic pauses in clockwork movement, and suspicious stares. Silence regressed into whispers, words broadcast over cups of chah [iii]. The whispers flew into their ears with the dust, melted into their blood, and bubbled in their throats like an angry cauldron.
“The League says Pakistan will happen.” “What Pakistan-Hindustan, people don’t change.” “Jinnah is crazy.” “Nehru is crazy.” “Has Gandhi said anything?” “The Angrez [iv] will never leave.” “Did you hear, Mountbatten’s woman and Nehru, that Comrade is spouting lies?” “Have you bought the guns?” “My woh [v] was saying these Musle [vi] will leave soon. Good riddance!” “I’m sending you and the children to Hyderabad. I’ll stay here and wait this out.” “You know, that Musla/Sardar/Lala[vii] family is packing up things.” “Those bastards!” “Suniye [viii], what if it’s not them who have to leave, but us?”
The dusty air hung pregnant with insecurity, as these whispers played in increasingly gory loops like a broken record. These rumours disguised themselves as lullabies — harmless, loving, cosy — tucking sleeping children in warm blankets, leaving families drowsy after sipping creamy hot milk on winter nights. They made the townspeople believe in so many lies that felt like truths — about how strongly they were cared for, thought about, important for, the leaders these whispers came from. It is said that animals have a sixth sense which protects them from disasters. The pigs from which Qasba derived its character, stood still in the mud, their ears swivelled towards the howls of the jackals. The next day, the pigs began to leave.
Those who suddenly recall religion, recall it in fits and starts. Man bangs the old TV as Kid hangs from the roof with an antenna falling apart, pushing it into the sky towards the glory of God (and the siren signal). The TV then flickers, and Woman prays fervently while wiping the screen. Recalled religion, as opposed to revealed religion or learned religion or forced religion or inherited religion, flickers like the TV set, its volume never quite apt, the colour scheme awry. Recallers permanently install themselves in places of worship, shout their prayers, faint in ecstasy (and revive magically after) and view everyone as labels — as catalogues of beads and beards and turbans and skull-caps and sacred threads. This cataloguing greatly aided the riots that happened after the pigs left. And since no one had a remote control, it was difficult to change the channel.
The townspeople, who had surely side-stepped cow dung and each other for so long, could have easily side-stepped what scared the pigs away. It began with a darzi [ix] whose fingers gently rippled through cloth, and eyes threaded needles almost unseeingly because the threads danced to his tune. The darzi’s finesse behind the sewing machine didn’t translate into side-stepping — he often fell face-down while navigating the town, coughing through the dust of the land which when rained over, tasted like a hug. It was he who greased the cogs which turned so swiftly that time left the town disoriented.
He took a wrong turn, stumbled, lost his way and never returned. They found his corpse lying face-down in dust, stabbed straight through the heart. Darzis were typically Muslim in that town, but they still checked — removed the pants of the corpse, pants sewn in rough patches by his still-learning forever-learning daughter. He was circumcised. Only then did they cry screams of revenge and despair. A corpse by itself has no name; with pants has no meaning.
The serial side-steppers continued to hone their skills: they now stepped over corpses of varying hues and clothes and beads and turbans and caps and threads littering the town. Meanwhile, British India’s water broke, and the two nations exchanged the halves of an unfortunate goat. Nobody cared that the Wild, Wild West of the East now smelled worse.
One day, don’t ask me what day it was — no it wasn’t the ‘stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps’ [x]— that Qasba finally realised things weren’t going back to normal. Normally, a few fires, a few murders, a few droning elders and spurious inter-community hugging solved things and people returned to their orbits. This time, a rumour came galloping across the dusty land like Rana Pratap’s Chetak [xi]. Like Chetak it leapt across bushes, crossed ravines, soldiered through rivers, but unlike the legendary horse’s heroism, it slithered venom into ears. “This...is India”, it said. That’s all. “This...is India.” Of course, it meant, “That...is Pakistan.”
It implied that half of the townspeople had to leave.
Crazy local leaders shouted victory from rooftops, and their mothers asked them to clean the roofs while they were on it. Even the elders, whose only profession in life was to play cards under the ancient peepal, stare openly at passers-by, and hack through plates of snacks, disregarded it. “Governments change,” one said, “but people don’t leave.”
But the new nations were certain. And the English had graciously presented them with a map. They haggled over it; they still haggle over it. It was done. The greatest displacement of recorded history was beautifully engineered; it would remain a joy forever.
The displaced half of Qasba began packing its bags, the rest deeply breathed relief, and along with it, the stench. In a strange equation where neighbours and friends became “Them,” the people forgot how they had perspired together in the fields and played together as children. The world became a simple binary of yes and no, this and that, here and there. The Whys, Buts, and Becauses lay forgotten.
Visualise Qasba as a Venn diagram with three circles. The half-convex of commonality was also the half-convex of rationality, it was where the pigs lived, and flies festered. Partition broke convex lens where light used to merge and converge. And replaced it with a mirror, installed with a flourish at border parades where high kicks and chest-thumping dominate. Two Nations were mirror images, laterally inverted so they would never know they were the same.
**
Men came riding horses, singing hymns of rifles-swords-spears-daggers. Red streaked their eyes, prayers on their lips in fits. They were too many, the Other now few. The Us impaled the men first. Enjoyed the women! Shot all of them. Go to Qasba today, see their unmarked graves. Nobody knows they died, nobody knows they lived, nobody knows their names.
A 10-year old boy from the other side had barely escaped the bullets. He had arrived last midnight, slept on the train roof in his weeping mother’s lap. He didn’t know there were mirrored borders where his home should have been, called Enemy state “home” despite belonging here! Children are disloyal devils.
Rejuvenated after the journey, Boy looked about for friends to play with, stumbled upon a lost rattle. He followed the overpowering smell of death and saw corpses, their souls wailing, becoming ghosts. The ghosts clung to houses; wept for an immediate past they were slowly forgetting just like Qasba had already forgotten about them. Boy hid behind a pile of sacks, saw —the many men (of a certain political party, of course) ripping apart the few, changing bodies into sieves you could separate tea-leaves with for a refreshing evening drink holes holes holes, so many holes, more hole than body, more see-through sky than flesh, whooshes of air breezing through lungs, cracking bullets speaking through gurgling throats, sudden silence and then congratulations brother, we avenged our sisters!
“Go left from x, turn to take y path, then right and straight ahead. Stop after 155 paces. And pray without fits. That’s where the graves are,” Boy recalled last month, now a man in his 70s stopping to chat while a sack of wheat-grain sits on his hunched back. He hasn’t forgotten them, he says. The ghosts never haunted him, sometimes asked him “Have you seen my rattle?”
Mirror mirror on the border, what did that side order? Same-old, same-old: Shot-raped stabbed-set afire-lost. The skies of ’47 spat onto the exhausted earth, flooded the Beas. The Beas, its banks reddened, water rusty, washed the town and cleared the corpses and cow dung and garbage. It accomplished what no Sanitation Department could. The town became a newly minted coin, its past buried for historians to begin excavating and then abandon when the funds suddenly stopped. Governments like their closets pristine.
Those who came from the other side were called refugees. These people carried strings of names of Village-Tehsil-District, words chanted in every office, every camp, every doorway, and every conversation. The refugees overturned simran, the tradition of repeating God’s name, with Village-Tehsil-District-Village-Tehsil-District-Village-Tehsil-District-Village-Tehsil-District repeated in sleep, murmured with every breath, sunk into the bones of the ghost town. “We are from Village x, Tehsil y, District z”, chanted so many times that some god heard because it was so loud that his ears began bleeding. Was it this god or that god? He heard (both this god and that god are men). He heard that one of the chanters got a house allotted in the town formerly of pigs and corpses. It was a family of Rulers ruling over 500 acres of land across the Beas who got a house first. They found pig droppings at the door, dust and litter inside.
Pig-town/Ghost-town/Refugee-town, formerly of side-stepping fame, after falling face-down in what it had been avoiding, now wore a deserted look. It was full of people with deserted faces, dead eyes, numbed thoughts, walking aimlessly, falling into each other because they were too tired to look, and forgetting gall-baat [xii]. The town lost one of the circles to its Venn and began speaking a different language. Malwayi Punjabi gathered layers of dust, and Mintgumri Punjabi whispered in hollow echo chambers, asking things no one had answers for[xiii].
The only fact that roused its living-dead people was a pearl-white ambassador car with curtained windows. “Sarkaar aayi hai,” the government had come. This was a different government, the mechanical aid officers were mere puppets — the ambassador was mai-baap, mother-father. A crowd gathered around the car, pushing each other, singing their woes, each louder than the other, comparing degrees of suffering where all had suffered — a daughter gone, a son murdered, an arm lost, a house burnt, a wife raped, a child traumatised. The official opened a sliver of the window to communicate his sympathies. Hmmed and haaned [xiv]. Murmured formalities, “surveyed” the site, left.
The people became numb again like a pendulum returns to mean position. Qasba was now destination-less, it had no beginning, no end. A place perpetually in transition, a silkworm boiled in its cocoon.
A strange silence precedes a storm, a stranger one follows it. It is the silence of dust settling, of the pigs returning home. They came in twos and threes, grunted at the newcomers who walked like the dead, sniffed at the new ghosts haunting rooms, looked for the garbage. They greeted Ruler Family — father lying listlessly on a cot, mother sewing clothes through the night, children forever hungry, ribs out and hearts sluggish. Rulers had come to Qasba in a straight line, walked in a straight line, measured life in centimetres and inches. Ruler Mother now spoke to the pigs in the dead of the night, nobody else cared to listen.
“I had clothes woven with gold thread, streams of milk and ghee, servants at my beck and call. We were so sure,” she mutters angrily, too used to suppressing her screams. “We were so sure we would live prosperously for the next seven generations, so bloody sure. And here I am, a daughter lost in the straight line we walked because I couldn’t diverge from it. Sons in the camp queue for a few sips of milk.” She wept into the clothes. Everyone who would wear clothes sewn by her felt gloomier, sorrow magnified.
**
Bhola ran after a squealing pig, he knew the pig, had bathed the pig before. Pig used to loiter about, mud cracking on the skin, and smell screaming for soap. Bhola, then 10 years old, would be drenched in sweat, bent from the back, plunging saplings into a water-logged field; he plunged himself into the field like a sapling, arms thinly muscled by wheat-harvesting and cotton-picking, cucumber juice dripping from lips in May, and ber [xv] crunching through the teeth. Bhola and his father laboured in the fields together and drowsed off into the land’s embrace at night. The Jatt’s [xvi] wife would roll roti [xvii] after roti after roti for them, carefully hold scalding cups of chah with the corner of her dupatta [xviii] for their lunch, Bhola recalled as he ran after Pig.
The running Pig grunted through the taveet [xix] it carried in its mouth. Bhola, who rendered namaz every Friday, washed fore-arms with Abbu [xx], was now Amar Singh who knelt before the Guru Granth Sahib as the old white-beard swung a fly-whisk over the text. Abbu was dead, Bhola-the-fool was forgotten by relatives. Palms curved towards the face 65 days ago, now folded before the chest to ward off suspicion. Hair carefully shorn by Abbu every fortnight was now refusing to grow from the head. Instead, hair sprouted from his ears like mustard stalks, as if overcompensating for his religious conversion. It became so long that the Jatt’s wife had to braid it, and tie it into his top-knot. Still, Jatt had taken him in, called him his son. He was kinder than most, Bhola thought as he crossed the volatile One-Eye emerging from his house.
The fool couldn’t let go of the taveet that Ammi had tied to his arm before she passed away years ago, mixing her blessings with the blessings of the almighty to shoo away evil. 65 days later, he wore a kara, a Sikh steel bangle carrying the strength of lions, and still, he ran after the taveet.
Qasba was a pig-strewn grain market before; it remained pigged grain market during the day and desi daaru [xxi] haven at night. Shah sat wiping his brow, thumbing through his bahi-khaata [xxii], as a queue of murmuring refugees stood before him. Shah was the king of his money-lending empire; men from miles away took his name with fear. But the days spent at his brother-in-law’s were stifling; he seethed as his wife’s brother crowed about his new District Party Position. He would remind himself of the gold resting in his wife’s underclothes, and surreptitiously pinch the fine China sitting on the cabinet.
He wrinkled his nose and looked down from his platform at the subject before him, wearing torn clothes, illiterate-looking and one-eyed. He handed him some cash, wrote a neat entry before his name and scrawled 40% interest against the figure. He pressed the subject’s thumb into his stamp ink and concluded the transaction with a gavel-slap on the table. Neat! God helps those who help themselves.
One-eye thanked the account-book with folded hands, squinted at the Shah high up on the platform, the sun glowering behind his head. He trudged through muck and pigs, mentally revised the list of items he needed to buy from the kirana [xxiii], and the cost of seeds for the next crop. He had some sacks of gram from a neighbouring house whose inhabitants had left in the dead of the night; he could sell that to tide over some of his debt. He greeted the official recording land claims. Just then, a terrified pig ran past, a ragged urchin shouting after it. The Officer hung out of the window and cheered the boy on.
One-eye walked back to his sand-dune field, barchans and parabolas where crop should have been. Years of labour had rendered parts of it fertile, but the confusion of the riots had led someone to torch his first successful crop in ages. The hussy he had abducted during the melee, fussed about him, handed him cool lassi [xxiv]. One-eye glared at her and sent her flying back.
“Dishonourable woman, randi...” [xxv] and One-eye descended on her with the fury of one wronged. Vessels banged, steel against copper, slap no please slap no kick please forgive me churn body add water spice with carraway, serve lassi cold push down slap press throat can’t...breathe...slam against the wall, leave the house and then Congratulations brother
His mother resolutely stared into the griddle, toasted rotis for him, blind to the charred woman fallen into the utensils.
Meanwhile, Bhola had wrestled Pig to the ground, a crowd of boys and men gathered around, hedged bets on what would happen. Pig slipped out of grasp, tried to run through the people, more anxious now than before. Bhola uncomfortable, wanting to stop, decided to let the taveet go, but unable to as the audience closed in, jeering at his manhood. Pig was crying, Bhola was weeping inside, crowd, eyes-bloodshot, was screaming at him to kill the pig. Bhola-the-fool, son of the soil, planter of paddy, did his best. Held the pig in a choke-hold, the taveet fallen long ago, mixed in the dust. The crowd reached a crescendo, and something shattered audibly. Bhola collapsed. He took huge gulping breaths of air like a sapling searches for water in a drought. Pig escaped. The disgruntled crowd dispersed.
The sun set on Qasba. Pig rushed past Ruler's mother, still stitching cloth. Her sewing machine is second-hand, passing from a family of darzis whose still-learning, forever-learning daughter had scrawled her name on its dull black body. Ran across the liquor-sellers singing praises of their fermented molasses-turned alcohol, fled from a group of particularly mean stone-throwing boys, and reached the faeces-laden mud spread near the untouchable habitation [xxvi]. Pig noticed with surprise that the untouchable habitation felt the same, dark and dead to Qasba. The dry latrines picked up by the untouchables from Qasba formed the home of the pigs, even the man-eating dogs stayed away.
**
Night descended. One-eye’s mother handed him a tumbler of milk, murmured her prayers and went off to sleep. She heard the rustling around midnight, and the broken woman trembled in the doorway. Mother handed the woman her gold bangles, and a small dagger previously stashed in a trunk and flicked her chin at the world outside.
One-Eye woke up late, head heavy, eyes barely opening, asked about the whore. “She’s gone to the well to fetch water”, Mother said. One-Eye went to the fields, pulled down his pants and sat on his haunches for his ablutions. A man some distance away began talking.
“Oye Sardara, are you going for the speech?” [xxvii]
“Of that leader from Delhi?”
“Yes, they’re setting up a stage and a shamiana [xxviii]; it seems grand.”
One-Eye returned home and ate. “Where is she?” “She’s at the neighbour’s; we are almost out of sugar...” “Keep an eye on her. I’m going to the marketplace.”
He passed by Bhola, the stupid convert, staring at him with large eyes. Angrily spat at the ground next to the boy, the fool flinched. One-Eye left satisfied but grim.
Remember the official in the ambassador’s car? He finished his conversation with the local record-keeper for refugee claims, arranged for the latter to keep a bag of cash in his car, and motioned for the driver to take him to the shamiana in the town centre. Their market economy of greasing hands began with the illegal bootlegger, moved to the record-keeper, the kotwal, the havildar [xxix], the district official (of pearl-white ambassador fame), the local politician, the regional politician, and ended with the minister in the interim government. It was a perfect model of the invisible hand in action, the envy of the capitalists.
The car drove dust into the one eye of One-Eye, as the Ruler woman stitching clothes in her verandah looked on. One-Eye cursed and then joined a group of men walking to the event. A small wooden stage with a garish green carpet lay under a spindly microphone-stand. A fat man in a white kurta sat on one of the wooden chairs, repeatedly wiping his sweat. His secretary shuffled a few pages and talked to him in a low voice, while the official from the car shouted at the handyman for not being able to work the rusty pedestal fan.
The secretary addressed the crowd first, asked the people to quiet down, and narrated a list of the fat man’s accomplishments. The fat man, who was really a Big Man from Delhi, stood. He began addressing the large crowd. “Friends, after the creation of Pakistan, which our party fought against, for which I also went to jail for years, we have come to our people. We have defeated the British and are now welcoming the refugees with open arms...”
Meanwhile, a large pig grunted up the stairs, heaved itself onto the stage, and began sniffing around. It ambled towards the Big Man, who had inched behind a chair. The secretary awkwardly tried to kick at it, but the stubborn pig, long used to abuse from the townspeople, neatly stepped aside and sat. The crowd began laughing, cat-calling at the freedom-fighting Big Man who had ostensibly braved the Englishmen’s batons. The pig rolled on its back, as the secretary called the kotwal over to take it away. The kotwal, more of a dog-lover, gingerly pushed at the animal with the butt of his rifle. He accidentally shot a crow out of the sky. He wasn’t known for being a crack-shot.
**
Bhola, ear-drums blocked by hair (which he couldn’t cut now that he had converted) [xxx], talked loudly. 10-year-old refugee Boy took him to the passing where he had seen the gruesome killings. Both boys searched for the bloody soil, fascinated, the refugee boy’s tales became longer and more elaborate with every telling. “And then they took one of the men, cut his throat, pulled his entrails out and...” “Hain? Hain? [xxxi] Can you repeat? His eyes, did you say?” Bhola spoke stridently. Boy, long accustomed to that fool with braids sprouting from his ears, the only one with the patience to show him the best hiding places in Qasba, mimed it for him.
After sharing a few laughs with the men over cups of chah, One-Eye returned. His mother was quietly chopping spinach inside. “Where is she?” “She left.” That’s all she said, still chopping. He screamed at her, asked her if she had known, banged her into the wall. Mother looked resolutely at him, deaf to his threats, murmuring her prayers.
The worthless clock tower began to ring madly, as that madman wrecked his home. It had been many years since it had moved last, it mused during its swansong.
After breaking her orbit in revolution, running through the fields, the next village, and the next town, the runaway woman found herself a kafila [xxxii]: a dejected, tired mass of humanity trudging towards land across the border which it hoped to call home. She joined the people, became one in the flock of sheep, so many of them butchered. She clenched the taveet the Muslim-convert boy had given her and wrapped the gloomy shawl the refugee Ruler woman covered her with before she left Qasba.
A laterally inverted kafila from the other side stood facing them, waiting to enter their new home, the land she was leaving. She saw vacant eyes, torn clothes, wailing children. She lifted her left hand to push her hair behind, but a woman from that side lifted her right hand to push hers.
The border official called for the next in line.
**
10-year old Boy, now-man-in-his-70s unconsciously fingers the rattle he found that day, shakes it on street 6 at the crossing of Golu; he knows the ghost there feels calmer because of it. The town becomes a farming town from a market town; the pigs roam around temples and gurudwaras. It occasionally gets parcels of heroin leaping over the border and shows visitors the bombed-out fields where fighter jets crashed in 1965, 1971 and 1999. It is the Wild, Wild West. The town still has dust-storms and sun and quietude and a stray crow screeching through the sky and a water tank that is so dry that its metal is cracking. No highway leads to it because it has grief sunk in its bones, a romantic would think. But really, someone somewhere swallowed the funds for the All India Rural Roads project meant for Qasba. People continue to revolve to the fields for morning ablutions, and pigs maintain the cultural heritage of their ancestors with a museum of droppings.
[i] Qasba: means “Town” in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi, a word that a border couldn’t sanitize from languages.
[ii] Chacha: Uncle
[iii] Chah is Tea in Punjabi, chai in Hindi.
[iv] Angrez: Englishman
[v] Traditionally, women don’t speak their husbands’ names in conversation in Hindu culture. They usually refer to them as “who” or ‘”they,” or via their children’s name, for instance, “Ramu ke Papa” (Ramu’s father). This has been called teknonymy by anthropologists.
[vi] As opposed to Mussalman or Muslim, Musla/Musle is a derogatory way of referring to Muslims.
[vii] Muslim/Sikh man/Hindu trader
[viii]Suniye: “Listen,” a wife calling out to her husband.
[ix] Darzi: Tailor.
[x] From Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech “Tryst With Destiny,” delivered from the ramparts of the Red Fort on 15th August 1947, the Indian Independence Day.
[xi] Chetak was the name of Maharana Pratap’s beloved horse. Maharana Pratap was a Rajput warrior of medieval history.
[xii] Lit. “chit-chat,” small talk
[xiii] Malwa and Montgomery were regions of undivided Punjab in British India. Post-Partition, Malwa became part of Indian Punjab, and Montgomery (today Sahiwal), part of Pakistan. Malwayi and Mintgumri are dialects of Punjabi belonging to Malwa and Montgomery respectively.
[xiv] Haan, lit. yes.
[xv] Ber are local crunchy berries.
[xvi] Jatt refers to farmer, and also to the Jatt caste in Northern India.
[xvii] Roti is unleavened bread; also called chapatti.
[xviii] Lit. thin cloth covering the torso of women. Also called a chunni.
[xix] An amulet/locket usually with Quranic verses inscribed on it.
[xx] Abbu: Father in Urdu.
[xxi] Desi Daaru: local liquor.
[xxii] Bahi Khaata: account-book.
[xxiii] Kirana: grocery shop.
[xxiv] Lassi: buttermilk.
[xxv] Randi is a word for slut/prostitute.
[xxvi] Untouchables or people from the lowest caste in the Hindu caste system are a systemically oppressed people. They are limited to performing only the most “profane” tasks: cleaning dry latrines, tanning leather etc., justified as hereditary professions based on low birth. They are called untouchable because even their shadow, their very presence is considered polluting. Their movements of resistance led to the term ‘Dalit’ being used to refer to themselves as a source of empowering identity. Gandhi called the untouchable castes “Harijan” or “Children of God,” which many Dalits have contested. See Ambedkar, B.R., Annihilation of Caste, London: Verso, 2016.
[xxvii] Oye: Oh, Sardara: Sikh man
[xxviii] Shamiana is a large tent.
[xxix] Kotwal and Havildar are policemen; the havildar is a police constable.
[xxx] Sikhs do not cut their hair; this is especially so of baptised Sikhs. Uncut hair is central to Sikh identity.
[xxxi] Hain means “what,” is used as a mark of exclamation, for clarification, emphasis or questioning.
[xxxii] Kafila: caravan of refugees. Here, Muslim refugees are leaving India for Pakistan, and Hindu and Sikh refugees are leaving Pakistan for India.
A student of literature, politics and history, Tript Kaur currently works in the development sector. Her work has previously appeared in JaggeryLit, Lucy Writers, The Bombay Review, The Indian Express, among others. A lot of her fiction and poetry is inspired by children's literature and folk traditions of writing from Punjab, India.