This is a story narrated by Abdul Qadir Shoukat who traveled many miles for countless days to find his family and reach the naya Pakistan.
Mid-summer, when I was a teenager, Aba Ji took me along with him to Sirinagar for some work. We took a train there but the way back to my hometown, Jammu, only allowed one bus with “special tickets”. Aba Ji and I had booked seats but when we reached, his friend, in desperate need to get back to Jammu, pleaded him to take the bus the following day. Aba Ji obliged and so we traveled back to the hotel where we were staying.
Upon reaching the hotel, we got an urgent telegram from our family at home alerting us to stay put because partition had started.
It said “Don’t move till Darbar moves.” The Darbar lived in Sirinagar, for 6 months, during the summer, and in Jammu the rest of the year. Later on, we found they were living in a partition camp and not at home but somehow they had sent us a signal.
For a while, we stayed at the hotel till Aba Ji met some of our neighborhood family friends. The two brothers were staying in a “Kothi” while their children had migrated to Jammu. They told my father, “Chachi Ji, Jang shuru ho gaye hay tussi hotel rehna munasib nahi” and so my father and I shifted to the small kothi with them.
Admissions had just opened at a college nearby and I had been accepted. I was expecting to start my college life soon, but little did I know what the future held.
It was during the winter break in December, however, that I heard about the massacres in Jammu. Whether my family was alive or not, I did not know. It worried me so I told my father, “Aba Ji hum baap beta bethay hoye hain yahan, makhan toast kha rah hain tou agar hamare bhen agar mar gaye tou aap ne aur meinay zinda reh kar kya karna hay tou meh mein border cross kar ke jaa raha hoon unka pata lene.”
Aba Ji decided that I was fully convinced and ready. After a couple of days, and a few people joining us, we set out to cross the border. A young couple was part of our group. We trekked alongside the mountainous path till we reached Sopore, where a Range officer, one of our ‘jaanane wala’, invited us to stay at his house. We prepped for our trip to Pakistan those five days and when we felt as if our hosts were getting irritable, we moved to a hotel.
As soon as we shifted to the hotel the police showed up. They told us that rumors of us wanting to cross the border had spread and they could not allow that.
While they didn’t physically cuff us, they did warn us and demand that we leave that hotel that very night. I explained how our family was in Jammu and we were merely worried about them. We weren’t terrorists; we just wanted to make sure our family was alive.
Luckily, the police officer started cooperating with me. He told us to travel to a nearby village and meet with a Hajji Sahab who would help us. We reached a little after ishaa when the Hajji Sahab‘s people hosted us and gave us delicious Kashmiri food to eat. We stayed the night, happy with his hospitality, and the next morning started the rest of our journey. Packed into a taanga, Aba Ji and I moved towards the river where we rented out a kashti. We sailed across and began walking upwards towards the border. On our way, we met some villagers who stopped us for more food and asked us many questions. When we told them about our destination, they replied with “aap maut ke kowain meh jaa rahay hain.”
Snow was thick and intense up ahead but our journey was not complete and we did not give up.
While our latest host cooked us some bakra, his older brother came in from the city, talking about how we were terrorists and against the government. Our host gave us our food but out of majboori had to ask us to leave. We left but due to the bitter weather had to stop to warm ourselves over a nice fire in the middle of a herd. A few villages later, we reached questioning villagers who told us it was impossible to complete our journey. We wasted that entire day. Our group had increased from 5-6 to 11-12 people.
With passing time, increasing cold and growing frustration, our group began to get agitated. After many arguments and wasting the entire day, I explained the simplicity of our situation to my group of companions: going back meant that the police would arrest us and moving forward meant apparent and inevitable death. Either way we might die so why not pick the option that’s more challenging?
The ground was covered with people who had come here to get salt and died due to harsh weather conditions.
After a long debate over lunch, it was decided that we would continue our journey no matter what. Around 11 am in the morning, we reached “thaap”, a border line which was basically just a landscape of lifeless bodies. The ground was covered with people who had come here to get salt and died due to harsh weather conditions. Our newly found friends warned us that the next 20 steps would determine whether we were safe or not. Aba Ji held me from the front, a man held me from the back, and one by one we made a line, supporting each other, safely crossing the path. Thank God, we survived.
Unfortunately, as soon as we stopped, I removed my kambal only to slip on it and slide right down the side of the mountain.
Aba Ji came down with our party, to help me. Down the mountain, we found many villages around us, each of them more hospitable than the previous. After staying a night in Azad Kashmir, we walked for four days till we reached Muzaffarabad. A rough encounter with Pathans and warnings from the locals resulted with us leaving Muzaffarabad on a bus that very night. The locals told us that as soon as the sun rose, Indians would come and bomb every place with civilization.
20 miles later and we were finally in Pakistan Territory.
We walked to Rawalpindi and stayed the night there. In the morning, we all went to the ‘Pindi Masjid where, outside, we took showers and got our haircuts. On the way from Sirinagar to ‘Pindi, we had lost our shoes (they had been stolen) and so we had been walking with shoes made of grass. I went out shopping that morning.
I bought my first pair of shoes in Pakistan as a Pakistani, on my second day.
We had brought one of our relative’s sons with us. He was also in Sirinagar for some work. We knew where his family had shifted so first we went to Gujrat to drop his son. I dropped the son off and was walking away when I noticed two of my brothers casually walking around in the street. I yelled out their names and Aba Ji and I ran to them. We couldn’t believe we found our family at a time when we were least expecting them to. We hugged them and held them tight. They told us that Ammi was also inside with the rest of our family. Stories were exchanged and they told us about how when everyone found out that we had been arrested by the police unlawfully, Ammi had gotten ready to go to ‘Pindi from Sialkot and talk to the President and demand that he somehow bring us to Pakistan. I said “aap ne tou Nur Jahan wala karma kar diya hay” and we shared out first laugh as a family, again.
Cover Image via: New Yorker