In December 2005 I accompanied my mother to her home in Agra, a home she left 58 years ago and had never been back to since the pivotal event of partition that to this day rules my parent's lives and mine ( and will probably play a big part in our American born son's life, hopefully in a "never again" manner). My mother was 16 years old when she left, she remembered every street and gulee in Agra, we found the building she was born in, knocked on the door and told the current residents, a Hindu family from Haryana who immediately recognised who we were and insisted that my mother should stay and cook lunch because it was her home. A puja was performed in celebration at an altar that the family has built in the very room where my mother was born.
We than made it to the village where my maternal grandfather came from, Peharsar, about 55 miles north of Agra across the Rajisthan border.Prior to partition this was a Muslim village, the majority were my grandfathers family and extended family, about 1900 people, mostly Shias with at least a two hundred year history in this prosperous village. They spoke the same language, wore the same clothes, ate the same makai ke roti and sarson ka saag that the surrounding Hindus did for generations. The played holi with the Hindus, tied rakhi's on the arms of Hindu men and the Hindus would compete with them as to who made the best tazia for the yearly Moharram procession, the Hindus I am told insisted that their tazia should be in the lead every year. The village was exempted from taxation by the Maharaja of Bharatpur because the founders of the village had conquered the area and given it to Surajmal, the Hindu Jat Maharaja in the early part of the 17th century for inclusion in the state territory. Out of 1900 residents in 1947 1600 were massacared by the Maharaja of Bharatpurs personal guard and brother, not one actual villager took part in the killing. We reached the village late at night and stayed in a bed and breakfast inn(the mansion belonged to a relative of my mother's, now owned by a nephew of the former Maharaja of Bharatpur. The next morning the entire village was outside waiting for us, greeting us with "this is your village, not ours, you and your ancestors settled it". They took us to a Muslim shrine where the entire village gets together to pray and recite fatiha, all Hindus where my ancestors used to do the same. When asked why they do so the villagers insisted that it is their shrine too, not only the Muslims who had left. we had a fatiha together. They than insisted that we should spend a night in the
small house my grandfather had built in 1946. A poor gardener approached my mother and asked if she remembered any of the graves, my mother could recall exactly where her grandfathers grave was, the one and only surviving one in the entire village. She found her way through the fields of waist high lush green and yellow mustard to the grave. The grave has been tended to with great care by this gardener, he replaces the stones, plants flowers around it. His answer to why he does so was " we all know that this grave meant a lot to your family so it means a lot to us". He refused to accept any money for the grave's upkeep. He also insisted on making it clear to me that none of the Hindu residents of the village at the time of partition took part in the killing nor did they pillage the property left behind because it would be "haram" for them. They insisted that "you are Jats like us".
In my grandfathers house in Agra, the 17 year old daughter of the current family living there brought out a brick with his initials on it, she told us it was excavated when they were re-doing the flooring in the house, that she knew these were the initials of my grandfather, that she would not give it to me because it was as precious to her as it was to me.
These stories are not just"about the milk of human kindness" but about one people, families torn apart by those who had their own agendas who committed the "crime against humanity" of the "batwara" and who were so intellectually defunct that they could see no alternative but a complete annihilation of people, a way of living and being that carried the wisdom of ages.
