Homeland Elegies(11)

Father’s reading of the history had a particularly derisive view of the Muslims of prepartition India, a besieged minority, yes, but deeply deluded in their besiegement, still dreaming of the pre-British Mughal era, when Muslims ruled the land. He thought this a recollection of useless glory, one that echoed the even more futile Muslim exercise of celebrating the Islamic Golden Age, a long-concluded chapter of history that had Muslims ruling much of the then known world by the turn of the last millennium. We—and now the referent would slip, as it often did when he was on a first-person-plural rampage, “we” no longer pointing to all prepartition Indians but to “we” the Muslims—liked to spend our time yowling for a past that helped us not a whit, a past that only fortified our loftiest delusions and encouraged excuses instead of the work required of us if we were ever to catch up to the rest of the world. I remember a particularly violent tirade in late 1979, two weeks into the hostage crisis in Iran, when a mob of Pakistanis—after hearing (false) radio reports of an American military attack on the holiest of Muslim sites in Mecca—marched on the US embassy in Islamabad and burned it down. In fact, there had been an attack in Mecca, but the United States had had nothing to do with it—the perpetrators turned out to be Saudi. To Father, the knee-jerk violence was typical: “Blind and stupid! Caught up in the past! Can’t even tell the difference between their anger toward the British and their anger toward the Americans! Litigating crimes of history in a courtroom of fools! When are they going to understand the only ones they’re hurting are themselves?!?!” The referent would slip again, a new “we”—now referring to us as Americans—as opposed to the older one, which was now the “them” he wanted nothing to do with, namely, Muslims: “It makes you wonder, beta. Maybe that’s what they really want. To fail. Not up to the challenge, not interested in change. The whole Muslim world. Expecting failure, so failure they get. Pouring all their creativity into finding new people to blame for old problems.” It was during that very same fall of 1979—when my third-grade class was studying the American Civil War, and as he leafed through the pages of the textbook dealing with the American South’s agrarian economy one Saturday afternoon—that he would make the following memorable analogy: “Imagine, beta, the South had won. Alabama, Tennessee, all that backward nonsense down there. What did they have back then? Just like your book is saying—slaves and cotton. No manufacturing. No transportation. No navy. If they had won the Civil War and were on their own? It would have been a disaster for them. If they didn’t have the North to depend on? To hold them up like we’ve done for more than a hundred years? What do you think it would be like down there today? Hmm? A shithole even bigger than it is now,” he said with relish as he snapped the book shut. “That, my boy, is Pakistan in a nutshell. As pathetic as the South would be today if its every wish came true.”

With me, Father disparaged his native country often and without reservation, but he didn’t speak that way about it in front of his wife, my mother. She loved Pakistan, or at least was bound to it in a way that reached as deeply into her as anything could. Years after 9/11, she, too, would sour on the Pakistani experiment, saying she didn’t recognize the country she’d grown up in, but by then, battling cancer for the fourth time in thirty years, there were reasons for this shift in her feelings deeper than just the war on terror. Unlike Father, she’d grown up close to the line through Central Punjab that divided the Indian nation and had been old enough during partition to have seen horrors she would never forget. One of her earliest memories was of being in Lahore station the summer of the bloodshed, when fifteen million people were uprooted and migrating with their belongings, Muslims leaving India, Hindus and Sikhs fleeing what is now Pakistan. She’d strayed from her father briefly onto a quay where workers were pulling what looked like long brown heavy bags from a train. The workers were having difficulty tossing them as far as they seemed to want to. It wasn’t until she approached that she saw they were not bags but naked bodies. The heaps were of the dead. A woman’s corpse tumbled from the pile, her long hair falling away to show a face with a hole where there should have been a nose and two pink bloody circles on her chest. Her breasts had been cut off.

It was a summer of horrors. In their neighborhood—close to a Sikh holy site in Wah, where thousands of Sikhs had been maimed and raped and killed in their homes and in the streets—she came across dismembered limbs, hands and feet poking up from shallow graves along the road. She saw dogs gnawing at human heads. She found a Sikh mother in a blood-splattered shawl holding a disemboweled child. She was barely five years old when she saw this. And she wasn’t just a witness. Her family, too, had lost many to the violence. Her dear favorite aunt, Roshina—her mother’s younger sister—was living with her in-laws on the other side of the border and didn’t make it back alive. Set upon by a Hindu mob while hiding in the family home, Roshina was pulled through the living-room window and gang-raped in the front yard, then beaten to death. Her husband had already made it to Pakistan, and when he heard the news, he gathered a mob of his own and went into the streets. They brought a bloodied Hindu boy back to the house; Mother thought the boy somehow responsible for what had happened to Roshina; she pressed her face to the bedroom window facing the driveway and watched them chop the child down with an ax.

To have lived through events like these so young was to know that murder is not an abstraction or something perpetrated only by evildoers. Good people could kill and be killed. It also taught her a fear for her life, a fear her body would never forget. It was no surprise she was as paranoid as she was about India. Even as she sat in her suburban American kitchen sipping Sanka, a quarter century removed from the sights and sounds of trauma, even as she stared out at a quiet backyard hedged by protective cornfields half a world from any Hindus who might have wished her harm, even there, even then, she worried about them coming to destroy her. Like Pakistan itself, she’d been forged in the smithy of that mortal fear. And it wasn’t just Hindus. Lethal danger lurked everywhere, and any reminder of it could overwhelm her. She didn’t watch the news. She couldn’t bear any corporal image of atrocity, current or past, a difficulty especially pronounced when it came to the Holocaust. Even the mention of Auschwitz or Treblinka brought on a peculiar rush of mourning and resentment it would take me a long time to make sense of. Though she never directly suggested an equivalence between what happened to the Jews in the Second World War and partition, she implied it. And what seemed to bother her most was that it reminded her not of what she’d been through but of how little anybody in this country—by comparison—knew about it.