However, since we could not go to Jammu via Banihal, the only other option open to us was to take the Jhehlum Valley Road via Rawalpindi, a much longer route but the only one available. One fine October morning, we left our flat off Srinagar’s Residency Road and hopped into a green Packard that my father’s close friend Col. Nicholson who had settled in the breathtakingly beautiful Lolab Valley had lent him. The Colonel died in Kashmir and, in accordance with his will, was buried in Lolab. His widow left for Britain where I visited her in Oxford when I went to England for the first time in 1968 to cover the Commonwealth Conference for the Pakistan Times that I had joined a year earlier after finally resigning from the service of the Government of Pakistan. The green Packard which my brother Bashir drove most of the way was returned to Srinagar though I have no idea how that was achieved because by the end of October, there was a civil war situation in areas along the Jhehlum Valley Road. I think there was a Kashmiri driver who had followed us who took the car back. We spent a night at Rawalpindi in the Circuit House and next morning we took a train for Sialkot. When we arrived at Gujrat, I found slain human bodies all over the platform. Non-Muslim men, women and children had been massacred for the greater glory of Islam and to celebrate, as it were, the birth of the new state of Pakistan. I also remember groups of scruffy-looking Pathan tribesmen milling around the station. They were on their way to Kashmir to wage jehad. Perhaps it was these very “liberators” who had done the killings on the train carrying those people towards Lahore.

My first impression of Sialkot when we arrived there was unsettling. It was a ravaged city and although, by the time we came, the Hindu and Sikh population had either left or been killed, their presence hung like a dark, invisible pall over the streets, homes and bazars. Most of the Hindu mohallas had been all but burnt down. Homes lay abandoned with their doors swinging forlornly on their hinges. Household articles and objects the rioters had found of no use or value lay scattered everywhere, on the street and inside the homes. There were also pictures and papers, old books, clothes, toys, images of gods and goddesses who had failed to come to the aid of their devotees. The scene was ghastly. I remember going into an abandoned Hindu home in the Dharowal mohalla which used to be almost entirely Hindu. It was scary. There was not a soul in there, only swinging doors and open windows and littered floors. The most disturbing and by far the saddest things that lay scattered everywhere were children’s toys. I do not think I have ever seen in the years since anything so desolate, anarchic and disturbing and I have no desire to see anything like it again. Freedom had come to the subcontinent but at what cost! And why had the innocent suffered? There were millions to whom freedom had brought nothing but death, ruin and dislocation.

My father was absolutely certain that these riots and upheavals would not last long and we would all be moving to Jammu any day. It took him a long time to come to terms with the fact that we were now refugees and we were never going to get back to Jammu or Srinagar. Some days after our arrival, those who had managed to escape their killers in Jammu began to arrive in Sialkot. They told harrowing stories. Most of the Muslims of Jammu had been brought out in batches on military trucks but instead of being taken to Pakistan, they had been driven towards Samba where armed men were waiting for them. Thousands had been massacred in cold blood, including old men and women, and even children. One of the qaflas or convoys that had left Jammu on a Thursday had been entirely annihilated. I do not think any people from that one survived except those who were left for dead or who hid themselves under piles of bodies. The only happy event of those days that I remember is that Dilawar Khan who had been with our family for nearly twenty years – he came from Kishtwar where my father was medical officer and where he had taken him in as a helper around the house – had survived. Most of his travelling companions had been killed but he had made it because of his youth, physical strength, courage and, in the end, luck.

In those days, refugees simply moved into homes they found without an occupant, and there were plenty of those. We did not want to do that, mainly because my father still thought of Sialkot as a temporary stop which we would leave once things had “settled down”. We had kipped in with Chacha Miran Bux, my father’s uncle who lived in Mohalla Islamabad. He was one of the most immaculately dressed men I have ever seen. He had spent most of his working life in Rangoon where he ran a smart tailoring and outfitting business. He was never to be seen in anything but a sharp suit, wearing highly polished leather shoes, an expensive silk tie and a fez on his head. He cut a dashing figure. He lost one of his sons in the 1947 holocaust. His name was Nazir. His wife and children lived with Chacha Miran Bux.

My father was finally persuaded by my mother to get ourselves a house. The one we found and where we lived for many, many years – it still stands but is in someone else’s possession after our entire family moved out of Sialkot one by one – was on Paris Road, a fashionable area where rich and fashionable Hindus once lived. It was a good road then, tree-lined and broad enough for what traffic there was. In the early years of independence, there were not many cars in Sialkot and we more or less knew which car belonged to whom. Right in front of our house which had three storeys and a very nice garden at the back, stood a Hindu millionaire’s folly which was called ‘Pillar Palace’. It was a huge place with hundreds of pillars and it always reminded me of an elaborate wedding cake. It was all white and in moonlight it was a splendid sight. When I saw it recently, it looked weather-beaten and a little sad. The various families that lived there had done little to preserve or repair it. The magnificent front lawn had been ravaged and divided among the various owners of the property. We are not preservers but despoilers and destroyers. Another magnificent place owned by Sardar Ganda Singh that was entirely made of red brick, was turned over to the rehabilitation department which did to it what it did to the refugees it was supposed to help. The most wonderful home on Paris Road belonged to the famous barrister C. Roy. It became the official residence of the sessions judge. Next to it stood a two-storey home where lived an old gentleman by the name of M.A. Khan who drove an old pre-World War II car and who had a lovely daughter we all used to long to catch a glimpse of. There was a belief among some that Khawar Malik who rode a maganificent Harley Davidson motorcycle had something going with her. Maybe he took her on secret rides on his great machine on moonlit nights.

Another beautiful pink-orange mansion became the residence of Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas, the Muslim Conference leader and a great fighter for the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The only property on Paris Road which belonged to a Muslim was the one that stood next to the Abbas house. In it lived my friend Khwaja Mahmood Anwar, son of Khwaja Hakim Din, one of the sport goods manufacturing geniuses of the city who ran the great Oberoi sports factory after independence. In the end, that fine place fell a victim to litigation which utterly destroyed it. Further down the road, going towards Bhed Bridge, built over the seasonal stream called Bhed, if you took a left turn, you came upon two enormous homes, both owned by Hindus. The government took them over and turned them into the official residences of the deputy commissioner and the superintendent of police. And now that we have no deputy commissioners – thanks to Gen. “Gorbachev” Naqvi’s “reforms” – I suppose it is in the possession of the District Nazim. Another very nice home close to the bridge had been turned into the city’s employment exchange. There was a large sign outside saying ‘Daftar-e-Roozgar’ which we always wanted to rewrite as ‘Daftar Gham-e-Roozgar’ which proved at least one thing. We had recently read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Naqsh-i-Faryadi - Tujh se bhi dilfareb hain gham roozgar ke. (Even more enticing than you, beloved, is the business of day-to-day life.)

Puran Nagar was where many of my friends and I lived. Kalim and Nasim Akhtar lived at the back of our house. Salim Ahmed Malik who was called Salim “Scott” after Sir Walter Scott because of the novel he was going to write (instead he went into geology and moved to England in the 1960s where he still lives) also lived in Puran Nagar, as did Abdul Waheed “Parwana”, Dr Aziz Kash, Fazlur Rehman Malik “Maana”, Waheed Ahmed known as Waheed “Kailash” and several others. The Hazir clan also lived in Puran Nagar and Paris Road at the same time as the large home had an entrance on each side.

One of our inseparable friends from those days was Syed Talib Hussain Jaffrey, universally called Talib “Bhaiyya”. The family came from Shahjahanpur and ran the city’s leading stationery store called Shahsons. There were many Jaffrey brothers, at least two of whom worked for the Ordnance Clothing Factory. They all later moved to Wah near Rawalpindi when the cantonment was established there and with it a major ordnance facility. One of the brothers, older to Talib, was Shuja Bhai who always had a paan tucked in a corner of his mouth. It was rumoured that one of the toughest fighters in the city by the name of Mohammad Amin “Meena” (who originally came, like us, from Jammu) was under Shuja Bhai’s orders and could be deployed if and when the need arose. Talib loved to play cards and often lost. He was madly in love with the actress Geeta Bali and I remember that when the movie Albela came to Sialkot, Talib Bhaiyya went to see it at least a hundred times. On one occasion when he forced me to go with him, the gatekeeper said to me, “Can’t you keep him home?” He knew everything about Geeta Bali whom he called Miss Bali. It was strange that he married a girl called Iqbal who was called Bali. Talib Bahaiyya’s other passion was international affairs. He had an amazing memory for facts and could rattle off dates and names from history without getting one of them wrong. After we left Sialkot, I lost contact with him but he kept in touch with my elder brother Bashir. He had become a lecturer in political science and served many years in Sindh and parts of the Frontier province. He is no longer around but time spent with him all those years ago I have never forgotten.

When we left Srinagar I was in the ninth class. In Sialkot, I joined the famous Government School which stood next to Murray College. I sat for my matriculation examination as a private student and passed with a second division, the only examination in which I scored a second division. I think the first person I met in Murray College was Irshad Hussain Kazmi, who became the finest Urdu debater of his or any other generation. He took me under his wing, already a senior, being in second year, and filled my admission form for me. Another boy who joined the same day as I did was Nawaz Shahid or "Nawaja Teela" or Bertie Wooster. His family made music instruments. In the column that required the applicant to list his caste (I hope they have done away with that nonsense now, but unlikely as caste consciousness has had a big comeback in Pakistan since Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s days), Nawaz wrote ‘music’.