Iqbal died in 1938 but he has not been forgotten. He lived in the Mohalla Kashmirian between Do Darwaza and Chowk Pasroorian. The cobbled backstreets where he played as a boy have not changed much since his days. Across the narrow road that runs in front of his home, on the other side but on a higher plane, stands the old Shivala which mercifully was spared the rampage let loose against Hindu temples under the patriotic fervour of those in power then in the aftermath of the razing of the Babri Mosque by frenzied BJP ruffians and religious fanatics in India. It was the same logic that led to the Hindu-Muslim holocaust at the time of independence. Iqbal’s poem ‘Naya Shivala’, in particular its imagery, I have always liked to think, was inspired by the one across the road. The burnished brass at its top still catches the first rays of the sun, as the young Iqbal must have seen them do. He wrote: ‘Sooni parri hooi hai muddat se dil ki basti; Aa ik naya shivala iss des main bana dain.’ (For long, my heart has been desolate: Let’s together raise a new temple in this land of ours.) Ironically, Iqbal’s dream remains even farther from fulfilment than when he wrote these lines.

The haves of Sialkot have left the city. Most of them have moved to the cantonment where land prices now touch the sky. There is street after street of pillared palaces, built mostly with money which should have gone into the public coffers but did not. They have abandoned the city to those who do not have the means to move out and build a home with pillars. Others who have been unable to afford the cantonment or Chhauwni’s land prices, have built houses at the city’s other extremities. If you are returning after some years of absence, you may have to ask for directions as you approach the town.

Sialkot was not always a city full of uncleared filth or blocked gutters. Before independence, it had the reputation of being one of the cleanest in the Punjab, in fact in Northern India. My earliest memories of Sialkot date back to those years. While it is quite possible that a child may not really notice dirt, I recall old, narrow cobbled streets that looked clean. We would come from Jammu every now and then to visit my mother’s family. Her uncle, Malik Fazal Elahi lived with his family in Tanchiwala Mohalla, called that because of a huge overhead water tank on stilts that may still be there. This strange structure on its criss-crossing legs of steel rose high in the air, gray and shrouded in mystery. I think I last saw it sometime in the 1970s and it did not look that massive as I remembered it.

But perception of size is relative to how old you are. To a child, who sees every object in relation to his own tiny size, everything appears big and imposing. A friend of mine who returned to Jammu thirty years after independence, went to see if his family’s old home in Mohalla Mast Garh still stood. He remembered that in front of the house, there used to be a big rock which he had always wanted to climb but never could because to him it was like a small mountain. He says he could not believe his eyes when he saw it after all those years. It was really quite small. I had the same experience when I returned to Jammu in 1983. The streets of my early childhood which I had always remembered as spacious, were so narrow at points that I had to stand aside to let a man pass.

The pre-independence Sialkot visit I remember most clearly was in early 1947, six months or so before the departure of the British and the establishment of Pakistan. There were green Muslim League flags flying everywhere and big posters on the wall with the Quaid-i-Azam’s picture. I also recall being taken to Green Café by Nazir Malik, my mother’s first cousin and uncle Fazal Elahi Malik’s son, who was a staunch Muslim nationalist and called himself a soldier of the Quaid. He worked in the government-run Ordnance Clothing Factory but he did not let that stand in the way of his convictions. That was how the Muslim youth in India was at the time. The Muslim League had fired their imagination and they dreamt of the day when they would be free citizens in a country of their own. Had they known what hard times awaited them and how their ideals would be shattered, they might not perhaps have been so enthusiastic.

Bha Nazir, as I called him, was a reader of the newly brought-out Pakistan Times which had been founded by the Quaid-i-Azam, though financed and produced by Mian Iftikharuddin with Faiz Ahmed Faiz as the first editor. I brought back from Sialkot heaps of Muslim League handbills and a tiny green Muslim League flag with a picture of the Quaid on it which I pinned to my shirt and wore all the time like a medal won in a competition.

However, it is the cantonment where “it is at” now. This is also true of Lahore and so many other of our cities. Once the exclusive home of the soldiery, the cantonments. have now been civilianised. Why don’t they make a law that anyone who decides to live in a cantonment should also furnish an undertaking that in the event of war, he would volunteer to pick up a gun and march out to meet the enemy, leaving his Honda Accord and his pillared palace behind. That seems to me to be the only way to rid these places of their present occupants. It is another matter that these are the same people who at the first rumble of a tank or the first gun report in the distance, would jump into their cars and drive at breakneck speed towards, not Wagha, but Gujranwala.

Safety first.

But to return to Sialkot, not everything is gone. A few of the old landmarks are still around as they once were. The great Gothic Cathedral in the cantonment still stands where it has always stood, and it stands intact.

Hallelujah!

On a crossroads, also stands the monument built by Col. Commandant Charles Rankin, CBC, MG, DSO, Commander of the Sialkot Brigade from 1920 to 1924. It is evident that it has been properly cared for, an accomplishment for which all Station Commanders who have served in Sialkot in recent years deserve our gratitude. A slab of white marble, framed in red brick bears the following engraved message, ‘And an highway shall be built and the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.’ An arrow points to the plains of the Punjab. And the inscription reads, ‘Yonder lie the scorching plains whence dust riseth as smoke from a furnace.’ Another arrow points towards Jammu, and beyond that, Kashmir. Jammu is less then thirty miles away, though it could as well be thirty million miles because nobody from here can go there. The text reads, ‘The land whither you go is a fair land of hills and green valleys and clear running waters.’

God bless Commandant Col. Rankin who, no doubt, is in one such land now.

How our family came to settle in Sialkot is now part of the story of millions of families who were forced to migrate from one country to the other because of the criminally ill-planned and, as subsequent evidence produced against the British has shown, ill-intentioned and maladroit division of a country which was the size of a continent. The enormity of the upheaval and trauma of partition becomes even more shattering when one lets the fact sink in that not even one leader or administrator had the vaguest forethought or inkling and, in some cases, concern for the human costs and consequences of partition. Some transfer of population was, of course, foreseen, but the colossal scale on which it actually happened came as an utter shock to everyone, including those who were presiding over the destiny of the people of the subcontinent. History offers no parallel to what happened to millions of people on either side of the dividing line drawn so arbitrarily and so treacherously, at least in the Punjab, by the British and their wonder boy Dickie Mountbatten who should have been tried on a charge of genocide. To this day, there is no exact count of how many perished during the communal upheaval on a primeval scale that preceded and followed partition.

In August 1947, our family was in Srinagar, Kashmir. My father Dr Noor Hussain, being deputy director of the Jammu and Kashmir State Medical Services, spent summers in Srinagar and moved to Jammu in winter with the Durbar, Jammu being the royal winter capital. He had also served as Maharaja Hari Singh’s personal physician for several years and was greatly liked and respected. He was a special favourite of Maharani Tara Devi, a winsome woman who came from ordinary stock but had caught the Maharaja’s fancy. I remember 14 August 1947 vividly and the green and white flag of Pakistan flying jauntily from the central post office building on Srinagar’s famous Bund that straddled the banks of the River Jhehlum. Hundreds of people stood there admiring the flag. It was an uplifting sight. The Pakistan flag had been raised since the communications of the State were now Pakistan’s responsibility. How long it flew there, I do not know but it must have been taken down when the State’s fraudulent “accession” to India was secured by Sheikh Abdullah in collusion with Jawaharlal Nehru and under the benevolent care of Dicky Mountbatten.

We always went to Jammu through the Banihal Pass, an incredibly exciting and hazardous journey. Particularly terrifying was the point where the bus passed through what was called Khooni Nullah because of the scores of accidents that had taken place there. Passengers would begin to recite prayers as the bus lurched forward over the road’s uneven surface. However, every year, this silent, baleful monster exacted its bloody toll in several human lives. I am told it has now either been bypassed or made safer with the straightening of the road. In 1983, when I went to Srinagar for the first time after 1947, I flew from New Delhi and it took no more than thirty minutes to land from one city in the other, a journey that in the past would have taken nearly three days by road. It is true that in our own lifetime, we have seen miracles happen.

In 1947, by October the Srinagar-Jammu road had been closed. It could not have been because of the weather as bad weather did not normally set in until several months later, but on account of the riots that had already broken out, of which we had had no inkling in Srinagar. There were all kinds of rumours, though. The Poonch uprising had already taken place where Muslim members of the Maharaja’s forces had revolted, aided by a large number of ex-servicemen who resided in thousands around the area. Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan was one of them and reportedly fired the first shot in what is now seen as the start of the Kashmir liberation war. The first bands of tribesmen had already entered the state with rag-tag Pakistani irregulars bringing up the rear. When one looks back, one realises what a fatal mistake that was, as it gave India the excuse it was seeking to annex Kashmir.