The diffused light of dawn lit a dull, flat landscape cut by the highway, gleaming under randomly spaced streetlights. Until about thirty years ago, this single-carriageway witnessed an almost daily carnage that left heavy and light motor vehicles, bicyclists, and bullock carts in confused mangles.
Everyone had a personal story of loss on this road. Three of my family were killed in two separate accidents. A splintered windshield glass lodged in a young girl’s throat. An aunt and cousin died when their car rammed into a truck to avoid a cyclist.
There was talk of ghostly cyclists and pedestrians, and even supernatural cars seen on foggy winter nights.
To my child’s mind, the road was a portal for violent plunges into the unknown. It has been the site of wars for the last 400 years, and further back, it witnessed prehistoric and mythological battles where the victor’s narrative could not eliminate the stories of the defeated, who live on as ghosts of alternate possibilities.
Which is why it made perfect sense that before every road journey, we stood in a circle around our grandmother, Bibiji, as she prayed for our safe return.
I sensed my father released to the continuity of the ancient road. The night drive of our grief was on a clear road.
Four a.m. is the hour between day traffic and night truckers. An early butter-yellow winter light evaporated the twilight ghosts.
For over 2,500 years, this road has streamed with traders from Central Asia, scholars from China, adventurers from Europe, sadhus from the Himalayas, and armies coveting Hindustan.
This portion of the road was the battlefield of the story of the eighteen-day Mahabharata war, marking the cusp of the end of the Dwapar Yuga and the rise of the Kali Yuga. Eighteen days of soldiers’ cries and trumpeting elephants and neighing horses, each ending with sunsets blackened by smoke from the funeral pyres hanging heavy until impelled by the sounds of wailing women.
From myth, we come to somewhat recorded history in 300 BCE, when Chandragupta Maurya built this road to connect his fast-growing kingdom, spanning the north of the subcontinent from the source of the Ganga to its northwestern limits.
The road was developed by Sher Shah Suri. My father remembered the time when it was called “Jarnailly Sadak” under the British, and then GT Road, its official name, The Grand Trunk Road.
The government of independent India called it Sher Shah Suri Marg, the Sanskrit “marg” guillotining the English “road” and the Urdu “sadak”.
“At least they did not say Sher Shah Suri puth,” I said to my father, “that’s a tongue twister.”
“Thank God they did not say something about feet on the road; then it would be pudd,” my father said with his poker face that was sometimes funnier than the joke. (Pudd means fart in Punjabi).
Now, it is NH1, National Highway 1, a single-carriageway that has grown into a broad four-lane highway with bridges flying over the clogged traffic of villages and towns. Modern India could have named it after Chandragupta Maurya. “Maurya Marg” has a nice, balanced ring to it that serves what used to be a hidden purpose – eliminating Muslim presence from the historical narrative in the grand plan of connecting (or creating) selected points in history to form a carefully crafted picture of Hindu India.
So flowed the road till the careless, callous Radcliffe Line severed the muscle of a 2,500-year-old continuum, flinging the western portion across a river of blood to be called Pakistan, which my parents still talked of as home.
The country watched those partitioned pummelled and humiliated, murdered and tortured and raped to fit on either side of this blood-stained sarhad.
The refugee also became the subject of jokes.
When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he arrived at a colony of Punjabis.
“When did you get here?” he asked.
“After Partition.”
In the immediate aftermath, the refugees did not talk much, perhaps for fear of losing or tainting their cherished memories, locked within themselves as precious possessions, only to be taken out sometimes. A photo album of people and places whose pain of exile had bleached them to a sepia tone.
To preserve a memory of their moorings, my family called themselves Rajkotias, literally, from Rajkot, Pakistan.
And in the town of Karnal, they built a home that they called Rajkot House. In nearby Jundla, my father tilled the banjar land that had been allotted to them as token compensation for the vast lands and homes they had left in Pakistan. Jundla and Karnal were on and about the same road that led to Lahore and Rajkot in Pakistan.
This border, a mere seventy years old, cannot partition the wheat and rice-laden breezes that whisper ancient stories and songs, sung in Punjabi laced with Persian and Urdu to the eight-beat dhol rhythm, the spirit of these regions, shaped by millennia-old accounts of valiant battles against hordes arriving over the mountains to reach the richly watered and wealthy plains below them.
Excerpted with permission from Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story, Malavika Rajkotia, Speaking Tiger Books.
