The Hindi-Bindi Club (12 page)

A bunch of us were suffering another bout of homesickness reminiscing about the Hindu festivals we missed most. Diwali, of course, our five-day Festival of Lights. Uma also missed Durga Puja. Meenal missed Ganpati. And I missed Lohri. We started swapping stories about our family traditions. Uma pointed out that going forward, we would create new favorite traditions, and we could certainly incorporate some of our old favorites. After all, the common themes of holidays are the triumph of the human spirit and giving thanks.

Leave it to Uma. She has a knack for turning lemons into lemonade. When she eloped with Patrick, she became the center of gossip in our Indian friends circle. People still blather over whether Uma’s brave or brazen, but I have to tell you, I admire her. When we first met, I expected her to be a stuck-up smarty-pants Bong (Bengali) with her nose either in a book or up in the air, sniffing her disdain at the simpletons in her midst. Was I ever wrong! Instead, it felt as though Uma jimmied open a sticky window with a crow-bar, airing out rooms that were stifling, choking with inbred fatalism. Sure, I coughed a while, but eventually, my lungs cleared.

Fifteen minutes on the phone with Uma can lift your spirits better than an hour of yoga and meditation. She’s the most open-minded of my friends. Obviously. She defied convention and married a
firangi
—Westerner. Which doesn’t mean I tell her everything. Even a loudmouth like me knows certain topics you just don’t discuss, not even with the people closest to you.

Anyway, it’s thanks to Uma that I meshed some well-loved traditions of Lohri with Halloween, Diwali with the 4th of July, and for Christmas, I recycled her family’s Durga Puja tradition of getting new clothes.

As I cut through the lingerie department, a silk nightgown catches my eye. Red. Festive. Sexy. I find my size (hooray!) and remove the hanger from the rack.

A voice in my head says, “Old lady, have you no shame?”

“Shut up,” I tell the voice. “I intend to enjoy this body as long as I’ve got it.” As the Punjabi saying goes,
Wakt noon hath naen phar-da
. There is no hand to catch time.

Meenal may be ready to renounce worldly pleasures, but I’m not. And good sex, unlike good chocolate, has negative calories.

D
o you know,
beta,
that everywhere I’ve lived, winter has been my favorite season? I love winter holidays….

In Delhi, we had Lohri, the bonfire festival signifying the harvesting of winter crops, celebrating fertility and goodwill. While Indians all over celebrate winter solstice on January 14, the day the sun enters Capricorn according to Hindu astrology, different regions have different names and traditions for this day. For Punjabis, it’s Lohri.

Some of our Lohri traditions are similar to fall harvest celebrations here. In the morning, kids go from door to door, caroling about a Punjabi Robin Hood and demanding
lohri
—loot—like trick-or-treating. When we received money or a sweet, we would sing,
“Ai ghar ameera da.”
This house is full of the rich. If we didn’t receive any
lohri,
we sang,
“Ai ghar bhukka.”
This house is full of misers.

In the evening, we dressed in our best, warm clothes and gathered with our family and friends around festive bonfires. Lit sparklers and firecrackers. Tossed puffed rice, popcorn, sugarcane sticks, snacks, and sweets into the flames, singing,
“Aadar aye, dilather jaye!”
May honor come and poverty vanish. As the frigid air filled with the sweet-smoky aroma of burning sesame seeds and jaggery, we danced and sang the night away. I credit these jovial Lohri bonfires for helping me get over my phobia of fires, though I still have my moments….

Beta,
don’t ask, I don’t want to talk about it.

Have I told you about Basant in Lahore? The festival of kites and colors to exalt the onset of spring. We would say,
“Aaya basant, paala udant.”
Warm weather comes, cold weather flies away. Kite flying was a cold-weather sport, mostly for boys. In winter, the boys of Kapoor Road came home from school and raced straight to rooftop terraces to send up their kites. Soon our
mohalla
echoed with cries of,
“Bo-kata! Bo-kata!”
The kite’s been cut! You see, kite strings were coated in a paste of ultrafine powdered glass—harmless at rest, but with velocity, sharp enough to bloody fingers, much the same as a paper or cardboard cut—ouch! Fliers battled to cut each other’s kite strings and chased booty that fell from the sky, finders keepers.

Once, Zarkha and I were playing
stapu
—hopscotch—in the courtyard behind my bungalow when a fancy, multi-cornered kite thunked down right in front of us. Our eyes went wide. This wasn’t just any kite. It was a
patang,
the
maharaja
of kites. Far showier, pricier than the common
guddis
and
paris, patangs
were the most coveted booty of all.

Whoops of excitement sounded from the wooden parapet—from my brothers Sunil and Harinder and cousin Shankar, better known as Sunny, Dimples, and Chhotu. While Dimples and Chhotu dashed for the stairs, Sunny, the eldest, rappelled down a banyan tree with the agility of a monkey! As
“Bo-kata!”
battle cries grew closer, Zarkha and I screamed and ran into the house because we knew any second, the courtyard would be swarming with boys. And it was! That is, until
Biji
came out and chased them all away because they were scaring the buffalos we kept for fresh milk.

Needless to say, Basant was a much-anticipated holiday, not just in our
mohalla,
but in every corner of Lahore. Before dawn, we awoke to the beating of drums, the
dhol-wallah
going down the road, signaling the arrival of Basant. Our gazes shot to the sky, filled with candlelit box kites. So beautiful, so peaceful that sight. As if stargazing, we watched the luminous lanterns twinkle, the only waking moments when not one of us talked.

By daybreak, we congregated on the rooftop terrace dressed in yellow, the first color to emerge after the biting cold winter with vibrant mustard flowers,
peeli chambeli,
scentless yellow jasmine, and Amaltas trees signaling new life. Soon, we could barely see the sky through all the kites! Every color, shape, size. Wind dancers and warriors. Dipping, swerving, tangling. Watching a kite ascend to the sky took my breath away. My heart soared higher and higher with the kite, climbing the stairway to heaven.

There wasn’t an empty rooftop in all of Lahore. Regardless of age, gender, religion, caste, or social standing, all Lahoris participated in the major festivals of Basant, Holi, Diwali, Eid, and Christmas. Nowhere else did I witness such collective merrymaking and communal harmony.

Nowhere else and never again.

“L
ong years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge…”

These are words,
beta,
every educated Indian knows. You’d already know them, if we’d raised you in India. Still, even if you are here, not there, you must know your heritage. It’s
how
you got here.

On the eve of India’s independence from the British Empire, as Lahore burned in communal riots, my family huddled around the radio, listening to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and father of later prime minister Indira Gandhi.

I remember
Dadaji,
usually aloof, removing his spectacles to dab tears as he grumbled over Panditji’s decision to deliver his address in English, the foreign tongue of our now-former rulers, a language the vast majority of Indians didn’t understand. The families of Kapoor Road, being Punjabi, shared a mother tongue. My generation also spoke English, or “
gulabi
English,” as we called English sprinkled with Punjabi. While my father spoke English, my mother didn’t; most of their generation and older spoke Punjabi exclusively.

“At the stroke of the midnight hour,” Panditji’s confident voice boomed, “when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…”

At six, I didn’t understand the meaning of these words, or the mixed emotions people had about them. Now I understand all too well.

“We end today a period of ill fortune, and India discovers herself again…”

Unfortunately, our period of ill fortune wasn’t over yet.

I
n 1947, my world went crazy. Lahore—a modern, cultured, charming, progressive, and tolerant city—descended into chaos. Though Lahore was awarded to Pakistan, my family never intended to leave. And though we fled to escape the violence, we never dreamed it would be permanent, that the borders would be sealed, and we would be exiled forever. More than
Indians
or
Pakistanis,
we were Punjabis,
Lahoris
. For generations, the land of five rivers flowed through our veins, until the knife of Partition slit our wrists.

The Cost of Independence.

One night, my father came home pale and shaking. A train had arrived at Lahore Station. A ghost train. Every passenger dead. Slain. They were Muslim refugees migrating west. All men, not one young woman among the corpses. But bags and bags were found heaped full of bloody, severed breasts.

It was “retaliation” that led to more “retaliation,” a vicious cycle of “you harm my people, I harm yours.” People fighting terror with terror.

With the breakdown in administration and absence of adequate peacekeeping forces, savagery escalated on either side of our two new borders. Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities all had blood on their hands and loved ones to mourn. Riots and looting ran rampant. Homes were torched. Doused with gasoline, entire neighborhoods were reduced to cinders. From Amritsar to Lahore—both sides of the Wagah border—trains pulled into stations like crypts containing murdered and maimed refugees, Hindus and Sikhs migrating east, Muslims migrating west.

Men were often forced to drop their drawers to prove their religion. Hindu men aren’t circumcised; Muslim men are. Women were kidnapped, stripped, robbed of jewelry, raped, and murdered. People jumped into wells to drown or otherwise committed suicide to avoid compulsory religious conversions and other fates deemed worse than death. Many women opted for “mercy killing” by a male relative in order to “protect their honor.”

Hundreds of thousands were massacred, millions violated. Some abductees were rescued. Some remain missing. Some women, tragically, returned to their families only to be turned away, written off as unlucky, damaged goods, shameful.

To be fair, there are many accounts of communal compassion and heroism, people who risked everything to save their fellow human beings, regardless of religion or caste. Our
mohalla
in Krishanagar organized a twenty-four-hour watch, and people took turns keeping vigil. Our Muslim neighbors and friends helped us in every way possible—storing our belongings, sheltering us in their homes, aiding our escape. On the other side of the border, many Hindus and Sikhs similarly protected innocent Muslims.

But the volumes that showcase the underbelly of human nature are the ones that haunt me. The ones that taught me tolerance is too often superficial. In times of peace and prosperity, people from different communities can live and let live, but in times of fear and uncertainty, many—
far too many
—side with their own and turn against those who share their biology but not their ideology or heritage. Far too many fall in line behind leaders who rally:
You’re either with us—“our kind”—or against us.
Or,
Death to a nation, or a people, not ours—not “our kind.”

I was only six, but I saw it. I lived through it. Others didn’t.

Nanaji
and
Naniji
refused to leave Lahore. “I was born here, and I will die here, if that is my karma,”
Nanaji
said. And
Naniji
refused to leave
Nanaji
.

Relatives, friends, acquaintances pleaded with them to no avail.
Biji
’s eldest brother, after escorting family across the border, risked his life to return
twice
for his parents. The first time, they sent him away with a neighbor girl who later became his wife. On the second trip, he found them in the charred remains of their home in the walled city.

They rarely slept in the same bed, but they did on their last night. On
Nanaji
’s single divan, they died side by side.

I
n Delhi, we rebuilt our lives from scratch and assimilated into a new land, a new culture where we were not always welcome, where locals regarded our overflowing refugee community as loud and unrefined, our speech and mannerisms as accented and crude. But we were survivors; we proved that every day.

Biji
had an intricately carved walnut jewelry box
Bauji
gifted her on a family holiday in Kashmir. She emptied it, selling her wedding jewelry to finance our new start.
Bauji
spent the next decade filling it back up again.