SALMAN    RASHID 

A Time Of Madness by Salman Rashid ; Published

 by  Aleph ; Pages 127 ; Price Rs 299/-

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The Partition of the Sub-Continent in 1947  into “India” and “Pakistan “ gave birth to a genre of literature dealing with the pangs and pain of  death, desolation and distress. One of the most moving works is by Ajit Cour, a Punjabi  writer, who has bagged the Sahitya Akademi Award. Her story  entitled “ Not a City but a Shell”, recalls her  visit to  Lahore after a gap of fifty years. She recalls lost—forgotten events from her younger days. She carries her Lahore home in her heart. She is unable to recognize her ancestral house. It has been cut up into several parts. The dreams of the whole world had been blighted.  Her dream was lying with its throat slit and its body still writing. Her beloved city Lahore had become a shell that had locked within itself.

A similar exercise has been undertaken by a well-known Pakistani travel writer who returns to his roots in India to understand what happened to his family in 1947.

Rashid who has  nine books to his credit,  has written extensively about his own country as well as about Afghanistan. The book under review is  a memoir and  is based on his quest to visit his house in India, about which he had heard from his father, uncles and a surviving aunt. His grandfather, Dr Badaruddin, two aunts and a few other relatives lived in that house when Partition violence engulfed the city. They were never heard of again. He not only found the house and got to see it from the inside, but more remarkably also met people who knew and remembered his grandfather, a well-known doctor in the city. He discovered aspects about his grandfather that his family was either not aware of or did not talk about.

Even more remarkably, he came face to face with the son of the man who led the mob that killed five members of his family, and seven members of their servant Eidu’s family. Eidu’s two-year-old son was tossed to death from the terrace to the courtyard below. Amazingly enough, the result of this meeting wasn’t a feeling of acrimony and revenge, but apology on the part of the rioter’s son and forgiveness on part of the writer. It is a deeply moving experience to read those pages.

 Salman Rashid’s  family were among the nearly two million people uprooted from their homes in the greatest transmigration in history. Besides those who fled, other members of the family became part of a grimmer statistic: They featured among the more than one million unfortunate souls who paid with their lives for the division of India and creation of Pakistan. After living in the shadow of his family’s tragedy for decades, in 2008, Rashid made the journey back to his ancestral village to uncover the truth. A time of madness tells the story of what he discovered with great poignancy and grace. It is a tale of unspeakable brutality but it is also a testament to the uniquely human traits of forgiveness, redemption and the resilience of the human spirit.

The book is  “Dedicated to all those Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who lost their worldly possessions and sometime their lives for the creation of Pakistan.”

 Rashid writes of his desire to come to India not merely to see the ‘enemy’ country but also to attempt to unravel the mystery about his family, the circumstances in which they left their ancestral lands in Ughi and their home in Jalandhar, and why they always maintained a stoic silence about the events that transpired ‘out there’ during the horrific humid days of August 1947.

Rashid arrives with a grainy photograph of a house on Railway Road in Jalandhar .He writes thus: “On the twentieth day of March 2008, I headed home for the first time in my life. I was fifty-six years and a month old. Walking east across the border at Wagah, I was on my way to the fulfillment of a family pietas of very long standing. I was going to a home I had never known; a home in a foreign land, a land that state propaganda wanted me to believe was enemy territory. But I knew it as a country where my ancestors had lived and died over countless generations. That was the home where the hearth kept the warmth of a fire first kindled by a matriarch many hundred years ago, nay, a few thousand years ago and which all of a sudden had been extinguished in a cataclysm in 1947.”

In the end he finds nothing in his heart but understanding and compassion. A tragedy that encompassed millions.

 The book  tells us that it is up to us to find our way back to light. Only genuine remorse and real forgiveness can show us the way.

  The moment he crosses the border he is interacting with a living land and with living people. The spontaneity and acuteness of his observations and responses are fresh, animated, often humorous and highly imaginative.

A remarkable feature of A Time of Madness, all 126 pages, is the amount of diverse – though relevantly related – matter that has been packed into it. Rashid simply states: ‘I had not let memory turn grief into hatred for them across the border. Instead, it taught me to forgive and move on’

 The climax of Rashid’s personal odyssey and where the narrative wheel comes full circle takes place not in Habib Manzil on Railway Road, but at a house lying just off Krishna Street. It was in a room here that his family had sought shelter from a murderous, ‘baying mob’ and from where ‘no living body left’. He names each one of them in a grim roll-call of the dead: his great grandfather, Mian Qutbuddin, about 90; his grandfather, Dr. Badaruddin, aged 60; his grandmother Fatima, probably 55; his aunt Jamila in her late twenties and Tahira, only 22. In limpid  prose Rashid describes the room, with ‘its green washed walls, badly in want of repainting’ and ‘lined with bags of refined flour’. He writes ‘in the silence I gazed at the walls that were once spattered with the same blood as mine. Where would have they huddled hoping to be dissolved into the brick and mortar behind them? Where my grandfather would have lain in a pool of blood? What were their final thoughts?’ The mind’s eye then closes. There is no melodrama or sentimentality, not even an anticlimax, just the eloquent simplicity of plain speech: ‘I felt nothing. If I had thought such a discovery would flood me with grief and I would weep uncontrollably, it did not happen.’

The tenor and style of the book is laudable. The sensitivity and honesty with which he responds to that which he learns and experiences lends the book its dignity and poise.

A deeply moving document that proves suffering has no caste or creed and compassion and forgiveness are human traits that still remain with humanity.

P.P.Ramachandran.

24/06/2018