PROLOGUE
I couldn’t imagine Dad visiting me in America. It wasn’t that he was unimaginably far—he was in Toronto, where he’d lived since the late sixties, when he came over with mom from Pakistan—but America had become for him, after two terms of Bush’s crusades, several years of Obama’s dirty wars, and their cumulative legacy of torture, rendition, and surveillance, an issue of dignity.
I moved to Seattle in 2007 after university. Mom wasn’t well enough to travel, and Dad rarely left her alone, so I didn’t bother asking them to visit. By the time Dad was saying—if America doesn’t want Muslims, why should I go there?—I had let go.
Dad, in his seventies, seemed unlikely to change. Somewhere within me hurt spilled, but the felt feeling was one of sympathy. His conception of “America” mostly aligned with my conception of America, the State: that is, war machinery governed by hegemonic policies—duplicitous and self-righteous. Where our Americas differed was in his flattening of all Americans to mouthpieces grafted onto the machinery. I understood that impulse. After all, Dad’s primary input was American cable news, which is concerned with nothing but selling its authority. While legible as propaganda to any non-American, its tone and polish, its wealth, still signal—This is America speaking—and when the spectrum of its discourse addresses Muslims only in relation to what it frames as an existential threat, as a late-stage cancer, casting us as either the cancer itself, or not wholly cancer, but obliged to somehow seek and vanquish the malignant cells, it’s hard not to take it all personally.
After several years in Seattle, I got married, and my wife and I shifted to Los Angeles. Dad insisted we buy a home. He helped us put a down payment on an apartment nestled in a two-story complex built in the sixties. Its past lingers in its features and moods, its dark wood cupboards and fluorescent lights, the way it lets the sun in to laminate the yellows. It’s perfect to us.
Dad’s favorite photo of Mom is one he took in their first home, back when he was an amateur photographer. One morning in the kitchen, her hands well into plying dough into roti, he nudges her, tells her to come as she is, and leads her out the back door into the garden. The light catches where her hair parts into two rivers, and shines on the ridge of her chin and the whole of her nose. She holds something, her fingers perhaps still gummy with dough, though likely not. Romantic urgency notwithstanding, mom would have washed her hands. Her slight smile looks to me like amusement, at the interruption, its flattery. Framing her on the left, in the leaves leaning on her: two dabs of red in the sea of sepia; the roses he rushed to place her next to.
I never knew them like this. Even with evidence, it’s hard to imagine.
My wife and I called whenever we remembered and had time. We gave reports of settling into our home, of how grateful we still were, of the deliriously hot weather, of the implications of Trump. Mom was two years gone. And Dad calls one day and, after all the expected things are said, says maybe he’ll come visit.
I.
Dad, my sister, and her two kids piled onto a futon and air mattress in our extra room, the wall AC wheezing over them. August was scorching. The days out ended early and in exhaustion. Outside the apartment, I stayed close to Dad, held his hand, as afraid of a fall as a bigot’s word or worse. As he slows with age, becoming in my eyes the grandfather he’s already been of my brother’s kids for nearly two decades, the thought of him in pain—or being disrespected—has become unbearable. The very idea of him as hurt-able is new and shocking.
I checked in with him constantly. Dad’s needs had always come after ours. It was rare that I thought to ask how he felt, and he wasn’t used to answering. But he seemed content, walking Hollywood in his dress shirts and slacks, white beard like a shock of frost in the dry sun.
We went on a studio tour that uncovered the magic behind special effects, to which Dad said—they fool you in the movie, then they make you pay to show how they fooled you. We drove down Rodeo Drive, which Dad loved for some reason, instructing my niece to take pictures as our car rolled through, of what she didn’t know. She got every blurred palm tree until I told her it was okay to stop. We found Muhammad Ali’s star tucked on a quiet wall beside a gelateria. By Ali’s request, his star wasn’t placed on the ground. He didn’t want the name “Muhammad” to be tread upon. Dad, a boxer in college until his math professor forbade it, lifted his fists for a picture thousands of others had taken and left pleased—they built it nicely.
In the evenings, Dad cooked for himself while the rest of us ate out, because—[us] people like garbage. He cooked with pots and pans he bought on the first day, dismayed by what we didn’t have, and then napped until we returned. His routine back home would be to flip between baseball and the news before retiring to his room to recite the Quran. A Hafiz is one who knows the entire Quran by heart. Even at his age, it comes readily to his lips, the physical book merely a prompt.
We didn’t have cable, so I searched dad’s favorites to stream. We ran through episodes of Perry Mason. The writer in me hoped to find those stories he engaged with more deeply, like Spartacus, or Rain Man, or ones we used to watch together, like Field of Dreams. Those experiences were evidence that fiction could be meaningful to him, evidence for a trial I repeatedly held in my head; or maybe more aptly, they were cheap hits of affirmation for writer-me.
I mistakenly remembered him liking The Twilight Zone and chose an episode from 1961, “The Shelter.” It’s a classic example of what I love about the show—a quick trap into suspense, then twenty minutes of sustained tension. A doctor is being honored by his neighbors at a birthday dinner in his home. During a toast, his neighbor lovingly mocks the doctor’s eccentric and slightly irksome nighttime project, building a bomb shelter in his basement. No time is wasted. An emergency radio broadcast warns of an unidentified object entering American airspace. The neighbors disperse, only to return, family by family, to beg the doctor entry into his shelter, which, he tries to explain, more wildly as the tension ratchets, has capacity only for his family. In my favorite moment, during the first plea, the camera suddenly fixes in a pair of extreme close-ups. There’s the sense that the sweat beading on their lips and foreheads is the residue left by masks that have slipped. The men haven’t gone crazy or become someone else. They’ve always been this.
The neighbors become a mob. Frank, the most aggressive, attacks the equally desperate but more reasonable Marty, baselessly accusing him of prioritizing his own family: “That’s the way it is when foreigners come over here—pushy, grabby, semi-Americans.” His wife adds, “You’re at the bottom of the list.” The shelter door is eventually torn apart, and, as the camera widens and the neighbor men fill the frame, the radio again interjects. The unidentified object has been identified as a satellite. Frank apologizes to Marty, who cannot look at him, while a white neighbor accepts the apology for him. They tell the doctor they’ll hold a block party to pay for the damages, but none of the relationships will be the same, and the episode ends with an unneeded speech from the doctor saying so.
As the credits rolled, Dad was leaned forward on his crossed leg, rubbing where his forehead touches the mat in prayer—that’s what it is: man becomes animal when death comes.
Though I didn’t remember it that evening, and rarely did I remember at all, Dad had had firsthand experience with the kind of panic that can alter the lives and relationships of millions. He was seven when the invisible line between August 14th and 15th of 1947 was crossed, and colonial India officially split into independent India and a new nation, Pakistan—an event known as Partition. Amidst mass violence and confusion, his family fled their home in Amritsar to uncertainty in Lahore. In Mohsin Ha-mid’s novel Moth Smoke, Partition is alluded to as a moment of fission, creating two “atomized, atomic lands.” Its fallout then, over a period of months: twelve million displaced; half a million to two million dead.
Dad has no shortage of Partition stories and side-stories. Some funny, but most disquieting, like the one humid night he slept on his roof and listened to a lonely man he couldn’t see bleed out; or the many times, in broad daylight, he saw people carrying their limbs. If I ask him how he felt as a child in those moments, whether he was scared, he waves me off or his face screws up, gestures that move between what do I remember and what does it matter.
I never pushed it. This was not a broken man who needed my mending. But I did have an urge to locate his trauma, to find Dad vulnerable. Sustained by God—yes—but sometimes needing comfort, crying to God. I wanted to better understand him, but there was also something neurotic and selfish in this. His invulnerability threw my (over)sensitivity in stark contrast, a weakness of mine that must have, deep down, disappointed or embarrassed Dad—and somehow must have meant I wasn’t Pakistani enough or devout enough or both. All of which was the drama of another trial held in my mind, all prosecution and no defense, all the more irrational, because none of these things had any correlation, and, in fact, I had seen Dad be the man I sought. I had seen him cry during the worst of my brother’s headaches, clusters and migraines that wiped out a decade. I had seen him cry with my sister as she battled something she couldn’t name. I had seen him after Mom, when his legs failed for weeks, and he could barely walk on his own. And weren’t the Allahu Akbar’s he whispered throughout the day cries to be carried?
Though it was hard to reconcile with the image of him carved by my insecurities, I had seen life affect Dad.
So then what of cataclysm—what of Partition?
II.
Dad led us a way he knew through Anarkali Bazaar. It was the December after his visit to LA. We followed him in a disjointed procession up New Anarkali Road to Lahori Gate and into Pa- par Mandi Chowk. The streets, with shops and stalls shouting their signage and flashing shalwar kameezes and metalworks and cell phones and everything essential, gave way to narrower lanes and more modest business. The electrical lines that sagged overhead thinned, too.
Amid Anarkali’s endless current of shoppers on foot and motorbike, who pushed our pace or pushed past, our large group was merely annoying. But here, beyond the bazaar, in a less-trafficked pocket, where anyone who was around likely lived nearby, above the butcher or behind the grocer or tucked down a skinny passage, our motley crew became conspicuous: my wife and I, my sister, her husband and kids—even if in Pakistani clothes, even if standing still in silence—all clearly Westerners, led by Dad, and my brother and his wife, who were more or less locals. We clumped together behind Dad, his beautiful beard here incongruent only in proximity to us. The looks we received were amused, caught by any number of the ways we looked funny together.
This visit—a first for the spouses and kids, and twenty-one years in the making for the rest of us—seemed a distant reality even a few months prior, when our visas were still processing. It only grew more miraculous once we all arrived. Incredulity came in waves. Without fail, it rose in waking to the azan trembling our windows; first in the call’s awesome conviction, and then again in my prayers for loved ones that were all here.
Dad hustled like a younger man. We followed him as he darted down side streets, a route dusted off from memory, his first home post-Partition somewhere up ahead.
Before Partition, Dad lived thirty miles east of Lahore on the outskirts of Amritsar, one of the most populous cities in Punjab. Dad’s father was a bill collector for the government, who charged for help with irrigation. His modest pay afforded a room in a mostly empty three-story building. It was just off the main road that piped workers into the city or out to surrounding areas where the factories were. Dad remembers living there, his memories forming at seven, forming as the rural town did, clustered about the road.
III.
There is no true beginning in any history. Choosing one marks what came before as prologue and denies the continuities that structure what was made the beginning. Neither is an end, a true end. In both directions, there is always more.
In The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan meticulously documents the confusion, rumors, and political machinations that beset the months before and after Partition. For instance, on February 20th, 1947, the British announced their intention to leave India by June of the following year. This was an India to which two-and-a-half-million Indian soldiers had returned, capable and confident, after fighting for the British in World War II. An India devastated by famine and its constitutive ruthlessness. Nearly four million Bengalis starved to death in 1943 under Churchill, as he continued mass exports of rice from India; scorched fields of crops, ostensibly to protect against Japanese invasion; ordered ships with Australian wheat not to dock there, to instead fill Britain’s war reserves, as he responded to a telegram reporting mass death, “Why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?” Centuries of brutality caked a bureaucracy now straining under strikes, mutinies, and riots, as British officials and soldiers penned nostalgic letters for home.
Indians had struggled for independence for a long time, but the suddenness of the February announcement, and its ambiguity—what India would the British leave behind? What of the idea called Pakistan?—threw forward a chaos. The two major political parties escalated their rhetoric against each other—for and against a unified India, for and against a Pakistan—both claiming freedom for its constituents without elaborating the specifics of governance. Local politicians rode the rhetoric and made moves, assembling militias and gangs, stoking supporters, colluding with police to consolidate and cull their populace.
By March, Punjab’s local government collapsed, and parts of Amritsar were burning; by April, the postmen were too afraid to deliver the mail; and on June 3rd, by radio broadcast from New Delhi, the date of independence for India and a new nation, Pakistan, was announced as August 15th, a mere two months away. Rumors—of what this meant, of what would happen to Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, to Muslims in India, of escalating atrocities—spread like the fires. Newspapers sketched their best guess of the border to come. In areas without radio or newspapers, rumor runners harvested news from nearby towns and returned, repeating what they heard for a fee, teased ever higher the more brutal the headline.
The British had washed their hands of their crown jewel. While some Indian officials still thought the British would maintain order until the following June, and planned accordingly, British soldiers were ordered to stay in their barracks unless British lives were at risk. In fact, the soldiers would start to depart only two days after independence.
It’s unclear where in a time line to place Dad’s memory of a bus arriving from the city, its passengers quiet, flesh red-smeared and piecemeal. They stayed in the empty rooms in Dad’s building and told their stories. More buses arrived that way. Factory workers who had protected each other across religious lines no longer would. The ambushes began. On the road, people died next to the dying. In the city, by August, petrol and burning balls of cloth had rubbled ten thousand buildings.
On August 7th, a friend of Dad’s father, who worked in transportation, told him he had access to a bus and was leaving for Batala, thirty miles northeast. They had heard that both Amritsar and Batala would be part of Pakistan, and since Batala had been quieter, it made sense to stay there until Amritsar calmed. Access to a bus was especially lucky—the trains weren’t safe, even when schedules were kept secret. Refugees fleeing communities they had been a part of for generations, escaping in and confined in hurtling carriages, were overtaken and stilled, murdered in intimate and exerting brutality. A train carrying only the dead, arriving in “funereal silence,” as Nisid Hajari puts it in Midnight’sFuries, became a symbol of Partition, and then, in its familiarity and inadequacy, a cliché.
Dad’s father worked even that last day in Amritsar, collecting from farmers what was a decade’s worth of his pay, which, like in any other shift, he deposited where expected before coming home. Dad, his parents, and his older brother boarded the bus with only a metal dhol of ghee.
Though the official borders, lines drawn by a British judge using old census data, weren’t made public until two days after independence, Dad’s family heard on August 15th that neither Batala nor Amritsar was in Pakistan. Their retreat had taken them thirty miles farther into India. And there were no more buses.
Dad’s family was one among many stranded. Two days passed, then a train of Indian military arrived. When they disembarked, a small pack of Pakistani soldiers, formerly Indian soldiers, boarded, and crowds swelled into the remaining carriages. Those already in tried to shut the doors to avoid being crushed. Dad remembers losing his mom’s hand. She could only push forward. Dad’s brother, onboard atop a luggage rack, watched as Dad was shot-put in through a window. Somehow, in one of those scenes that fragments of memory and written record can’t stitch back into being, Dad’s whole family made it.
The train made unscheduled stops: a few hours in a patch of wilderness; at a station on fire; and then in Amritsar. The conductor refused to take the train farther west until threatened. Ten hours had passed. Dad’s brother was stuck above, cramped, on a suitcase, and, having to pee, had no choice but to drizzle those below. The train almost made one more unscheduled stop. A crowd had coalesced up ahead on both sides of the track. They held swords, and the train began to brake. The soldiers reached out their windows and fired into the sky. The crowd scattered, and the train regained its pace, rattling toward Lahore.
Dad’s older brother, for decades now an esteemed physicist, an affectionate uncle and grandfather, whose words float gently, one by one, into long pauses, told me over tea that Partition revealed to him that man is essentially evil. Different than Dad’s statement that humans could become animals in the presence of death, void of the crucial caveat underpinning Dad’s beliefs—that transcendence was possible, selflessness was possible, through humility and earned stations in devotion to God—the evil Dad’s brother believed in was inescapable and quick to rise. As history had shown, he said, man needs only a license to kill, big or small. He was unconvinced by notions of higher order systems of power, politics and militias, of accounts of people risking their lives to save others and would-be murderers needing days of convincing and conditioning to kill—though I didn’t say all this. I felt no right to convince. I was no expert, just someone who’s read some books. But if I’m being honest with myself, these objections I still deeply feel and believe were snuffed out by his change of tone: gone was his contemplative lightness; what remained was the authority of his cynicism and what he’d seen, which swallowed, in the moment, all other possibilities.
In the end, if history is made to mark one falsely, 240,000 Hindus and Sikhs fled Lahore, a third of its population at the time, to east Punjab, Delhi, and elsewhere, many not making it. Half of Amritsar, 200,000 Muslims, left for Lahore. Refugees arrived to sprawling camps meant to be temporary, and, during the days, they searched for abandoned homes to make their own.
IV.
Dad stands in a puffy, black jacket over a silver sweater and white shalwar next to a pale green door. My sister snapped the photo at the end of our walk through Papar Mandi Chowk. The rest of us are smiling at him as he gestures toward the door, which is a foot taller than him, with a window atop it shaped like a flame lighting a candle. Behind him, the building façade rises in a tarnished white, then a single horizontal panel of yellow and purple, the rest a storm-gray.
They arrived with no possessions or food. The neighborhood cooked communally for the newcomers—roti with salt and chili, a little bit of water. For the first few weeks, Dad bought pears and resold them. His mom made channa, which he also sold. Eventually, luckily, Dad’s father was given a job identical to his old one, only now, he collected for the Pakistani government.
In another picture, a misfire far too blurry to upload or even keep on a hard drive with an eternity of memory, we’re all ghosts. I’m looking up at the building, all blurred except my Pakistani nose and a smile so content I look goofy. Dad’s beard and prayer hat are square to the camera, though they smudge to his right, as if he just turned to his left, where his eyes, or at least one eye—a vivid pin through his left lens—points. The silver of his sweater shimmers and rises into his jacket, like steam or kicked up sand. His mouth has dropped open. He’s noticed something he’s about to tell us, I assume, or maybe he noticed something and kept it to himself.
If I were writing a novel, Dad’s Partition story would be more than enough to propel a protagonist. The story would wind itself around where the trauma went. It’s been said that realistic fiction fails to convey the traumas of displacement. The traumas, I think, also fail to measure the human. Both are immense, beyond what writing can do.
What I think about now—what I was too late to think about with Mom, who I always expected to interview and novelize, to have one more chance to appreciate—is what I owe Dad. I owe him more than I can give. And so I hope, at the very least, to always meet him with a kind of discipline—an active and inquiring and learning spirit that seeks and honors that which only God can truly encompass, a soul’s complexity.
EPILOGUE
On our second-to-last night in Pakistan, Dad told me he wrote a story in his thirties, around the age I am writing this. He told me what the story was about:
A man and woman are married in pre-Partition India. The man leaves to study and find work in England. The unrest begins, but they assume it’ll be over soon, and she’ll join him when they have enough money. They send letters. The man has a picture of her in a frame on his wall. The news gets worse, and the letters from India stop.
He returns to his village, which is ruined. He finds a Hindu friend of his, despairing in ash. Childhood friends killed each other, he says. They did this, and your wife is likely dead, too. The man refuses to believe it, leaves for Lahore, but there it’s the same.
In England, he grows sick, cannot work. He’s admitted to a hospital, and as he drifts in and out, he resolves that if he ever leaves this bed, he never wants to see another Pakistani or Indian. He does recover but has nowhere to go. The woman who nursed him takes him in, and, after a few years, they marry. Along with her daughter from another marriage, they become a new family.
They move to Canada, and there the man runs a factory floor. He meets many Pakistanis and Indians, who unsettle him. His daughter meets a Pakistani, too. She sees in his house the same picture she has in hers. She brings the boy home to show him, and they wait for her father to come. When he does, the boy berates him. How he left his pregnant wife. She escaped the chaos and survived a bus to Pakistan. She raised the boy on her own and sent him to Canada, which he regrets, because she died alone.
He has more to say to his father, and after he’s said everything, he sits, tumbling into tears. After a long silence, the man rises. He looks at his son, at the picture framed on his wall, and he tells him everything he went through without them.
Ahsan Butt was born in Toronto, is of Pakistani descent, and currently lives in Los Angeles. His short-fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch, Split Lip Magazine, Barrelhouse, The Massachusetts Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is currently a Senior Editor at South Asian Avant Garde: A Dissident Literary Anthology (SAAG).
Photo is the author’s father.