What Partition did to her mother and her family

Radio Netherlands International

The legacy of separation

by Dheera Sujan

09-01-2009

Pack a bag, we’re going to be away for a month

Sarla Sujan was born into a Hindu family in the city of Hyderabad Sindh in 1931. She’d always taken it for granted that she was Indian - yet suddenly, on the stroke of midnight in August 1947, the Muslim state of Pakistan was created - and she became Pakistani overnight.

In the chaos following Partition, more than ten million people migrated over the new border. In some places, Partition was accompanied by extreme violence - entire communities were murdered. Sindh was spared much of the bloodshed, but not the heartache of families divided.

Radio Netherlands producer Dheera Sujan tells the story of what Partition did to her mother and her family.

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"Pack a bag, we’re going to be away for a month." This is what my mother was told when she left her home forever. She was not really aware of living through a historic time because in August 1947, she was obsessed with only one thing - becoming a teacher.

At that time in [Hyderabad] Sindh, the schools had closed, and there were rumours that if and when they finally re-opened, girls would not be allowed back. My mother - then 16 years old - would not be able to sit her final school exams and without them, she could never attain her dream. She cried for a week, until her uncle finally agreed to take her to Bombay where she could complete her matriculation.

So she went to Bombay with her uncle, with one
small bag, packed for a month. While she was there,
a telegram arrived, asking her uncle to deposit her with friends in India.

Don’t come back was the message - too much trouble here. Stay put, we’ll come to you.

Eventually she was joined by her parents who had had to make the traumatic decision to choose between their daughter and everyone and everything else. They brought her two brothers, but not the cousins, uncles, aunts and grandfather she had lived with all her life. The others stayed on in Hyderabad, now Pakistan, keeping the family business going. Neither side expected the split to last more than a few months.

As it turned out, they would never again be together as a family.

Paradise Lost

My life has been dominated by the stories of Partition. My sister and I grew up half believing that we ourselves had played in the corners and porches of my family house in Hyderabad. My mother’s childhood there was a Paradise Lost, all the more precious because it could never be regained.

As a teenager, I was often exasperated by the endless stories of the relatives I’d never known. I would sigh with resignation when I had to hear — yet again — of the beloved books left behind, of how my great grandfather had died of heartbreak. "No one dies of heartbreak mum" I would reply in my duhh voice - "he must have had a weak ticker." But my mother insisted. No - he loved us grandchildren and his heart broke when we left. That’s what killed him.

Throughout my life, these stories have been pulled out and dusted off to stand as a benchmark. Against them, nothing in my coddled westernised upbringing could have been either as much fun as the carefree childhood my mother had had, or that no trouble that has happened to me since could match the grief, the pain and the loss of leaving your home forever.

Becoming Australians

Later, my mother re-lived that painful break with her family when she decided to immigrate with her two daughters to Australia. When we were offered Australian citizenship she accepted it for one main reason: it would allow her to finally go home. As an Indian she couldn’t go to Pakistan. So we became Australians. At the age of 35, she returned to the home she’d left 20 years before. She took us back with her on that first visit. I was the same age she had been when she left.

Until then, I’d rarely seen my mother get emotional. She came from an undemonstrative family - a sideways hug or a gentle pat is as much as I’d learnt to expect from them. So I was unprepared for the sight of my mother breaking down and sobbing in front of her grandfather’s bookcase, or the splash of my great aunt’s tears as she clasped my head in her hands - my sister and I were the first children of the our generation she would ever see.

Its 70 years since my mother saw her family divided. And every year she makes the long trip from Australia to visit the dwindling number of elderly relatives in both India and Pakistan - trying to make up for a lifetime of separation.