Salima Hashmi was born Salima Sultana in 1942 to an Anglo-Indian family in Delhi. At the time of Partition, Hashmi along with her mother, sister, grandparents, maternal aunt and uncle were in Srinagar. “My father, a lieutenant Colonel in rank, who had resigned from the army in February of 1947 moved to lahore to set up the office of both Pakistan Times and Amroze newspaper. My grandparents had just arrived from london so we had decided to spend the summer in Srinagar. We celebrated Eid there and afterwards, our father sent us a message from lahore to leave Srinagar immediately, as the situation was getting worse,” Hashmi recounts.
They took a bus from Srinagar to Murree. On the way to Murree, Hashmi says she saw a bus that was full of people who had been killed. After reaching Murree, her mother organised the women in a procession to stop the rioting and bloodshed. “I remember she sat me down on a donkey and handed me a white flag. I was the leader of the procession waving my white flag. I was scared of the donkey but at the same time felt proud to be leading a rally of women,” she says.
After a day or two in Murree, Hashmi and her family continued on to the Rawalpindi railway station on the bus, and took the train to lahore. They shared the compartment with another English woman, the artist Anna Molka Ahmed (who founded and headed the department of fine arts at Punjab University, with her daughter). “There were so many people on the roof of the train. They were from Rawalpindi trying to crossover to India. There was mayhem and crowds, and there was no light in the train compartment,” Hashmi recounts. “We arrived at the lahore station, which was under curfew at the time. There was a terrible hush in the city. My father had a curfew pass, so we managed to leave the station and stayed at lawrence road for a while and in the meantime my parents started looking for a place to stay,” she says. They found a grand house not too far on lawrence Road which today is a government office building.
Sharing her memories of her mother’s reactions on visiting that house, Hashmi says, “The lawn was completely dug out. The electrical sockets had been pulled out, fans were taken off. There was a prayer room in the house that was defaced and badly desecrated. I remember picking up a children’s comic book from the rubble and my mother snatching it from my hand and throwing it down, yelling at me, “We are not to touch anything here.”
Hashmi and her family eventually settled in an undamaged upper portion of a well-known doctor’s house on Empress Road and began rebuilding their lives. Her paternal grandmother had migrated to Gujranwala from Gurdaspur barely escaping the violence, and was eventually allotted residential property in lahore against the lands she owned in Gurdaspur.
Sharing her final thoughts on Partition, she says, “There is no closure because people’s stories have yet to be properly documented and understood. They were the ones who had to pay the price for a decision in which so much was left to chance, and neither side envisaged what they were unleashing. It was a terrible carnage which was totally unnecessary. The issue of Partition keeps re-emerging with the 3rd and 4th generation today who don’t have those immediate memories but they do carry the stories that were handed down to them.
“Over the years I have heard stories of bitterness, of great optimism, of loyalty and of gratitude. As a child, I’ve heard stories from my parents who witnessed it. My mother worked in the refugee camps. I was at the lahore railway station when a train full of dead bodies had arrived and my mother had yelled at our driver to take me away from that carnage. There was a deathly silence on the platform in lahore which I understood years later.
“I feel we really have to accept this separation and we need to come to terms with it if we want to move forward. Otherwise, we are only going to trivialise all the carnage that has happened and it will weigh on our shoulders if we don’t find a way to cope with it.”
The interview was conducted by story scholar Fakhra Hassan
Photos: MD Meharban