From Patna to Detroit (A true lifelong migration)

She was fourteen, holding her child of a few months, walking along a caravan of broken screams into that indigo dawn emanating through a dark crimson night.

The night of 20th August 1947, which witnessed violent flames holding her family until they resolved into ashes. Her baba, amma, bhayya, apya, were burnt alive in her city of innocent smiles, Patna.

And now her twenty seven-year-old husband was holding her petite and swarthy frame, but constantly failing in sincere efforts to hold her melancholic heart, trundling towards new dreams, a new life in a new puritanical land, named Pakistan.

They were migrating from still farms of Patna towards still waters of Chittagong (which every few monsoons envelope its silence with deaths of thousands, a flood of screams). From a city that blessed her birth and all the virtuous pleasures a child could treasure towards a city anonymous for her heart.

She really had no grasp on implications of the word Azadi, of Independence. In fact her dependence had just shifted from her father to her husband. One man to another. She would now follow his gait; swallow his wheat.

Her life illegally migrated from preadolescence to adulthood.

They adjusted fine into their new land, and life was treating them well until it was august 1971. Her husband was now a senior clerk and she was pregnant with their sixth child, the fourth son.

Her ears were starting to hear all-too-familiar chants of independence again. She had never read newspapers; they were tools for the distant and privileged, where she lived people experienced news. Army was raping Bengalis and Bengalis were returning the favors to Biharis. Mukti Bahni were bombing streets. Urdu signs were being ripped off the board hoardings, and Bengali dialect was appearing everywhere.

There were talks for another migration, this time to Karachi, to a city of no Bengalis, to a Purer Pakistan.

In the frosty winds of December, yet another war got played on between India and Pakistan.

And her husband was sent to Dhaka for an assignment.

There was independence again; another flag defining her piece of land, the land was elevated from East Pakistan to Bangladesh, a land only for pure Bengalis.

Biharis had to flood out of Bengal.

Their tickets on a ship to ‘Pakistan’ were booked, but her husband, her sole dependence was still missing. Their eldest son went to Dhaka but nothing could be found of his father, no one knew his whereabouts and no one ever found out. Her son returned in time dejected, disconsolate. And she abjectly surrendered herself towards another migration, towards another set of holding hands.

Karachi was a bustling city, devoid of the serenity of Chittagong or even Patna, but lively and vivacious.

Middle-class dwellings of Nazimabad suited her children well. Even though her eldest son receded from studies and became the caretaker of family, his efforts to inculcate discipline and education in his younger siblings bore fruits like monsoon’s mangoes from Bihar. Two sons completed their engineering from N.E.D. University and soon flew towards greener pastures of America.

The fourth son, ironically named Bhutto, was on his way towards becoming a doctor at Sindh Medical College. But during his days at college, a political party named MQM gained vast popularity, avowing to fight for the rights of his and the people of his affinity, the Mohajirs. He usually kept his distance from all the political conglomerations, except one day when he left his house all prepared for exams, but outside the college gate was a crowd violent and malevolent. He tried to view the happenings up close, to maybe find a way into the college, but soon police arrived, the crowd dispersed, leaders absconded, and got arrested students who failed to escape its clutches and lathis.

Bhutto was subjected to ‘routine’ police torture: he was hung upside down with hard strikes on his sole, and soul; his nails were pulled out, and numerous ineffable attempts to breach his soul.

They tried their best to create an Altaf out of Bhutto.

His family called every influential person they could, but by the time they released him, it was too late; he limped while walking, stuttered while talking, with time he gained both his walk and talk but never could gain his normal intelligent self, never could succeed another exam.

He found his solace in religion, and soon drifted, with a Hari Pagri on his head, towards enlightenment of dars and dawa. He journeyed along from Sehwan to Raiwind, and after few years news of his death came from Kashmir.

Another Martyr. Another Shaheed.

Or Maybe: Another Faceless. Another Aimless. Another Soulless. Another Homeless. Another Hopeless. Corpse.

Lost of another loved soul stole her sanity; she would be calm only with all her loved souls close by every minute of every day, a single one’s absence would draw her into a state of panic.

Doctors advised for an ambience change; and her two sons in U.S.A arranged for her Third Migration, to Detroit.

This time to an impure place.

From Impure. To Pure. To Purer. To Impurer.

Her sons had completed their post-graduations and found lucrative jobs at General Motors. They had also gotten married; love marriages, or maybe Green-Card marriages. The older of the two married a charming white lady called Ivory, and the younger married an immigrant Pakistani called Maryam. They also had a pair of two teenage kids, a son and a daughter, each.

It was odd for her to watch farangis everywhere her family took her, serving her in malls, in huge all encompassing Wal-Marts, walking and talking as normal humans; she had only watched and understood them as imperialists.

Abusers of brown skin: farangis and many others.

The kids hated her, old and stupid granny, trying to control, telling them all the time what to do and how to do it, reminding them of the namaz they just missed, or roza they didn’t care about. A granny of homilies.

She was shared and switched regularly by both small but distant families. Like a thing they needed from time to time.

Like a Baby-Sitter.

Like a Granny.

Her need was over soon, the kids moved out towards colleges in distant cities, towards independence (which could never be azadi), towards longer and shorter relationships.

She hardly saw her son, they moved from their day jobs to their gas stations; or her daughter-in-laws, they moved from their day jobs to parties.

She found solitude in the empty cloisters they left for her, on top of her five feet long ja-namaz. Days felt brief and nights succinct on top of her ja-namaz.

Her three grandkids soon got married, Ali to a not-so-nice American-born-Pakistani called Neha, Omer to a not-so-charming Columbian girl called Katy, and Saema to a nice and charming American-born-Indian called Subhash.

In her last years (as though she knew they were her last!) her heart started longing for two place, for Pakistan, the Purer (or Impurer?), and for Makkah, the Purest. Her sons kept promising the visits, next summer amma, definitely next Christmas amma, until the night her lungs suffered cessation.

They buried her in a Muslim graveyard in the suburbs of Detroit.

Her Fourth and Final Migration.

In the Purest Soil. Inside another Impure Land.