Mirpur refugees, Jammu’s Bakshi Nagar, and bus stop drama

My mother’s family were refugees from Mirpur. This is now in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. In Jammu, November 25 is still marked as ‘Mirpur Balidan Divas’. On that day in 1947, and in the couple of days that followed, in the aftermath of Partition, one of the most heinous massacres took place. It is one that has rarely been talked or written about. India had been Independent for over three months when Mirpur was attacked by what are believed to be contingents of the regular army and by irregulars and mercenaries from Pakistan.

This attack was followed by what is believed to be a pogrom in which around 18,000 Hindus and Sikhs were massacred. My mother’s family escaped death (or worse), as they were in Jammu at the time. In a separate incident, my grandfather’s older brother, Chaudhry Amar Nath, who was the Wazir-e-Wizarat, Governor of Skardu (Baltistan), Gilgit and Ladakh, had already been brutally killed and his wife, who escaped with their young children, wore a metal strap on a leg and a special shoe, as she too had been shot and badly wounded.

Most of the survivors from Mirpur were settled in what was to become Bakshi Nagar in Jammu. That is where my grandparents lived and where my parents, my sister and I spent a couple of months every winter. Over the years, one watched the house grow from a very basic structure to something rather grand.

It was a house that had a constant stream of visitors. Something was always coming out of the kitchen. Conversation was often hushed. When we children were around, the elders would often stop talking. Today, I know why those silences came. They did not want us to hear about all those times and their unanswered questions about who could still be alive and who got killed. And yet, it was a house filled with laughter and great love. It was also a place where the easier and funnier sides of life could be observed.

A little below the house was a bus stop. A short slope, past a couple of ber trees, led to a trifurcation. One slope went up to the main section of Bakshi Nagar. A mild descent led down to the canal where, often enough, I would join my parents and uncles on their evening walk. That was only if the family dog, who went by the eponymous name of Doggie, chose that direction. That dog was a canine of many moods and of considerable character. At some point, he had moved into the house from an indeterminate place and with an equally indeterminate ancestry.

He would choose where we would go. Doggie ji, as he was respectfully known, in deference to his firmness and determination, would grab the lead walker’s legs and cling on till his chosen route for the evening was approved. The trifurcation of the roads was where this world-changing decision would be made.

That trifurcation also had the bus stop. For reasons best known only to him, Doggie ji did not like the old three-wheel tempos. These stopped there to pick and drop passengers. There, at the bottom of the ‘dhukki’, as an incline was locally called, dramas would periodically unfold.

Some were verbal arguments that could occasionally turn into an exchange of fisticuffs and some were pure entertainment. Of the former, many stemmed from the tempos trying to catch as many ‘fish’, as passengers were called, and stuff them into their tempo-nets. Rattling away and spewing smoke, off they would race to disgorge one lot of cramped passengers that emerged in assorted yogic postures to harvest the next catch.

The way excessive fishing has reduced marine life in certain seas, similarly, arguments stemmed from moments when one tempo had trawled the road and left no ‘fish’ for the next one. And when a bus came by, it was like the local industrial scale trawler that would dredge the area with a catch that could have been collected by several tempos. That was when all the tempo drivers would suddenly become convivial and polite to each other. They would line up neatly and wait for passengers. The big shark had swept away all fish and now that common enemy had made friends of all the rival littler fishing tempos.

As entertainment was limited, as a child, one hung around that bus stop — and occasionally took a bus to Raghunath Bazaar. Two incidents remain parked in memory. The first was of a lady who berated the driver as he refused to wait till ‘Beeji finished her bath’. The second was the moment when another lady was short of money for the fare, and couldn’t understand why the conductor couldn’t put the rest from his own pocket. (For the readers who speak Dogri or Punjabi, please translate these lines to get the real effect of the conversations!)

— The writer is an author based in Shimla

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