The Road To Lahore

Journeying to the city for the first time was like being reconnected to a long-lost past

- Mannu Kohli

I HAD NEVER THOUGHT I would see Pakistan. Whenever I looked at my father’s passport, where his birthplace was stated as “Undivided India”, I felt a stab of pain in my heart. Could we wipe away what had passed between the two countries? Would I ever get to see the land my parents had left in the wake of Partition?

I grew up hearing the Punjabi spoken in Rawalpindi, where my folks came from. Our home resonated with music from across the border, that, unbeknownst to me, had become a part of my life. I was memorizing the nazms of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, sung by Mehdi Hassan, and unsuccessfully reproducing them to myself at age five. My childhood was spent listening to the greats: Farida Khanum, Iqbal Bano, Abida Parveen, Ustad Amanat Ali Khan and Nayyara Noor, among others.

Growing up, I listened with rapt attention to my father’s stories—the glamour of Lahore, the beauty of the Murree Hills, the spiritual fervour of the Golra Sharif near Rawalpindi— that seemed magical.

The scenes of bloodshed and massacre that accompanied this shattering of a map and its people came alive. Those dark days when families and friends were separated forever, trains and buses bursting at the seams offloaded homeless people into a strange land. These were people who had left behind their belongings, their living and their dead—and, I suspect, a part of their souls—forever. I dreamt of stepping foot in my ancestral land, but I knew it was not to be.

The Invitation