1947, Lahore, Pakistan. Biji, my grandmother was very pregnant with a child that would be my father, Bittu Sahgal. Bittu would be born – who could imagine – in a brand new country in a snowy little mountain town called Simla, just across the border.
Of Biji’s four children at this time, daughters Prabha and Shukla were 12 and 10, sons Vinod and Pim, 9 and 6. Auntoo, Biji’s sister-in-law, a single woman, divorced, and an educator of note in Lahore, urged the family not to delay their departure. The threat was real. Rumours were rife. Riots, arson, a baying for blood. Refugee camps were filling up. It didn’t seem real. But there was a hole in a hedge, and if the rioters came, said their Muslim neighbours and friends, escape through there. A duffle bag had been packed with condensed milk and baked beans – Biji showed her girls where it had been stored. Just in case.
Of Bijis husband, LC Sahgal, my grandfather, I could say: Lal Chand Sahgal, a valued employee of Prudential Insurance died in the year 2008 at the age of 97 after a long and fruitful life. But that wouldn’t cover his love of Emerson’s poetry or how he danced like no one was watching at my wedding in 2005 in Bombay, waving his walking stick in the air. Or that he was a tutor of English and Math to supplement his income to feed his growing family in his younger years. Or that during his crossover from Pakistan in his best friend Giani Singh’s Jalopy, they were chased by men brandishing “nange talwar” (his words).
Giani dropped him to the border at Ambala and from there LC had to leg it alone. All the rest of his life he would tell tales of the sound of the galloping of the Rani’s horse and slash of her whip as she patrolled the caravan of trucks and vans, guarding her treasure while he cowered under a tarpaulin, a stowaway, a refugee in a sea of refugees, trying to get to his wife in Simla before she gave birth to their fifth and youngest child.
IMPRESSIONS FROM CONVERSATIONS WITH MY FAMILY. A WORK IN PROGRESS.
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