Sindhi Children and the 1947 Partition of India

My notebook, pen, and voice recorder on my parents' bed in Bombay in 2012.  I had been sitting across from my Aunt Koshi, my father's younger sister, and asking her about the Partition.  It was probably the longest conversation we had ever had--though interrupted and added to by relatives coming in and out of the room--and one I enjoyed very much.

Our childhoods remain with us, coloring our experiences as adults, affecting how we make sense of the world.  The older I get, the more I realize how much of my past I keep with me, how vivid my seventh birthday is, how clear the memory of a high-school field trip in Kuwait.  My memories include emotions and physical sensations.  As I have entered middle age and this awareness about my past has grown stronger, I have realized that my parents, thirty-one years older than I, also have their childhoods inside them--an obvious conclusion but one that is also startling. 

In recent years, I have been talking with my parents and their siblings about a crucial turning point in their lives, the move from Karachi to Bombay after the Partition of India in 1947, when they were still children. During these conversations, I have been listening, through these adults' memories, to the experiences of those children.

Last month, my short essay, How to Interview Your Mother About Her Lost Childhood was published in Bluestem magazine.  The link above will take you to the essay and to an audio recording of my reading of the essay.*

Before that issue of the magazine was released, I showed my mother the essay, nervous about her response.  "It's all the truth.  It's short and sweet," she said.  And then she added, "You write really well.  You should write a book."  I thought of the essay and laughed.  After you read it, you'll see why.

*The essay is also available here.

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Below are some photos Marilyn and I took in 2012 in the Sion Sindhi Colony, the location of the first permanent homes in which my parents lived in Bombay.  They happened to live two doors from each other.  When I returned there, after a gap of many years, I was struck by how narrow the lanes were.  The homes on that lane now are sturdier and fancier than the ones my parents' families built in the late forties.

The house with the bicycle in front of it is on the spot where my mother's family's house was.  It was a much simpler, one-story structure with a small loft that held a bed.

The house in the left foreground and in the photo below is on the spot where my father's family home stood.

A view of the lane looking out towards the street.  

That's me in 2012  in the lane where my parents' spent their teen years (though the lane looked much different then): Block 8 of the Sion Sindhi Colony.

Another view of the lane, looking towards the railway tracks at the end, just beyond the wall.

This alley runs perpendicular to the lane.  My paternal grandparents moved to Block 16 of the Sion Sindhi Colony, and my brother and I walked countless times down this alley from the house of our Nani, our maternal grandmother, in Block 8 to the house of our Dadi, our paternal grandmother, whom everyone in our family called Ama.

This is the Sita Sindhu Bhawan, a community center for Sindhis in Bombay.  In 2012, I visited during a gathering, and I was touched that several elderly Sindhis there were willing to share with me their stories of the Partition.  Being surrounded by Sindhis reminded me of my childhood, when on the weekends, visiting my grandparents in the Sion Sindhi Colony, I would hear the sounds of Sindhi being spoken, see the Sindhi script on the newspaper on my grandmother's bed,  and smell the aroma of Sindhi food cooking.  I lived in a multi-ethnic neighborhood, where for most of my childhood ours was the only Sindhi family. So the weekends were the only time I had this experience of being immersed in Sindhi culture.

Scarves Make Me Happy

A display of dupattas at one of my favorite shops in Bombay.

When I was a child, my mother and I wore scarves on road trips to keep our hair from blowing in the wind.  The scarves were square, and we would fold them in half, into triangles, and knot the corners under our chins.  My mother sometimes wore sunglasses and looked glamorous.  Our mini vacations often took us to the hill stations outside Bombay, where the air was cooler, so sometimes we wore the scarves to stay warm.

I was much more familiar with the long dupatta, the scarf worn with salwaar kameezes, North Indian baggy pants and tunics.  As a child, I would ask to play with my aunts’ dupattas, and they usually let me.  I remember one, belonging to a great aunt who lived in Poona.  A gauzy black fabric dotted with tiny red, green, and gold sequins, it seemed magical to my eight-year-old self.  When we returned home, I was more sorry to leave behind that dupatta than I was to say good bye to my aunt. Now I have many dupattas of my own, and I love experimenting with draping them and like seeing how other women wear them. 

Scarves are in fashion these days, and as I walk the halls of the college where I teach, I notice the many styles and colors worn by our students.  It brightens even a long, tiring day when I catch a glimpse of a silk scarf twisted into a cheeky knot or a knitted one draped in chunky rolls.

These pieces of fabric have been around for centuries, serving to warm us or to adorn us, or both.  When I wear one, I know I am part of a long tradition.   And each scarf is so simple—a square, a rectangle—and offers so many opportunities to be creative.  

The other morning, I was on YouTube looking for videos to use in my poetry class when a title caught my eye: 25ways to wear a scarf in 4.5 minutes.  I was in a hurry with much to do before class, but I couldn’t resist this title.  For 4.5 minutes, I sat there smiling.

 

A Colorful Surprise

Recently, I was looking through photos taken in Bombay last summer and came across this one of a paan waala’s stand.  I took the photo on Colaba Causeway near a small bookstall where Marilyn and I had bought a couple of books that the seller recommended. 

The colors of this display stopped me; I don’t eat paan, but I asked the vendor if I may take a photo.  He nodded in that minimalist way many Bombayites have.  I was grateful.

What a delight it is to see these colors again and to be reminded of that hot afternoon of shopping for kurtas and books—and of our break for a cold fresh lime soda at Café Mondegar. 

Perfectly Ordinary

Recently acquired dupattas

Saturday evening treats

Bombay, India.  June 18, 2012

I walked to the neighborhood sweet shop the other evening to buy some sev ki mithai, a Sindhi specialty I have loved my whole life. A cousin of mine calls it heaven on a spoon.

I was by myself.

That in itself was remarkable. My parents, whom I am visiting, don't like my going places in Bombay alone--even though this is a cosmopolitan, lively city where a woman alone is absolutely unremarkable. Maybe their hesitation stems from the decades I've lived abroad, away from India. Or maybe it comes from years of protecting me as a teenager when we lived in Kuwait.

My parents are okay with my walking around with Marilyn, my partner, so long we report in by mobile phone regularly. But she returned to the States a few days ago. Anyway, when I walk around with a tall, white woman, the only one around for miles, my foreignness is more marked.

That evening, though, I felt blissfully ordinary. When a cousin dropped me off near my parents’ apartment building after we had been to the movies, I was just another woman out on a Saturday in a salwaar kameez, the ubiquitous baggy pants and tunic. My dupatta, the long, flowing scarf, was draped across my shoulders. I love dupattas and had bought this one, sheer black and embossed with gold paisleys, only that morning. ("You and your dupattas," my mother had smiled indulgently).

As I walked to the sweet shop, avoiding muddy puddles left by the recent rain, I did not worry about looking "exotic," as I do in the States. And I knew I wouldn't have to explain my clothes to a fellow American.

I speak Hindi without a foreign accent, so I was able to buy the sweets and then pick up a Limca, a lemon-lime soda, at a nearby restaurant without drawing attention to myself.

For a brief time, I was neither an American in India nor an Indian in America. I was just another woman in Bombay, a woman who loves dupattas and sev ki mithai, unremarkable and ordinary.

Looking up

The autorickshaw drivers were preoccupied when my father and I walked out this afternoon to the busy road in front of my parents' apartment building in Bombay. As we tried to hail an auto, the driver waved us off, gesturing vaguely above him before pulling over to chat with a fellow auto driver. I noticed other people looking up.

A ladder was leaning against a tree, and a rope dangled from a branch. Someone had been trimming the tree to prevent branches from breaking off in the monsoon rains.

The tiny leaves of this large, old tree filter the sunlight, offering a refuge to the auto drivers who line up along the road, to the owners of the tiny shops on the sidewalk, and to those of us who venture out into the muggy warmth that is Bombay in June.

Yet, until today, I hadn't quite noticed the grandeur of this tree. I'm glad everyone was looking up when I walked out this afternoon.

The Matching Center

In India, when one needs a blouse for a sari, one can go to specialized shop called a matching center, where salespeople with expert eyes find cloth in just the right shade and recommend which fabric will work best with which sari.  Yesterday, I was at this matching center near Chembur station, looking for a lining for a silk blouse.  While the salesman hunted down the right shade of navy blue, I lost myself in the feast of color.  These bolts of cloth thrill me, much as a box of crayons did when I was a child. 

Mumbai Haiku

Autorickshaws whiz by.

Marigold garlands await

worshipers at dusk.