Bride & a border

Amarjot Kaur

The three-time Olympic gold champion in field hockey Balbir Singh Sr was all of 22, during Partition. Now aged 93, the sports star has a way of arranging the chronological order of events around matches he played. The tense times of 1947 remind him of a taxi ride to Lahore’s Model Town after his team, Punjab, had won the national championship final. 

He had been married for a year and he was going to meet his wife, who was staying with her parents when he was playing the championship. “Those days, Punjab hockey team was at its best. In 1946, we had won the nationals in Calcutta and the very next year, Bombay. Ali Dara, Punjab’s team captain that year, was going the same way, so we took the same car,” he says, having a cup of tea at his residence in Sector 36, accompanied by his daughter and grandson.

Singh can’t recall the exact month, but says communal tension had started to set in by then. “It was before Partition. On our way, we stopped at a few places. Each time, Dara asked me to remain seated in the car. He would meet a few people, but I could not hear what they were talking,” he shares. “I had reached my wife safely, but my mother-in-law insisted that I take her back to Ludhiana, where I worked with the Punjab Police as an Assistant Sub-Inspector. I’m originally from Moga,” he adds. 

When he reached Ludhiana, Singh considered it better for his wife to stay with him at the police station. 

The news of Partition was rife, he says. “I was on duty, and though we were allotted a government house, I wanted Sushil to stay at the police station because it was safer there. Throughout  troubled days, we stayed in a small room with no running water, or electricity, not even basic facilities. She was a brave woman,” Singh gets sentimental.

“Everyone was out of their minds. I once asked a sipahi to load a carton of guns in the jeep. Instead, he pointed a gun at me and fired a shot that missed my turban by inches. He was stressed and so apologetic that he fell on my knees for mercy. On the streets, all we saw was blood, people being murdered, butchered mercilessly.” 

He remembers one incident in particular: “I got a call to reach a house little away from Ludhiana—a family had been burnt alive. The stink of human flesh burnt alive was unbearable. 

At Moga, his parents were sheltering a Muslim friend at home. “My grandfather was a freedom fighter and he always used to say—I am a Sikh by birth, nationalist and secular by choice. When he was about to leave, my parents advised him to dress up like a Sikh to reach the nearest refugee camp. But he did not. He didn’t want to hide his identity. Unfortunately, he never made it to the refugee camp,” he says.

His wife’s mother was on the other side of the new border, till six months after Partition. He informs, “The Muslims looked after her for six months. She was at her home at Model Town in Lahore and when she was about to leave, they offered her to take along all things valuable to her. She refused; that house was her home, and what could be more valuable than home? She came to Jalandhar from Pakistan and stayed in a small room that was shared by three other families. Years after, when my wife and I visited that house in Lahore, it was being shared by as many as five families. They told my wife off, saying that there was no room for more to live there. When she told her that it was once the house she lived in, the old lady at the door exclaimed, “Khuda ka kehar hai, jinka ghar hai, wo hamse andar aane ki ijazat maag rahe hai!”

Most of his friends on the other side of the border are not alive anymore. But their children and grandchildren keep in touch with him on his Facebook page, Balbir Singh Sr. His old-time hockey friend Mohammad Shah Rukh, who represented Pakistan in hockey at the 1948 Olympics and in cycling at the 1956 Olympics, paid him a visit in 2006. He remembers many more of his Muslim friends who studied with him in Khalsa College, even his school friends like Mohammad Azam. 

“He was a brilliant hockey player, but very careless,” he remembers. His daughter tells us that though Azam in no more, his wife and kids keep in touch through Facebook.

Hockey legend’s reply to the British

Hockey legend Balbir Singh Sr is not a man of many words. A year after Partition, he did the talking with his hockey stick at the 1948 Olympics. In the final against Great Britain, he scored the first two goals of India’s 4-0 win and set the path for India’s record of three consecutive Olympic gold medals in hockey.

  (The series concludes)